CHAPTER 8

Matériel

Churchill took a serious and penetrating interest in ship design, often resolving the differences between different schools of thought. He enjoyed this, and the relevant chapter in The World Crisis is entitled ‘The Romance of Design’. According to Sir Tennyson d’Eyncourt, who became Director of Naval Construction in 1912, ‘Winston Churchill too was a keen exponent of progress in all things to do with the Navy, and his encouragement and interest were a never-failing inspiration and bulwark of support, though his own career had not given him the practical knowledge of ship design possessed by Lord Fisher.’¹ Churchill paid tribute to ‘the manner in which the Royal Corps of Naval Constructors can juggle with these factors, and the facility with which the great chiefs and masters of battleship design … were able to speak on these matters were marvellous beyond belief’.² When Churchill came to office the head of the Corps was Sir Philip Watts, who started as an apprentice shipwright in Portsmouth Dockyard and was selected to study in the School of Naval Architecture in South Kensington. He worked with the pioneering naval architect William Froude and left the navy in 1885 to work in the Armstrong Yard at Elswick on the Tyne, where he gained experience on British and foreign warships. He came back in 1902 to succeed Sir William White as Director of Naval Construction. He designed the Dreadnought, the Queen Elizabeth class battleships and the cruiser Arethusa before retiring in 1912.

For his successor, Churchill took the unprecedented step of advertising outside the service. Eustace Tennyson d’Eyncourt was on the Tyne designing ships for the Brazilian Navy when it was suggested he might apply. At first he thought it was a joke, but he was summoned to an interview by Churchill. It was his first time in government service, but as he wrote: ‘Perhaps it was not altogether the drawback it appeared to me than, as my genuine ignorance of Civil Service methods enabled me to pursue certain courses of action at times when an old government servant would have hesitated to take such a line.’³ He was soon involved in the design of the Revenge class battleships and the C-class cruisers, and in developing underwater protection against torpedoes.

Since the original Dreadnought was launched in 1906, battleships had expanded from 18,000 tons to 23,000 and from the Orion class of 1910–12 they carried 13.5-inch guns instead of 12-inch, giving greater range and penetrating power. All the turrets were now mounted on the centre line and some were ‘superimposed’ above others, so that all could be fired at once in a full broadside. Churchill claimed the credit for initiating the next step. He quickly realised that the increase in calibre had increased the weight of each shell from 850 to 1,400 lbs. ‘I immediately sought to go one size better. I mentioned this to Lord Fisher at Reigate, and he hurled himself into its advocacy with tremendous passion.’ For he had concluded that ‘Nothing less than a 15-inch gun could be looked at for all the battleships and battle-cruisers of the new programme. … What was it that enabled Jack Johnson to knock out his opponents? It was the big punch.’ Churchill went on, ‘Enlarging the gun meant enlarging the ships, and enlarging the ships meant increasing the cost. Moreover, the redesign must cause no delay and the guns must be ready as soon as the turrets were ready.’ He claimed that ‘No such thing as a modern 15-inch gun existed’ though in fact the Ordnance Board had begun to look at possible designs in February 1911.⁴ In any case, he went on, ‘I hardened my heart and took the plunge. The whole outfit of guns was ordered. forthwith.’ He recognised that this was a great gamble, for if they did not work he would be subjected to enormous pressure, and he was relieved when an advance model, known for security reasons as ‘the 14-inch experimental’, was successfully tested at the Elswick works.

It was decided to arm the new ships with eight rather than ten main guns, as that would still provide a punch of 16,000 lbs rather than 14,000, and over a longer range. Though Fisher thoroughly supported Churchill with the increase, he opposed the idea of using 6-inch guns for defence against torpedo boats, perhaps reasoning that the old secondary armament of the pre-Dreadnoughts was creeping back. ‘If you let these silly idiots frighten you into the 6-inch gun I shall be bitterly disappointed … Utterly silly.’⁵ But the increased range of torpedoes meant that attackers had to be fought off at longer range, and the 6-inch guns were to prove themselves in battle.

Of course the guns were only the beginning. Churchill described the process in ‘very unexpert language’:

You take the largest possible number of the best possible guns that can be fired in combination from one vessel as a single battery. You group them conveniently by pairs in turrets. You put the turrets so that there is the widest possible arc of fire for every gun and the least possible blast interference. This regulates the position of the turrets and the spacing between them. You draw a line around the arrangement of turrets thus arrived at, which gives you the deck of the ship. You then build a hull to carry this deck or great gun platform. It must be very big and very long. Next you see what room you have got inside this hull for engines to drive it, and from this and from the length you get the speed. Last of all you decide the armour.⁶

But Churchill wanted more than a ‘great gun platform’ for the 15-inch guns. He planned ‘a division of ships fast enough to seize the advantageous position and yet as strong in gun power and armour as any battleship afloat’ which would score ‘almost with certainty an inestimable and a decisive advantage’. Tactical studies in the war college showed that a speed of 25 knots would be necessary for this, compared with 21 knots for most existing Dreadnoughts, while the battlecruisers ‘had thin skins compared to the enemy’s strongest battleships, which presumably would head his line’. There was only one way to achieve all these advantages. ‘We could not get the power required to drive these ships at 25 knots except by use of oil fuel.’⁷ The ships were designed by Sir Philip Watts and four of them were ordered, supplemented by one funded by the Federated Malay States. They were the famous Queen Elizabeth class, laid down from October 1912 to October 1913, and they were completed in 1915–16, to make a significant contribution during two world wars. Beatty, who did not always give Churchill the credit he deserved, wrote that ‘the Q.E. is the finest fighting unit in the world’.⁸

Oil fuel offered great advantages as a means of heating the boilers of steam engines, compared with the more traditional coal. In Churchill’s words, ‘In equal ships oil gave a large excess of speed over coal. It enabled that speed to be attained with far greater rapidity. It gave 40 per cent greater radius of action for the same weight of coal. It enabled a fleet to re-fuel at sea with great facility.’ Furthermore it could be pumped rather than shovelled so the gruelling operation of coaling, often done after an exhausting patrol, was avoided. Once it was on board the great army of stokers was no longer needed and their numbers could be cut by half, while the remainder became semi-skilled mechanics. Accommodation was less tight on board, and wages bills were reduced.

Against this there was the minor disadvantage that the coal no longer protected against shellfire, and the far greater one that it had to be obtained from abroad, and that storage facilities and large reserves would have to be built up almost from scratch. Destroyers and submarines already used oil, but battleships and cruisers had far larger engines. Churchill told the House of Commons in 1912: ‘The adoption and supply of oil as a motive power raises anxious and perplexing problems … can we make sure of obtaining full supplies of oil in time of peace and of war? Can we accumulate and store a sufficient reserve of oil to meet our ever-growing requirements, and can we make that reserve properly protected against attack either by aeroplanes or sabotage?’⁹ Moreover the world oil supplies were largely controlled by Standard Oil of New Jersey and by Royal Dutch Shell, partly owned by Germans and based in the Netherlands, which was vulnerable to German invasion.

The idea of oil fuel was not new and Fisher was pushing hard for it, though in 1904 his then First Lord had dismissed it on the grounds that ‘oil does not exist in this world in sufficient quantities’.¹⁰ And Fisher himself had a different agenda, believing that oil should be used to power diesel engines instead of steam boilers – though no diesel which was anything like big enough for a battleship would appear until much later. In December 1911 a departmental enquiry under Pakenham, the Fourth Sea Lord, was lukewarm about the prospects for oil, but Churchill went over his head and asked Fisher to chair a Royal Commission on the subject. He told Fisher: ‘You have got to find the oil: to show how it can be stored cheaply: how it can be purchased regularly and cheaply; and with absolute certainty in war.’¹¹ Since Fisher was allowed a free hand in choosing the membership of the Commission, it is not surprising that the report concluded in 1913: ‘The use of oil-fuel makes it possible in every type of war vessel to produce a ship which will fulfil given conditions of speed, armament, &c., on lesser dimensions and at smaller cost.’¹² On the question of supply, the Commission wanted to buy oil on the open market as it did coal, though of course it was far more international. Churchill had a different idea, to find and develop the country’s own resources using the Anglo-Persian Oil Company which already had concessions in Iran and was building a refinery at Abadan. The British government invested heavily in APOC and acquired a controlling interest, hoping to guarantee the supply of oil. This was popular at the time: Conservatives saw the Admiralty taking decisive steps at last, while socialists were glad to see a form of nationalisation, and taking on the great oil giants. This was the origin of British Petroleum, and it was to involve much difficulty with the Iranian government over the decades, sometimes involving Churchill.

Meanwhile other practical difficulties were solved by building 5,000-ton oil tanks at the major naval ports. They were difficult to hide, and Churchill worried about their vulnerability to air attack and sabotage. By July 1914 the navy had large facilities at Sheerness and Portsmouth with capacity for 210,000 and 170,000 tons respectively, with other depots mainly on the east coast. A fleet of tankers was built up. In the navy itself, the change was welcomed by the sailors as more and more ships were completed to use oil, or were converted. Able Seaman George Saban reported: ‘The seamen were free as soon as they had secured the oiler alongside … That was, I think, the biggest step forward in the service ever.’¹³

In the meantime, however, there was a backward step with the battleships of the 1913–14 programme. Pakenham and Lambert, the Civil Lord of the Admiralty, had dissented from the Royal Commission report and urged caution over oil supplies, claiming public opinion ‘would crucify any Board that failed to make a certainty of plentiful oil supplies’.¹⁴ The new ships, known as the R or Revenge class, retained the 15-inch guns but were smaller and cheaper and were to revert to a speed of 21½ knots, as the ‘fast division’ would only include the Queen Elizabeths. There were still doubts about oil fuel and they were to use a combination of coal and oil until that was changed in 1915 to oil alone.

Churchill disagreed with Fisher over his pet project, the battlecruisers. He wrote later: ‘I do not believe in the wisdom of the battle-cruiser type. If it is worthwhile to spend far more than the price of your best battleship upon a fast heavily gunned vessel, it is better at the same time to give it the heaviest armour as well.’¹⁵ In effect the new Queen Elizabeth class were to replace the battlecruisers, and no more were ordered during Churchill’s peacetime administration. In the matter of smaller ships, Fisher firmly believed in his battlecruisers as a means of protecting British commerce, though he did not explain how a small number of expensive ships could cover the vast oceans. As a result there was a ten-year gap in building smaller cruisers, which had various functions, ‘now scouting for the Battle Fleet; now convoying merchantmen; now fighting an action with another cruiser squadron; now showing the flag in distant or tropical oceans’.¹⁶ In addition, it was becoming clear that they might have to fight off torpedo attack on the battle fleet, as the Germans were sending destroyers out with their battleships. Apart from the battlecruisers there were four different types of cruisers in service in 1911. Armoured cruisers were almost equivalent to pre-Dreadnought battleships and had guns of up to 9.2 inches. They were obsolescent, though many remained in service. Protected cruisers were just as big but had much lighter armour so their coal was distributed to help absorb shot. Scouts were intended to lead destroyer flotillas and had very light gun armament of 12-pounders or later 4-inch. The ‘Towns’ had been built more recently with 6-inch guns but were unarmoured and tended to be poor sailers.

Churchill soon concluded that ‘We required a very large number of small fast vessels to protect the Battle Fleet from torpedo attack, to screen it and within certain limits to scout for it. After hearing many arguments, I proposed to the Board that we should concentrate on this type, to exclude all requirements of the distant seas, and to build vessels for attendance on the Battle Fleets in home waters and for that duty alone.’¹⁷ Fisher was not helpful, claiming ‘You are forced by the general consensus of opinion to have these useless warships …’. He wanted fast battlecruisers, fast destroyers and fast submarines, for ‘The first of all its necessities is SPEED …’.¹⁸ Nevertheless Churchill set up a committee of admirals to consider the cruiser question and two possibilities offered themselves – in effect a large destroyer based on the Swift of 1907, or a small cruiser based on the Blonde class of scouts of 1909–11. The admirals chose the latter, and Churchill justified it to Fisher: ‘These vessels are intended primarily for service with the battle-fleet as destroyer-destroyers as well as scouts and patrols. In the last character they have many points of superiority over the Super-Swift: they have better observation platforms, stronger batteries, larger radius of action, and are much less likely to their lose speed in a sea-way. … They are also cruisers and count as such: there is no flotilla they cannot break up, and no flotilla-cruiser they cannot go round.’¹⁹ They had the unusual armament of six 4-inch guns firing forward and two 6-inch in the stern. As Churchill put it, ‘When advancing to attack destroyers she could fire a large number of 32-lb shots, each sufficient to wound them grievously; when retreating from a larger cruiser she could strike back with her two 6-inch guns. I personally insisted upon the two 6-inch. The Navy would never recognise these vessels as cruisers if they did not carry metal of that weight.’²⁰ Described as ‘light armoured cruisers’, eight ships of the Arethusa class were built in 1912–15, followed by six of the improved version, the Caroline class, in 1914–15. Many more were added during the war and they proved very suitable for North Sea conditions, though rather cramped. Eventually most of them were fitted with the 6-inch armament. One of them, the Caroline, survives to this day.

Churchill described his philosophy for destroyers: ‘Build slow destroyers! One might as well breed slow racehorses.’ He ‘gave directions to design the new flotilla to realize 35 knots speed without giving up anything in gun-power, torpedoes or seaworthiness’.²¹ They were based on the existing L class but with increases in length and power, and the result was the M class. He wrote in 1917: ‘The 1912–13 destroyer, for which I was responsible, lifted six or seven knots on its predecessor, attaining the immense speed of thirty-six or thirty-seven knots without the sacrifice either of gun-power or sea-keeping capacity. These boats, which are almost miniature cruisers, were designed to catch and hunt down the best destroyers of the German Navy in their own waters across the broad distances of the North Sea.’²² They were none too soon: faster destroyers were needed to escort the battle fleet and make torpedo attacks, and the design became the basis for many more ordered during the war.

Apart from aircraft, the submarine was by far the most revolutionary factor in naval warfare when Churchill came to the Admiralty. Such vessels had been tried many times, most notably by Robert Fulton in the Napoleonic Wars and by the Confederates in the American Civil War. The Irish-American John P. Holland intended his early submarine as a challenge to British sea power, and had developed a successful craft by the 1890s. In 1900 the British Admiralty bought a vessel from the Electric Boat Company, which had acquired Holland’s rights. Known as Holland 1, it entered service in 1901 and despite its loss development proceeded over the next decade. By 1911 the latest boats of the E-class had a speed of 15.25 knots on the surface and 9.75 knots underwater. They carried four 18-inch torpedoes and a crew of 31, and had a range of more than 3,000 miles on the surface at 10 knots. However, like all such craft of the day, they were ‘submersibles’ rather than true submarines, only able to stay underwater for limited periods.

Though the submarine was generally seen as a weapon by which a weaker naval power could threaten a stronger one, both Fisher and Churchill were enthusiastic about its use. Fisher saw it as a means of blockading the German battleships in port and defending the British coast against invasion, while Churchill believed it was the only kind of vessel, apart from battleships, that might ‘directly determine the fate of a naval war’, as he told the Prime Minister of Canada. Fisher wanted two classes of submarine, the coastal type to protect from invasion and the overseas type to blockade Germany. In a paper of August 1913 Churchill advocated a third, the ‘ocean’ or ‘fleet’ submarine: ‘The ocean submarine (or submarine cruiser) must have sufficient speed to overhaul a battle fleet so as to make sure of being able to anticipate it at any point, to get head in order to dive and attack.’ A minimum of 24 knots was needed on the surface, and such vessels would be accompanied by surface ships to guide them to the point of attack. The design was examined in Churchill’s office in December, and the Director of Naval Construction ‘expressed great confidence in the design and did not anticipate any great difficulty in controlling a vessel of this displacement’. But he clearly had doubts, remarking that ‘if it failed as a submarine, it would still be a very formidable surface torpedo craft’. Commodore (submarines) pointed out that it would have three times the displacement of an E-class boat and was nearly twice as long, but ‘no serious objection was raised by anyone present to the laying down of one experimental vessel – except that the money might be better spent’.²³ That was a good point, as it diverted funds away from the smaller boats which would prove more useful.

In the meantime Fisher had been commissioned to report on the future possibilities of submarines. He foresaw uses in fleet battle, in commerce defence and destruction, and coastal defence. He also raised the possibility that the Germans might sink merchant ships without warning – ‘inhuman and barbarous’ but a ‘truly terrible’ menace for British commerce and indeed survival, for ‘no means can be suggested at present of meeting it except by reprisals’. Churchill was horrified and commented: ‘If there were a nation vile enough to adopt systematically such methods, it would be justified and indeed necessary, to employ the extreme resources of science against them: to spread pestilence, poison the water of great cities, and, if convenient, proceed by the assassination of individuals.’ Though he claimed these were ‘unthinkable propositions’ which ‘marred’ Fisher’s paper, his extreme reaction suggests that he was fearful of the danger.²⁴

However Churchill was with Fisher in agreeing that the submarine might supplant the battleship, and in March 1914 he told the House of Commons: ‘The whole system of naval architecture and the methods of computing naval strengths are brought under review by the ever-growing power, radius and seaworthiness of the submarine …’.²⁵ Historians are bitterly divided on whether Churchill and Fisher were on the verge of a revolution before they were interrupted by the war; but as always they were keen to put forward new ideas.

Churchill was always interested in the British Empire and the contribution it might make to naval power. He looked towards the quasi-independent dominions, especially Canada, Australia and New Zealand, which had total control over their own budgets but not over their foreign policy. There were several ways in which they could help: by forming their own navy for regional defence as Australia had done, or by providing ships and men for the main fleet in British waters. Churchill’s big idea in 1912 was an Imperial Squadron of battlecruisers supplied by the three dominions plus cruisers from South Africa and India: ‘Separately these navies are weak and even ridiculous. One Dreadnought, et praeteria nihil! But combined they might make a force which no European power could face without dispersing its own concentration & consequently releasing ours. … In times of peace to move constantly from station to station spending 3 or 4 months in rotation in the waters of each Dominion …’.²⁶ That proved impracticable, but New Zealand agreed to fund a battlecruiser for presentation to the Royal Navy. Later in the year Robert L. Borden, Prime Minister of Canada, suggested that the dominion might provide three Dreadnoughts, and Churchill offered to go to there to help muster support. He raised the possibility that an equal amount of money might be spent on submarines. He wrestled with the question whether the Dreadnoughts would be part of the ships needed for the 60 per cent superiority over Germany or additional to it, and for political reasons he had to maintain the latter, though he also argued that ‘the three ships now under discussion in Canada are absolutely required from 1916 onwards for the whole world defence of the British empire, apart altogether from the needs of Great Britain in home waters’.²⁷ He was in the middle of the naval estimates crisis of 1913 when the Canadian parliament rejected the proposal; it was ‘a heavy blow’.