Abstract
In recent years naval and maritime history has enjoyed something of a renaissance. Without ignoring the personal, technical, operational, and strategic elements that have always constituted the bedrock of the discipline, historians who work in this field have broadened their approach to encompass an ever-growing body of economic, social cultural, structural, and organizational perspectives. Armed with these additional focal points, they have then moved to reassess well-worn issues from new angles. This dual methodology of adopting novel analytical techniques to look again at old problems can be deeply enriching. Each of the books under review here demonstrates this process in different ways. All of them focus, wholly or in part, on a specific aspect of modern British sea power and security. However, they do so in distinct and different ways: each of them adopting a broader metanarrative that elucidates the problem afresh and, with varying degrees of success, provides new answers to older questions.
Jan Rüger’s Heligoland is a case in point. This North Sea outcrop can hardly be said to have escaped the notice of previous generations of naval historians. 1 Lying in a strategically vital position in the German Bight, the island was of tremendous value at times of international tension or great power conflict. For example, at the start of the nineteenth century, it was an important vantage point in the Napoleonic Wars facilitating Britain’s efforts to undermine the French continental system by acting as a locus for espionage, smuggling, and sea control. Equally, at the beginning of the twentieth century, as diplomatic constellations changed and centuries of Anglo–French rivalry were superseded by a new and intense Anglo–German competition, so Heligoland’s significance was once again brought to the fore. Britain had bartered the island away to Germany in 1890, exchanging it for fuller political control of the east African island of Zanzibar. However, this trade would soon come to be regretted, as what had seemed like an equitable bargain at a time of Anglo–German amity would look foolhardy and misguided once tensions between the two nations arose. The reason was simple: the island was strategically significant. Continued possession of the island by Britain would have allowed the Admiralty to maintain it as a base for refuelling and replenishing destroyer and submarine flotillas and this would have permitted the Royal Navy to mount an in-shore blockade of the German North Sea coastline and possibly even to conduct offensive operations in the Baltic. As it was, the island had become German and was now heavily fortified – a circumstance that conferred immunity to Germany’s North Sea littoral and made any prospect of a British Baltic mission utterly illusory. ‘A wilderness of Zanzibars would not buy Heligoland from Britain, if we had our choices again today’, proclaimed Sir Charles Ottley, the Secretary of the Committee of Imperial Defence in February 1911; but by then, of course, it was too late to reconsider. 2 From that moment until such efforts were abandoned in the middle of the First World War, much time and energy would be spent by British naval planners seeking ways to reverse what had happened in 1890 and to recapture the island, all of which would ultimately prove futile. Such episodes have provided much meat over the years for naval historians, seemingly leaving little new to say. Rüger, however, demonstrates otherwise.
As the subtitle of Rüger’s book makes clear with its emphasis on ‘the struggle for the North Sea’, the author is interested in the naval matters discussed above and he devotes a certain amount of space to explaining Heligoland’s military significance and the wider maritime context, but what separates the book from other studies is that for him Heligoland is much more than just a problem in naval strategy. Rather, the island acts as a metaphor for the entire Anglo–German relationship. The manner in which Britain and Germany regarded Heligoland and the ways in which they treated it and its population when they were in possession or occupation of the island serves as the prism through which Rüger re-examines Anglo–German interactions across the better part of two centuries, be those interactions at the level of high interstate politics or more mundane small-scale personal contacts. By such means, Heligoland provides in microcosm a detailed exposé on the state of the Anglo–German friendship or, as was often the case in the twentieth century, the Anglo–German antagonism. To achieve this, the book advances a series of carefully chosen vignettes that serve to articulate much bigger points. One highly symbolic example of this is the manner in which Heligoland became, by virtue of its intertwined British and German characteristics, the cultural focal point of mid-nineteenth-century German nationalism. It was no accident, as Rüger shows, that the words of the future German national anthem, Deutschland über Alles, were composed by Professor August Hoffmann (pen name: Hoffmann von Fallersleben) while the author was on the island. As a British colony, albeit one governed according to continental legal principles, the island was a refuge for liberals such as Hoffmann escaping from the heavy hand of the deeply conservative and repressive regimes that proliferated among the German states. Yet, as an ethnically German territory separated from other German lands both by the sea and by foreign rule, it epitomized the nationalist desire to bring the disparate German world together as one entity. In short, it both inspired dreams of Deutschtum and facilitated their creation and articulation through its ambiguous mix of British and German properties. As Rüger frequently suggests and as this story illustrates, the micro setting that is Heligoland operated as a major nexus and illuminates a much larger context. Other vignettes across the chronological range of the study, encompassing high politics, music, art, Nazi propaganda, ornithology, and aerial bombing, make the point in different ways across the span of the book.
The scholarship underpinning this work is impressive. Rüger uses a wide range of national, regional, local, institutional, and personal archives in Britain, Germany, Australia, Canada, America, Austria, and Denmark to provide the materials for the study and deploys them to great effect. If any resource base has been omitted it is not obvious. The result is a work of ambitious inclusivity and breadth. While it might be said that micro-history is fast becoming an established genre, Rüger’s approach is nevertheless genuinely innovative and offers a succession of new insights.
No less successful is Christopher Bell’s study, Churchill and the Dardanelles. If prospective readers of Rüger’s book might have wondered if there was much to say about the North Sea rock that is Heligoland or anything new to say about that well-trodden topic, the Anglo–German relationship, those seeing a title focusing on probably the most studied British political figure of all time and one of the most notorious military failures of all time could surely be forgiven for thinking the same even more emphatically. However, Bell, who has previously demonstrated that there are new ways of assessing Churchill in his masterly study Churchill and Sea Power, demonstrates that a fresh approach to the Dardanelles campaign can reap major dividends.
Bell’s book essentially has two themes. The more conventional of the two is a review of the Dardanelles operation itself. Bell examines the origins of the campaign and forensically dissects the reasons for the eventual failure of the attempt to force the straits by naval power alone. To some extent this covers well-known ground, but Bell’s collection and evaluation of the source materials is not just exemplary and judicious, it is also fuller and more extensive than previous assessments. As a result, he is able to dismiss entirely some of the wilder and more speculative recent interpretations, such as the theory that the origin of the operation lay in the need to release Russian wheat trapped by the closure of the Black Sea onto the global market, while at the same time cementing his own well-considered and fully grounded view. 3 Thus, his conclusion that Churchill’s promotion of this assault was rooted in his failure to get backing from his naval advisors for his desired operations in the North Sea is well grounded and unlikely to be bettered. It is also essential because it provides the background and foundation for the second, more important and more original theme of the book, namely Churchill’s battle across many subsequent decades to reshape the way in which the Dardanelles campaign was perceived. As is well known, the attempt to force the straits was not just a failure, it was a failure that was blamed squarely upon Winston Churchill by many segments of the press, the wider public, and Churchill’s numerous coteries of hostile political opponents. Churchill as an ambitious and enterprising politician who still aspired to the highest office could not accept such a major blight upon his career prospects and quickly set about trying to restore his reputation. To this end he needed to upset the prevailing and entrenched consensus that the Dardanelles was a doomed operation that had been foisted upon a reluctant and unwilling Royal Navy by a First Lord, Winston Churchill, who disregarded professional advice out of an arrogant and self-inflated belief in his own strategic acumen. To achieve this, Churchill needed to establish his own counter-narrative – one in which far from being a reckless, interfering, and irresponsible amateur, he in fact consulted with his naval advisors, received widespread support for his ideas, left the detailed planning to those with the requisite knowledge, competence and training, and, having acted properly at all times, advanced an operation that came within a whisker of unprecedented success.
That Winston Churchill the author frequently used his historical writing to create a popular narrative designed to buttress his political reputation has been well established in the case of the Second World War by David Reynolds. 4 Equally, Robin Prior has shown that Churchill used his semi-autobiographical account of the First World War, the multi-volume The World Crisis, to enhance his standing both by providing a robust defence of his perceived failings and by claiming credit for any notable successes. 5 Bell builds upon this genre. Unlike Reynolds and Prior, he does not focus upon a single publication and its impact, but looks instead at Churchill’s attempts across several decades and via an array of media to influence public opinion on one issue. This includes his successful endeavour to influence the findings of the Dardanelles Commission in his favour, his equally successful efforts to ensure that the official histories of the Great War looked sympathetically at his role, as well as his potent use of newspaper articles, speeches, periodicals, and, of course, his and other people’s memoirs to advance his cause. As Bell demonstrates, Churchill’s public relations campaign to force a reassessment of the naval operation against the Ottoman Empire lasted far longer than the actual campaign itself and was a good deal more fruitful. Churchill did rehabilitate his reputation and, although opinion on the Dardanelles operation is still massively divided, a substantial body of opinion came to regard it as an imaginative means of attempting to break the bloody and futile deadlock of the trenches that was well worth trying and that might have succeeded with just a bit more perseverance. Considering how few people took this view in the immediate aftermath of the operation itself, the very existence of such an interpretation, let alone its resilience, is testament to Churchill’s many and prodigious efforts to reshape public opinion.
Bell’s study is firmly based upon very considerable research in the relevant documentary collections. The Admiralty and Cabinet papers in the British National Archives provide the basis for Bell’s assessment of the origins of the operation. No stone has been left unturned to ensure that a fair and balanced assessment is provided of Churchill’s role in bringing about this operation – something that is essential if Churchill’s later campaign to influence public opinion is to be properly grounded and understood. However, with much of the book focusing on the question of perception and the efforts to reshape this, it is hardly surprising that the most groundbreaking research is in the private papers of opinion formers of various kinds. Bell has looked forensically for any and every trace of Churchill’s correspondence with journalists, newspaper proprietors, publishers, authors of historical works and memoirs, and, indeed, with anyone else who might have been able to facilitate the reassessment of his role that Churchill was seeking. Bell’s overview of these efforts is, thus, truly comprehensive and ensures that the book does not just provide a detailed re-examination of the Dardanelles operation, but also offers an unparalleled view of how Churchill subsequently fostered the image that he sought. As a study of a one-man political public relations exercise it is both masterly and probably unparalleled.
Equally impressive, albeit for different reasons, is David Morgan-Owen’s exploration of British war planning in the 35 years before the outbreak of the First World War. As with the two volumes already examined, the first assumption for many readers on seeing a new study of this topic would be to wonder if there could possibly be anything new, let alone important, to say about a matter that has already attracted so substantial a degree of scholarly attention. While it is certainly true that there have been many fine evaluations of British military planning 6 and an equal number focusing on the naval equivalent, 7 this book nevertheless manages to adopt a distinct new approach: it is the first to examine military and naval planning in equal tandem and to do so through the particular prism of home defence. In many respects the want of previous overviews of this topic is quite surprising.
As Morgan-Owen explains at the outset, while the British Empire possessed many isolated vulnerable spots and had acquired numerous military commitments across the globe, none could equal the importance of protecting the British Isles from foreign invasion. After all, while wartime set backs on the periphery could always be reversed later, if the metropolis should fall, so would the empire. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that home defence was the major security concern of the British government and the primary task of the British armed forces. And yet, notwithstanding the fact that in 1940 invasion would suddenly loom as an immediate and genuine prospect, showing how and why this could matter, the assumption in the historiography concerning the decades prior to the First World War is that there was never any real prospect of an invasion of the British Isles and that any concerns raised on this point were merely manufactured scare stories designed to produce policy changes, most especially an increase in funding for one or other of the armed forces. In short, the process of planning to defend the British Isles has been ignored by historians because they have largely assumed that this was a topic for scaremongers rather than serious military strategists.
Morgan-Owen demonstrates definitively that this was not the case and that protecting the British Isles from invasion was always a matter of the deepest concern in the corridors of power in London. Yet, of even more importance, Morgan-Owen shows that determining which of the two armed services would maintain the principal responsibility for this was a matter of some contention with the eventual answer having considerable long-term implications. The first section of the book deals with the period from 1880 to 1900, when Britain’s main political opponent and hence its most likely prospective wartime enemy was France (possibly but not necessarily in combination with Russia). France had a sizeable navy and was the continental state closest to the British Isles and, hence, intuitively the power one might think best placed to launch an invasion. The British Admiralty certainly thought so and, to prevent this, the Royal Navy kept a large force of battleships in home waters. However, in 1886 the majority of France’s fleet of large armoured warships moved to the Mediterranean port of Toulon. Based there, these vessels could, as intended, pose a threat to the British position in the Mediterranean; however, they were no longer in a position to convoy an invasion force across the Channel. Moreover, a British fleet based at Gibraltar could secure the British Isles from a distance, by preventing French vessels from leaving the Mediterranean. Accordingly, in 1887 a large force of British warships quit home waters for the Mediterranean. This was sound naval strategy, but the absence of British warships created doubts in some minds as to just how secure Britain actually was. Could France rush an invasion force across the Channel while the British fleet was away even though there were no French armoured warships to guard it? The Navy thought not, but the Army was tasked with making this certain. To do this the War Office had to prioritize keeping divisions at home that might otherwise have been used to reinforce the garrison in India or be deployed as an expeditionary force overseas. In effect, therefore, as Morgan-Owen points out, the forward policy of one service – in this case the Navy – required an insular policy from the other service – in this instance the Army. This would establish a pattern that had huge consequences come 1914.
The second part of the book shows how the roles of the two services reversed after 1900. The trigger was geopolitical and resulted from a combination of the German decision to build a powerful navy based in the North Sea, greatly improved Anglo–French relations, and the weakening of Russia in the aftermath of the war against Japan. This created a situation in which hostile naval action against Britain by Russia was no longer possible; while an attack by France was unlikely and certain to fail if undertaken. By contrast, the threat from Germany was now greatly increased. Significantly, this included the threat of invasion. Various factors made a potential German invasion of Britain a much more dangerous prospect than one from France had ever been. To begin with, the German merchant marine was much larger than its French equivalent. This meant that whereas France could not easily collect the shipping necessary for transporting a large army to British soil, the Germans would have no such problem. Second, there was geography. Whereas the French faced the English south coast, a short littoral that included a large number of fortified naval bases from which defending warships could easily advance to meet any invasion force, the German navy had as its objective the long and largely unfortified east coast. With no defended anchorages north of Sheerness, British warships stationed along the east coast to protect it would be vulnerable to surprise attack by torpedo craft, a theoretical prospect that loomed large even before the Japanese demonstrated the feasibility of such a strike in 1904 with their coup de main against the Russian warships resting at anchor at Port Arthur. However, if the British fleet was based out of harm’s way in one of the fortified harbours on the south coast or one of the more remote Scottish anchorages, then relative distance meant that the German navy would be closer to any potential landing ground than the British forces supposed to protect it. Thus, without considerable advance warning, a German blow, be it for a raid or an invasion, could take place before a British force could arrive to disrupt it.
How might security be provided in such circumstances? One solution might have been to devolve this task to the Army, but as Morgan-Owen shows, in the early years of the twentieth century, this option slowly disappeared. Initially as a result of growing pressure to reinforce India and then out of a desire to provide direct military support to France on the continent in the event of war, the British General Staff progressively reorganized away from static home defence in favour of expeditionary warfare. Just as a forward policy on the part of the Navy had compelled the Army to adopt a defensive posture prior to 1900, so the Army’s new outward-facing agenda forced the Navy to take on a defensive stance after 1900. At one level this suited the naval leadership, as it allowed them to press for additional resources. However, defending 600 miles of coastline without secure harbours was no easy task. As Morgan-Owen reveals, although the Admiralty claimed to have no doubts about their ability to do this at the 1908 Invasion Inquiry, their internal documents, especially the report of the very important but previously neglected Fremantle committee, suggested otherwise. By the time another invasion inquiry rolled around in 1913, the Admiralty was forced to admit not only that they faced a significant dilemma, the so-called ‘North Sea problem’, but that they had deliberately dissembled on this matter previously. In short, a German landing was a genuine danger to which no simple solution had yet been found.
The Fear of Invasion is a landmark study. By examining the problem of home defence from both a military and naval angle it is able to show, as no work has done previously, how the two interacted to create a set of a priori assumptions about British national security that became something of a strategic straightjacket for British defence planning. This explains as never before how and why the choices facing the British government in August 1914 had become so limited. With the Army adopting a forward policy predicated on expeditionary warfare, the Navy was forced to take on a defensive mission for which it was not really suited. Yet, as the Navy became increasingly tied to protecting the British Isles, so the ability to use maritime assets to project British power overseas became increasingly restricted. Economic warfare via contraband control and home defence through a concentrated North Sea battle fleet became de facto the Navy’s role and alternative uses of British sea power, such as amphibious warfare, retreated into the background. This explains why so little consideration was given in August 1914 to how the war then breaking out might be waged. There were options, but they had been narrowed by the roles implicitly assigned to the two services. That they ended up fulfilling these roles is hardly surprising under the circumstances.
The research underpinning The Fear of Invasion is exemplary. Morgan-Owen has gone back over well-known records and found neglected materials of all kinds. More impressively, given the acres of work on war planning, he has also discovered a range of little- or never-used sources. For example, the bound volumes of the Directorate of Military Operations in the British Library, almost untouched by military historians, have provided a wealth of new insights into the planning conducted at the War Office. Similarly, Sydney Fremantle’s copy of the report on the ‘German invasion theory’, produced by the committee he chaired in December 1907, has eluded historians until now, notwithstanding its enormous significance to the issues at hand. Likewise, although he heralded it in an article published prior to this book, Morgan-Owen has been instrumental in reintegrating the Admiralty’s 1909 war plans into the analysis both of naval thinking and of wider strategy. 8 The result is a book that challenges much of the existing historiography on British strategy before 1914. 9 Home defence was taken seriously, the Royal Navy was genuinely worried by the capacity of the German armed forces to undertake a landing, and efforts to prevent this tied the British battle fleet to the North Sea while simultaneously making possible the dispatch of much of the British Army to the continent. These are paradigm-changing conclusions.
The final study in this review, Between Empire and Continent, is the (selectively) updated and newly translated version of Andreas Rose’s 2011 book Zwischen Empire und Kontinent: Britische Außenpolitik vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg. Like its German-language predecessor, the particular focus of this book is the role of the press in helping to shape Britain’s foreign and defence policies in the years before the outbreak of the First World War. As with many of the works already discussed, this is not an analytical approach that has entirely escaped previous scholars – A.J.A. Morris’s excellent study The Scaremongers being an obvious case in point. 10
To differentiate from such earlier work, Rose maintains that his study is less interested in the nature of what was said in various media reports and press campaigns, but instead narrows in on the role of journalists as political actors in their own right. The nineteenth-century communications revolution, Rose argues, led to a politicized press that transformed some high-profile writers, editors, and publishers into influential protagonists for particular policies. Their articles did not merely mirror public opinion; they led popular perceptions and also exerted a considerable pull on the views of key politicians and decision-makers. This had, Rose maintains, very profound results. According to his analysis, at the outset of the twentieth century, there existed a coterie of journalists who sought to change the direction of British diplomacy and campaigned tirelessly to this end. They believed that Britain’s place in the world depended on breaking away from the traditional and, in their view, increasingly untenable policy of ‘splendid isolation’, which they characterized as ‘drift’, and joining forces with one of the political constellations on the European continent. The choices were either the Triple Alliance, led by Germany, or the Dual Alliance of France and Russia. Although there were politicians and diplomats who favoured closer ties with the former, these journalists were convinced that Britain should align itself instead with France and Russia. The reason for this was not the one normally given at the time – and frequently cited in the traditional historiography – namely that the expansion of German power and the obvious extent of German ambition made it necessary for the other powers to pull together for their mutual security. Rather, these journalists considered the German Empire to be too weak to have any value as a political partner and preferred instead an alignment with those nations that could threaten Britain and whose friendship therefore really mattered. These were said to be France and, most especially, Russia. To this end, these journalists did everything they could to sour relations between London and Berlin and to promote instead an Anglo–Russian accommodation. A stream of articles and editorials appeared along these lines, which were accompanied by vigorous behind-the-scenes efforts to influence sympathetic decision-makers.
The result of this campaign, Rose argues, was the successful adoption of the policy these journalists wanted. Under Sir Edward Grey, a foreign secretary who was influenced by and shared their views, Britain abandoned its long-held role of maintaining a balance of power in Europe in favour of appeasing France and Russia, joining them in a political block and acting alongside them in a highly partisan manner in international disputes. This was effective in the short term in enhancing British security and prestige, but it came at a long-term cost: it upset the stability of the continent by creating two rival blocks that sparred dangerously over every controversial issue. Rose maintains that for Grey, the officials around him, and the journalists that supported the policy, this destabilization was a price that was regarded as acceptable and, indeed, well worth paying. On that basis, Rose draws a particular and somewhat pointed conclusion, namely that Britain was the nation that did the most to undermine the old European power system and so create the febrile atmosphere and tense conditions that made a world war possible in 1914. Germany, in effect, was merely the unfortunate victim of this ill-thought-out, unnecessary, and unbalanced British policy shift.
In some respects, Rose’s reassessment of British diplomacy – especially his suggestion that it was the Reich’s weakness rather than German strength that led to London’s appeasement of France and Russia – puts his work in a continuum with those of other well-known revisionists, such as Keith Wilson, Jonathan Charmley, Niall Ferguson, and Keith Neilson, who have also sought to re-evaluate the foreign policy of Sir Edward Grey and especially his attitude towards France and Russia. 11 However, there are some significant differences between Rose’s work and theirs. First, there is the sharpness of Rose’s conclusions, which in their exculpation of Germany and implied condemnation of Britain might remind some readers more of the trenchant apologist tracts of the interwar years than of recent mainstream revisionist scholarship. Second and perhaps more positively, in his emphasis on the role of the press, his employment of the concept of the media as an independent political actor, and the suggestion that London’s policy change was driven by deliberate public discourse, Rose brings a new dimension to the revisionist canon. While such novelty is, of course, to be applauded, there are several problems with the work that seriously undermine the tenability of its core conclusions.
The first concern is a methodological one, namely that, in the absence of specific data on the reception of public media, it is very difficult, if not actually impossible to quantify the effect, if any, that press campaigns had on policymaking before the First World War. As a result, the connection that Rose seeks to make between the public activities of his independent media actors and the transformation of British foreign policy is often more implied than proven. True, one can establish, as he does, the existence of a wealth of articles that praised one policy and condemned another, and one can even occasionally demonstrate that people with power and position actually read them, but if and how these articles changed their behaviour and influenced their actions is not so easily shown. Rose at one point actually acknowledges the difficulties of making such a link. In respect to the failure of one set of Anglo–German negotiations to reach an accord over the Baghdad Railway, a series of discussions that Rose maintains was vilified by a determined segment of the popular media, he admits that the ‘precise nature of the press campaign’s impact on the eventual outcome cannot be known’ (p. 234). Yet, if that is so, it is entirely possible that, notwithstanding all the sound and fury, its role in this and other policy decisions was only a marginal one and, if that is true, then the whole edifice of his argument concerning the media as an independent political actor becomes difficult to maintain. In short, without some way of definitively demonstrating that these press campaigns actually worked, all Rose is doing is proving that they existed, and this alone is hardly of profound significance.
Another area of concern is Rose’s skewed presentation of Britain’s national security policy. According to Rose, notwithstanding any public pronouncements to the contrary, the British diplomatic establishment as well as the competent authorities in the armed services all knew that Germany posed no military threat to Britain and that the only actual outside danger came from France and Russia. This leads him to conclude that all claims that a German menace actually existed were merely fabricated propagandistic endeavours cynically advanced to buttress the self-interested arguments of specific individuals or pressure groups. For example, Rose maintains that, despite knowing it to be untrue, the British Army constantly insisted that Germany had planned and was capable of launching an invasion of Britain so as to persuade the government to adopt universal military service, a matter he seeks to prove by means of the testimony of several prominent witnesses to the 1908 Invasion Inquiry (pp. 311 and 324).
Despite the certainty with which Rose advances this interpretation, it is not a reading that survives detailed scrutiny. To begin with, it rests on a massive simplification of British military politics. Contra Rose, the Army was not a homogenous body with a single viewpoint accepted across the service. The General Staff, for instance, did not always see eye to eye on strategic matters with the various local corps commanders, who themselves sometimes differed substantially from those senior officers placed in charge of training and military education. This is important because the practicalities of universal military service was one of the areas where significant differences of opinion existed. While most soldiers were broadly sympathetic to the idea and would have welcomed it if no strings were attached, the more politically astute among them understood that in reality it could only be achieved – if it could be achieved at all under a Liberal administration headed, initially at least, by the peace-loving Sir Henry Campbell Bannerman, and at a cost. That cost was a complete change of mission. The General Staff wished, in the event of war, for Britain to fight alongside the French and, to this end, had just succeeded in reorganizing the Army for expeditionary warfare on the continent. Yet, a campaign for conscription justified on the grounds of protecting Britain from invasion meant, if successful, an army tied to the home islands and unable to go overseas. In short, it would require an abandonment of all the recent plans in favour of what was derogatively described as a ‘stay-at-home army’. For most General Staff officers this was unthinkable. As a result, although much else might be uncertain about military thinking, one thing is crystal clear: those (ex-)soldiers who appeared before the 1908 Invasion Inquiry and strenuously promoted the German threat in order to bring about conscription – namely Lord Roberts and Charles à Court Repington – most decidedly did not speak for the Army. Retired and distant from the inner circle of senior officers at the War Office, they represented themselves and the national service lobby they headed and no one else.
By contrast, the officers who were formally placed before the Committee of Imperial Defence by the General Staff to express the official view of the military establishment, such as Colonel Edward Gleichen, the assistant director of military operations, categorically denied that Germany could invade Britain. Ironically, Gleichen probably believed exactly the opposite, having forcefully made the case that a German invasion was possible when he had been posted to Berlin as military attaché in 1905. 12 However, it was no longer expedient for him to say so in 1908. Gleichen, like his superior, Major-General Ewart, the director of military operations, was firmly behind the expeditionary force strategy that the General Staff had recently embraced. While he would naturally have been happy to see an expanded army, he did not wish this outcome to come at the expense of its newly developed role. Accordingly, he spoke up forcefully against the Repington and Roberts’s argument when given the chance to do so. For this reason and many others, the idea that the Army peddled a myth of German invasion to justify conscription is simply untenable.
If Rose misunderstands British military thinking and the drivers behind it, he is even less at home when it comes to naval matters. In Rose’s depiction the growth of the German navy never worried the British Admiralty because the officials there knew that the Royal Navy would always be larger than its upstart rival. This analysis is sustained largely by counting numbers of warships, tables of which, arranged according to type, dutifully show a healthy British lead throughout this period (p. 325). Such arithmetic, while not inaccurate, takes into account none of the problems of geography and infrastructure – so ably explained by David Morgan-Owen – that made a surprise German strike on the British Isles so difficult for the Royal Navy to counter. Germany might well have fewer battleships than Britain, but it was obvious to most Admiralty planners that if the Germans wished to undertake a raid or invasion, they could reach the British east coast well before those British vessels based out of reach of a surprise torpedo attack in Scotland or Portland could do anything about it, an uncomfortable reality which could be gleaned by a simple glance at a map and which the Scarborough raid of December 1914 would later validate in a very clear and public manner. Rose, however, insists that no such obstacles existed. Instead, to buttress his assertion that a German strike was impossible he reproduces some of the soothing (but inaccurate) balms advanced at the time by those navalists more interested in defeating the national service lobby than in the propagation of the strict truth. One notable example is the assertion that an invasion force would never have been able to reach Britain from Germany because its smoke ‘would be visible 30 nautical miles away’ (p. 322), thus giving its presence away with enough warning for action to be taken. In fact, relative distance was such that unless the smoke was seen deep in the Heligoland Bight and immediately recognized for what it was, the invasion convoy would still stand an excellent chance of reaching the east coast of England before any counter force could intercept it. And that is before one considers the implications of North Sea conditions for the validity of the statement. There are many oceans in this world blessed with crystal blue waters and clear blue skies and where to-the-end-of-the-horizon visibility is possible on a regular basis. The North Sea is definitely not one of them. Known for its frequent mists and rough, inclement conditions, the number of days where it is possible to see 10 miles into the distance let alone 30 is exceedingly small. And that is not the only problem with this statement. A competent naval staff, such as Germany’s, contemplating the transportation of an expedition across the North Sea would hardly begin it on a cloudless summer’s day when the obvious alternative of a moonless autumn night would provide many hours worth of dark and uninterrupted steaming. And, if such a force did leave at dusk, especially if made up of quicker warships accompanying fast liners, it would be a long way towards its destination by first light. By that stage, even if smoke was seen over the horizon by a British ship and it was able to get away and make a report, what could be done? First the nature and intent of the threat would need to be recognized and then a force would have to be dispatched to meet it. Given the location of the defended British fleet anchorages, any possible response would be too far away to get to the Germans before they reached the east coast. In other words geography combined with meteorology was a significant issue that favoured the offensive over the defensive and could not easily be thwarted by a chance sighting of smoke on a horizon that was in any case frequently shrouded in mist. As Morgan-Owen shows, that was the problem that exercised the Admiralty planners in their private deliberations, their public statements to the Invasion Inquiry and elsewhere notwithstanding. Rose, unfortunately, knows nothing about this having chosen not to look at these internal Admiralty documents.
The strategic difficulty inherent in countering a German attack was not the only reason why the German navy had long attracted the nervous attention of its British counterpart. Rigorously trained and professionally led, consisting of well-designed and solidly built ships, and based exclusively in modern heavily defended anchorages on or adjacent to the North Sea, its inherent quality – especially in comparison to a Russian fleet that exhibited few of these traits – meant that it could hardly be ignored. Moreover, its significance increased every year with each new ship laid down. As such, as early as December 1900, Britain’s Naval Intelligence Department calculated that by 1907 the German navy would have overtaken the Russian navy as regards its ability to threaten Britain. 13 Rose attempts to dodge such analyses by not mentioning them and by asserting instead that prior to October 1904 the German navy did not figure in ‘the list of foreseeable risks’ produced by First Sea Lord Sir John ‘Jackie’ Fisher (p. 142). Leaving aside that no such formal list existed and also leaving aside that Fisher had identified Germany as an enemy (and France as a friend) to Arnold White as early as August 1902 14 (in correspondence that Rose also ignores), the fact is that Fisher, who was not responsible for the Admiralty’s threat assessment analysis at the start of the twentieth century, is a red herring here. The German navy had been seen as a pressing problem by the Naval Intelligence Department and its able director, Rear-Admiral Custance, many years prior to Fisher’s appointment as First Sea Lord in October 1904. At Custance’s instigation, a Home Fleet had been created in 1902 to ensure a force in the North Sea always ready to take on Germany. 15 He had also ensured that studies into war with Germany were undertaken. Custance, it may be noted, does not even merit an entry in the index, let alone any analysis in the book. Effectively, Rose discounts British naval appreciations of the German threat by the simple expedient of not studying them or even acknowledging their existence.
Another problem that runs through the entire book is that there is a very large number of factual errors. Sometimes these are just a minor irritation. For example, on one occasion, Rose confuses Sir Edward Grey with Earl Grey (p. 52); the former the foreign secretary, the latter the governor general of Canada. At another point, he tells us that in 1907 ‘Germany’s secretary of state for foreign affairs [was] Adolf Marschall von Bieberstein’ (p. 373), when in fact Marschall had ceased to hold that post in 1897, when he had been transferred instead to the post of German Ambassador in Constantinople. If these slips jar, but otherwise have no appreciable effect on the argument, others are less innocuous. Rose’s commentary on the impact on informed opinion of Erskine Childers’s famous invasion novel, The Riddle of the Sands, is buttressed by the comment that it was sent for examination to Admiral Louis Battenberg, ‘the head of naval defence’ (p. 46). That sounds impressive until one realizes that no such post existed. Battenberg, then still a captain, was Director of Naval Intelligence, a significant job but hardly ‘the head of naval defence’.
If Rose has difficulty with names, titles, and positions, his imprecise use of terminology is also problematic, especially as the imprecision always seems to benefit the argument he wishes to make. For example, we are told that the ‘Triple Alliance [was] formed by Britain’s joining with the powers of the Dual Alliance’ (p. 99). It definitely suits Rose’s analysis of Britain’s role in disrupting the European power system for Britain’s entente with France and Britain’s separate entente with Russia to be grouped together and styled as a single alliance. The fact is, though, that neither was an alliance – Britain had no military obligations to either power – nor did they constitute a single agreement. To represent it as a coherent alliance block is, thus, to use choice of terminology to advance an interpretation. Problematic for the same reasons is Rose’s depiction of the French navy. His interpretation requires this to be as strong, dynamic, and threatening as the German navy was weak, inconsequential, and impotent. His text does not disappoint. For example, he notes that at the start of the twentieth century, whereas German naval plans merely ‘aroused curiosity rather than consternation’, the French building programme was seen as highly threatening. The reason he gives: ‘the French were concentrating on technological innovations such as torpedo boats, submarines and battle-cruisers, which by then had already been recognized as the real weapons of the future’ (p. 135). Several key details in this statement are simply not true. The most glaring error is the suggestion that the French navy of 1900–3 concentrated on battle cruisers. The term is, of course, a complex one as it was not formally adopted until 1911, at which point it was retrospectively applied to all ships that followed the design parameters set out by HMS Invincible (laid down 1906) and its successors. Nevertheless, however one interprets it, the French never concentrated on battle cruisers. Indeed, they did not construct a single ship of this type before the First World War and did not possess one until the commissioning of Dunkerque (arguably a fast battleship) in 1937. By contrast, it might be noted that the German navy had laid down seven such vessels before 1914. Consequently, if battle cruisers were the ship of the future – a doubtful proposition as it happens and the reason why the Royal Navy built four times as many dreadnought battleships as battle cruisers – the French navy was decidedly behind the times. Rose’s analysis, however, requires this to be otherwise and, thus, by a terminological sleight of hand France is invested with a naval technological preponderance in capital ships that it never actually possessed.
How is it that Rose makes these mistakes? The answer possibly lies in weaknesses in his research. His book contains an abundance of archival materials on the work of the British press. Yet, it is not so well resourced when it comes to matters of security and defence. Here the archival sources are extremely limited and reliance is largely placed instead on the secondary literature and a small subset of that only, namely the two or three controversial historians whose work would support the analysis Rose wants. 16 This limited coverage was perhaps excusable when the German version of this book came out in 2011. Since that time, however, a great many publications have appeared that show that the literature that Rose uses to prop up his analysis of British security policy is fatally flawed. Yet, in updating his book, Rose had considered none of this. Important texts by the likes of Shawn Grimes, John Brooks, Christopher Bell, and Richard Dunley do not even make it to the bibliography. 17 However, most problematic for Rose is his total failure to engage with the work of David Morgan-Owen. 18 In matters of defence and security policy, Morgan-Owen covers much of the same ground as Rose, but unlike Rose he has delved deeply and afresh into the archival sources. This leads to major differences in their conclusions. Whereas Rose uncritically accepts all the public assurances of ‘Fisher and his naval experts’ that claims concerning a German threat were ‘groundless, unfounded and at times absurd’ (p. 474), Morgan-Owen assesses what the naval leadership was thinking and saying in private and uncovers in the process the confidential assessments that showed why the rosy view that was propagated for public consumption was anything but the opinion they actually held. This is not just a case of a difference of opinion between two historians, both of whom have assessed the evidence and simply come to different conclusions. Only Morgan-Owen has actually underpinned his assessment with new archival work; Rose has relied on older secondary materials. As a result, he is found wanting.
The four books discussed above all demonstrate that there are considerable advantages to thinking about sea power and security through the prism of new analytical foci. While they are not equally convincing in their interpretations, and one is significantly weaker than the others in the quality of its archival underpinnings, they all show that a broader metanarrative, be that geographical, personal, or thematic, can offer fresh ways of viewing well-known and oft-examined topics.