So, Kaiser Wilhelm Wanted a Navy

An 1894 Cruiser Design by Kaiser Wilhelm II

I had a peculiar passion for the navy. It sprang to no small extent from my English blood. When I was a little boy. . . I admired the proud British ships. There awoke in me the will to build ships of my own like these someday, and when I was grown up to possess a fine navy as the English.

Kaiser Wilhelm II, My Early Life

In the extra-large fantasy department of Kaiser Wilhelm's mind, he could muse over a fleet so magnificent and elegant his British cousins would turn emerald green with envy at the semi-annual naval review, while doing their gentlemanly best to hide their crushed self-importance behind stiff upper lips. I doubt, though, that he ever imagined that they would view his naval build-up as a threat to their national survival. Oddly, when the British Admiralty responded determinedly with its own building program and innovative ship design, that didn't seem to puncture the illusions of the Kaiser or his expert, Admiral Tirpitz, whose grandiosity reminds me a bit of a building-czar Robert Moses. They kept building until they ran out of money. In this issue of Roads, we tell the sad tale of the construction of Wilhelm's pretty "luxury" fleet, doomed to be scuttled one day.   

A recent paper by Wesley R. Hale at the University of Rhode Island nicely summarizes how Kaiser Wilhelm II was inspired (seduced?) into building his huge, but eventually inadequate and doomed, battle fleet.

At the beginning of the 20th century, England possessed the largest navy in the world, having established in 1889 a Naval Defense Act that formalized the "Two Power Standard" of parity with the next two naval powers, France and Russia." Kaiser Wilhelm II sought to earn prestige as a monarch by elevating Germany to a maritime power in the same manner his grandfather Wilhelm I had transformed the Prussian Army to unify Germany under one flag. Unlike his grandfather, whose reorganization efforts benefited from a long history of military institution, where the Prussian army was a fixture of society, Wilhelm II faced the challenge of developing a formidable navy in a country lacking a cohesive naval tradition.

Kaiser Wilhelm and his admirals envisioned [a battle fleet] elevating Germany to a maritime power in line with A.T. Mahan's notion of military strength. First published in 1890, Mahan's book The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 argued that numerical superiority accounted for much of the maritime success of the major world powers against their enemies. While he highlighted several naval battles throughout history, Nelson's victories at the Battle of the Nile and Trafalgar were both particularly important to this argument and still relatively recent history. To that end, Mahan begins his introduction with a discussion of the basic tactics of those battles, which were "to choose that part of the enemy's order which can least easily be helped, and to attack it with superior forces." Mahan's work became one of the most influential geopolitical pieces of its time, eventually becoming recommended reading for every major world leader with global ambitions, including Theodore Roosevelt and Wilhelm II. His book became a manual that set the naval standard to which all major powers subscribed and to which Imperial Germany aspired.

Over the next half-decade, Wilhelm—being Wilhelm—fantasized, talked, consulted industrialists, pressured ministers, and gave endless pep talks to his family and entourage about the necessity for a world-class German fleet. As the illustration at the top of this article shows, he was even designing his own ships. His byword was "The Trident Must Be in Our Fist." However, at the time Wilhelm's "Trident" consisted of a navy of only 68 ships, compared to the Royal Navy's 330.

Kaiser Wilhelm II, Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, and
General Helmuth von Moltke Aboard Ship

To turn his dream into a reality, he needed a naval man of great skill to lead the effort to get the fleet built. He found his man in a brilliant and politically savvy admiral named Alfred von Tirpitz. Born in 1848, Tirpitz enlisted in the navy as a midshipman at age 16 and quickly showed aptitudes for tactics and engineering. He rose through the ranks rapidly, becoming a rear admiral by 1895. The following year he was assigned to command a squadron of cruisers in the Far East when he caught the Kaiser's eye. For several years he had been writing memoranda for navy on the importance of building the nation's navy. An adherent of Mahan, the admiral's writings showed a clear understanding of the connection of political, economic, and sea power. Further, he pointed out, "If we intend to go out into the world and strengthen ourselves commercially then if we do not provide ourselves simultaneously with a certain measure of sea power, we shall be erecting a perfectly hollow structure." The Kaiser had found an admiral whose thinking perfectly meshed with his.

In June 1897, Tirpitz was appointed to the new position of secretary of state of the Imperial Naval office and given the job of challenging the Royal Navy's dominance. He immediately got to work, raised a staff, appointed committees, and set them to work—exploring the latest in ship design, gunnery, and shells; examining training programs; studying docks, shipyards, and the Kiel Canal. Maybe most important, he began a huge public relations campaign to win public support for the coming financial investment to build the fleet. He cultivated the press, organized public events, and funded a naval propaganda team that had a team of authors turning out novels, pamphlets, and school presentations. In just six months, Tirpitz put together a first-phase building program and had both the Reichstag and public opinion primed to support it.

Sources: Hale, Wesley R., "The SMS Ostfriesland: A Warship at the Crossroads of Military Technology"; The Dreadnoughts, Time-Life Books