Sir John Fisher’s Naval Revolution (2002) by Nicholas A. Lambert

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.