Customer Reviews

Sir John Fisher's Naval Revolution (Studies in Maritime History)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a major revisionist interpretation of British naval policy as conceived and carried out by Admiral Sir John Fisher as First Sea Lord between late 1904 and early 1910. In fact, there appears to be hardly a single conventional assumption about Fisher's policies, and the policies and technical flexibility of the Admiralty during this period that is not subject to reconsideration in the book.

What I found most interesting was the startling - to me - degree to which senior British naval officers readily accepted the potential for torpedo-armed submarine and destroyer flotillas to change naval warfare, and the amount of effort they were willing to put into devising ways to use this revolutionary potential to reinforce British naval supremacy. The book is filled with descriptions of British investment in submarine technology and the ongoing discussions between naval officers of ways to adapt that technology to British needs.

According to the book, Fisher's planned great revolution in naval warfare was not intended to be the Dreadnought battleship that his name is still commonly associated with. Instead it was to be a British fleet made up of a combination of battlecruisers with Dreadnought-scale heavy armament, great speed, and excellent gun laying based on analogue computers, designed for overseas force projection; and a submarines and destroyer flotillas designed and deployed for protection of Great Britain and such other narrow seas where they could be used to bottle up potential enemy forces. This assertion is thoroughly backed up with detailed quotes from personal letters and Admiralty memos and position papers, plus the evidence of how Fisher spent funds available to him.

The plans of Admiral Fisher and others in the British Admiralty were developed in largely hostile political environment. The British government during this period, and the opposition political parties, were intent on reducing British naval expenditures, and not at all interested in developing the ability to expand British ability to project naval force overseas. Therefore, Fisher and his allies had to act largely in secret, while disguising their true goals from most of their political masters.

This book has a lot of trees in its forest. I did not find it easy reading, and I would not recommend it to someone with only casual interest in British naval history or the history of naval technology. To fully understand appreciate the book's thesis and scope, the reader must be willing to delve along with the book's author into British domestic politics, British foreign policy, and a host of technical issues beyond those mentioned above. I personally found it difficult at first to fully understand why, given that Fisher had much of the Admiralty behind him, and that Winston Churchill, the First Lord of the Admiralty from 1910 up to 1915, also had great faith in submarine and destroyer flotillas to control narrow seas, the Royal Navy didn't manage to make the changeover desired by Admiral Fisher. The way I finally understood it, it comes down to one basic fact, Fisher, Churchill and their allies in the Admiralty simply did not have enough time. Not enough time to educate and prepare the politicians and the British public, not enough time to nurture the necessary submarine building industry in Britain or in one of the Dominions, and not enough time to guarantee a completely united front in the Admiralty needed to quickly push through such radical change in naval policy. Given that it was less than a decade between Fisher's appointment as First Sea Lord and the outbreak of WWI, that is probably reason enough.

In Sir John Fisher's Naval Revolution Nicholas Lambert has provided a comprehensive analysis of the policies of Admiral Sir John Fisher and the Royal Navy in the ten years before the outbreak of World War One. Displaying a remarkable command of the source documents Lambert examines grand strategy, tactical concepts, national financial policy and politics with great skill and fluidly moves between these seemingly disparate subjects with ease. It becomes apparent as Lambert dissects events that much of the research that has went on before on this subject and which forms the basis for many people's ideas about era is superficial and incomplete.

This is a complicated subject but Lambert's grasp of narrative and clean clear prose makes it easy for the interested reader to follow the string through the maze that was British naval policy in the Fisher era. Lambert makes it clear that Fisher was not appointed First Sea Lord in 1904 to introduce the dreadnought battleship/battlecruiser but to cut naval spending. This fact spurred Fisher to introduce new technologies to maintain Britain's naval supremacy when that supremacy was increasingly under threat from a number of quarters. Lambert puts emphasis on Fisher's ideas about the use of flotilla craft. These were small submersible boats and surface craft armed with torpedoes that could close the narrow seas around the British Isles to enemy battle fleets thus freeing the British fleet to roam the high seas, bringing battle to the enemy and protecting her own huge ocean trade. Lambert shows how on the eve of the war, the Royal Navy was on the verge of stopping battleship construction altogether on favor of flotilla craft. This is new ground.

Fisher was faced with four other areas of crisis which this book delves into: financial constraints, manpower limitations, ship deployment policies and forging new tactics that would take advantage of the developing technology that was changing the face of naval warfare. Lambert also makes clear that the senior officers of the Royal Navy in the decade before the war were not operating in an intellectual vacuum, countering the unfortunate impression that many historians have fostered that the navy was resistant to new technology, unable to think critically, and too lazy for deep analysis and staff work. While a number of hidebound ignoramuses had managed to reach high command, most senior officers were energetically working to exploit the emergent technologies to the full extent.

Lambert's story of the Royal Navy before 1914 presents a picture completely different from the accepted one. It is one that is wholly convincing and presents a more satisfying explanation of what happened, and why, than we have had before. I recommend this book to those who are familiar with the subject and have a desire to go deeper into it. You won't be sorry.

Admiral Fisher is one of the most interesting historic characters I've run across. However, the man associated with big-gun battleships had many, craft, prescient sides to him that I'd never suspected. The purported revolution of the title was most unexpected and the tactics involved were downright sneaky to the point of brilliance. I salute you, Sir John!

Naval policy before the First World War and the so-called Dreadnought revolution is a fascinating case study in strategic defense policy and there are many notable pieces of historiography on the subject (Marder, Sumida, Massie, etc.). Nicholas Lambert's contribution to the debate, "Sir John Fisher's Naval Revolution," is a daring revision of just about everything you've read before, so hold on to your seats.

The author begins by emphasizing that insufficient government finance was the overriding problem for defense planners. The challenge was created by the rapidly increasing cost of modern navy ships combined with the capital depreciation resulting from the shortened service lives of the new platforms. (The cost of building a Dreadnought class battleship doubled and that of cruisers went up fivefold while the service life of the new ships dropped by fifteen years.) The situation was exacerbated by liberal British governments of the early nineteenth century that were committed to massive domestic social programs. And the modern reader needs to remember the deficit spending was out of the question to the fiscally responsible governments of this period. There simply wasn't enough money to go around, especially for the already bloated naval budget.

The author argues that previous histories have got this period completely wrong, mostly because they have taken the direct, obvious approach: that Fisher's sole aim was to prepare the British Navy for the looming war with Germany. Lambert rejects this thesis entirely. He writes that Fisher was not unduly concerned by the High Seas Fleet and held on to the goal of the British Navy as guardian of the empire via the two power standard. He sought to do this, Lambert says, by building a "new model navy" of sorts, one that could achieve the traditional ends of the British Navy (global imperial defense) via new means (namely battle cruisers and submarines). This is exactly the opposite of what has traditionally been ascribed to Fisher, which was to leverage the traditional means of decisive sea battle between capital ships to achieve a new end, the defeat of the German High Seas Fleet.

What is most shocking, to this reviewer at least, is that Lambert claims that Fisher intentionally misled the Liberal governments of Asquith and later Lloyd-George as to the threat posed by the German fleet to keep Navy budgets elevated. Along this same line, the author stresses that Fisher never put his thoughts down in writing for fear that his true ideas on naval policy would be used against him. Lambert believes that Fisher harbored truly revolutionary ideas, focused on using fast battle cruisers directed centrally from London by wireless to defend the global sea lanes, while a new generation of submarines provided the main defense to home island invasion. This was the concept of "flotilla defense" that was dropped when Fisher departed the Admiralty in 1910 and was picked up again by Churchill in 1913.

For all the ink spilled on the Dreadnought battleship and the fast battle cruisers, the foundation of the impending revolution, according to Lambert, was the submarine. The British wrestled with the implications of the new platform, but according to Lambert were more forward leaning and imaginative than traditionally appreciated. Should they invest in smaller patrol submarines for coastal defense? Or larger, faster fleet submarines that could fulfill offensive tasks from battle fleet support to close in blockade? The 1913 Royal Navy fleet maneuvers did much to shape opinions, especially concerning the usefulness of submarines in solving the so-called North Sea dilemma. In short, the channel was too narrow to deploy the full battle fleet, but leaving that strategic waterway under defended exposed the east coast of England to raids or invasion. In 1913, the Blue Fleet wasn't even able to find the Red Fleet (commanded by the rather unimaginative Admiral Jellicoe) in the North Sea. The Naval Board concluded that it needed to keep the main fleet in northern waters and pursue a distant blockade of Germany. Lambert claims that these maneuvers convinced the British that the overseas "fleet submarines" were for real - they could inflict massive damage on the opposing fleet and could even achieve close-in blockade.

The author stresses that the mainstream on the Navy saw the potential for submarines before WWI, contrary to collective historical opinion. Indeed, when the war broke out the British were on the verge of a large submarine construction program. Their strategic blind spot wasn't the potentially disruptive technical nature of the platform, but rather failed to foresee that it would be used primarily against unarmed merchant ships, not as a critical actor in the fleet-on-fleet engagement.

Generally speaking, I like authors that take on the conventional wisdom, iconoclasts offering up a new and innovative interpretation to age old questions. But this book didn't deliver for me for two reasons. First, the basic premise of the book is that Jackie Fisher kept his true intentions secret and that Lambert, after nearly a century, has miraculously decoded the puzzle. It's like some sort of naval policy version of "The Da Vinci Code." Second, and perhaps more damning, this book just isn't a good read. I found it long, convoluted and often dull. Even if mainstream academics might wrinkle their noses at Lambert's revisionist interpretations, I'd give him a pass if he delivered a fun, lively narrative on a familiar tale with an alternative ending. But it's not, and thus the three stars.

An interesting book on the politics of defense spending and its relationship with grand strategy and domestic politics. Tedious at times, and often unbalanced as to proving the grand point and instead focusing on partisan minutae, this book is still interesting to consider; you have to commend Lambert for his exaustive research behind the common assumptions. He did major work in the primary sources.

The point is that much of the arms race theory before WWI is not genuinely correct. The motivations for the growth and posturing of the British Navy prior to WWI had less to do with fear of Germany -although using that fear was an effective tool- than with a naval revolution by the Admiralty's First Lord, Sir John Fisher. It is an intersting foray into the dynamics of defense spending politics, and how that ultimately impacts capabilities and strategy.

This is a superby researched book, though it falls flat on its major premise, that Fisher and the Royal Navy were ahead of the times in terms of naval strategy, armaments or hwat not.

Also the book is a misnomer, as it's more on the rivalries amongst the Board of Amiralty than on Fisher, and its dubious claim that Fisher pioneered the so called "flotilla defense" by submarines and torpedo boats stretches credulity, as Fisher is notorious for NOT beleving in a Naval War Staff, or any war plans at all.

The author also neglects, being a fan of Fisher, to point out that the latter's morbid fascination with "battle cruiser" led to the fiasco in Jutland, though all British historians and apologist will claim that they may have lost a battle there, but ultimately won the war!