Imperial German Navy

“ Hence, in the preamble of the last Navy Bill which the Government got the Reichstag to accept before the war, it was plainly stated that the naval policy of the German Higher Command did not aim at possessing a fleet capable of defeating the strongest fleet in the world, but would be satisfied with a force that the strongest fleet could not defeat, except at a cost that would bring it so low that its world supremacy would be gone. ”

“ When the Act of 1900 was introduced the Reichstag was informed by Admiral von Tirpitz in a Memorandum that "as, even after the projected increase has been carried out, the number of vessels in the German Navy will still be more or less inferior to that of other individual Great Powers, our endeavours must be directed towards compensating this superiority by the individual training of the crews and by tactical training by practice in larger bodies.... Economy as regards commissioning of vessels in peace time means jeopardizing the efficiency of the fleet in case of war." ”

“ The German Navy has no use for anything but the best which the Empire can provide, and in order that the highest expression of the esprit de corps which has contributed to German influence on shore may be instilled into the Navy, no officer, however influential or brilliant, can enter either the executive or engineering branch unless his claims are endorsed by all his contemporaries ”

“ The Federated Governments entertain no thoughts of entering into competition with British sea-power by means of the construction of the German navy. According to the provisions of the Navy Law, the immovable purpose of German naval policy is founded upon the fact that we desire to create our naval armaments solely for the protection of our coasts and our trade. It is, moreover, an indisputable fact that the programme of our naval construction lies open in absolute publicity. ”

“ There are brutes among them, no doubt, but such German naval officers as I have met compare very favourably with their swaggering colleagues of the land service. German sailors are under no misapprehension as to the might and efficiency of the British Navy. It is not they who spread the tale of the British Fleet hiding in ports while German ships proudly sail the North Sea. It is not they who ask plaintively, “Will the British Fleet never come out?” ”

“ First, the British people increased their naval expenditure and more ships were built and more officers and men were entered; and then the German Navy Act of 1912 was passed.
It had been the practice of the naval Powers to keep about one-half only of their ships in full sea-going commission. The armed peace, before Germany began to give expression to her maritime ambitions, was a yoke which rested easily upon the [Pg 15] navies of the world. As a British naval officer has remarked:—
"Up to the end of the last century our Navy enjoyed a peace routine. ”

“ The German navy has been in existence a much shorter time than the American navy, belongs to a much less populous and wealthy country, and yet is not only about 30 per cent larger in material, and more than 100 per cent larger in trained personnel, but if we judge by maneuvers carried on in both peace and war, is much better in organization, morale, and capacity for doing naval work upon the ocean. ”

“ Our ships are better and faster than the German ships, our guns heavier and more accurate than theirs, our gunners more deadly than their gunners, because our Navy has the greater human soul. The Royal Navy is not a collection of lifeless ships and guns imposed upon men by some external power as the Kaiser sought to impose a fleet upon the Germans, a nation of landsmen. The Navy is only a matter of machines in so far as human beings can only achieve material ends by material means. I look upon the ships and guns as secreted by the men just as a tortoise secretes its shell. ”

“ The fact was that thousands of their trained seamen were hopelessly cut off from Germany by the British Navy. Nearly every German merchant ship outside of the North Sea or the Baltic was either taken by the British or chased into some neutral port from which it never got out. The crews were mostly reservists in the German Navy. They were ready for the call to arms. But they could not answer it. So new men had to be trained. Meanwhile the one good chance slipped away; for by the time these recruits had been trained the Grand Fleet had grown much stronger than before. ”

“ As the British Navy in its influence on world policy inspired German ambitions, so German thoroughness in organization, when applied to the growing German Fleet, reacted upon the British Navy and gave it a new and vigorous life. ”

“ Similarly, small torpedo-boats have given way in the establishment of the Navy to torpedo-boat destroyers of large size, and step by step the naval strength of Germany has been increased by a process, the cleverness and ingenuity of which even the German people themselves have not realized.
Germany has immensely increased her resources of [Pg 141] ships and men, but she has done more than that: she has forced other Powers to organize and train their squadrons on a standard of efficiency never attempted in the past. ”

“ One day when I had gone to my uncle, the Imperial Chancellor, for a conference, at which the Secretary of State for the Navy, Admiral Hollmann, was present, Freiherr Marschall, one of the Secretaries of State, suddenly appeared in high excitement, with a sheet of paper in his hand. He declared that the excitement among the people—in the Reichstag, even—had grown to such proportions that it was absolutely necessary to give it outward expression, and that this could best be done by a telegram to Kruger, a rough draft of which he had in his hand. ”

“ The ultimate scale of the new German Fleet, as contemplated by the latest Navy Law, will be 41 battleships, 20 battle or large armoured cruisers, and 40 small cruisers, besides a proper proportion—an ample proportion—of flotillas of torpedo-boat destroyers and submarines, by 1920. ”

“ It is just when the efforts to do away with the restrictions imposed on us have succeeded, that the German Navy has an ever-increasing and really vital interest in furthering the German Armament Industry and preparing the way for it in every direction in the competitive battle against the rest of the world. ”

“ Our Navy has played the great game of war by sea for too many hundreds of years ever to under-rate its foes. It is even more true of the sea than of the land that the one thing sure to happen is that which is unexpected. Until they have measured by their own high standards the quality of an enemy, our officers and men rate him in valour, in sea skill, and in masterful ingenuity as fully the equal of themselves. Until August 1914 the Royal Navy had never fought the German, and had no standards of experience by which to assay him. ”

“ The German High Sea Fleet, at the beginning of the war, consisted of forty-one battleships, seven battle cruisers, nine armored cruisers, forty-nine light cruisers, one hundred and forty-five destroyers, eighty torpedo boats, and thirty-eight submarines. Under the direction of Von Tirpitz the navy had become democratic and had drawn to it many able men of the middle class. ”

“ The boy volunteers and the conscripts who re-engage constitute the class from which petty officers are drawn, and these men are the backbone of the naval organization ashore and afloat, and it is to their efforts that the high standard of efficiency which Germany's Navy has attained may in a large measure be traced. ”

“ This whole maneuver, conceived on a large scale, was engineered for the sole purpose of hampering the development of the German fleet, while, simultaneously, in America, which had an almost negligible merchant fleet; in France, whose navy was superior in numbers to the German; in Italy, in Russia, which also had ships built abroad—vast construction programs were carried out without eliciting one word of protest from England. And Germany, wedged in between France and Russia, certainly had to be at least prepared to defend herself on the water against those nations. ”

“ We have been able to prove to the world that, the English Navy no longer possesses her boasted irresistibility. To us it has been granted to fight for the rights of the German Nation on the open seas, and the battle proved that the organisation of our Navy as a High Sea Fleet was a step in the right direction. The German national spirit can only be impressed on the world through a High Sea Fleet directed against England. ”

“ If ships in "line ahead" all turn together to the right or left, or, to use the correct wording, alter course together eight points to starboard or port, only the leading and rear ship could use their broadsides, and only one of them at that. But a similar turn in "bow and quarter line" can be made without any loss of fire effect.
In the Great War we have not, at the time of writing, yet had a fleet action. The German Navy has shown itself most determined—to take no risks. ”

“ The fleet certainly stands to benefit by this comparatively long period of single command. It will feel the confidence born of experience in its distinguished leader, and he in turn, knowing exactly what his ships can do, need fear no check to his plans by unsuspected defects in personnel or material. Whatever the near future may bring, it is certain that the German navy will put forth its utmost effort to fulfil the hope placed in it by the nation, and those who anticipate a cheaply purchased naval victory for us are laying up a rude disappointment for themselves. ”

“ If the demand is made that the foreign service fleet shall be in a position (1) energetically to uphold German interests everywhere in time of peace, (2) to be adequate for warlike conflicts with oversea States without navies deserving of the name, an increase of at least five large and five small cruisers, as well as of one large and two small cruisers as material reserve, seems called for. The Navy Law foresees as ready for use three large and ten small cruisers, and as material reserve three large and four small cruisers. ”

“ In other words, a war with Great Britain must find the German navy too strong for the British navy to be able to confine it to its harbours, and to maintain, in spite of it, complete command of the seas which border the German coast. As German strategists continuously accept the doctrine that the first object of a fleet in war is the destruction of the enemy's fleet with a view to the consequent command of the sea, the German Navy Act is equivalent to the declaration of an intention in case of conflict to challenge the British navy for the mastery. ”

“ They are practical [Pg 143] men, and for the most part honest men, and they know that Germany has it in her own hands to bring out the British Fleet in no uncertain manner.
The Germans are annoyed because the valuable ships of the British Navy do not parade up and down in the neighbourhood of Heligoland and Wilhelmshaven and allow themselves to be torpedoed by German submarines. The German idea of naval warfare is sometimes childish, but it belongs to the layman and not to the expert. “Our people started the war ten years too soon,” was the remark that one German officer made to me. ”

“ Preparation for war was never thought of. Why should it be? The French Navy had no aggressive designs, and was much below our own, both in material strength and in personnel, while the Russian Navy was partly confined in the Black Sea, the other part being in the Baltic. And so we, both officers and men, set out to have a good time. Our ships were kept up to yacht-like perfection as regards their paintwork, while their bright work shone like gold, and the road to promotion lay not through professional efficiency, but the state of cleanliness and splendour of one's ship. ”

“ It was a glorious moment in world-history when British, French, and Americans at last stood side by side. The American Navy led the way, joining the hunt for German submarines with a keenness whetted by having been held back so long. The Army followed, bit by bit, until two million men had gone to Europe, thanks chiefly to the British ships that took them there. The Nation backed both Army and Navy with vast sums of money, which it could so easily afford, and with patriotic work of every splendid kind. ”

“ The fact remains that, in the long struggle between the German and British submarines in the North Sea, the work done by the latter was the most efficient [141] and destructive, and broke the nerve of the enemy submarine crews, whereas the moral of our men remained unshaken to the end. The men of the soulless German Navy were brave enough at first, with the bravery inspired by an ineffable conceit and arrogance. They had been taught that the German Navy was in every respect superior to the British—in ships, guns, personnel, and skilful leadership. ”

“ To conquer their bully's "place in the sun" of the white man's empire overseas the Germans built their Navy. But the Grand Fleet blockaded it so well that the Germans clamoured for a fight to wipe the British off the sea and to let the German merchant ships get out. Jutland settled that. From Jutland on to the end of the war the German bluejackets could never again be led against the British on the surface of the sea. So the murderous German submarine campaign was tried instead. ”

“ The infant navy, which had been the work of a popular movement and a popular Parliament, proved a source of dissension and embarrassment to the Confederacy Governments. Several of the inland states were altogether opposed to the idea that Germany needed a navy. A strong party advocated that one fleet should be provided by Austria for the Adriatic, a second by Prussia for the Baltic, and a third by the remaining German states for the North Sea. ”