After more than five decades during which the work of Arthur Marder was regarded as definitive, the 1880–1918 era Royal Navy has more recently attracted sustained scholarly scrutiny by, among others, Jon Sumida, Nicholas Lambert, Andrew Gordon, Michael Partridge, John Brooks, Nicholas Black, Roger Parkinson, and C. I. Hamilton. As a consequence, old verities have been overturned and many lively interpretative disputes ignited. Shawn T. Grimes's volume will stoke some of these fires, since one of his central contentions is that the British Admiralty developed coherent and viable war plans as early as the late 1880s, first for use against France and Russia, and that, contra Sumida and Lambert, these began to be modified to reflect the growing German naval threat by 1902. Grimes argues, furthermore, that, although the Admiralty lacked a formal naval staff for war planning prior to 1912, the Admiralty's Naval Intelligence Department (established in 1886)—in conjunction with the extramural work of historian John Knox Laughton and the intellectual circle around him—and the Naval War College's War Course functioned as a de facto staff, fulfilling the war-planning function much more capably than has been generally recognized. The results of his effort are mixed, however.
Grimes is most persuasive with regard to the earlier years covered in his study. His analysis of Royal Navy fleet maneuvers, conducted from the late 1880s onward, and the service's procurement policy lends weight to his contention that the Admiralty's war plans were far more than mere window dressing. The former functioned as modern war games do: large-scale operational tests of strategic plans under circumstances as close as possible to those likely to obtain in wartime. The latter, especially as regards the design and operational capabilities of specific warship classes—destroyers and scout cruisers, in particular—sheds telling light on the intentions of Admiralty planners who were typically reticent about airing their views, partly due to security concerns and partly because the service's culture generally militated against the public discussion of strategic topics.
Grimes's account of the evolution of Admiralty war planning down to 1907 (chapters 1–3) is the strongest portion of the book. It reveals the clear continuities of Admiralty planning, which centered first on blockade and then on coastal assault of enemy naval arsenals throughout the whole period under review. As for those who have argued that the close blockade traditionally favored by the Royal Navy was rendered unacceptably hazardous by torpedoes, Grimes points to two developments during the late 1880s and early 1890: first, the supplantation of close blockading—demonstrated to be unfeasible in the naval maneuvers of those years—by an observational blockade in which the fleet's capital units were kept out of harm's way, beyond the range of enemy torpedo craft. Second, the observational blockade consisted of swift smaller warships, the scout cruisers and destroyers the Admiralty ordered in large numbers beginning in the 1890s. These had the operational range and seakeeping ability to operate close inshore and the speed and firepower to overwhelm enemy torpedo vessels. Moreover, the Admiralty never wholly abandoned offensive schemes of coastal assault, and the same vessels that were to do the inshore observation were also intended to screen the capital units of the fleet if circumstances demanded and conditions permitted the adoption of a more offensively oriented strategy.
Two further points emerge from the early chapters. First, the observational blockade, as it was developed with reference to Germany, became directed chiefly toward economic warfare, that is, strangling enemy trade. This, of course, was precisely the course adopted by the allies during the First World War, and Grimes demonstrates that it was on the minds of war planners no later than the first Moroccan crisis in 1905. Second, the planners themselves were uniformly men of high intellectual attainments. This fact has long been recognized with regard to Maurice Hankey, but others, especially George Alexander Ballard, who Grimes terms the Edwardian navy's “pre-eminent intellectual strategist” and who is credited with establishing “the observational blockade concept behind nearly all the Admiralty's plans into the First World War,” have not been accorded similar recognition (232). Grimes has made a persuasive case for doing so.
Other aspects of this study are less satisfying. While Grimes does a solid job of detailing the chaos that descended on war planning during the latter years of John Fisher's first stint as First Sea Lord (1904–10), the disastrous First Lordship of Winston Churchill (1911–15), and the resumption of planning continuity after 1912 (thanks in large part to Admiral George Alexander Ballard), his insistence on the realism of the Admiralty's various offensive schemes is not persuasive. His eagerness to establish the navy's seriousness and professionalism leads him to defend as practical plans that, as he admits at one point, were “discredited” by capable strategists like Ballard between 1906 and 1908 (160). The most egregious example of this special pleading occurs in chapter 7, which argues that the April 1918 Zeebrugge raid (itself a failure in terms of its aims) “was significant as a practical demonstration of what might have been possible offensively” had plans for an assault in the Helgoland Bight or Baltic been carried out (223). Missing from this claim is any consideration of the differences in distance from British bases, the defenses of the respective targets, and, in the case of the Baltic, the perils of navigating the confined entrance to the sea.
Likewise, his claim that the “main reason why a British campaign aimed at Germany's vitals in the Baltic never materialized during the First World War” was owing to the lack of a determined “planner” (to use Fisher's self-referential words) “to execute it” is wholly undercut by his own evidence earlier in the work (220). The most capable planners in the Royal Navy (Ballard again to the fore) examined such schemes and determined that they were not worth the risk: that there was nothing vital enough to Germany in the Baltic to justify the almost inevitable heavy losses the navy would suffer in making the attempt.
Finally, almost without exception Grimes fails to acknowledge that with respect to commerce protection, Admiralty war planning was not so much fatally flawed as it was nonexistent. He fails to address plans evolved during the 1880s for stationing cruisers at strategic chokepoints or the abandonment of any contingency plans for convoying, and he implies that even the capable war planners of the 1887–1907 era assumed that an effectual blockade would throttle enemy attempts to conduct commerce warfare, despite abundant historical evidence to the contrary. And his chapter on wartime planning reveals that the Admiralty remained obsessed with offensive measures (cf. the Zeebrugge raid) even after the efficacy of convoying had been demonstrated beyond all doubt (222–23).
As a corrective to the still commonplace view that pre–World War I British naval administration, Fisher excepted, was the preserve of incompetent amateurs, Grimes's study is of great value. He also drives another nail in the coffin of the myth (originating with Fisher himself) that the Royal Navy had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into the twentieth century. It is to be regretted, however, that he pushes his claims for the practicality and realism of Admiralty war planning further than the evidence will bear.
