Prinz Friedrich Wilhelm Viktor Hohenzollern von Preussen, the future Kaiser Wilhelm II, first saw the light of day on 27th January 1859. It was a difficult breech birth resulting in Erbs Palsey and it left him with a withered left arm. In later life he was able to conceal this disability by resting his left hand on his sword hilt or bridle if mounted, or by using it to carry a pair of white gloves or a cane to produce a fair impression of normality. It was also said that during his birth the supply of blood to the brain was interrupted for a period and this may have contributed to his erratic, impulsive and self-contradictory personality.
For example, he was the first grandchild of the British Queen Victoria, whom he dearly loved and deeply mourned when she died. His mother, also named Victoria, had been the United Kingdom’s Princess Royal, although his feelings for her were very different. His father inherited the throne to become Kaiser Friedrich III, Germany’s second Emperor, but he reigned for only 99 days. Wilhelm’s view of these events was summed up in one unjustifiable and hysterical outburst: ‘An English doctor killed my father and an English doctor crippled my arm, which is the fault of my mother!’ Who, of course, also happened to be English.
Wilhelm fitted perfectly into the militaristic society which was the Germany of the time. Depending upon any one day’s programme, he might change into different uniforms every few hours, requiring considerable forethought and activity on the part of his servants, all of which seemed quite unremarkable for the Supreme Commander of mainland Europe’s most efficient army. Parades, reviews and manoeuvres all enabled him to posture to his heart’s content, assisted by a distinctive turned-up moustache producing an impression of ferocity. Those with some knowledge of the subject recognised that he was affected by the disorder known as megalomania.
As most of Europe’s royal families of the era were related, personal contact between their members played a large part in diplomatic activity. Unfortunately, while commenting that war between Germany and Great Britain was ‘a most unimaginable thing,’ Wilhelm harboured a strong dislike for his English uncle, King Edward VII, stemming from jealousy. Edward did indeed possess an empire on which the sun never set. Wilhelm declared that Germany, too, had a right to ‘a place in the sun,’ but few of the colonies he began establishing in distant parts of the globe produced an adequate return for their upkeep. Again, Edward’s Royal Navy was the largest and most prestigious in the world. Wilhelm admired it and was desperate for a large fleet of his own, the acquisition of which would mean that the German Empire, created as recently as 1870, had indeed become a world power.
In this he was actively encouraged by Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, who sported the kind of forked beard favoured by pantomime demons. When he became virtual head of the Imperial German Navy in 1897, Tirpitz encouraged Wilhelm’s government to spend vast sums on building a battle fleet that would pose a threat to the Royal Navy’s dominance, arguing that the risk posed by a rival presence in the North Sea would discourage the British from interfering in Germany’s perceived interests around the world. British naval policy was already to maintain a navy equal in size to the combined naval strength of any two major powers. Tirpitz reasoned, therefore, that in any possible conflict between the British and German navies, the former would sustain losses that would destroy that ratio, even if the Royal Navy was victorious locally. This so-called ‘risk theory’ was wishful thinking at its worst, as British diplomacy quickly reached an amicable understanding with the United Kingdom’s most likely maritime opponents, France and Russia. The immediate result of Tirpitz’s avowed intentions was to sour Anglo-German relations and provoke a naval construction race between the two countries. Tirpitz immediately found himself to be at a major disadvantage as the Imperial Army had a prior claim on funds and resources. His construction programme was already lagging when, in 1906, HMS Dreadnought, armed with ten 12-inch guns, entered service with the Royal Navy, making every other battleship in the world obsolete. Tirpitz was forced to start from scratch again, not only in the field of designing dreadnought-type battleships, but also in building docks to handle them and widening the Kiel Canal, which was the Imperial Navy’s strategic means of passage between the North and Baltic Seas. To make matters worse, in 1908 the Royal Navy introduced an altogether new class of warship, the battle cruiser, which combined the hitting power of the battleship with the speed of the cruiser. As we shall see, there was an inherent flaw in the concept, but for the moment it rendered the heavy cruiser obsolete as a class and set the German designers yet another problem to be solved at short notice. As if this was not bad enough, in 1912 the Royal Navy began arming its latest class of dreadnought with 15-inch guns while the Germans had not progressed beyond a 12-inch main armament for theirs.
By August 1914 the Royal Navy had 20 dreadnought battleships in commission, plus two due for completion by the end of the year, three due for delivery in 1915 and six more in 1916. In addition, three dreadnoughts being built for foreign navies were promptly requisitioned. Nine battle cruisers were already operational and a tenth was serving in the Royal Australian Navy. In contrast, only 15 German dreadnoughts had been commissioned by August 1914, with two more expected in 1915 and another two in 1916. Six battle cruisers were in service, with a seventh due in 1915 and an eighth in 1916.
Tirpitz had annoyed a great many people with his anti-British attitude and incessant demands, but now, thoroughly alarmed, he began agitating for peace. Unfortunately, because of greatly improved relations between Great Britain and France, Germany’s historic enemy, there was now a ground-swell of anti-British feeling throughout central Europe. Even if his warnings had been heeded, events were rapidly spiralling out of control. On 28th June 1914 the Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife were murdered by a Serbian nationalist in Sarajevo, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. There was a horrible inevitability about the sequence of event that followed. Austria-Hungary threatened to invade Serbia unless the Serbs agreed to accept a series of impossibly humiliating demands. Serbia’s protector was Russia, who promised to come to her aid if she was attacked. The contents of this witches’ cauldron were already close to bubbling over when Wilhelm, whose forays into international relations were the despair of his diplomatic service, chose to toss in one of his hopelessly ill-considered comments: ‘The day of Austro-Hungarian mobilisation, for whatever cause, will be the day of German mobilisation, too!’ Then he went on holiday. Encouraged, the Austrians set their war machine in motion. Russia had no alternative but to respond by mobilising her huge army. By the time Wilhelm returned from his jaunt the situation was beyond control. France mobilised in compliance with her understanding with Russia, followed by the United Kingdom, which had similar understandings with both as well as a treaty obligation to protect Belgium, passage through which formed part of the German General Staff’s plan of campaign against France. All the major powers of Europe now found themselves embarked on a full-scale war, little understanding that modern weapons were capable of inflicting slaughter on a truly industrial scale.
The Imperial German Navy might have been one of the Kaiser’s favourite toys, but the question of what to do with it now that Great Britain and Germany were actually at war was never satisfactorily resolved. In global terms, a number of German cruisers and gunboats were showing the flag around the world. No one expected them to survive for long and they didn’t, but that is another story. Most of the Imperial Navy, was optimistically named the High Seas Fleet, despite being confined to home waters from which it could only be deployed against Russia in the Baltic or the United Kingdom across the North Sea. Admiral Friedrich von Ingenohl, Commander-in-Chief of the High Seas Fleet, immediately dismissed the idea of a major action between his surface ships and the much larger British Grand Fleet as the outcome was entirely predictable. On the other hand, what was to be done with the surface warships on which so much treasure had been lavished and which required tens of thousands of men to man, men whom the Army would gladly have absorbed to replace the horrendous losses of the war’s early battles? In the view of Ingenohl, an innately cautious man, the answer was nothing, beyond mine-laying off the English coast, sinking a few British trawlers, regular defensive patrolling in the Heligoland Bight, and gunfire support for the ground troops fighting against the Russians on the Baltic coast. Again, the Kaiser himself insisted that the High Seas Fleet must be preserved as a bargaining counter in the peace talks that would follow shortly after his armies’ rapid destruction of their opponents. That, too, proved to be wishful thinking and in a matter of weeks Ingenohl would be forced to commit his ships to battle.