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| ISBN-13: | 9780253355935 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 05/03/2011 |
| Pages: | 608 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.40(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.80(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
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Tirpitz and the Imperial German Navy
By Patrick J. Kelly
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2011 Patrick J. KellyAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-35593-5
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
OVERTURE: THE WATCH ON THE NORTH SEA
On 3 August 1914 gray-clad German troopers crossed the Belgian and Luxemburg frontiers to begin, in that theater, the greatest conflagration Europe had ever seen. Nestled in the fenlands of the North Sea coast, the small, drab German city of Wilhelmshaven overnight became a household word. In its harbor and in the nearby Jade, a lagoon-like body of water, sheltered from the stormy North Sea by a great sand bar, there gathered the most powerful fleet ever assembled in continental Europe, the mighty German High Seas Fleet. Fifteen of the most modern (Dreadnought-type) battleships, soon joined by two more in trials, and four speedy battlecruisers lay poised for an expected Armageddon with the even mightier British Grand Fleet, which then had twenty-two Dreadnoughts and ten powerful battlecruisers.
A few dozen leagues to the north, on the small island of Helgoland, lookouts scanned the horizon in wary anticipation of the British Armada. Smaller warships, based in Helgoland, formed a picket line to the north and west, ready to wireless the alarm.
To the south, the presence in an Austrian Adriatic base of the German battlecruiser Goeben alarmed the British Mediterranean command. Halfway around the world, in the German colony of Tsingtau on the Chinese Shantung Peninsula, a small squadron of older German cruisers excited the same fears for British forces in the Pacific. This impressive array of German naval might was, in large measure, the life's work of Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz.
As recently as 1897 most ships of the Imperial German Navy were obsolescent museum pieces, many of them foreign-built. Depending on how one measured, Germany, an industrial giant, had a fleet that ranked only fifth or sixth among the world's navies, with just a handful of modern ships. As the French Revolution proved, nations could create, train, and arm huge military forces over a short period of time; navies, however, were another matter. To construct and maintain a formidable navy required vast amounts of coal and steel, large numbers of skilled workers, highly sophisticated machine tools and engineering, and complex organizational entities to manage the process. Failing heroic measures, a large modern ship needed at least three or four years to complete, and usually another year for trials. Some of the essential fleet-building elements were in place in Germany by 1897, but a master organizer was needed to initiate and direct such a complex systematic undertaking.
The naval zeal of William II (r. 1888–1918) was an indispensable prerequisite for a large fleet, but his mercurial temperament and erratic work habits provided little progress on naval matters during the first nine years of his reign. To finance a first-class navy required vast sums of money. Absent were a plausible program, public enthusiasm, and parliamentary support from a society not previously noted, except in a few coastal cities, for its maritime interests.
Alfred Tirpitz, who brought the German Navy to second in the world by 1914, was the son of a respected Prussian country judge. In 1865, at age sixteen, he joined the navy to escape the rigors of the classroom. How could such an unpromising middle-class youth rise to one of the highest positions in the Second Reich? How could he ultimately challenge the might of the British Royal Navy? How could he become the most effective politician in the entire history of Imperial Germany, save only the incomparable Otto von Bismarck? This biography addresses these questions, along with the failures and doleful consequences that followed from those same unlikely successes.
Tirpitz is best remembered for his work as State Secretary of the Imperial Naval Office (Reichsmarineamt, or RMA) from 1897 to 1916. During those years he persuaded the Imperial Reichstag to pass five naval bills (1898 and 1900, with amendments in 1906, 1908, and 1912) that produced the world's second-largest navy. The laws were mainly directed toward the construction of sixty modern battleships and battlecruisers by 1920. In 1914 the exigencies of war essentially brought the construction plan to a halt; nevertheless, the partially fulfilled program was a remarkable, if tainted, achievement. Tirpitz had to overcome enormous political and diplomatic obstacles, the fecklessness of William II, and even the opposition of powerful elements within the navy itself.
THE NAVY AND THE CONSTITUTION
To understand the character and magnitude of the challenges Tirpitz faced, it is necessary to examine some of the peculiarities of the Constitution of the German Empire that Bismarck put into place shortly after the founding of the Empire in 1871.
By the standards of a world accustomed to the idea of a nation-state, even a federal one such as the United States, the German Empire was an odd creation. The official name of the Empire was "The Federated Governments of the German Empire." Sovereignty was not vested in the Emperor but in the Bundesrat, an unelected body comprised of what amounted to ambassadors from the various German states. Prussia, with over 60 percent of the territory and population of the Empire, was the dominant force within the Bundesrat, and held veto power over anything it enacted. The King of Prussia was President of this union of states and, solely by virtue of this position, was styled the "German Emperor." In many respects he enjoyed far more power as King than as Emperor.
A rough analogy would be as if all of the United States east of the Rocky Mountains were one of the fifty states, and the rest of the country were divided into the other forty-nine. If we call the largest state "Columbia" and give the states hereditary governors, then the Governor of Columbia would, ipso facto, be President of the United States. Even if the smaller states had considerable power over their domestic affairs, one can imagine how significant in national affairs the Governor of Columbia would be.
In peacetime the larger German federal states had their own armies; only in wartime would they be partially subordinated to the King of Prussia. Technically, under the Empire, there was no such thing as a German Army. At first many services, including post, customs, and railroads, were left to individual federal states.
The Prussian Parliament (Landtag) had a three-class suffrage system, which overrepresented rural, aristocratic, and agrarian interests, and underrepresented cities and the fast-growing urban population. The Imperial Reichstag was elected by universal and equal manhood suffrage, although it was never redistricted between 1871 and 1918 to reflect vast population movements from rural to urban areas. Royal prerogative precluded the Reichstag's direct participation in military and foreign affairs, and it could not initiate legislation, which first had to come from the Bundesrat. The Reichstag's main power was to vote on the national budget. In the background lurked the fear (or hope) of a repetition of what had happened for several years in the 1860s, when Bismarck taxed and spent money in defiance of the Prussian Landtag that, on paper, had a budget right similar to that of the post-1871 Reichstag. In Tirpitz's time, William II sometimes blustered about a government coup, with army backing, against the Reichstag. Under the Empire, this would have been harder to do than in Prussia, because the other federal states would probably have opposed what they would see as a Prussian power grab. Some groups in the Reichstag, such as the Bavarian wing of the Catholic Center Party, were much more concerned with the interests of their own states than those of the whole Reich.
Compared to other parliamentary systems, the position of the Imperial Chancellor was similarly unusual. Unlike, for example, the British Prime Minister, leader of the ruling party, the Chancellor and his cabinet did not rely on a parliamentary majority, but were chosen by and served at the pleasure of the Emperor. This arrangement often created awkwardness for the Chancellor, as well as the danger of serious instability if the Emperor and the Reichstag were irreconcilably at odds on an important issue.
The Imperial Navy, founded in 1871, was truly a national institution, without cumbersome constitutional ties to individual states. Under Bismarck there was a Chief of Admiralty, who simultaneously exercised both military command of the navy, directly subject to the Emperor, and the task of dealing with the Reichstag, under the aegis of the Chancellor. Shortly after William II ascended the throne in 1888 he demanded more direct control of the navy. He therefore split the Admiralty into three parts, modeled, he thought, on the army's organization. A High Command (Oberkommando, or OK), led by a Commanding Admiral, conducted solely military matters and thereby was not "tainted" by contact with the Reichstag. A State Secretary of the RMA, another naval officer, would deal with the Reichstag about the naval budget. Although a member of the Chancellor's cabinet, he was still subject to military discipline. A Naval Cabinet (Marinekabinett, or MK) handled personnel matters within the navy. This apparently logical arrangement led to fierce internecine battles, in which Tirpitz was seriatim engaged for both sides, first as Chief of Staff of the OK and later as State Secretary of the RMA, when he had to refute his prior claims to OK supremacy. Tirpitz was no simple sailor turned minister, but he was at the nexus of a complicated process of institutional creation/reformation that reached into many dimensions of governmental and extra-governmental life.
INTERPRETING TIRPITZ
Tirpitz's achievement has attracted many interpreters, one of whom was Tirpitz himself. As with many memoirs, Tirpitz's were exculpatory. He argued that, in a predatory world, Germany needed a powerful fleet of battleships to protect German coasts, trade, and economic interests, particularly from the British Royal Navy. He proposed a counterintuitive defense of Germany's worldwide interests, the concentration of almost the entire fleet in home waters. The idea came to be called the "risk theory," a form of deterrence, first articulated publicly in the preamble to the 1900 Navy Law. An enlarged German fleet would eventually create a situation whereby a British naval defeat of Germany would incur losses that would leave the Royal Navy exposed to the combined French and Russian navies. He argued that, instead of risking a pyrrhic victory, the British would make political concessions to Germany, particularly in the realm of trade and colonies. If the risk theory were correct, a German fleet concentrated in home waters would make its weight felt all around the world and serve as a lever for German world policy (Weltpolitik). If the British failed to see the logic of the scheme, Germany, with its small but growing fleet, would be an attractive alliance partner for France and, especially, for Russia, who were Britain's two principal opponents in colonial questions around 1900. He did not address how Germany could become an ally of France while still in occupation of Alsace-Lorraine, the principal spoils of the war with France in 1870–1871.
Every ship added after 1900 would, he argued, increase the navy's deterrence value. Early on there would be a "danger zone," during which the young fleet might be vulnerable to British preventive attack. To pass the danger zone safely it would be essential to avoid provocative foreign policy actions until the fleet was "ready." He was vague about when the danger zone would end but was confident that it would be sometime before the full fleet of sixty battleships and large cruisers was complete in 1920.
Tirpitz boasted that, with the 1900 naval law, he had established an "iron budget," which obviated the need to go to the Reichstag for ship construction money every year, as had been the case before 1898. Freed from the vexing annual interference of Parliament, the fleet could grow at the pace of three large ships per year as it finessed the danger zone. In hindsight, Germany was less secure against Britain with a large fleet in 1914 than it had been with a much smaller one in 1900; Tirpitz later attributed this situation mainly to the "bungling" of Chancellors Bernhard von Bülow (1900–1909) and Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg (1909–1916).
Official histories, most published naval memoirs, and later German conservative historians, particularly Hans Hallmann and Walther Hubatsch, defended Tirpitz. Hubatsch has suggested that the fateful choice made in 1897 to establish a navy based on fixed laws was, in itself, sufficient to involve Germany in a hopeless arms race:
He [Tirpitz] belongs to that type of homo faber that was brought forth in an age of technology. But technology at the turn of the century was in the position of making itself independent. The naval laws, like the Schlieffen Plan and the clockwork of mobilization, withdrew from the necessary political and diplomatic influences....
The mechanically unfolding, long-term Navy Law became an instrument of the political leadership, and was never arranged to the degree necessary to correspond to the total interests of foreign policy.
According to Hubatsch, if Tirpitz did not completely foresee the political effects of his policy, then the fault lay with the Foreign Office.
Another view held that Tirpitz and Germany were not trapped by technology but that Tirpitz was, by nature, a militarist. Gerhard Ritter has written that Tirpitz's solution to Germany's political problems with Britain was "build more, until they come to us," the reply of a "typical militarist." Ritter defined militarism as "the erroneous belief that political problems can be mastered by military exertions alone."
With very few exceptions, such as Carl Galster and Wolfgang Wegener, the navy's official history and published memoirs era reflected Tirpitz's view. Recent scholarship has demonstrated how assiduously the Weimar era navy protected Tirpitz's image and justified his ideas.
Beneath the official silence, some of Tirpitz's former close associates wondered what had gone wrong. In 1926 retired Admiral Eduard von Capelle, Tirpitz's closest aide for eighteen years and the master of dealing with the Reichstag, heard from a former subordinate, Vice Admiral Carl Hollweg, also retired. The latter lamented that the true story would probably never be told:
There are in Germany only two men who would be, because of their own experience, in a position to write such a book on the theme of fleet building and the causes of the war. These are Your Excellency and Admiral Dähnhardt [Capelle's former deputy], who were both in Berlin during the whole Navy Law period and were knowledgeable about all things. Tirpitz himself is too much of a partisan to write such a book credibly. Thus, it will happen that the "professors" and other people who work only on the basis of "files and documents" will be victorious with their view that building a fleet was a fundamental error, and led to our misfortune.
Despite Hollweg's misgivings, the "official" version held up for a surprisingly long time. The only major exception was Eckart Kehr, who died tragically in 1933 at the age of thirty. Virtually ignored when published, Kehr's work saw Germany's naval and foreign policy driven more strongly by the need for the aristocratic ruling classes to defend their hold on Germany from socialism and democracy than by legitimate defense needs. Kehr's interpretation emphasized what he saw as the primacy of domestic over foreign policy in building the fleet.
Hollweg's prediction about the "professors" only began to materialize in the early 1960s, when the German Naval Archives, which survived the war almost intact, became available to historians. The first book to explore in depth these new holdings was Jonathan Steinberg's Yesterday's Deterrent: Tirpitz and the Birth of the German Battle Fleet. Steinberg argued convincingly that Tirpitz, from the moment he took over as State Secretary of the RMA in the summer of 1897, clearly intended to build a "fleet against England." His second contention, which came under attack from later historians such as Volker Berghahn, was that Tirpitz, of bourgeois origins himself, operated with the Reichstag in a much more collegial and parliamentary manner than his more traditional and conservative colleagues. Steinberg thus gave Tirpitz a "liberal" flavor.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Tirpitz and the Imperial German Navy by Patrick J. Kelly. Copyright © 2011 Patrick J. Kelly. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Abbreviations xi
1 Introduction 1
2 Tirpitz's Early Life 14
3 The Aspirant, 1865-1870 24
4 The Young Officer, 1870-1877: A Taste of War 33
5 The Creation of the German Torpedo Arm, 1877-1889 47
6 Interim, 1889-1891 69
7 Oberkommando der Marine, 1892-1895 81
8 On the Verge of Power, 1895-1897 103
9 Tirpitz Ascendant, 1897-1898 129
10 The Second Navy Law, 1899-1900 166
Illustrations 203
11 The "Quiet" Years, 1900-1906 223
12 Sow the Wind, 1906-1908 263
13 The Whirlwind Rises, 1908-1911 293
14 Denouement, 1911-1914 323
15 Tirpitz at War, August 1914-March 1916 375
16 Uncommon Recessional, 1916-1930 410
17 Conclusion 444
Appendix 467
Notes 469
Bibliography 535
Index 555
What People are Saying About This
As both a definitive biography and detailed evaluation of the historiography of this period, Kelly has produced a compelling portrait of Tirpitz that balances the views of those scholars who have overestimated Tirpitz’s rationality in political, social and military affairs with those who underestimated his opportunism.
As both a definitive biography and detailed evaluation of the historiography of this period, Kelly has produced a compelling portrait of Tirpitz that balances the views of those scholars who have overestimated Tirpitz's rationality in political, social and military affairs with those who underestimated his opportunism.
Beyond its great interest for naval and military historians regardless of specialization, this work will be required reading for any . . . historian of the Second Reich and the interwar period . . . and for those fascinated by the eternal query, 'Who or what caused the outbreak of the First World War?'
Patrick Kelly has written the first major scholarly biography of Tirpitz in English, based on detailed knowledge of vast archival material and an extensive historical literature. With great precision, Kelly's narrative integrates Tirpitz's naval and political careers with broader developments within the German Empire and the Weimar Republic. He also treats in detail the international politics of Wilhelmine arms policy, the naval race with Britain, and the ensuing First World War. This book can be thoroughly recommended to students of both German and naval history.
Beyond its great interest for naval and military historians regardless of specialization, this work will be required reading for any . . . historian of the Second Reich and the interwar period . . . and for those fascinated by the eternal query, 'Who or what caused the outbreak of the First World War?'
Patrick Kelly has written the first major scholarly biography of Tirpitz in English, based on detailed knowledge of vast archival material and an extensive historical literature. With great precision, Kelly’s narrative integrates Tirpitz’s naval and political careers with broader developments within the German Empire and the Weimar Republic. He also treats in detail the international politics of Wilhelmine arms policy, the naval race with Britain, and the ensuing First World War. This book can be thoroughly recommended to students of both German and naval history.
As both a definitive biography and detailed evaluation of the historiography of this period, Kelly has produced a compelling portrait of Tirpitz that balances the views of those scholars who have overestimated Tirpitz's rationality in political, social and military affairs with those who underestimated his opportunism.
Beyond its great interest for naval and military historians regardless of specialization, this work will be required reading for any . . . historian of the Second Reich and the interwar period . . . and for those fascinated by the eternal query, 'Who or what caused the outbreak of the First World War?'
Patrick Kelly has written the first major scholarly biography of Tirpitz in English, based on detailed knowledge of vast archival material and an extensive historical literature. With great precision, Kelly's narrative integrates Tirpitz's naval and political careers with broader developments within the German Empire and the Weimar Republic. He also treats in detail the international politics of Wilhelmine arms policy, the naval race with Britain, and the ensuing First World War. This book can be thoroughly recommended to students of both German and naval history.