One of the great peculiarities of the First World War, and in particular its nautical dimension, is that Germany and Great Britain, as late as the 1890’s, had no real sense that they were preparing to fight a war with each other. Well towards the end of the century, both German and British naval policy continued to view France (and to a lesser extent Russia) as the chief objects of anxiety.
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In the early 1890’s, Germany’s navy was viewed fundamentally as a limited coastal defense force, designed and tasked with keeping the French and Russians away from Germany’s North Sea and Baltic coastlines, respectively.
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The German Kaiser was both the head of state and the head of the armed forces, and he wielded power through his cabinets and the senior appointees within them. In practice, however, the Kaiser had limited authority over the land forces. The General Staff maintained absolute authority over war planning, and was free to appoint Chiefs of Staff to the field commanders (who were appointed by the Kaiser). The army thus had strong institutional control over both personnel and operations planning which were largely immune to the Kaiser’s direct interference.
The navy was much different, and far more subject to the Kaiser’s direct control. As a result, he tended to view it as something of a personal plaything. In wartime, the Kaiser had to personally approve naval operations, and he generally did so with great trepidation over losing “his ships.” Unlike the army, the navy had no institutional insulation from the Kaiser, and it lacked a strong central planning body akin to the army’s general staff.
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Initially, there was a conventional admiralty, generally called simply the OK (for Oberkommando, or Naval High Command), which was nominally responsible for planning and combat operations. The OK was parallel to a separate office known as the RMA (for Reichsmarineamt, or Imperial Naval Office), which was responsible for the navy’s building program. Finally, there was a a Naval Cabinet which was responsible for personnel and appointments, and was directly subordinate to the Kaiser. In a sense, we can think of the Germany Navy as having its three critical functions (operations planning and command, material and shipbuilding, and personnel) split into three separate bodies which did not have direct institutional connections, and instead were separately suborned to the Kaiser.
This suggests, from the beginning, a fragmented command structure with the Kaiser at its nexus, and in the absence of a unified naval command it was inevitable that the Kaiser — mercurial, easily influenced, and largely ignorant of naval operations — should have dominated the navy as a service. Furthermore, the lack of unified command and clear lines of communication largely froze the navy out of war planning and made it a strategically autonomous service, which did not coordinate with the General Staff of the army and generally lacked a sense of how it could fit into Germany’s larger war plans.
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Finally, we can add that because the German navy began as a strongly subsidiary service (relative to the army, which was always the main pillar of German strength), the navy was forced to actively promote itself to ensure its own survival and growth as a service. This made the German Navy intensely political, locked as it was in a perennial fight to get the Reichstag to appropriate money for shipbuilding. We can say, with little exaggeration, that the primary activity of the German Navy was shipbuilding, rather than war planning or tactical innovation.
This was particularly the case because the dominant figure in the prewar Imperial Navy was Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz. Undoubtedly a titanic figure, Tirpitz more than any other man was responsible for transforming the German Navy from a modest coastal defense force into a world class service capable of threatening (at least on paper) the Royal Navy.
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Tirpitz was a Prussian, but in contrast to the usual Prussian pedigree he had joined the Navy as a young man, at a time when – by his own admission — it was not a particularly popular institution. He began his first serious leap towards high power in the 1880’s as the head of Germany’s torpedo program — notwithstanding his background in torpedo boats, however, he would become a staunch advocate of battleship construction and became the driving figure in the naval arms race which Germany would launch, almost unilaterally, against Great Britain.
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Tirpitz was aggressive about aggrandizing power in whatever office he happened to hold at the time. During his years as chief of staff in the OK (Naval High Command), he argued that shipbuilding responsibilities should be taken away from the State Naval Secretary. Once Tirpitz was himself the State Naval Secretary, he lobbied to strip command authority from, and the ultimately dissolve, the OK. At both stops, he was skilled at manipulating the Kaiser — with whom he had an exceptional relationship — to get what he wanted, even threatening to resign on multiple occasions.
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The embryo of Tirpitz’s evolving theory of naval power was his growing concern that, in some future war, the enemy might attempt to blockade German ports at long distance — that is to say, rather than conducting a close-in blockade of German harbors, the enemy fleet might loiter at strategic standoff and intercept German trade as it flowed through traffic chokepoints. It seems that at the beginning, the specific anxiety that preoccupied Tirpitz was the possibility that France might interdict German trade in the English Channel and the North Sea, at a distance beyond the fighting range of Germany’s coastal fleets.
If this were the case, then the entire German naval strategy might be obsolete. A blockade at range would compel the German fleet to come out from its own coastal areas to defeat the enemy on the open sea. This marked a conceptual shift from coastal defense to “sea control”, which necessitated in turn an entirely different sort of battlefleet prepared to fight a decisive battle far from German bases.
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Nothing about the German operational sensibility at this time was remotely realistic. A draft operations plan in 1895 envisioned a blockade of French channel ports designed to draw the French fleet out for battle. This was an elementary sort of formulation which ignored the fact that the French Northern Fleet would simply wait for reinforcements from the Mediterranean, and to make the plan work (even on paper) the OK assumed that repair and resupply could be done in English ports. This latter point is important, as it emphasizes that in 1895, rather than thinking of a war with the Royal Navy, the Germans were not only still preoccupied with France but even assuming that England would be a friendly neutral.
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Tirpitz was determined to build a viable and powerful fleet comprised of battleships, but to do so he needed a strategic vision that could justify such a program. Neither Russia nor France was a good fit for the Mahanian understanding of war, with its emphasis on “Sea Supremacy.” In any war against the Franco-Russian alliance, whatever the particular configuration, it was inevitable that the German Army would be the arm on which the country lived or died. A Navy designed for decisive fleet battle and sea supremacy implied, almost by definition, that the Royal Navy was an adversary. Russia and France could never be defeated by sea, therefore Tirpitz needed an adversarial standard which would require, unequivocally, a fleet of battleships.
