Castles of Steel (58 page)

The key relationship, of course, was that between Churchill and Fisher, “a genius without a doubt” and “a veritable dynamo,” as they described each other. Even apart from the thirty-four-year age difference, they made a curious pair. Churchill enjoyed the company of the clever, wily, irascible, ruthless old man; he warmed to the quips and quotations, the uncompro-mising judgments, the feeling of movement and accomplishment. For all Churchill’s vanity, he was too clever not to allow himself to be guided by someone with Fisher’s weight of experience. Yet the First Lord always knew where ultimate authority lay. “I was never in the least afraid of working with him,” said Churchill, “and I thought I knew him so well and had held an equal relationship and superior constitutional authority so long, that we could come through any difficulty together.” Churchill’s appreciation of Fisher at this stage of the admiral’s life was heartfelt and eloquent:

Lord Fisher was the most distinguished British naval officer since Nelson. The originality of his mind and the spontaneity of his nature freed him from conventionalities of all kinds. His genius was deep and true. Above all, he was in harmony with the vast size of events. Like them, he was built upon a titanic scale. But he was seventy-three years of age. As in a great castle which has long contended with time, the mighty central mass of the donjon towered up intact and seemingly everlasting. But the outworks and the battlements had fallen away, and its imperious ruler dwelt only in the special apartments and corridors with which he had a life-long familiarity.

Fisher’s age and the enormous weight of his new responsibilities forced him to parcel out his energy carefully. Their new working relationship also required Churchill to alter his own routine. Fisher usually awoke before 4:00 a.m. in his room at Admiralty House, had a cup of tea, and was in his office by 5:00. He worked diligently during the morning, ate a spartan lunch, and returned to his desk in the afternoon. By this time, Churchill later remembered, “the formidable energy of the morning gradually declined and with the shades of night, the admiral’s giant strength was often visibly exhausted.” He went home to an early supper and bed. Once, when Lady Randolph Churchill, the First Lord’s mother, invited him to dinner, Fisher excused himself, saying, “I can’t dine out—I go to bed at 9:30 and get up at 3:30—I don’t go anywhere. Winston is quite enough dissipation for me. I want no more!”

[Fisher was seventy-three, but few men of any age could stand up to Churchill’s formidable persuasive powers. Rear Admiral Reginald Hall, the wartime Director of Naval Intelligence, explained how, on one occasion, he managed it:

Once, I remember, I was sent for by Mr. Churchill very late at night. He wished to discuss some point or other with me—at once. To be candid, I have not the slightest recollection what it was; I only know that his views and mine were diametrically opposed. We argued at some length. I
knew
I was right, but Mr. Churchill was determined to bring me round to his point of view and he continued his argument in the most brilliant fashion. It was long after midnight and I was dreadfully tired, but nothing seemed to tire the First Lord. He continued to talk and I distinctly recall the odd feeling that, although it would be wholly against my will, I should in a very short while be agreeing with everything he said. But a bit of me still rebelled and recalling the incident of the broken shard in Kipling’s
Kim,
I began to mutter to myself: “My name is Hall, my name is Hall. . . .”

Suddenly, he broke off to look frowningly at me. “What’s that you’re muttering to yourself?” he demanded.

“I’m saying,” I told him, “that my name is Hall because if I listen to you much longer I shall be convinced that it’s Brown.”

“Then you don’t agree with what I’ve been saying?” He was laughing heartily.

“First Lord,” I said, “I don’t agree with one word of it, but I can’t argue with you. I’ve not had the training.”

So the matter dropped and I went to bed.]

Lady Randolph’s son lived rather differently. He awoke at 8:00 a.m., had breakfast in bed, and, still in bed, began his work. One astonished admiral, a witness to this “extraordinary spectacle,” described the First Lord “perched up in a huge bed, and the whole of the bedspread littered with dispatch boxes, red and all colors, and a stenographer sitting at the foot—Mr. Churchill himself with an enormous Corona Corona in his mouth, a glass of warm water on the table by his side and a writing pad on his knee.” The First Lord then arrived at the Admiralty, spent a few hours, departed for a leisurely luncheon, enjoyed an extended nap, and worked until dinner. He was always invited out and, after several stimulating hours of talk, he would return to the Admiralty, work through until one or two in the morning, and then retire to bed. Four hours later, Lord Fisher would arrive to begin his day. On this basis, the Admiralty kept what Churchill called “an almost unsleeping watch through the day and night.” To coordinate this dual control, Churchill said, “we made an agreement between ourselves that neither of us should take any important action without consulting the other, unless previous accord had been reached.” Even the color of their respective notations and comments on Admiralty documents was coordinated: Churchill habitually used a pen with red ink; Fisher used a green pencil. “Port and starboard lights,” Fisher called this system. And for a while the system worked.

Fisher returned to the Admiralty during days of crisis. He succeeded Prince Louis on Thursday, October 29. On Sunday, November 1, the Battle of Coronel was fought. On Tuesday, November 3, German battle cruisers appeared off Yarmouth on the English east coast. The very next day, Wednesday, the fourth, reports of the disaster at Coronel reached London, and that afternoon Fisher persuaded Churchill to detach
Invincible
and
Inflexible
from theGrand Fleet to deal with Spee. Meanwhile, on Tuesday, in the midst of these other events, Fisher convened a conference of Admiralty officials and principal British shipbuilders to launch the largest emergency shipbuilding effort in the history of the Royal Navy: eventually 606 new vessels flying the White Ensign were to go to sea. At the outbreak of war, the Admiralty had ordered accelerated work on all warships building in British shipyards, with priority to be given to vessels that could be finished in six months. Three months later, when it was apparent that the war would be longer, the policy was changed to “everything that can be finished in 1915 and nothing that can’t.” But only twelve new destroyers and twelve new submarines had been ordered. Fisher considered this grossly inadequate and convened the November 3 meeting to change course. His most urgent concern was the construction of submarines; that same day he placed orders with British shipbuilders for an additional twenty. Then, staring at the Admiralty Director of Contracts, he threatened to “make his wife a widow and his house a dunghill if he brought paper work or red tape into the picture; he wanted submarines, not contracts. . . . If he did not get them within eight months, he would commit
hara-kiri.
” At this, Keyes, who was present, made the mistake of laughing. Fisher then turned on Keyes “with a ferocious glare, and said, ‘If anyone thwarts me he had better commit
hara-kiri
too.’ ” Later that day, Fisher saw the American steel magnate Charles Schwab, who as a passenger on
Olympic
had witnessed the sinking of
Audacious.
Schwab took home orders for another twenty submarines to be built by Bethlehem Steel in the United States and Canada. They were delivered within six months.

From submarines, Fisher passed to other types of ships. Five half-finished dreadnought battleships of the
Royal Sovereign
class, originally designed to burn coal, were reconfigured to burn oil. Two new British battleships,
Repulse
and
Renown,
funded but not yet laid down, each originally intended to carry eight 15-inch guns in four turrets, had been allowed to languish on drawing boards because so much time would be required for their completion. On December 19, following the dramatic vindication of the battle cruiser design at the Falkland Islands, Fisher demanded that the two battleships be radically redesigned and built quickly as fast battle cruisers. They were needed, he declared, to catch the newest German battle cruiser,
Lützow,
which had a design speed of 28 knots. In the two new British ships, 32-knot speed would be obtained by sacrificing one heavy turret with its two 15-inch guns and putting the weight thus saved into more powerful propulsion machinery. Armor also suffered; instead of the shielding that protected dreadnought battleships, the new battle cruisers carried only the armor of the early
Indefatigable
s. Both keels were laid down on Fisher’s seventy-fourth birthday, January 25, 1915. He insisted that they be completed within fifteen months; in fact,
Repulse
required nineteen and
Renown
twenty.

With these two big battle cruisers under construction, Fisher went further and ordered three fast 19,000-ton ships,
Courageous, Glorious,
and
Furious. Courageous
and
Glorious
carried four 15-inch guns and
Furious,
as originally designed, two 18-inch. Because Parliament had not approved more large armored ships, but had sanctioned additional light cruisers, Fisher designated these vessels “large light cruisers” and had them built under conditions of extraordinary secrecy. All were designed with 32-knot speed, a draft of only 22 feet—five feet less than any other British capital ship—and armor so thin that the Grand Fleet, which dubbed them
Outrageous, Uproarious,
and
Spurious,
could find almost no use for them. “They were an old man’s children,” said Churchill. “Nevertheless, their parent loved them dearly and always rallied with the utmost vehemence when any slur was cast upon their qualities.” Eventually, all three were converted into aircraft carriers.

Fisher’s immense shipbuilding program also included new light cruisers and destroyers, and thirty-seven inshore monitors: 6,000- or 7,000-ton ships with slow speed and no special armor, but carrying two 12-inch or 14-inch guns. Useless in a sea battle, they were meant only to bombard enemy positions onshore. The First Sea Lord also ordered 200 steel-plated, oil-powered motor barges for landing troops upon hostile beaches. These early amphibious landing craft, forerunners of the flotillas vital to Allied operations in the Atlantic and Pacific in the Second World War, were designed to carry 500 infantrymen at a speed of 5 knots and were fitted with extended landing bridges that could be lowered from their bows onto a beach. Their appearance earned them the name of Beetles; soon, their purpose—along with the purpose of the new monitors and battle cruisers—would be revealed.

Churchill rejoiced in his new First Sea Lord’s burst of energy. “Lord Fisher hurled himself into this business with explosive energy,” he was to write, “and in four or five glorious days, every minute of which was pure delight to him, he presented me with schemes for far greater construction of submarines, destroyers, and small craft than I or any of my advisers had ever deemed possible. . . . Probably never in his long life had Fisher had a more joyous experience than this great effort of new construction. Shipbuilding had been the greatest passion of his life . . . [and] here were all the yards of Britain at his disposal and every Treasury barrier broken.” No one was allowed to stand in his way. The army, still entirely made up of volunteers, had been recruiting in the shipyards, a practice that infuriated Fisher. To stop it, he went directly to Lord Kitchener and demanded an immediate “order to his subordinates to cease enticing away men from our shipyards. I told him that [if he did not], I would resign that day at 6 p.m. my post as First Sea Lord and give my reasons in the House of Lords. . . . [Kitchener] wrote the order there and then, without hesitation.” To all this activity, Churchill gave a green light: “I backed him up all I could. He was far more often right than wrong, and his drive and life-force made the Admiralty quiver like one of his great ships at its highest speed.”

The grand purpose for which Fisher ordered the construction of three shallow-draft “large light cruisers,” dozens of inshore monitors, and scores of large landing craft was an operation that the new First Sea Lord was convinced would win the war: an invasion of the Baltic Sea by the British fleet and the subsequent landing of an army on the north German coast. Fisher had always believed that the British army’s greatest effectiveness lay in amphibious operations—as “a projectile to be fired by the navy.” He never liked the idea of sending the army to France to act as an extension of the French left wing; “criminal folly,” he had called it. As early as the 1905 Moroccan Crisis, Fisher—certain that Britain’s enemy in the next war would be Germany—was thinking of an amphibious operation to seize control of the Baltic. Since his visit to Russia with King Edward VII in 1908, he had nursed the idea of substituting “a million Russian soldiers” for British troops in a proposed landing on the Pomeranian coast “within eighty-two miles of Berlin.” This force would be disembarked “on that 14 miles of sandy beach, impossible of defence against a Battle Fleet sweeping with devastating shells the flat country for miles, like a mower’s scythe—no fortifications able to withstand projectiles of 1,450 lbs.!”

Fisher had no difficulty infusing his enthusiasm into Churchill. As early as August 19, 1914, the First Lord had sounded out the Russian Commander-in-Chief, Grand Duke Nicholas, on the possibility of a combined Baltic operation. Churchill offered to send the British fleet through the Belts, the channel between Denmark and Sweden. This could not be done, he cautioned, until either a decisive naval battle had been won against the High Seas Fleet or the Kiel Canal had been blocked so that the German fleet could not shift rapidly between the North Sea and the Baltic. But once established in the Baltic, Churchill continued, the British fleet could “convoy and land” a Russian army on the German coast to take Berlin. The Russian reply was tentatively favorable. “We gratefully accept in principle the First Lord’s offer,” the grand duke wrote, adding that “the suggested landing operations would be quite feasible and fully expedient should the British Fleet gain command of the Baltic Sea.”