Abstract
This is a most welcome book. There has been no new analysis of the Imperial German Navy since Holger H. Herwig published ‘Luxury’ Fleet with George Allen & Unwin in 1980 and with the Ashfield Press in 1987. Nicolas Wolz, a former editor with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and currently with the German Central Bank, thus is able to offer the reader his encapsulation of the most recent research on the ‘Tirpitz fleet’ by naval historians such as Volker Berghahn, Wilhelm Deist, Michael Epkenhans, Paul Kennedy, Werner Rahn, and Michael Salewski, to name but a few. The work under review is, in fact, a translation of his book, ‘Und wir verrosten im Hafen:’ Deutschland, Großbritannien und der Krieg zur See: 1914–1918, published by the Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag at Munich in 2013. The title, ‘And we rusted in port’, summarizes the dominant theme of the book.
There are no new, earth-shattering revelations. Wolz by and large accepts what has become the standard interpretation of the ‘Tirpitz fleet’, namely, that it was built first and foremost against Britain and that it did a great deal to poison relations between Berlin and London before 1914. More, that by about 1907–1908 the ‘Tirpitz plan’ had foundered due to financial constraints on German shipbuilding, on the army’s demand for primacy in Reich armaments expenditures, and on the British decision to counter the perceived naval threat across the North Sea with HMS Dreadnought. New is the author’s heavy reliance on the diaries, letters and memoirs of especially German mid-career naval officers such as Lieutenants (senior grade) Reinhold Knobloch, Hermann Schweinitz, Walter Zaeschmar, and Rudolph Firle, which he combed out of a host of archives and museums, associations and unions, naval veterans’ associations and private collections. Much of this material he had already used in his University of Tübingen dissertation, published by Ferdinand Schöningh at Paderborn in 1908 as Das lange Warten. Kriegserfahrungen deutscher und britischer Seeoffiziere 1914 bis 1918 (‘The Long Waiting: War Experiences of German and British Naval Officers 1914 to 1918’). These wartime recollections give a much more vivid account of the frustrations and disappointments over the lack of a decisive naval engagement in the North Sea (Der Tag) already related in more measured terms by senior fleet commanders such as Admirals Franz Hipper, Reinhard Scheer, Wilhelm Souchon, and Adolf von Trotha. Overall, Wolz succeeds in his primary aim: ‘to provide the general reader with a personal experience of the past’ (p. x).
The highlight of the book is Wolz’s dramatic recounting of Rear Admiral Ludwig Reuter’s scuttling of the interned High Sea Fleet at Scapa Flow on 21 June 1919 (‘A painful and grandiose piece of theatre’). It is written in a lively, personal style and spares no reputations. On the German side, it was a ‘question of honour and existence’ (p. 200) for the fleet, that is, to burnish the badly tarnished image of the once proud Hochseflotte. While no formal command from Berlin to scuttle has ever been found, Wolz quite clearly establishes that Reuter’s discussions with senior admirals in the Navy Office left no doubt in his mind concerning what was desired. On the British side, the author retells the sorry spectacle of Vice Admiral Sir Sidney Fremantle’s men opening fire on the unarmed German seamen, killing nine and wounding 16. Vice Admiral Sir David Beatty’s munificent award of £100,000 from Parliament did little to erase the public’s displeasure over the absence of a ‘second Trafalgar’.
In the final analysis, Wolz’s tale of the German naval officer corps comes down to one word: ‘honour’. Senior commanders from Vice Admiral von Spee (German East Asia Squadron) in November 1914 at the Battle of the Falkland Islands to Admiral Günther Lütjens (battleship Bismarck) in May 1941 in the North Atlantic knew what was expected of them: to go down with the flag still flying rather than to surrender. Only Captain Hans Langsdorff commanding the ‘pocket’ battleship Graf Spee at the River Plate in December 1939 refused to go down with flag flying. Grand Admiral Erich Raeder’s general order in response to Langsdorff’s action can well serve as the epitaph of the German navy: ‘The German warship fights with the full engagement of all her crew to the last shell either until she is victorious or goes down with her flag flying’ (p. 49). Wolz has hit that mentality on the head. Well done!