EHQREVIEW 2016-02-29 14-00 2016-03-04 12-40
Britain, Europe and the War at Sea, 1900-1918
Nicholas A. Lambert, Planning Armageddon: British Economic Warfare and the First World War: Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard UP, 2012; viii + 651 pp., 1 table, 1 map, 9780674061491, £37.95.
Isabel Hull, A Scrap of Paper: Breaking and Making International Law during the Great War, Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 2014, xiii + 368 pp., 0801452732, $45.00.
Lawrence Sondhaus, The Great War at Sea: A Naval History of the First World War, Cambridge: CUP, 2014, 407 pp., 9 maps, 9781107036901, £25.99.
Mathew S. Seligmann, Frank Nägler and Michael Epkenhans eds., The Naval Route to the Abyss: The Anglo German Naval Arms Race, 1895-1914, Farnham: Ashgate, 2015, xlix + 508 pp., 9781472440938, £90.00.
James Goldrick, Before Jutland: The Naval War in Northern European Waters, August 1914-February 1915, Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2015, xvi, 382 pp., 11 maps, 9781591143499, $44.95.
The turn of the twentieth century witnessed the growth of the first international associations for the study of history. After meetings of likeminded scholars at the Hague in 1898, Paris in 1900 and Rome in 1903, The International Congress of Historical Studies began a regular series of gatherings, arranged on a quinquennial basis.[1] The 1913 meeting in London was the first time that the fledgling disciplines of naval and military history, hitherto primarily consigned to staff colleges, were represented in the program. Julian Stafford Corbett, Lecturer at the Naval War College and a regular source of consul to the Admiralty, edited the proceedings of the panel for Cambridge University Press. In the volume, Professor C. Oman lamented how ‘a school of modern historians has systematically depreciated the study of military history.’ To his mind political and personal bias led some contemporary scholars to diminish the utility of the discipline, focused as it was upon great men and cataclysmic events, rather than upon society as a whole and the steady march of civilising progress.[2] Like all writers, Oman was a product of his time. Yet in articulating these sentiments he reflected challenges which have proven enduring to scholars of warfare in the century since he spoke. Despite widespread popular interest military history remains unfashionable within the academy, where many remain suspicions about its intellectual rigour, methodology and intentions. The books reviewed in this essay confound such doubts. They demonstrate the breadth and diversity of approaches increasingly prevalent in the study of war, applying innovative research methodologies and approaching topics from fresh and interesting perspectives. They place the sea at the heart of the conflict, assigning it its proper place as far more than a medium for naval combat. People and their treatment are integral to the story, as are the myriad technical, logistical and doctrinal issues involved with applying sea power in a total war. The volumes here discussed display the strength of military and naval history and why the study of conflict can no longer be questioned on grounds of academic rigour or analysis.
The First World War at sea has traditionally been approached from the perspective of the Anglo-German naval rivalry which grew up in the decade after Tirptiz guided the first of his Navy Laws through the Reichstag in 1898. Scholars have debated the precise moment at which Germany became a definite factor in the British Admiralty’s strategic calculations, however the naval race has all-too-often been viewed from a national perspective. The Naval Route to the Abyss addresses this oversight, providing a truly transnational account of the Anglo-German rivalry for mastery of the North Sea before 1914. With chronologically sequential sections dealing with developments in both countries, the editors have assembled a collection of the documents most crucial to our understanding of how officials on each side of the North Sea perceived the situation and how their actions, intentions and perceptions interacted. The translation of the German documents into English and the introductions provided by Frank Nägler and Michael Epkenhans are of particular value to scholars working without the benefit of access to the German archives. They show a clear progression in German thinking from a focus upon fighting against France and Russia in the mid-1890s towards an Anglo-centric focus by the turn of the century. Whereas in 1895 Admiral Knorr could inform the Kaiser that ‘France’s Northern Fleet and Russia’s Baltic Fleet [were our] probable opponents’, as little as six months later Tirptiz was laying out his arguments for developing German naval power to increase her value as an alliance partner against Britain. ‘Germany’s alliance value’, he argued, ‘does not lie in our army, but to a great extent in our fleet…up to the present our policy has failed completely to grasp the political importance of sea power.’[3] This formed the basis of his policy after he became State Secretary in 1897 and provided the rationale for the Navy Law of 1898.
The influence these developments had in Britain, once viewed as defining British naval policy after 1900, has been called into question in recent years. Critics of this viewpoint have argued that Britain remained a global power and that the Admiralty simply could not afford to prioritise Germany over other threats to British interests - particularly those of Russia and France but also Italian, Austro-Hungarian and nascent US navies. This argument has some validity in that it is impossible to consider British naval policy in this era in a purely European context. However it misses the fundamental point of Tirptiz’s policy; to make Germany an attractive alliance partner for other European powers in a standoff against Britain. Despite starting from a comparatively modest level of strength in the 1890s, the German fleet rapidly became a source of considerable concern in London precisely because the Admiralty was simultaneously preparing to defend British interests in the Atlantic, Mediterranean, Indian Ocean and Far East and had distributed its resources accordingly. Indeed, prior to 1903 there was no fully-commissioned British fleet permanently located in home waters for this very reason. Thus, the relatively modest size of the German fleet prior to 1905-06 cannot be considered justification to view it as a subsidiary concern in London. Matthew Seligmann makes this point clear with a comprehensive arrangement of documents detailing the evolution of British concerns about German strength. Some of these will be familiar to scholars of the period, but many will not. It will, perhaps, come as a surprise to some to see extensive discussions of the German naval programme as early as 1898, when the Senior Naval Lord minuted that the ‘real concern for this country is the new German Naval Programme which cannot be ignored.’ An extensive use of the ADM 1 series in The National Archive enables Seligmann to compile a compelling case that the Naval Intelligence Department came to view Germany in precisely this light and that by 1902 ‘the strategic centre in Home Waters lies in the neighbourhood of the Straits of Dover.’[4] The ability to view the development of the Anglo-German rivalry from both sides of the North Sea and from the primary material itself makes Naval Route to the Abyss a unique and important contribution to the existing scholarship and one of great value to students and researchers alike.
The destruction of Russian naval power during the War against Japan and the conclusion of the Entente Cordiale with France enabled Admiralty planners to focus more fully upon fighting a war against Germany after 1904-05. Traditional interpretations have been critical of the naval leadership’s intellectual capacity to prepare to conduct such a war, however the books reviewed here present a markedly different account. In Planning Armageddon: British Economic Warfare and the First World War, Nicholas A. Lambert presents the case that the Admiralty developed a highly sophisticated strategy to exploit Britain’s dominance of global shipping, communications and finance to wage an aggressive campaign of economic warfare against Germany. He posits that this was conceived as a ‘short war’ strategy, intended to produce such dramatic affects upon the German economy that she would rapidly become unable to prosecute war on a large scale due to the sheer scale of domestic dislocation and the resulting social upheaval she would experience. ‘Economic warfare’, he believes, ‘constituted a national strategy of quick, decisive war comparable in function and objectives to Germany’s infamous Schlieffen Plan.’[5]
On first inspection the thesis presented in the first third of Lambert’s book - that which covers the pre-war period - appears strikingly at odds with previous scholarship, if not actively iconoclastic towards it. Lambert contends that the British government endorsed the Admiralty’s ambitious plans to devastate the German economy as the principal tenet of British grand strategy in 1912 and that this approach remained in place in August 1914. This confounds the consensus that Britain entered the war with a limited strategy of ‘business as usual’, which gradually shifted towards a ‘continental commitment’ after the failures at Gallipoli during 1915. In forwarding this provocative argument Lambert does make a number of valuable contributions, both to our understanding of Admiralty planning and to the broader picture of British thinking about war as a whole. The extent to which British control of global shipping was seen as a means of augmenting pressure on Germany and the emphasis placed upon restricting exports from the Central Powers as well as goods reaching those countries are both important points of emphasis. Lambert’s story is also elegantly woven into the economic, political and social context of the period. It features a range of compelling characters - some of whose involvement with the machinery of blockade during the First World War will perhaps come as a surprise to general readers. We find Professor Robert Griffin (of ‘Griffen goods’ fame) providing statistical advice on international trade to the Committee of Imperial Defence and government officials finding support for the Admiralty’s arguments in Norman Angell’s best-seller The Great Illusion, for instance. Here we see some of the best aspects of modern writing on war - new research on technical issues being fused into a nuanced understanding of the wider political and economic context.
That said, Lambert’s ambition overtakes what the evidence will sustain in several important ways. This becomes particularly clear from the documents produced by the Committee of Imperial Defence’s ‘Trading with the Enemy’ sub-committee reproduced in Naval Route to the Abyss, which are considerably less definitive in their tone than is reflected in Lambert’s thesis. The prominent Treasury official Sir Robert Chalmers’ cautionary words that ‘a policy of prohibiting trade might alienate the good-will of neutrals and incense our own population’ fore-shadowed the debates which occurred after the declaration of War and Lambert does not convincingly demonstrate that the government overcame these issues prior to 1914.[6] Isabel Hull’s work on international law highlights other problems in Planning Armageddon. She shows that Lambert’s argument that the pre-delegation of responsibility for the economic warfare campaign to the Admiralty represented a major and highly significant departure from previous practice are exaggerated, reinforcing doubts as to whether the government had adopted the definite stance Lambert presents before 1914. Moreover, Hull stresses how Britain’s entire approach to the question of blockade and of international law prior to the War had been one of compromise and consent. The government worried that the independence of British Prize courts would render the strangulation of seaborne trade with Germany problematic, to say nothing of the issues arising from neutral shipping destined for non-combatant countries sharing a contiguous land border with the Kaiserreich. Whether a Liberal government for whom the importance of ‘Britain’s self-image as law abiding and as a leader in the world community of ‘civilised’ states cannot be overemphasised’ would accept a strategy based upon attempting to precipitate and then manage a general financial collapse whose affects would be felt globally is unclear.[7] This criticism is borne about by Lambert’s own account of the wartime administration of the blockade, which highlights how the lack of agreement between politicians, officials and government departments combined with the vital necessity of preserving functioning relationships with neutral states to curtail the effectiveness of British economic warfare. The attention Lambert devotes to these debates between 1914-16 inevitably calls into question his comparatively very brief treatment of the supposed acceptance of the ‘economic warfare’ strategy in 1912.
Another shortcoming in Planning Armageddon is Lambert’s failure to account for the vital question of how economic warfare would function in the context of the Entente with France. Successive French premiers had pressed the British government for a firm commitment of direct military support in the event of a German attack and Asquith was under no illusion that Paris viewed naval measures alone as insufficient.[8] If co-operating with France to maintain the balance of power on the Continent was a crucial prop of British diplomacy, how the government could have adopted a strategy so poorly calibrated to suit the needs of its potential ally required some additional explanation.
Despite this tendency to overstate his case, the value of Lambert’s work is that it places the Admiralty and Britain’s maritime and financial power at the heart of his narrative. By doing so he restores an important element of perspective to debates over Britain’s involvement in the War. Regardless of whether four or six divisions of the Expeditionary Force were sent in August 1914, the British contribution would be primarily a maritime, naval and financial one for the foreseeable future. The advisability of abandoning this stance in favour of increased military intervention on the Continent was a question of philosophical preference as much as it was one of political necessity. It therefore played an important part in shaping the attitudes many politicians and officials took to the wartime administration (or lack thereof) of the blockade. Emphasising this point makes Planning Armageddon a valuable contribution to the broader debate on British strategy, even if it is questionable on numerous points of detail.
Whilst it diverges from Lambert’s work, Naval Route to the Abyss paints a similarly positive view of the capabilities and thoroughness of Admiralty planning prior to 1914. Seligmann’s previous work on naval and military intelligence enables him to present a clear picture of how the Admiralty identified aspects of the German threat and then proceeded to respond to them. Detailed information was gathered on German fleet tactics, the likely attitude neutral nations would adopt in wartime and how the German’s might seek to prosecute a campaign in the North Sea. Combined with the Navy’s own fleet exercises and grand manoeuvres, this information lead the Admiralty to anticipate many of the difficulties involved in operating effectively against the German Fleet in the North Sea. These stemmed primarily from the acknowledgement that, by 1912, regular observation of enemy ports would no longer be possible in the face of growing German strength. The British would therefore not be able to tell if and when the enemy fleet put to sea. This posed serious problems for how best to patrol the bleak swathes of the North Sea, how to protect the Fleet from enemy torpedo attack and how to safeguard the east coast. Collectively these difficulties became known as the ‘North Sea problem’. Solving them obliged the Fleet to adopt an increasingly conservative stance, much to the chagrin of its pre-war commander, Vice-Admiral Sir George Callaghan, who warned that ‘such an idea, if allowed to grow, cannot but be most prejudicial to that spirit of initiative which is so essential.’[9]