CHAPTER 15

Fisher Returns to the Admiralty

The extended infatuation between Jacky Fisher and Winston Churchill originated in April 1907, in Biarritz, where both were staying as guests of a mutual friend. Fisher, a shining eccentric of sixty-six, was First Sea Lord and at the height of his power; Churchill, although a blue blood and the maverick grandson of a duke, was then merely the thirty-two-year-old under secretary for the colonies. But that Churchill would go far—unless he self-destructed—no one doubted. “He is a wonderful creature,” said H. H. Asquith, the prime minister, “with a curious clash of schoolboy simplicity and what someone said of genius: ‘a zigzag streak of lightning in the brain.’ ” From the beginning, Fisher and Churchill recognized each other’s qualities. “We talked all day and far into the nights,” Churchill remembered. “He told me wonderful stories of the navy and of his plans—all about dreadnoughts, all about submarines . . . about big guns and splendid admirals and foolish, miserable ones and Nelson and the Bible. . . . I remembered it all. I reflected on it often.” Fisher, for his part, “fell desperately in love” with Churchill and was “perhaps the first to be told” of the young Cabinet minister’s engagement a few weeks later to Clementine Hozier.

In April 1908, when Asquith succeeded the failing Henry Campbell-Bannerman as Liberal prime minister and was reshuffling the Cabinet, Fisher hoped that Churchill would become First Lord of the Admiralty. Churchill, however, accepted the presidency of the Board of Trade, which he felt offered more scope for exercising independent authority. By 1910, Churchill was ready to move and requested Asquith to give him either the Admiralty or the Home Office; Asquith chose to make him home secretary. Fisher retired on his sixty-ninth birthday, January 25, 1910. Nevertheless, neither the old admiral nor the rising politician forgot their Biarritz conversations and in March Fisher wrote to Churchill, “My dear Winston: Now that I am absolutely free of the Admiralty I suppose I may venture to ask to be welcomed once more into your arms unless in the meantime you’ve got to hate me.” Churchill’s reply came the next day: “My dear Fisher: I am truly delighted to get your letter. I stretched out several feeble paws of amity—but in vain. I like you very much indeed. . . . I have deeply regretted since that I did not press for the Admiralty in 1908.” Thereafter, their correspondence became frequent. Fisher’s letters were couched in his flamboyantly affectionate style, usually beginning “My beloved Winston” and concluding with “Yours to a cinder,” or “Yours till Hell freezes,” or “Yours till charcoal sprouts.” Churchill’s replies were more respectfully sedate. On October 25, 1911, he finally went to the Admiralty and that morning, before leaving the Home Office, he wrote: “My dear Lord Fisher: I want to see you very much. When am I to have that pleasure? You have but to indicate your convenience and I will await you at the Admiralty.” Three days later, they met at a country house and again talked far into the night. “I plied him with questions and he poured out his ideas,” said Churchill. “It was always a joy to me to talk to him on these great matters, but most of all he was stimulating in all that related to the design of ships. He also talked brilliantly about admirals, but here one had to make a heavy discount on account of the feuds. My intention was to hold the balance even and, while adopting in the main the Fisher policy, to insist upon an absolute cessation of the vendetta.” During these days, the new First Lord began to think about bringing the former First Sea Lord back to the Admiralty. “I began our conversations with no thought of Fisher’s recall,” Churchill said later. “But by Sunday night, the power of the man was deeply borne in upon me and I had almost made up my mind to do what I did three years later and place him again at the head of the Naval Service. . . . All the way up to London the next morning I was on the brink of saying, ‘Come and help me.’ ” But Churchill was deterred by Fisher’s age and by his fear that the pernicious intraservice feuding would resume. Even so, Fisher was pleased. “I think Winston Churchill will do all I’ve suggested to him,” he wrote to his son. “He’s very affectionate and cordial.”

Over the next three years Fisher remained in retirement, but he had Churchill’s ear and much of what Churchill did at the peacetime Admi-ralty was on Fisher’s advice. It was Fisher’s encouragement that spurred Churchill to the adoption of 15-inch guns for the five Queen Elizabeth–class dreadnoughts. Fisher’s old animosities surfaced when Churchill appointed Admirals Sir Hedworth Meux and Sir Berkeley Milne to high commands and he lashed out that Churchill had “betrayed the navy.” This storm quickly passed and Churchill next persuaded Fisher to take control of a matter critical to the navy: the conversion to fuel oil. Fisher had long been obsessed by the idea of using fuel oil for turbine propulsion; oil was cleaner, safer, and more efficient than coal; it would drive the new 15-inch-gun battleships at 25 knots. Churchill now wished to turn this obsession into reality. “My dear Fisher,” he wrote, “The liquid [oil] fuel problem has got to be solved. . . . No one else can do it so well. Perhaps no one else can do it at all. You have got to find the oil; to show how it can be stored cheaply; how it can be purchased regularly and cheaply in peace and with absolute certainty in war. Then . . . develop its application in the best possible way to existing and prospective ships.” Churchill argued that Fisher must do it for his own sake, not just the navy’s. “You need a plough to draw. Your propellers are racing in the air.” Fisher agreed and become chairman of the oil commission.

For three years, the honeymoon continued. Churchill and Fisher both enjoyed and profited from their relationship. On January 1, 1914, Churchill wrote to Fisher, “Contact with you is like breathing ozone to me.” On February 24, the First Lord’s private secretary wrote to Fisher, “Winston is quite cross with you for not coming to see him. He says he wants to talk to you badly about many things.” On July 15, Winston wrote to Clementine, “Tomorrow old Fisher comes down to the yacht with me. This always has a salutary effect.” Once war began, Fisher came often to see Churchill at the Admiralty. As Prince Louis’s health deteriorated and he retreated to the seclusion of his room, Churchill yearned for Fisher’s sparkling, irreverent dynamism. During these weeks, Churchill studied the seventy-three-year-old admiral,

[watching] him narrowly to judge his physical strength and mental alertness. There seemed no doubt about either. On one occasion, when inveighing against someone whom he thought obstructive, he became so convulsed with fury that it seemed that every nerve and blood vessel in his body would be ruptured. However, they stood the strain magnificently and he left me with the impression of a terrific engine of mental and physical power burning and throbbing in that aged frame. . . . I therefore sounded him [about returning] in conversation without committing myself and found that he was fiercely eager to lay his grasp on power.

On October 19, when the Cabinet knew that a change at the Admiralty was necessary, Haldane suggested to Churchill that the restoration of Fisher would “make our country feel that our old spirit of the navy was alive and come back.” The following day, Churchill went to Asquith and asked for approval to bring Fisher back, declaring “that I could work with no one else. I was well aware that there would be strong, natural and legitimate opposition in many quarters to Fisher’s appointment, but, having formed my own conviction, I was determined not to remain at the Admiralty unless I could do justice to it. So in the end, for good or for ill, I had my way.”

Not without opposition from the highest in the land. Churchill went to see the king on October 27 to warn him of what was coming and to inform him that he proposed to nominate Fisher as Battenberg’s replacement. King George had long detested Fisher (who for his part disliked the monarch) and mistrusted many of the reforms the admiral had initiated. He argued that Fisher was too old and too untrustworthy and that his return to the Admiralty would reopen old wounds. The king preferred almost anyone to Fisher and, during the interview, suggested alternatives. He proposed Sir Hedworth Meux; Churchill declared that Meux lacked the necessary technical expertise. The king suggested Sir Henry Jackson; Churchill conceded Jackson’s scientific and intellectual attainments but said that he was colorless and lacked the energy to do the work. The king mentioned Sturdee; Churchill shook his head. Jellicoe, whom both men liked, was irreplaceable in the Grand Fleet. The interview broke up with the king and the First Lord in complete disagreement; Churchill went back to Asquith to say that if he did not get Fisher he would resign.

Unable to persuade Churchill, the king appealed to the prime minister. Asquith came to the palace on the afternoon of October 29 and fully supported his First Lord: Meux would not inspire confidence in the navy, Jackson lacked personality, Sturdee was more suited to command a fleet than to remain in Whitehall. Then Asquith warned the king that if Fisher were not brought back, Churchill, whose knowledge of the navy was unique and whose services could not be dispensed with, would resign. Faced with this threat, George V had no choice. Constitutionally, he could not oppose his ministers, but he felt it his duty to record his protest. He would approve Fisher’s appointment, he wrote to Asquith after the meeting, but he did so “with some reluctance and misgivings. . . . I hope that my fears may prove to be groundless.” The following morning, the thirtieth, the new First Sea Lord spent an hour in audience with the king at Buckingham Palace. The visit was a success and King George, who had not seen Fisher for six years, confessed to his diary, “He seems as young as ever.” The monarch and the admiral agreed to meet once a week and, when Fisher returned to Whitehall, Churchill wrote jubilantly to Asquith, “He is already a Court Favourite!”

The public hailed Fisher’s return, reacting as it had three months earlier to the appointment of Kitchener when it found comfort and reassurance in the presence of a legendary British hero. Fisher’s age was overlooked, as were his cantankerous moods and the methods that had roiled and divided the navy. The press gave a cautious blessing: “Undoubtedly the country will benefit,” said the Times, expecting that Fisher would restore public confidence in the navy through a more aggressive strategy while at the same time restraining Churchill’s impetuosity. From the navy, the response was mixed. “They have resurrected old Fisher,” Beatty wrote to his wife on November 2. “Well, I think he is the best they could have done, but I wish he was ten years younger. He still has fine zeal, energy and determination, coupled with low cunning which is eminently desirable just now. He also has courage and will take any responsibility. He will rule the Admiralty and Winston with a heavy hand.” A few admirals expressed dismay: Rear Admiral Rosslyn Wester Wemyss called it a “horrible appointment” and predicted a falling-out between Fisher and Churchill. “They will be thick as thieves at first until they differ on some subject, probably as to who is to be No. 1 when they will begin to intrigue against each other.”

Fisher, on returning to the Admiralty, assumed that he had come to take command of the great naval weapon he had forged during his previous dramatic term as First Sea Lord. At once, he swung into action. “Everything began to move. Inertia disappeared. The huge machine creaked and groaned. . . . He was known, feared, loved, and obeyed,” wrote his friend, protégé, and biographer, Admiral Reginald Bacon. Fisher’s first task was to reinvigorate the Admiralty itself. He made new appointments; he swept away deadwood. Churchill had followed up on Haldane’s suggestion and asked a retired former First Sea Lord, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Arthur Wilson, to return to the Admiralty as Chief of Staff. Wilson had refused to accept any official position, since he did not relish having to side with either Fisher or Churchill against the other should they disagree. But he agreed to come back in an unofficial and unpaid capacity, giving advice when asked and being available to work on a variety of special tasks. Sturdee, the incumbent Chief of Staff, had to go. Fisher, it may be remembered, detested Sturdee, a prominent member of Beresford’s camp, and Fisher also suspected him of being responsible for the flawed dispositions that had brought about the Coronel disaster. Churchill, who knew that the faulty dispositions were as much his doing as Sturdee’s, was unwilling to sack him and, instead, sent him to the South Atlantic to find and destroy Admiral von Spee.

The workaholic Henry Oliver was appointed Chief of Staff in Sturdee’s place. Oliver had been Director of Naval Intelligence before the war, supplying the First Lord and the Admiralty with facts and numbers related to comparative British and German naval strength. On October 14 he became naval secretary to the First Lord. Now, only a few weeks later, Fisher proposed that he be made Chief of Staff with the rank of acting vice admiral. Thereafter, Oliver, dedicated, unruffled, and inexhaustible, worked fourteen hours a day, Sundays included, and never took leave. He had broad common sense and sufficient self-confidence to stand up to both Churchill and Fisher. His method was simple: if he could not get either to see his point of view, he would agree with them and then quietly go away and do as he thought best. If he was found out, he was rarely overruled. In the months ahead, this combination of Churchill, Fisher, Wilson, and Oliver, known as the War Group or the Cabal, met at least once a day—often many times in a day.

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!” *26

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 Indefatigables. 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.”

Fisher’s return to the Admiralty temporarily linked the two powerful advocates of a Baltic naval offensive. When Churchill showed Fisher his correspondence with the Russian government, the admiral’s eyes shone with enthusiasm. The new First Sea Lord’s huge naval building program, begun during Fisher’s first week in office and launched with the First Lord’s endorsement, was filled with shallow-draft vessels designed to work in the shallow waters of the Baltic. But beyond their agreement on the grand objective of entering the Baltic, the two men differed. Fisher favored an immediate, direct naval attack on the Baltic without any preliminary effort to defeat the High Seas Fleet in battle; the German navy, he said, could be locked up inside Heligoland Bight by the laying of extensive minefields. Churchill remained dedicated to action in the Baltic, but he had reluctantly accepted that the British navy could not pass through the Belts without preliminary action to neutralize the High Seas Fleet—and that this action would have to consist of something stronger than laying minefields. Churchill’s idea was to “storm and seize” an island close to the German coast; this, he believed, would provoke the Germans to a major sea battle in the island’s defense; if it did not, capture of the island would provide a base to help blockade the High Seas Fleet. Three islands loomed largest in these plans: Borkum, off the Ems River; Sylt, off the coast of Schleswig-Holstein; and Heligoland itself. Unfortunately for Churchill, all of his island-seizing proposals were declared impracticable by Admiralty staff experts; it was one thing, they said, to seize an island, but quite another to hold it and keep it supplied at a considerable distance from England and a very short distance from the enemy. (One exception to the naysayers was Admiral Sir Arthur Wilson, who vehemently advocated the seizure of Heligoland, although it was bristling with artillery, surrounded by minefields, and lay only thirty miles from Wilhelmshaven, the main base of the High Seas Fleet.) Even in the face of overwhelming professional disapproval—“a palpable reluctance . . . manifested by lethargy,” the First Lord called it—Churchill refused to give up. Oliver recalled that “Churchill would often look in on his way to bed to tell me how he would capture Borkum or Sylt. If I did not interrupt or ask questions, he would capture Borkum in twenty minutes.”

Ultimately, the issue narrowed to a disagreement between Churchill and Fisher. “I am wholly with you about the Baltic,” Churchill wrote to Fisher on December 22. “But you must close up this side first. You must take an island and block them in; or you must break the canal or the locks, or you must cripple their fleet in a general action. No scattering of mines will be any substitute for these alternatives.” After the war, Churchill took a harsher view of Fisher’s views: “Although the First Sea Lord’s strategic conceptions were centered in the entry of the Baltic . . . I do not think he ever saw his way clearly through the great decisive and hazardous steps which were necessary for the success of the operation. . . . He talked in general terms about making the North Sea impassable by sowing mines and thus preventing the Germans from entering it while the main strength of the British fleet was in the Baltic. I could not feel any conviction that this would give us the necessary security.”

While the two principal proponents of the Baltic plan continued arguing over means, an opportunity appeared at the Dardanelles, and the Baltic project faded away. This outcome came as a huge relief to the man who commanded the Grand Fleet and whose duty—had he been so ordered—would have been to lead his ships into the Baltic. Jellicoe’s general reluctance to risk his fleet was coupled with a specific condemnation of Churchill’s Borkum scheme. He could not understand, Jellicoe wrote, “how an attack on Borkum could possibly assist fleet operations in the Baltic or lead to the German fleet being driven altogether from the North Sea.” As for Sir Arthur Wilson’s idea of seizing Heligoland, Jellicoe wrote simply, “We one and all doubted Sir A.’s sanity.”

During their first weeks together at the Admiralty and before the Baltic project began to divide them, a continuing, prolific, and mellow exchange of letters, notes, and memoranda flowed between the First Lord and the new First Sea Lord. Their relationship worked because, in addition to a shared fierce determination to defeat the enemy, each knew how to speak to the other, assuaging ego with compliments while still making the desired point. Churchill deferred to the old sea dog whenever he could, and Fisher responded in avuncular kind. On December 8, he offered Churchill advice when the First Lord returned from one of his numerous, much-criticized visits to France. “Welcome back!” Fisher wrote. “I don’t hold with these ‘outings’ of yours! I know how you enjoy them! Nor am I afraid of responsibility while you’re away! But I think it’s too venturesome! Also, it gives your enemies cause to blaspheme!” Despite these warm feelings, it was not long before signs of friction appeared at the summit of the Admiralty. Fisher’s ego had much to do with it. It was not easy for a First Sea Lord who had ruled and revolutionized the navy to see operational signals going out to the fleet, sent by the First Lord with the notation “First Sea Lord to see after action.” In addition, Fisher’s volcanic energy often overflowed established channels, and his huge outpourings on naval matters were combined with a limitless, incautious correspondence with people outside the service. Before long, his extreme language, his triple underlinings in green pencil, his capitalizations, his exclamation points, and his frequent threats of resignation were alarming as much as assisting the First Lord.

Essentially, the two men were competing for control of Britain’s sea power. On this matter, both had miscalculated. The First Lord’s determination to restore Fisher had rested on the assumption that he could control and use the old admiral. Paradoxically, Fisher and others had agreed to his restoration on the grounds that he alone would be capable of controlling Churchill. When this failed to happen, the admiral began to complain. “My beloved Jellicoe,” he wrote to the Commander-in-Chief on December 20, “Winston has so monopolized all initiative in the Admiralty and fires off such a multitude of purely departmental memos (his power of work is absolutely amazing!) that my colleagues are no longer ‘superintending Lords’ but only the First Lord’s registry! I told Winston this yesterday and he did not like it at all, but it is true! and the consequence is that the Sea Lords are atrophied and their departments run really by the Private Office, and I find it a Herculean task to get back to the right procedure, and quite possibly I may have to clear out.” Beatty had caught a whiff of this discord. “The situation is very curious,” he wrote to Ethel on December 4, 1914. “Two very strong and clever men, one old, wily, and of vast experience; one young, self-assertive with a great self-satisfaction but unstable. They cannot work together. They cannot both run the show.”

Long afterward, when because of the collision between the admiral and the politician, both men had been stripped of power, Violet Asquith, the prime minister’s daughter and a close friend of Churchill’s, asked him whether he had had any

inkling that he was on the edge of a volcano in his relations with Fisher. He said “No,” they had always got on well, differed on no principle, he had always supposed him to be perfectly loyal, etc. Poor darling Winston. . . . He is quite impervious to the climatic conditions of other people. He makes his own climate and lives in it and those who love him share it. In an odd way, there was something like love between him and Fisher, a kind of magnetic attraction which often went in reverse. Theirs was a curiously emotional relationship, but, as in many such, they could neither live with, nor without, each other.