When the First World War began on August 4, 1914, the German High Seas Fleet was an impressive instrument of war. With seventeen battleships plus eleven more in construction, fifty-five cruisers, 154 destroyer and forty-five submarines, it ranked a powerful second in the world, easily surpassing all of its rivals save one. Only the British Navy was larger than the Kaiser's, and this numerical advantage was, to a sizable degree, negated by German qualitative superiority in many fields of naval armaments; the commander of the British Fleet, Admiral Jellicoe, frankly admitted that it was "highly dangerous to consider that our ships as a whole are superior or even equal fighting machines."[1] As a result , the flotillas and squadrons of the Second Reich were the first naval forces in over a century to pose a serious threat to the British Grand Fleet, and even if the English were the odds-on favorite in a general engagement, few argued that regardless of who won the encounter the victory would be a Pyrrhic one.

Still, despite its enormous size, the German High Seas Fleet has to be regarded as one of the greatest mistakes in history. Lacking a clear raison d'etre, the Kaiser's ships proved to be an expensive liability in times of peace, and an ineffective weapon in times of war.

The reasons for the creation of a German Fleet at all are varied. One factor was the nature of the individuals in power. Kaiser Wilhelm II was a much greater naval enthusiast than any of his predecessors, and Secretary of the Navy Admiral Von Tirpitz was the strongest proponent of a powerful German fleet in history. The political and diplomatic ideas of the day were also supportive of these values, for contemporary leaders believed that a nation had to be a world power to be a first-rate power and to be a first rate power a state had to have a strong navy. Tirpitz took this to heart when he wrote the Navy Bill of 1900:

To protect Germany's sea trade and colonies, there is only one means -- Germany must have a battle fleet so strong that even for the adversary with the greatest sea power a war against it would involve such danger as to imperil his own in the world.[2]

One fault that cannot be attributed to Germany's naval program was its timing. In 1898 Britain stood far beyond her rivals:[3]

	Britain	German	France	Russia	Italy
Battleships
First-class          Second-class          Third-class	29 7 18	4 4 6	14 8 7	6 4 5	8 2 3
Total Battleships	54	14	29	13	14
Coast-defense ships	14	18	16	13	..
Cruisers
First-class          Second-class          Third-class	23 47 34	1 3 9	8 13 9	6 3 1	.. 5 9
Total Cruisers	104	13	30	10	14
Torpedo Gunboats	34	4	19	8	15

It is obvious that Germany could never hope to compete with Great Britain when the disparity between the two nations was so great to begin with. However, when the HMS Dreadnought was launched . February 10, 1906, every other ship in existence became obsolete. Although the Germans were unable to even lay the keel for a comparable vessel until July 1907, it was only this overnight revolution in naval design that gave the Kaiser a chance to achieve numerical equality with England.

Tirpitz was quick to seize upon this fact and immediately embarked on an ambitious building program:

Year	In Service	Building	Total
1907 1909 1910 1911 1912 1913 1914	0 0 2 4 7 10 13	4 10 8 9 10 7 6	4 10 10 13 17 17 19

At this point one of the first major flaws of the German naval plan became evident. The Kaiser and his ministers believed that by simply proclaiming that their fleet was being built for defensive purposes, the British would quietly acquiesce to the construction of a rival navy right at their doorstep. Winston Churchill, in an address to the House of Commons, concisely summed up England's estimate of the situation:

The whole character of the German fleet shows that it is designed for aggressive and offensive action of the largest possible character in the North Sea or the North Atlantic - action, according to the Memorandum accompanying their first Bill, against the strongest naval Power at some moment when that Power will not be able, owing to some duty which it may have to discharge to its Colonies or to some other part of the Empire, to beep all its forces concentrated to meet the blow. The structure of the German battleships shows clearly that they are intended for attack and for fleet action. They are not a cruiser fleet designed to protect Colonies and commerce all over the world. They have been preparing for years, and are continuing to prepare, on an ever larger scale a fleet which, from its structure and character, can be proved by naval experts to have the central and supreme object of drawing out a line of battle for a great trial of strength in the North Sea or the ocean.[4]

Indeed, even the idea that another power could exert its will on the sea lanes was unthinkable to the British. By the 20th Century, England was vitally dependent on seaborne commerce for most of her raw materials, and even more so for her foodstuffs. Great Britain simply could not allow any potential enemy to contest the oceans, especially Germany, whose 4.5 million-man army could directly threaten the British Isles and its 380,000-man force in a decidedly non-reciprocal arrangement. In order to prevent the possibility of a German invasion of England, the British undertook their own rapid shipbuilding, designed to keep Germany's capital ships at a figure 60% of that of Britain:

Year	In Service	Building	Total	Superiority over Germany
1907 1909 1910 1911 1912 1913 1914	1 2 5 8 12 15 18	3 6 9 10 10 11 14	4 8 14 14 22 26 32	0 -2 4 1 5 9 13

British Admirals had other evidence that the High Seas Fleet was cast for more than a defensive role. Besides constructing far in excess of what was needed for purely defensive purposes, the nature of the German dreadnoughts indicated that they were designed to fulfill roles other than the Protection of merchantmen. The Kaiser's ships had a notoriously short cruising radius, effectively limiting their scope of operations to the North Sea. As a result, more defensive armor and heavy guns could be included on each vessel, the exact prerequisites for ships intended not to escort convoys but to exchange salvos with enemy battleships.

The German government not only miscalculated England's desire to respond but also Britain's ability to compete industrially with Germany. With the Ruhr factories rapidly outdistancing Great Britain in terms of coal and steel production, the Kaiser felt it would be possible for his Deutschland to at least match British dreadnought construction. This would combine with England's need to disperse her naval forces due to her worldwide commitments, and make it possible for the High Seas Fleet to challenge the Grand Fleet on a more equal basis.

Neither of their assumptions existed in reality. Despite a German superiority in raw materials, Britain still held a decisive advantage in shipbuilding facilities. This itself was important but became decisive when two other factors were considered - the aforementioned determination of the British government and people to maintain their supremacy at sea, and the fiscal inabilities of Germany to create and maintain both the world's largest army and the world's largest navy. The following chart bears out the financial limitations suffered by Germany and her inability to keep pace with Britain:[5]

Year	Great Britain (expenditures in British Pounds)	Keels Laid	Germany (expenditures in British Pounds)	Keels Laid
1901-1902 1902-1903 1903-1904 1904-1905 1905-1906 1906-1907 1907-1908 1908-1909 1909-1910 1910-1911 1911-1912 1912-1913 1913-1914	10,341,780      9,282,217      12,398,133      13,184,419      11,368,744      19,480,397      8,840,589      8,521,930      11,227,194      14,957,430      17,566,877      17,271,317      17,361,850	3 2 5 2 4 3 3 2 8 5 5 4 5	4,653,423      4,662,769      4,388,748      4,275,489      4,720,206      5,167,319      5,910,959      7,795,499      10,177,068      11,392,850      11,710,859      11,393,340      10,710,787	2 2 2 2 2 2 3 4 4 4 4 4 3

The weakness supposedly incurred by Great Britain because of her far-flung collection of colonies was also untrue. From the war's outbreak in 1914 until its conclusion four years later, Great Britain was able to concentrate every one of her dreadnoughts in home waters. Only temporary, voluntary detachments of capital ships, such as to the South Atlantic in 1914 and Gallipoli in 1915, hampered the British Admiralty. The Allied powers divided up the world's bodies of water in such a way as to maximize England's ability to station her naval forces in the North Sea; France ad Italy effectively bottled up the Austrian fleet in the Mediterranean, and the Japanese Navy had a free reign in the Pacific. With friendly fleets so deployed, only token light forces were needed to defend the empire and show the flag, allowing the majority of the Grand Fleet to remain in English ports and maintain their numerical superiority over the Germans.

Only one conclusion can be reached - Germany could never successfully challenge Britain on the seas. The ability of England to keep her fleet united in her home waters, her capacity to outbuild Germany, and the English people's unwavering resolution to retain Britain's mastery of the seas dictated that German naval strength would always remain numerically inferior to England's. This third factor was the all-important one, as exemplified by Churchill in 1912:

As naval competition becomes more acute, we shall have not only to increase the number of the ships we build, but the ratio which our naval strength will have to bear to other great naval powers, so that our margin of superiority will become larger and not smaller as the strain grows greater. Thus we shall make it clear that other naval powers, instead of overtaking us by additional efforts, will only be more outdistanced in consequence of the measures which we ourselves shall take.[6]

The creation of a German navy also proved to be a stupendous diplomatic failure. Ironically enough, the Kaiser's fleet almost singlehandedly destroyed the most important goal of German foreign policy - the military isolation of France. It was the threat of the Iron Cross ruling the waves, not economic competition or international friction, that drove Great Britain away from the Central Powers; instead, out of desperation, England was forced to ally herself with her age-old enemy, France, and her imperialist rival Russia. Once again Churchill remarks:

With every rivet that von Tirpitz drove into his ships of war, he united British opinion throughout wide circles of the most powerful people in every walk of life and in every part of the Empire. The hammers that clanged at Kiel and Wilhelmshaven were forging the coalition of nations by which Germany was to be resisted and finally overthrown. Every threatening gesture that she made, every attempt to shock or shake the loosely knit structure of the Entente made it closed and fit together more tightly.[7]

Militarily, the High Seas Fleet was an equally enormous disaster. Within two months of the outbreak of hostilities every German combat vessel outside of the Baltic had been hunted down and sunk; more importantly, from the day of the war's inception until its completion over four years later, not one cargo vessel carrying war materials reached Germany. It was this airtight blockade to which the Grand Fleet subjected the Second Reich that was directly responsible for Germany's gradual economic and moral collapse and was the decisive factor in the Triple Entente's ultimate victory.

In contrast, the High Seas Fleet's war record was nothing short of embarrassing. Guided by only a vague strategy of "whittling down" the British Navy in a series of minor battles before a final decisive engagement, the German Fleet gradually rusted away in port. The Kaiser allowed his ships to give battle as a combined force only once, resulting in the tactical draw of Jutland, but a strategic victory for England - the High Seas Fleet never challenged British seas supremacy again. The Germans were also incapable of preventing either Britain or the United States from landing huge armies on the continent, and these armies proved instrumental in defeating the Germans in France. The worldwide British Empire stood untouched while the German colonies were overrun, and only the Kaiser's U-boats posed any threat to England's commerce. In the end, the mighty German Fleet suffered the most ignominious fate that can befall any navy - widescale mutiny followed by a final scuttling of the entire fleet off the enemy's coast.

Given Britain's natural refusal to allow any foreign power to challenge her on the oceans, it was inevitable that Germany's naval program was doomed to failure. Britain's goal was simply to maintain the status quo, utilizing her excellent geographical position to seal off Germany from the rest of the world. Germany, however, had to achieve a superiority in capital ships, for she had to attack the British Fleet and destroy it in order to keep her overseas trade routes open. With Britain avowed to keep her naval position out of jeopardy, the German fleet was destined to be numerically interior, hence militarily impotent.

Nor could the diplomatic fruit borne by the German fleet be anything but poisonous. The limited operational radius of the Kaiser's fleet, and its lack of worldwide ports and coaling stations condemned the German Navy to steam forever only in the limited waters of the North Sea. The High Seas Fleet could never defend Germany's colonies, or even expand the existing empire; during the entire 20th Century prior to World War I, Germany's only overseas gains were minor acquisitions in the French Congo.

Ineffective in peacetime, impotent in wartime, and immobile all the time, the German High Seas Fleet was totally incapable of fulfilling any of the goals it was ostensibly created for. If Germany's worry was the safety of her colonies and her international trade, the solution was cooperation, not competition, with England. The construction of a German battle fleet made this impossible, resulting only in Britain's alliance with the Entente and Germany's disastrous defeat in World War I. The High Seas Fleet was an enormous expenditure effort and resources, nothing more; to the Kaiser it was a shining embodiment of Germany's new world power and international prestige that directly resulted in his eventual abdication of the throne, and the destruction of the Second Reich.

FOOTNOTES

[1]Warships and Sea Battles of World War I. Fitzsimons, Bernard (Ed) New York: Beckman House, 1973, p. 12.
[2]>I>England and Germany, 1740-1914. Schmitt, Bernadotte E., New York: Howard Fertig Inc., 1967, p. 176.
[3]Asquith, Herbert Henry. The Genesis of the War. New York: George H. Doran Company, 1923, p. 115.
[4]Asquith, pp. 126-127.
[5]Schmitt, pp. 216-217.
[6]Churchill, Winston S. The World Crisis. New York: Charles Scribner and Sons, 1923, p. 103.
[7]Churchill, p. 118.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Churchill, Winston S. The World Crisis (New York: Charles Scribner and Sons, 1923).
Schmitt, Bernadotte E. England and Germany 1740-1914 (New York: Howard Fertig Inc., 1967).
Asquith, Henry Herbert. The Genesis of the War (New York: George H. Doran Company, 1923).
Fischer, Fritz. Germany's Aims in the First World War (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1961.)
Hale, Oron J. The Great Illusion 1900-1914 (New York: Harper and Row, 1971).
Fitzsimons, Bernard (Ed.) Warships and Sea Battles of World War I (New York: Beckman House, 1973).
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