Did Tirpitz Lose the War for Germany?

The Kaiser,  Admiral Tirpitz, and General Moltke

By Norman Friedman from "World War I: A Maritime War?"

It followed that as the Germans began building a large fleet, the British–including the British public–saw that fleet as a direct threat. For all the Germans’ talk about how the fleet might deter the British from entering a European war, the existence of a large German fleet in effect guaranteed that the British would enter the war. That in turn guaranteed that the war would have an important maritime aspect. Maritime did not mean simply naval; it did not mean that sinking the German fleet, for example, would necessarily win the war for the Allies. It meant instead that the Allies gained potential mobility around the edges of Europe and also that the Allies could draw strength from the rest of the world. Every Australian soldier who fought in France or in the Middle East got there by sea, courtesy of Allied–mainly British–sea control. Conversely, when the U-boats threatened to break maritime communications in 1917, they posed a mortal threat to the Allies.

It might be pointed out that in selling his fleet-building plans, Admiral von Tirpitz often claimed that the German battle fleet would deter the British from participating in a future European war. The German public certainly understood that the new fleet was directed against Britain. To what extent did Tirpitz’s very effective News Bureau (propaganda office) foment anti-British sentiment in Germany as a way of justifying an expensive fleet program? That is not to suggest that there would have been no anti-British sentiment in Germany without Tirpitz, but rather to suggest that Tirpitz and his associates were not particularly responsible when it came to selling a big navy. They certainly did well; in 1912 about half the German defense budget went to the navy–-in a country which traditionally concentrated on its army.

The maritime character of the war seems to have been obvious to the defeated Germans in 1918. A U.S. naval officer on the Allied Control Commission (which was superintending German disarmament) wrote home early in 1919 that the German navy was hated in Berlin, its former officers afraid to wear their uniforms. Pamphlets with titles like "Tirpitz, Gravedigger of Germany" were being sold freely. The point of the pamphlets was that, had Admiral von Tirpitz not succeeded in building a large fleet, the British might well not have entered the war. The German army would have been larger, presumably large enough to win its land war in 1914. Instead, the Germans were forced into a protracted war in which they had to take worse and worse risks. After World War II (WWII) the German naval commander in the Mediterranean, Vice Admiral Eberhard Weichold, wrote that Germany lost World War I because she failed to break British sea power. All the successes of the German army on the Continent were negated by the course of the war at sea. Every means of pressure used by the Allies, which led to the collapse of the Central Powers in 1918, was only a consequence of British seapower. Moreover, the last decisive battle, which was fought on the Continent, was only made possible by the exercise of seapower.

Naval rivalry surely led the British to enter the war as they did, although it can be argued that they would have supported France anyway to maintain the balance of power in Europe. The important point is that without a widely-agreed feeling that Germany offered a mortal threat, the British government would have found it difficult to convince the British population that the war was worth the sacrifices it entailed. Looking back, we see an emphasis on "brave little Belgium" and on the cynical German statement that the treaty guaranteeing its integrity was only a "scrap of paper." It seems likely that when war broke out the British government hoped that it could be contained and that the government accepted that the war was irreversible only when the Germans invaded Belgium despite their pleas. It might be added that Belgium was a sensitive area for the British because it was seen as a natural base for invasion—by sea.

Battlecruiser SMS Hindenburg Surrendering with the
High Seas Fleet, 21 November 1918

We now know that the rise of the German navy had nothing to do with any German decision to trigger a world war. There was no German naval war plan. We know as much from the remarkable diary kept by Admiral von Tirpitz as he stayed in the Kaiser’s headquarters in 1914-15. There is a parallel set of letters by Admiral von Pohl, the head of the naval staff. Neither had any idea of what to do with the fleet, and both were unhappily aware that both the Kaiser and the Chancellor thought the best use of the fleet was as a postwar bargaining chip (the Kaiser wanted the fleet kept intact for that role).

The British apparently could not imagine that a rational country like Germany would spend heavily on a fleet, which would obviously threaten them, without thinking through its wartime employment. It appears that no one in the Royal Navy or, for that matter, in the British government, could imagine irrationality on this scale. In retrospect, it seems that Tirpitz was fixated on building a big battleship navy, perhaps because as a young officer he had decided that he did not want to serve in a third-rate fleet. The Kaiser was enthusiastic about battleships–at one point before the war he described a type he wanted (but did not get) as his "love object." Tirpitz argued that his fleet was in effect a public works project which would create a class of well-paid workers who would vote against the Social Democrats (but did not do so in 1912).

Source: "The War at Sea: 1914-18" — Proceedings of the King-Hall Naval History Conference 2013.