Above: “The Anniversary of Trafalgar.” The Daily Express, 21 October, 1904. Caption read: Nelson (in Trafalgar Square): - "I was on my way down to lend them a hand myself, but if Jacky Fisher's taking on the job there's no need for me to be nervous, I'll get back on my pedestal." Taken from Lord Fisher, Memories. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1919. Link. “Although tactics remained unclear in the face of the increasingly long-range torpedoes, a revolutionary strategic consensus was emerging around them. When Jacky Fisher took over as First Sea Lord in October 1904, his main task was to reduce naval expenditures. A lower budget meant that the Royal Navy might have to sacrifice one of its two traditional missions, protecting the home islands and defending the empire (namely, its trade and communications). Indeed, the historian Arthur Marder, who wrote the first major studies of the prewar Royal Navy, interpreted two of Fisher’s chief reforms—the so-called redistribution of the fleet, which removed capital ships from distant stations to concentrate them in home waters, and the scrapping policy, which eliminated smaller vessels that could be used for commerce protection—in just these terms, as analogous to Rome’s recall of the legions. Thus, the conventional wisdom holds that Fisher abandoned imperial defense in order to concentrate on the German threat to the home islands. Subsequent scholarship has shown, however, that Fisher was up to something very different. Fisher formed his strategic views during his command of the Mediterranean from 1899 to 1902, not in the North Sea. The Mediterranean was the linchpin of the British Empire, and the enemies there were France and Russia, not Germany. Rapid changes in British diplomacy (the Japanese alliance in 1902, the French entente in 1904) hardly disposed Fisher to think in terms of permanent threats. Instead of focusing on a particular enemy, he wanted to build flexible capabilities that could respond across a range of scenarios. He believed that technology would allow him to do so despite reductions in the Navy’s budget. The central vessels in his vision were not battleships—slow, expensive battle-ships that were extremely vulnerable to torpedoes—but torpedo craft and battle-cruisers fitted with superior fire-control systems, along with revolutionary command-and-control systems. In a scheme known as flotilla defense, torpedo craft (destroyers and submarines, also known as flotilla craft) would deny the Channel, North Sea, and Mediterranean to enemy vessels, deterring them from invasion and interference with imperial trade. Calling the “risk fleet” bluff of the German Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, Fisher accepted that British capital ships could not risk entering the North Sea, and then he turned Tirpitz’s logic against the Germans: as long as the Germans could not enter the North Sea either, then Britain would achieve its end. A torpedo-based strategy of deterrence could achieve that objective just as effectively—and much more cheaply—than a gun-based strategy of decisive battle. In short, Fisher answered the risk fleet with a risk flotilla. While torpedo craft defended the narrow waters of the Channel, North Sea, and Mediterranean, battle-cruisers would control the high seas elsewhere. If the battle-cruisers got caught in a battle with enemy capital ships, they would use their superior speed and fire-control systems to hit the enemy while remaining outside the enemy’s range so that their weaker armor protection would not be a problem. An extraordinary series of innovations known as the War Room System would track enemy merchant vessels and guide the battle-cruisers to them. Marrying advances in telegraphy with more centralized command-and-control, the War Room System would allow the Admiralty to replace blockade of the enemy’s coast with global economic warfare. Far from recalling the legions, therefore, Fisher created a new fiscal-technological-strategic synthesis that would allow the Navy to continue performing its traditional missions more effectively and possibly more cheaply. In so doing, he fundamentally rede ned the metrics of naval power. Rather than measuring naval power in big guns and battleships, Fisher’s strategy measured power in torpedoes, torpedo craft, battle-cruisers, fire control, and communications. Rather than seeking command of the sea through decisive battle, Fisher sought denial and control of the sea through flotilla defense, battle-cruisers, and the War Room System. Fisher was happy to let others believe that he believed in battleships. In a period of nancial retrenchment, Fisher’s main goals were to preserve the Navy’s budget—and particularly its construction budget—from Army depredations and to ensure that he could maintain Britain’s capacity to build warships by feeding industry with regular contracts. The latter goal in particular was not likely to win supporters in a Liberal government. With strong incentive to mislead, Fisher publicly played up the German threat in the North Sea and Britain’s corresponding need to build capital ships, even as he took a very different line in private. “[T]he English Navy is now four times stronger than the German Navy,” he cheerfully informed the king, “but we don’t want to parade all this, because if so we shall have Parliamentary trouble. . . . [I have recently read a paper] convincingly showing that we don’t want to lay down any new ships at all—we are so strong. It is quite true!” By catering to the crudest metrics of naval power, Fisher fooled not only contemporary politicians but also historians into thinking he believed his own propaganda. Torpedo evelopment from 1903 through 1908 was a double-edged sword for the Royal Navy. Gyroscopes made torpedoes more accurate, but they required new practice regimes and safety devices for reliable use. The Hardcastle superheater increased torpedoes’ range and speed, but it created friction with the Armstrong Company and eventually with Hardcastle himself. The relocation of the torpedo factory from Woolwich to Greenock gave the Navy control of this vital piece of naval ordnance, but it disrupted the supply base at an important moment. Torpedoes made possible the strategy of flotilla defense, which enabled the Royal Navy to perform all its traditional missions despite budget cuts, but they created severe tactical headaches. None of these dilemmas would go away.” - Katherine C. Epstein, Torpedo: Inventing the Military-Industrial Complex in the United States and Great Britain. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014. pp. 130-132.
