Germany's Fighting Machine / Her Army, her Navy, her Air-ships and Why She Arrayed Them Against the Allied Powers of Europe

by Ernest F. Henderson

In 1848 the German Confederation was at war with Denmark on account of Schleswig-Holstein. The national parliament voted six million thalers for the creation of a fleet; it might as well have voted sixty millions as far as the possibility of collecting it in such disordered circumstances was concerned. But on June fourth, 1849, a squadron of three steamships, the Barbarossa, the Hamburg and the Lübeck did set out from the mouth of the Elbe, with decks cleared for action. The admiral was a Saxon, Rudolph Bromme. It was known that a Danish corvette was becalmed in the neighborhood of Helgoland. She was sighted and some shots had already been sent through her rigging, when suddenly from another direction, from Helgoland itself, then a British possession, a shot was fired. It signified that the ships were within the three-mile limit over which then and now a state’s sovereignty extended, and that England was forbidding the fray. The “fleet” complied with the order and Lord Palmerston took occasion to send a diplomatic note to the German Confederation stating that ships had been seen in the North Sea flying a black-red-gold flag and conducting themselves as war-ships; that England would not recognize such ships with a black-red-gold flag as war-ships, but would treat them, if need be, as pirates.

England has more or less preserved this attitude to the present day and has been righteously indignant whenever Germany increased her fleet. A first lord of the admiralty once publicly declared that Britain’s rule of the sea was part of the common treasure of mankind and that England could never endure that another power should be able to weaken her political influence by exerting naval pressure. Such a position, he said, would unquestionably lead to war.

The attempts to weld Germany into a nation having failed, the fleet was put up at auction and sold in 1852. The state of Prussia, however, which was one of the purchasers, had by this time started her own fleet and soon began to build the harbor in the Jadebucht, which is now called Wilhelmshaven. One of the royal princes, Adalbert, was made admiral and furthered the cause of the fleet in every way. Himself an intrepid leader, he was wounded in an encounter with Morocco pirates, who fired on one of the small boats of the Danzig. In 1863, however, the fleet consisted of but four corvette cruisers, the Arkona, Gazelle and Vineta, which had each twenty-eight cannon, and the Nymphe, which had but seventeen. Add to these twenty-one cannon boats, four of which carried three cannon, the rest but two. In 1867 the Prussian fleet merged in that of the North German Confederation, which in turn, in 1871, merged into that of the new German Empire.

In the war with France the German fleet played no rôle whatever, there being but five ironclads in all, two of them small coast defenders, to oppose to France’s fifty-five. There were but one or two insignificant encounters between small single ships—one between the Grille and the Hirondelle in the Baltic, and one between the Meteor, whose whole crew numbered sixty-three, and the French despatch-boat Bouvet, with eighty-three. The two had come upon each other in the harbor of Havana and then tried conclusions on the high seas. But the German victories on land had been so quick and decisive that the fleet as a whole never came into action.

Even the successful outcome of the war did not spur Germany on to build up a strong navy. A general, not a seaman, was made chief of the admiralty and, although Von Stosch brought in a building plan according to which the navy, by 1882, would have had fourteen large ironclads, seven monitors, twenty cruisers and twenty-eight torpedo-boats, it was carried out only in part. Stosch deserves credit, however, for insisting that Germany should build all her own ships. The sinking of the Grosse Kurfürst in 1879, which was run into by one of her own sister ships, was a great calamity for the navy, and the loss of her two hundred sixty-five officers and men caused wide-spread grief.

Caprivi, the later chancellor, followed Von Stosch in 1883 as head of the admiralty. He was conscientious, but, it would seem, altogether without fruitful ideas. He placed all his hopes in the torpedo-boat, and from 1883 to 1887 not a single battle-ship was built. It was not so much to be credited to Caprivi, but to a young officer, Von Tirpitz, now grand admiral and state secretary for the navy office, that the German torpedo-boat fleet became the best in the world. Tirpitz made a new weapon of it, one that could be used not merely for coast-defense, but also for fighting on the high seas. But the fact remains that the torpedo-boat under Caprivi’s régime was greatly overestimated and that its usefulness has more and more been checked by new inventions—search-lights, Gatling guns, torpedo-boat-destroyers and the like.

Toward the end of his term indeed Caprivi began to see the importance of a strong fleet and the idea gained ground that “a navy which has its center of gravity on or near shore is not worthy of the name.” In 1887 was begun the Kaiser Wilhelm canal between the Baltic and the North Sea, which enables the one fleet to operate in both waters without fear of being intercepted. Meanwhile Germany had started on her career as a colonial power, having acquired by purchase and by treaty tracts in Africa and islands in the Pacific Ocean more than twice the size of her possessions in Europe. Some of her little cruisers and cannon boats had even seen service against unruly natives. The Reichstag, however, showed little interest in the government’s colonial policy and was not to be won for the building of large war-ships.

A change came soon after the accession of the present emperor, William II. One of his first acts was to reorganize the whole naval system, separating the administrative part from the purely military. At present Admiral von Tirpitz is at the head of the former and Prince Henry of Prussia, subject to the emperor’s own commands, of the latter. Four great battle-ships, all of the Brandenburg class, were begun in 1889. England responded by ordering ten new battle-ships, but in 1890, by ceding Helgoland in return for a correction of boundaries in East Africa, she gave Germany an advantage worth fifty dreadnaughts. And almost before there was any tangible fleet at all Germany was at work scientifically, learning both by theory and by practise how a fleet should be managed and maneuvered.

“How few these ships were,” writes a vice admiral, “and how little in accord with modern warfare on the high seas, we all know. Imagination often had to substitute what was lacking. School-ships, still with all their old full rigging, represented ironclads; torpedo-boats served as cruisers, and the Mars, built to be an artillery training-ship, acted as flag-ship. In those next few years we went through a period which—we can say it without boasting—is unique in the history of fleets. Not but that we made mistakes—much that then seemed to us indubitably right has since been superseded—but the German fleet, which had fewer and less available ships than many other countries, has outdistanced them all in tactical development. … The stake, it is true, became greater as ships representing a capital of millions and carrying hundreds of men took the place of the little boats, but the method remained the same. Commander and crew, by progressing from easier to more difficult and more warlike maneuvers, achieved that feeling of security which is not a foolish scorn of danger but the knowledge of power to cope with it. That is the state of mind which makes for success in war and which enables one to win all by risking all.”

The fleet legislation of 1898 for the first time looked ahead and established rules as to the future number of ships and the time-limit within which they should be built, and also laid down principles as to the tasks that the fleet was intended to accomplish. Two squadrons, of eight battle-ships each, were to be in constant readiness and were to have a flag-ship at their head. Six large and sixteen small cruisers were to act as scouts, three large and ten small cruisers as a “foreign fleet”; two battle-ships, three large cruisers and four small ones were to form the reserve, and the whole reorganization was to be completed in six years—that is, by 1904. It had heretofore been provided that in case of war each ship should give up half of its trained men as a nucleus for the new crews of the reserve ships. This greatly weakened the fighting power of the ships at the crucial moment, and the legislation of 1898 abolished the compulsion for one at least of the two squadrons.