The Book of Neil: Friedman's [i]Fighting the Great War at Sea[/i]

[grumbler]

Just finished this book.  It's a pretty amazingly complete look on the topic, and contains more analysis than I have seen on just about every topic that one could think of: gunnery, torpedoes, tactics, strategy, ships, personnel, on, and on.  The one thing it is missing is consideration (in any detail) of any of the combatants other than Britain and Germany.  It deals with France, Italy, and AH only insofar as they relate to British or German plans or strategy.

As many of you know, Friedman has been writing about navies and ships and wars at sea for decades now.  I've gotten pretty much everything he has written, and this is definitely his magnum opus.  It is much more analytic than anything he has written to date, though it is also chockablock with descriptive detail.  Various chapters cover the navies, the fleets in the North Sea and Med, the strategies of each side (including their evolution over time), the ships (from dreadnoughts down to trawlers), the geography, the actual campaigns and battles, technology (especially mine warfare, communications, gunnery, submarines, and ASW), trade warfare, and what each side thought they had learned from the war.

The book is in the large "coffee table book" format, which suits its use of photos and maps well (it has a lot of photos but not nearly enough maps). at over 400 pages plus sources and whatnot, it is a big book.  One of the interesting book design choices was a decision to use extensive captions for the pictures, and to let those captions replace a fair amount of text; one only finds out about the Battle of the Helgoland Bight, for instance, by reading the captions for some British destroyer photos and German cruiser photos.  I'm still unsure as to whether I think that this is a good idea; it seems new and interesting at first, but becomes less attractive as one reads on, and realizes that one has made a mistake by getting involved in the text and not reading some key captions.

So, what did I learn from reading this book (keeping in mind that I have read a number of previous works on the topic)?

1.  Probably the decisive weapon carried on the dreadnought battleships were their underwater torpedoes.  Neither side even fired a battleship torpedo at another battleship, but both sides' fleet commanders' dominant tactical concern was to avoid getting within torpedo range of the other side.  Since either fleet, pursuing the other, would be sailing into enemy torpedo range and outside their own, direct pursuit of a fleeing enemy fleet was deemed foolish.  This made a decisive battle almost impossible.

2.  Jellicoe was a lot better prepared to fight a modern naval battle than Speer.  He at least tried to keep a rudimentary plot of all friendly and hostile ships, and though he was badly let down by his scouting forces, made all the right decisions for all the right reasons.  Speer bungled his side of things badly, let his T get crossed twice, and was basically in the dark and was purely reactive after the fleets made contact.  Jellicoe would have won a smashing victory at Jutland had his fleet been equipped with shells that met navy specifications.  Ironically, he had, as Third Sea Lord (in 1910? - well pre-war, at any rate), been aware of the issue and had ordered the development of what would later be the deadly Greenboy shell, but his successors failed to follow up and the shell wasn't available until 1917. 

3. Beatty was an ass, in almost all possible ways.  He bungled Dogger Bank and Jutland, failed to keep Jellicoe informed of what the Scouting Fleet had learned about Speer's movements, and ordered the disastrous changes to British powder-handling practices that cost the British three battlecruisers (and almost his own flagship).  His punishment was promotions and awards.

4.  The British battlecruiser was actually an excellent innovation that served its purpose very well, so long as it was used in that purpose.  It was a "dreadnought armored cruiser" conceived by Fischer as a replacement (on a 1:3 basis) for the armored cruisers that were crippling the British naval budget (far more so than the battleships were).  They were trade protection ships and fleet scouts, and fast enough and long-ranged enough to serve both roles at the same time (as the Falklands proved; they had enough strategic mobility to be redeployed against raiding cruisers straight from the Home Fleet).  German battlecruisers were less well-thought-out, though they proved to be much tougher in combat (due to bad British shells).  Tirpitz didn't want them; he thought Blucher-sized-and-armed ships were the way to go, so the battleship construction could go forward at full speed.  Kaiser Wilhelm over-ruled him.

5.  Fischer believed that the submarine was the warship of the future, and would make the dreadnought type obsolete.  The British had the most modern and capable subs of the war, up until the start of 1918.  The Germans only really got interested in subs when they realized that their surface fleet could do nothing.

6. The whole issue of the Belgian ports as submarine and destroyer bases was something I had read a bit about, but Friedman really exposes the significance of this element of the naval war.  The war between the Germans at Zeebrugge and the British Dover patrol/barrage was constant, intense and lasted the whole war.  All of the really successful German sub patrols were out of Zeebrugge.  British countermeasures were various, inventive, but only partly successful.

7.  Friedman makes the convoy/non-convoy debate much more clear and controversial than the usual treatment of "stupid Brits took too long to get off their asses and convoy."  He concludes that the British did start convoys too late, but not by much; before they enacted convoys, they had to have the resources to protect them.   

8.  His look at technology is probably the best part of the book ("Expectations versus Reality" and "Anti-Submarine Warfare: Tactics and Technology").  Probably the hero of the ASW war was Thomas Edison (yes, THAT Thomas Edison), who oversaw US development and production of ASW listening devices.  By war's end, all the Allies were using Edison's mass-produced technology (Edison + Ford = win).  I'd never heard Edison's name in relation to the war before.  The extent to which the British and Germans economized on fire control equipment (especially compared to the Americans, who recognized a force-multiplier when they saw one) is quite startling; the British had the technology for range prediction before anyone, but decided that a simpler and cheaper estimation system was good enough.  The Germans didn't even do that well, and that's why they hit their targets so seldom (they had half the hit rate the British did at Jutland, but because they used TNT rather than Lyddite their shells burst inside the enemy's armor rather than outside it, making the British hits more moot).  The British had never conducted a single battleship live firing exercise at greater than 10,000 yards when Jellicoe took over the Grand Fleet and announced that the standard range was now to be 12,000 yards (because of the fear of torpedoes).  The Grand Fleet was adept at such "impossibly long-ranged" firing in astonishingly short order.

So, the book really was an excellent investment.  I'd recommend it to anyone interested in the topic, even with its $50+ price tag; it's published by the US Naval Institute Press, so you know the production values are of the highest.  The only real complaint I have is the lack of maps; it does have 2 large maps in the section on "Naval Geography" (one of the North Sea, and one of the Eastern Med), but a great many places mentioned in the text are not on the maps.  It's a common sin, but a pet peeve of mine (and one of the things I check before my company publishes any book).  That's pretty minor, though, all things considered.

[Berkut]

That sounds good enough to justify Habs buying it and loaning it to me.

[Pishtaco]

On Beatty, I'm currently re-reading "The rules of the game - Jutland and British naval command", which changed my opinion of him. He wasn't a pleasant guy, and he made mistakes, but some of the mistakes at Jutland were because he expected the admirals under him to use some common sense, and be willing to take the initiative to attack the enemy, rather than always blindly follow signals.

The book's description of the battle stops in the middle for a 250-page flashback to the Victorian navy, explaining the history of the (extremely complicated) signal book and how slavish obedience to signal flags became the expected behaviour. It makes the case that this was a large part of the reason that Jellicoe's grand fleet failed to destroy the Germans. Beatty had been working on fixing this problem with the battlecruisers, and was promoted, despite being an ass, to reform the navy at large.

The explanation of the battle in terms of the history and politics of signalling reminds me of "Shattered Sword". It's a great book.

[Neil]

I've been devouring Friendman's works over the last few years, so this seems right up my alley.

I regards to point 1, while the battleship torpedo might have been the most potentially decisive weapon, but it suffered from the fact that the previous twenty years of naval technology had been conspiring to make them less useful (albeit in large part due to the danger of the torpedo).

[Warspite]

That's a really interesting and useful review, Grumbler. Thanks.

[grumbler]

On Beatty, I'm currently re-reading "The rules of the game - Jutland and British naval command", which changed my opinion of him. He wasn't a pleasant guy, and he made mistakes, but some of the mistakes at Jutland were because he expected the admirals under him to use some common sense, and be willing to take the initiative to attack the enemy, rather than always blindly follow signals.

The book's description of the battle stops in the middle for a 250-page flashback to the Victorian navy, explaining the history of the (extremely complicated) signal book and how slavish obedience to signal flags became the expected behaviour. It makes the case that this was a large part of the reason that Jellicoe's grand fleet failed to destroy the Germans. Beatty had been working on fixing this problem with the battlecruisers, and was promoted, despite being an ass, to reform the navy at large.

The explanation of the battle in terms of the history and politics of signalling reminds me of "Shattered Sword". It's a great book.

I'll have to pick that one up, then.  I must admit that I thought it looked like a real snooze.

[Agelastus]

I'll have to pick that one up, then.  I must admit that I thought it looked like a real snooze.

Do so. It is, indeed an excellent book. I second Pishtaco's recommendation.

[The Minsky Moment]

4.  The British battlecruiser was actually an excellent innovation that served its purpose very well, so long as it was used in that purpose.  It was a "dreadnought armored cruiser" conceived by Fischer as a replacement (on a 1:3 basis) for the armored cruisers that were crippling the British naval budget (far more so than the battleships were).  They were trade protection ships and fleet scouts, and fast enough and long-ranged enough to serve both roles at the same time (as the Falklands proved; they had enough strategic mobility to be redeployed against raiding cruisers straight from the Home Fleet).

IIRC Friedman has made this point before, although I can't remember which book. The idea was that fewer could do more work than the armored cruisers. 

Anyway this is one I'll mark for later reading, thanks.

[Neil]

I'll check my copy of British Cruisers of the Victorian Era.  I'd suspect I might find it in there.

Honestly, I've seen that argument made in a number of places, that the battlecruisers made exception cruisers, but rather substandard battleships.

[The Brain]

I'll check my copy of British Cruisers of the Victorian Era. 

Gay.

[CountDeMoney]

British Cruisers of Victoria's Secret would be much better.

[grumbler]

I'll check my copy of British Cruisers of the Victorian Era.  I'd suspect I might find it in there.

Honestly, I've seen that argument made in a number of places, that the battlecruisers made exception cruisers, but rather substandard battleships.

Friedman isn't claiming that as an original thought; he, in fact, was pointing out that this was the designed mission of, and rationale for, battlecruisers.  The Germans lost sight of that even more than the British; they continued to order battlecruisers for the "fast battleship" role throughout the war, to replace lost armored cruisers, and ordered no new battleships; the British continued to order fast battleships (and a few slower ones because Jellicoe was a bit of a slow learner).  Friedman notes that the "large light cruisers" were akin to battlecruisers in concept, not fast battleships.  The Hoods were the fast battleships, though called battlecruisers.

[Neil]

I always found it interesting the way the Germans tried to find a mission for their battlecruisers.  All those bombardment runs and the like.  It turns out that when you're not using your battlefleet, the battlefleet scout cruiser role isn't that important, and the only German BC that operated in anything like an overseas cruiser role was the Goeben, for a couple of weeks.

Wasn't the R-class more about Churchill and Battenberg than Jellicoe?  I was under the impression that the First Lord and First Sea Lord were very concerned about the security of oil supplies to the UK in wartime.  Thus, d'Eyencourt was ordered to design a ship for coal, so 25 knots and QE size would be impossible.  When Fisher came back after Battenberg was chased out of office, he bullied everyone into trading out the 33,000 shp coal-fired boilers for 40,000 shp oil-fired boilers, but the ships were under construction and so you weren't going to be able to modify them enough at that point anyways.  Sure, as Second Sea Lord Jellicoe would have had a voice on the Admiralty Board, but I don't think it's fair to say that the retrograde nature of the R-class vs the Queen Elizabeths was due to Jellicoe was holding things back.

[Ed Anger]

British Cruisers of Victoria's Secret would be much better.

HMS Elizabeth Hurley

[grumbler]

I always found it interesting the way the Germans tried to find a mission for their battlecruisers.  All those bombardment runs and the like.  It turns out that when you're not using your battlefleet, the battlefleet scout cruiser role isn't that important, and the only German BC that operated in anything like an overseas cruiser role was the Goeben, for a couple of weeks.

Wasn't the R-class more about Churchill and Battenberg than Jellicoe?  I was under the impression that the First Lord and First Sea Lord were very concerned about the security of oil supplies to the UK in wartime.  Thus, d'Eyencourt was ordered to design a ship for coal, so 25 knots and QE size would be impossible.  When Fisher came back after Battenberg was chased out of office, he bullied everyone into trading out the 33,000 shp coal-fired boilers for 40,000 shp oil-fired boilers, but the ships were under construction and so you weren't going to be able to modify them enough at that point anyways.  Sure, as Second Sea Lord Jellicoe would have had a voice on the Admiralty Board, but I don't think it's fair to say that the retrograde nature of the R-class vs the Queen Elizabeths was due to Jellicoe was holding things back.

Jellicoe stated that he wanted the next class of battleships to revert to the 21-knot standard of the fleet, as he couldn't imagine a scenario in which 25 knots would be more useful than 21.  Churchill certainly used this opinion to try to get more ships ("we can afford more because they are cheaper"), but he probably would have had trouble getting slower ships if that wasn't "what the Fleet wanted."