TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/111191/1111470.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.5 KB | 113 lines

                                                                                BOOKS, Page 90

When Britannia Ruled


Vividly but lengthily, historian Robert Massie retells the story
of a massive arms race that led to war

By JOHN ELSON


    The year 1897 saw many celebrations of Queen Victoria's
diamond jubilee, but none so grand as the naval review that took
place on June 26. It was a humid, breezeless day, and flags hung
limply on their staffs. Precisely at 2 p.m., the royal yacht
Victoria and Albert, bearing an entourage headed by the Prince
of Wales as surrogate for his frail, ailing mother, cast off
from Portsmouth quay and steamed toward the flotilla. It was an
awesome sight: 165 British ships of the line, plus vessels from
14 other nations including the U.S. and Japan. At a signal,
seamen scurried to attention on decks and yardarms, and the
warships boomed out cannon salutes as the yacht passed by. For
three hours that evening, in a dazzling display of modern
technology, every ship was outlined against the somber sky by
hundreds of electric lights. It was, wrote a stunned British
reporter, "a fairy fleet festooned with chains of gold."

    As Robert K. Massie notes in Dreadnought (Random House;
1,007 pages; $35), the Portsmouth review marked "the high-water
mark of British naval supremacy," which had gone virtually
unchallenged since Admiral Horatio Nelson's victory over a
French fleet at Trafalgar in 1805. During the latter years of
the 19th century, however, France and Russia had constructed
seemingly formidable armadas. More worrisome, Germany, under the
prodding of Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, was rapidly building a
war fleet to protect its commercial interests and colonial
empire. The naval rivalry between Britain and Germany led to an
arms race that in its consequence was deadlier than the postwar
nuclear buildup of the U.S. and Soviet Union. For as Massie
persuasively argues, that oceanic competition was a key factor
in plunging Europe into the bloody morass still known as the
Great War.

    Without warships, Britain was perilously vulnerable to
blockade or invasion. But Britannia's capacity to rule the
waves, as Massie also points out, was somewhat illusory; the
Royal Navy during much of Victoria's reign was largely unfit for
combat. Weighed down by moribund traditions that Winston
Churchill acidly defined as "rum, sodomy, and the lash," British
tars were ill fed and worse led. While their social-climbing
officers fopped and preened, sailors spent long days at sea
scrubbing decks and polishing brightwork, or wielding cutlasses
in boarding drills as if they were still in the age of sail.
Meanwhile, gunnery practice was cursory even though naval
bombardments were ludicrously inaccurate. In 1881, for example,
eight British battleships fired 3,000 rounds at forts guarding
the Egyptian city of Alexandria and scored precisely 10 hits.

    The man who did the most to spare Britain from Armageddon
at sea was a hot-tempered banty rooster of a martinet with, as a
female admirer put it, eyes "like smouldering charcoals." (He
was, among other things, a superb dancer.) Gritty,
inexhaustible and ruthless, Sir John Arbuthnot (Jacky) Fisher
rose from midshipman to First Sea Lord (1904-10) and transformed
the Royal Navy along the way. Fisher was a true visionary. He
devised and named the class of small, fast warships that navies
still call "destroyers." He predicted that torpedoes would
supplant long-range guns as the navy's primary weapon and that
submarines were the warships of the future. He ordered and
supervised the construction of H.M.S. Dreadnought, which became
the eponym for swift, heavily armed super battleships. And in
a welcome addition to the quality of life belowdecks, he had
baking ovens installed on ships to provide fresh bread in place
of hardtack biscuits.

    Relations among European powers warmed and cooled in the
crisis-fueled game of diplomacy played during the Edwardian era,
but both Fisher and Tirpitz had a clear sense of what the future
offered. Nine days after becoming naval secretary in 1897, the
German admiral cited Britain as his country's "most dangerous
naval enemy" -- a view from which he never wavered. Fisher
similarly saw Germany as Britain's inevitable foe. In 1911 he
predicted that in October three years hence his protege Sir John
Jellicoe would command British forces "when the Battle of
Armageddon comes along." Fisher was right about the year,
although World War I actually began in August. And Jellicoe was
in command when the Kaiser's High Seas Fleet met its Armageddon
in 1916, at the Battle of Jutland.

    Dreadnought's author is no stranger to this era. In 1967
he earned critical praise with Nicholas and Alexandra, which in
many respects was a more inviting book. It had a relatively
manageable cast and an agonizing family tragedy -- the
hemophilia of the Russian imperial couple's only son -- at its
center. By contrast, Dreadnought is almost too sprawling a
canvas. Time after time the narrative creaks to a halt while
Massie pauses to introduce yet another admiral, politician or
royal personage or to explain the background of the latest
diplomatic spat involving Morocco. Even so, Dreadnought is
history in the grand manner, as most readers prefer it: how
people shaped, or were shaped by, events that consensus has
declared to be landmarks. At his vivid best, Massie does not
simply retell the past. He allows one, in a way, to relive it.