The Royal Navy and the German Threat 1901-1914: Admiralty Plans to Protect British Trade in a War against Germany, by Matthew S. Seligmann

Abstract

The Royal Navy and the German Threat 1901-1914: Admiralty Plans to Protect British Trade in a War against Germany, by Matthew S. Seligmann. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012. x, 186 pp. $110.00 US (cloth). Historians of the Royal Navy in the pre-First World War period have long accepted that the two principal challenges facing naval planners at the turn of the twentieth century were those of safeguarding British seaborne trade and securing the United Kingdom from a hostile invasion. The widespread acknowledgement of this fact makes all the more extraordinary the consistent failure of scholars to adequately address how the Admiralty intended to prevent hostile operations against British shipping. This volume is a welcome, and highly successful, attempt to address this significant gap in the existing historiography. Matthew S. Seligmann argues that, by devoting their focus on the prospective danger of French or Russian cruiser warfare against British trade, previous writers have overlooked other important dangers to British commerce. Making an extensive use of German archival material, he demonstrates that, from 1898 onwards, the German admiralty staff planned to make an extensive use of armed merchant cruisers to deliver a paralyzing blow to British trade at the outset of an Anglo-German war. Due to Britain's reliance upon imported foodstuffs, the Germans hoped that such a blow could potentially produce an effect on the British public sufficient to induce the government to sue for an early peace. Aware that the Royal Navy would seal the North Sea at the outbreak of war, the Germans thus contemplated using merchant vessels already on the trade routes to instigate this campaign against British shipping. Their government therefore extensively subsidized the construction of large, fast oceanic liners in exchange for design features intended to allow for the rapid mounting of guns in wartime. After detailing these plans, the author goes on to demonstrate their effect upon Britain's naval leadership. A detailed exposition of Navy's awareness of German intentions and the palpable concerns of key figures at the Admiralty provides significant authority to the book's argument and builds on the author's previous work on British naval and military intelligence before the First World War. After illustrating the existence of the danger and the Admiralty's very real concerns with the prospect of German armed merchant cruisers attacking British trade routes, Seligmann goes on to chart the various means by which the Admiralty planned to meet this danger. In doing so, he enters the thorny debate regarding the conception of what were later to be known as Battle Cruisers by the Fisher Admiralty in 1904-5. There, he persuasively argues that an important factor in the design of these craft was the need to provide the Navy with a vessel capable of catching and destroying the large ocean-going liners which the German government subsidized for conversion into armed merchant cruisers in wartime. …