British Influence on the German Navy
In a very special sense the German Navy is the child of the British Navy, which is the mother of all the great naval forces of the world to-day. From the very first it has been no secret that the German Fleet was definitely planned on the model furnished by the many centuries' development of the British Navy, and the Emperor William has been one of the principal agencies through which this formative influence has been exerted in more recent years. He came to the throne at a moment when naval sentiment in Germany was at its lowest point, and he assisted in the initial revival which occurred before Grand Admiral von Tirpitz came on the scene.
Old residents of Portsmouth still remember a boy whom they occasionally saw walking about the dockyard looking at the ships with admiration and rapt attention. His greatest delight seemed to be to watch the great ironclads moving in and out of Spithead. Sometimes he would find his way on board vessels of the Royal Navy. This lad was none other than the present German Emperor. As a grandson of Queen Victoria, he was a frequent visitor in his boyhood and early manhood to his grandmother during the summer months when she was in residence at Osborne, and on one occasion his father and mother, then Crown Prince and Princess of Germany, rented Norris Castle, on the outskirts of Cowes, and lived there for several months with their children. Prince William, who was a great favourite of the late Queen, thus not only became an eager spectator of the naval pageants in the Solent directly under the windows of Osborne House and Norris Castle, but watched with interest the gay assemblage in Cowes roadstead for the regatta from year to year.
At this time the newly-created German Empire had practically no fleet. During the Franco-Prussian War the few ships which flew the flag of the North German Confederation were so weak that they could take no part in the conflict. The memory of these recent events was still fresh in the mind of the future Emperor when he visited England and watched the activities of the British Navy, whose far-flung squadrons performed the triple task of protecting the Motherland from fear of invasion, safeguarding all her oversea possessions, and defending British ocean-borne commerce. He determined that he, too, would have a great fleet when he succeeded to the throne of the German Empire.
This is no imaginary picture of the ideas which were taking root in the mind of the ruler of the German Empire to-day. Years afterwards—in fact, in 1904—addressing King Edward, on the occasion of His Majesty's visit to the Kiel Regatta, the Emperor paid a tribute to the power and traditions of the British Navy, with which, he added, he became acquainted as a youth during visits which he paid to England. He recalled that he had had many a sail in the Dolphin and Alberta, old British yachts, and had seen mighty ironclads constructed which had since served their time and disappeared from the Navy List. "When I came to the throne I attempted to reproduce on a scale commensurate with the resources and interests of my own country that which had made such a deep impression on my mind when I saw it as a young man in England."
When he first advocated the construction of a big navy, the German people viewed his dreams with indifference and distrust. Shackled by a system of conscription in order to provide the Empire with its huge army, they asked what it would profit them if to the burden of a great army they added the vast expense of a fleet capable not merely of defending their coasts, but of operating on the offensive in distant seas. At first the Emperor made little progress in educating public opinion; but he still nursed those dreams of sea-power—very moderate dreams at that date, before Admiral von Tirpitz came on the scene—which had first taken shape in his mind when he wandered about Portsmouth Dockyard, and viewed from the grounds of Osborne House the coming and going of mighty British warships. In the early days of the present century he referred with some pride to the persistency with which he had pursued his aims in spite of popular disfavour. At the launch of the Kaiser Karl der Grosse he said: "If the increase in the navy which I had demanded with urgent prayers had not been consistently refused me during the first eight years of my reign—I did not even escape derision and mocking at the time—in how different a manner should we now be able to promote our prosperous commerce and our interests overseas!" He had to wait for many years before he saw his dreams reaching fruition.
As the British Parliament is the mother of all popular representative institutions, so the British Navy is the mother of navies. If the records of most of the great fleets of the world are searched, it will be found that in greater or less degree they owe their birth to the more or less direct assistance of British naval officers, oft times acting with the direct authority of the British Admiralty; while in almost every fleet in the world even to-day may be found ships designed by British brains and constructed of British material by the skilled craftsmen of these islands. It was to England that Peter the Great came to watch the shipbuilding on the Thames, and it was with a large body of British mechanics that he returned to Russia to create a fleet with which to defend his empire and extend its borders at the point of the gun. The prestige of the Russian Navy in the seventeenth century was due entirely to the skill and daring of Scotsmen. The Greigs of four generations, Admiral Elphinstone, Lord Duffus Gordon, and a number of other Scotsmen entered the Navy of the Czar and did splendid service; and some of the descendants of these pioneers of the Russian Navy may still be traced in the fleet of to-day. The American Navy was, of course, of distinctly British origin; so were the fleets of many of the South American Republics; while, as everybody knows, the seeds of sea-power of Japan were sown by British naval officers, including first and foremost Admiral Sir Archibald Douglas, and her ships were mainly built in England. The excellence to which the Chinese Navy once attained was also due to British instruction under another Scotsman, Admiral Lang; and one of the principal shipyards of Italy, as well as her gun factory, is of British origin, and is still linked with its British parent. The Spanish Navy is now being recreated under British supervision; Turkey never was so nearly a sea power as when she had British naval officers in her service; and under Admiral Mark Kerr the glories of the Greek Navy are being revived.
In the case of the modern German Fleet the British Admiralty had little part in its upbuilding, but British naval power fired the imagination of the Emperor, and it was a kindly present made years before by King William IV. to the then King of Prussia which first directed his Majesty's thoughts towards the sea. When the present Emperor was a boy, one of his favourite recreations was to sail a beautiful model of about 20 tons of a British frigate on the Havel lakes near Potsdam. This little ship, of excellent workmanship, was sent as a present to the then ruler of Prussia early in the last century by our sailor King, and was a never-failing source of pleasure to the present German Emperor as a youth. From his earliest years at home and in England the future ruler's aspirations were always towards the sea, and we can now see that his dreams of later years, which have taken such tangible shape, were largely due to those vivid impressions of sea-power which he obtained during his visits to England, and which reached their climax in 1889, when Queen Victoria, on the occasion of his visit to the Cowes Regatta, conferred on him, a foreign monarch, the, then, unique rank of Admiral of the Fleet.
Though other foreign princes and monarchs have since been made honorary officers of the British Navy, the German Emperor remained for some years the only person of foreign birth holding supreme rank. The commission conferred upon the Kaiser was of course purely honorary, but his Majesty never concealed the pride with which he donned the British uniform with its deep gold cuffs and cocked hat, and he could claim that he was the only ruler of a foreign State who ever commanded the British Navy in modern times.