Fear God and Dread Nought
The Royal Navy was the most powerful naval force in history at the outbreak of the war in 1914. In terms of modern dreadnoughts and battlecruisers, it could match any two of its rivals combined. In the two decades before 1914, navies, including Great Britain’s, had undergone massive and rapid changes as submarines, airships, aircraft, and radios came into service. Coal was steadily being replaced by petrol, while the launching of the battleship HMS Dreadnought, faster, harder-hitting, and more heavily armored than anything before it, had made effectively all other ships obsolete.
Rapid change lead to a naval arms race in the early 20th century, with nations like Germany and the United States trying to match Britain’s naval power, spurred on by military theorists like A.T. Mahan who identified blue water fleets as the crux of a nation’s strategic power. Nevertheless, at the war’s onset, the British fleet still easily outnumbered its enemies and allies. In 1914 the Royal Navy counted 22 dreadnoughts and nine smaller battlecruisers, compared to Germany’s 15 dreadnoughts and five battlecruisers, or America’s ten dreadnoughts. In smaller warships, the Royal Navy outnumbered Germany in cruisers by 121 to 40, destroyers by 221 to 90, and submarines by 73 to 31. Moreover, the Britain’s empire gave it countless stations for fueling and supplying worldwide, while preventing Germany from doing the same.
The Navy was Britain’s greatest strategic asset during the war. The plan was to blockade Germany from a distance, blocking its warships access to the English Channel and the North Sea, while preventing any supply ships from reaching German ports with patrols and mine barrages. Early on, the RN swept lingering German naval presence from the rest of the world, neutralizing Germany’s Pacific and African overseas bases and chasing down its ten commerce raiders operating around the world’s oceans. Helpfully, the alliance with France allowed Britain to concentrate most of its ships around the British Isles. Since the Battle of the Nile in 1798, the Mediterranean had been effectively a British lake, but the French Navy allowed the British to deploy most of their ships around the British Isles in the devastatingly powerful Grand Fleet, based at Scapa Flow in the Orkneys
The most vexing question to Britain’s admirals was what to do about Germany’s fleet. Admiral Sir John Jellicoe, commander of the Grand Fleet, advocated bringing the German ships into action, and getting “the Big Thing” over with as soon as possible. However, he and others fretted about going into action on German terms, too close to mine barrages or traps where submarines could lie in wait and diminish British strength piecemeal. This very thing happened several times at the beginning of the war, like at Hegioland Blight in August 1914, when the British lost four ships and more than 1,000 sailors in Vice Admiral Sir David Beatty’s battlecruiser squadron.
While Jellicoe acted cautiously afterwards, Beatty pushed aggressively for a sharp, knock-out fight with the German Navy. But some factors troubled British strategists. For one thing, although the Royal Navy had an obvious qualitative advantage, German gunnery actually threatened Britain’s navy with advantages in optics, range-finding, and fire control. More importantly, the RN had been essentially resting on its laurels since Trafalgar in 1803, hardly tested since Nelson’s day. There were serious doctrinal problems, including poor British staff work, unreliable underway communications, and flaws in gunnery doctrine, like neglecting to close scuttles between gun turrets and powder magazines, thus providing insufficient anti-flash protection to vulnerable ammo stores. Some of these flaws had been illustrated in battles with German raiders during the war’s early months, like the success of the German East Asia Squadron at the Battle of Coronel off Chile.
German refusal to fight openly frustrated British admirals by diluting the war at sea into a smattering of ambushes and boring blockade work. Nevertheless, British officers and sailors were confident that when the time came for a decisive naval battle with the German fleet, British naval technology and prowess would once again rule the waves.
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