Alfred von Tirpitz

German naval commander

• Born: March 19, 1849
• Birthplace: Küstrin, Brandenburg, Prussia
• Died: March 6, 1930
• Place of death: Ebenhausen, Germany

Tirpitz, one of the ablest naval administrators in modern history, was the architect of the German High Seas Fleet that fought in World War I.

Early Life

Alfred von Tirpitz (TIHR-pihts) was born of middle-class background. His father was a jurist and later county court judge in Brandenburg; his mother was the daughter of a physician. He joined the navy in 1865 when it was hardly a popular Prussian institution (the Prussian navy was a career choice for many ambitious young men of middle-class background who were barred from advancement in the army) and was commissioned four years later. Tirpitz rose rapidly in the navy. His leadership abilities were amply demonstrated when, in the 1880’s, he headed the torpedo section of the German navy. Torpedoes were then coming into their own at sea, and Tirpitz worked to ensure their reliability. He was appointed captain in 1888 and gained practical experience at sea. From 1892 to 1896, he was chief of staff of the Naval High Command and was given responsibility for developing and codifying fleet tactics. He was promoted to rear admiral in 1895. His last assignment at sea was in 1896 to 1897, when he was chief of the cruiser squadron in East Asia. He was not a great success, as one of his vessels, the Iltis, sunk on a misson near Kiaochow, generating unfavorable publicity. Ironically, Tirpitz never commanded a modern battleship, much less a squadron of capital ships.

Tirpitz was a large man who had a strong personality. A trademark, and later a cartoonist’s delight, was his great two-pronged beard. He radiated competence and leadership. A devoted family man, he liked to dress elegantly and had a polish lacking in many of his class. Patriotic and energetic, he could also be overbearing, ruthless, and domineering. Certainly he was an adroit politician and manipulator. He was also ambitious and very confident of his own abilities and came into office with a fully developed plan for naval expansion.

Life’s Work

On June 18, 1897, William II appointed Tirpitz as state secretary of the navy office, a post that he retained until he resigned all of his offices on March 15, 1916. In 1898, he became a voting member of the Prussian ministry of state and two years later was raised to the hereditary Prussian nobility. In 1911, he was made admiral of the fleet. Tirpitz made his place in naval history on land, as the architect of the navy. Ironically, although Tirpitz built the German navy, in World War I he was not allowed to use it as he wished.

Tirpitz was appointed specifically to build up the size of the navy, which had languished under Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. In 1888, William II became kaiser. His mother, Empress Frederick, wrote, “Wilhelm’s one idea is to have a Navy which shall be larger and stronger than the Royal Navy.” William was determined to pursue a more aggressive foreign policy (a chief reason for his break with Bismarck), and a strong navy was seen as a principal element in this Weltpolitik. The army had given Germany hegemony in Europe; the kaiser and Tirpitz saw the navy securing the same result for Germany in the world, elevating the nation to world power (Weltmacht) status. Justification for this view was provided by the timely publication of Alfred Thayer Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783 in 1890. Mahan contended that history did not offer a single example of a world commercial power that was not also a sea power. Tirpitz agreed with the kaiser on the need for a strong fleet but disagreed that the emphasis should be on a guerre de course with commerce-raiding, cruiser-type vessels. Mahan had argued for the absolute primacy of the battleship, and Tirpitz won the kaiser to this viewpoint.

Tirpitz saw to it that the navy, unlike the army, came under the personal control of the Supreme War Lord. He assured the kaiser in February, 1898, that he would “remove the disturbing influence of the Reichstag on Your Majesty’s intentions concerning the development of the Navy,” and he did precisely that. The Reichstag had no control over naval construction or organization. The Second Navy Bill of 1900 provided that a set number of vessels would be authorized, then built regardless of cost. Funds for personnel, maintenance, and training were all to be made available automatically based on the number of ships in service.

Tirpitz was able to take advantage of growing support in Germany for a strong navy, especially from the small but influential German Colonial League and the Pan-German League. Still, winning approval for a strong navy was in large part the result of Tirpitz’s own extraordinary abilities as promoter and publicist. In March, 1897, the Reichstag rejected the modest naval building program advocated by his predecessor, Friedrich Hollmann. In April, 1898, the same body passed the much more ambitious Tirpitz program by a vote of two to one.

Tirpitz cultivated an alliance with the Rhineland industrialists, who embraced the navy as their vehicle to rival the old Prussian-Junker combination centered in the army. He supported the creation of the Navy League, which had its own publication and speakers who traveled throughout Germany. Although the Navy League had only about 100,000 members, it was quite influential. Tirpitz also did not hesitate to appeal to German nationalism, and he took advantage of foreign policy crises to push for additional naval construction.

Tirpitz relied on a program of steady expansion (Etappenplan) of the navy, or the “patient laying of brick upon brick.” In part this was designed to deceive the Reichstag and German public as to his true aims. For public consumption Tirpitz announced only modest goals; Germany wanted a fleet capable of keeping the North Sea and Baltic shipping lanes open in time of war; a strong navy was also justified as necessary to protect steadily expanding German commerce and its overseas empire. By 1895, Germany was second in the world in the value of its foreign trade, but its navy was only the fifth largest.

For public consumption also, Tirpitz argued that the navy was to be a “risk” fleet, that is, only large enough that another major naval power would not “risk” doing battle with the German navy for fear that its strength might be crippled to the point at which it would be vulnerable to the fleet of another major naval power.

Tirpitz also argued that Germany did not need a fleet as large as that of Great Britain; its warships could be concentrated, whereas the Royal Navy had to dissipate its strength in worldwide commitments. Tirpitz also advanced the belief that the fleet would be a useful diplomatic tool, making Germany a more attractive ally. In private, Tirpitz spoke of a panic-stricken British government willing to surrender up to half of its colonial empire to Germany in return for an alliance.

Such arguments were, in fact, a smoke screen designed to mask Tirpitz’s real intent of creating a fleet strong enough to challenge Great Britain for control of the seas and world mastery. Tirpitz saw Great Britain as the enemy. He stated in 1897 that the navy had become “a question of survival” for Germany. He believed that the navy, supported by the middle-class industrial German state, was the future, to which eventually the army would have to give place. He opined in 1899 that if Germany could not, with its battle fleet, take advantage of shifts in world power, it “would sink back to the status of a poor farming country.” In his view, Germany had to prepare for a showdown with the Anglo-Saxon powers. This would probably be in one great naval battle in the North Sea or Atlantic Ocean between Germany on the one side and either Great Britain or Great Britain and the United States on the other. Ironically, this was precisely the scenario anticipated by English navalists, and it almost came to pass at Jutland in World War I. Such a battle, Tirpitz believed, should take place only after 1920, when Germany would stand a good chance of winning it. His greatest concern was that the British might opt for a preemptive strike before that time, to “Copenhagen” his new creation before it was ready.

The first Tirpitz naval bill passed the Reichstag in April, 1898. It called for the construction, by April, 1904, of nineteen battleships, eight armored cruisers, and twelve large and thirty small cruisers. Taking advantage of the international situation (the impact of the Spanish-American War, sentiment against Great Britain aroused during the Boer War, and the Boxer Rebellion in China), Tirpitz introduced a second naval bill, which passed the Reichstag in June, 1900. It doubled the size of the projected navy to a total of thirty-eight battleships, twenty armored cruisers, and thirty-eight light cruisers all to be built within twenty years. This was a direct challenge to the British Home Fleet, then about thirty-two battleships.

A naval-building race between Great Britain and Germany ensued. In 1906, the British answered with the new super-battleship Dreadnought, the first all big-gun ship, driven by steam turbines. Later they introduced the battle cruiser class as well. Tirpitz followed suit. Although the pace of construction subsequently slowed somewhat, Tirpitz used two crises over Morocco to secure the passage of supplementary German naval construction laws (Novellen) in 1906, 1908, and 1912. Six dreadnoughts were to be built by 1918; six large cruisers were also to be built, and additional funds were granted to expand dock facilities and widen existing canals so as to enable the warships to pass from the Baltic Sea to the North Sea. Battleship replacement was also to occur every twenty years instead of twenty-five as previously agreed. This meant, in effect, that new dreadnoughts would reach the fleet at a faster rate (four were to be built yearly from 1908 to 1911, and two per year from 1912 to 1917). The third Novelle of 1912 increased the projected size of the fleet to forty-one battleships (in five squadrons), twenty large cruisers, and forty light cruisers. It is by no means clear that Tirpitz intended to stop there. He was absolutely opposed to any reductions in the naval sphere and helped scuttle British war minister Richard Burdon Haldane’s 1912 mission to Germany wherein he attempted to reduce the naval race between the two countries.

The quality of German construction was quite high. Naval historians generally concede that German range-finding optics were better than those of the British, and their armor-piercing shells were also superior. Although less heavily gunned than their British counterparts, German capital ships had excellent internal subdivision by watertight compartments, which at sea meant survivability. They also had better armor protection, and they were broader of beam and hence more stable as gun platforms.

With his attention fixed on battleships, Tirpitz was a late convert to submarines. U1, the first German Unterseeboot, or U-boat, was not completed until the end of 1906, and it was several years before its potential was realized. The budget of 1912 projected a total of seventy-two U-boats, but Germany entered World War I with only twenty-eight, compared with seventy-seven for France, fifty-five for Great Britain, and thirty-eight for the United States. There was no plan to employ them against commerce. By 1913, Tirpitz had also been won over to the use of naval airships.

At the beginning of World War I, Tirpitz offered to assume operational control over the navy, but this was rejected. He opposed keeping the fleet in port, where it spent most of World War I. He recognized the importance of the new U-boats in the war at sea but opposed their employment too early, judging 1916 as the right time. His advice was for the most part ignored, and he resigned his offices in 1916.

After leaving the navy, Tirpitz went into politics. He was one of the founders of the Fatherland Party (Vaterlandspartei), and from 1924 to 1928 he was a nationalist deputy in the Reichstag. He supported the Dawes Plan but opposed the Locarno Pact and the reconciliation with France, as he believed that they would jeopardize cooperation with Great Britain and the United States. Tirpitz died on March 6, 1930.

Significance

As the founder of the German navy that fought in World War I, Tirpitz played a pivotal role in German history. The Tirpitz plan was, however, in the words of one historian, a “gruesome error” and a “monstrous error in judgment.” Far from driving Britain to panic, the construction of German vessels simply goaded the British into action. Britain was dependent for its survival on imports of food and raw materials; British political leaders and the public long believed that the German fleet was a “luxury” designed to satisfy the kaiser’s ego, whereas the Royal Navy was seen as a “necessity.” The British government adopted the “two-power naval standard,” which required a fleet as large as the next two naval powers combined. Although facing serious fiscal problems, the British outspent the Germans in the naval sphere; one reason this was possible was that the British army was so small.

As Bismarck predicted, the construction of a powerful German fleet drove Britain away from Germany and into alliance with France. Far from making Germany an attractive ally, the plan had the effect of further isolating Germany in Europe. The Entente Cordiale of 1904 was a direct result of German naval construction, as was the agreement in 1912 whereby the French agreed to take primary responsibility for the Mediterranean and concentrate their naval units there while the British did the same for the north Atlantic.

A treaty with Japan and the elimination of the Russian navy in the Russo-Japanese War enabled the British to strengthen their position in Europe. As a result, the Home Fleet was able to overshadow the High Seas Fleet. Although by 1914 the German navy was second in size only to that of Britain, the Royal Navy had in fact widened its advantage over Germany in most classes of ships (the capital ship ratio was thirty-two to eighteen), making the Tirpitz quest more illusory than ever.

There were limits to what Germany could do financially, particularly as it was at the same time maintaining the largest standing army in the world. By 1907-1908, the army was again getting priority in armaments expenditure. Seen in retrospect, had the bulk of assets spent on the navy gone to the army instead, Germany would have had a better chance at a land victory over France in 1914.

Bibliography

Herwig, Holger.“Luxury” Fleet: The Imperial German Navy, 1888-1918. London: Allen & Unwin, 1980. This is a well-balanced, lucid, dispassionate, short, and thoroughly researched study of the Tirpitz era. It is particularly strong in its discussion of ship characteristics. Herwig also provides much useful information on Tirpitz.

Hobson, Rolf. Imperialism at Sea: Naval Strategic Thought, the Ideology of Sea Power, and the Tirpitz Plan, 1875-1914. Boston: Brill Academic, 2002. Chronicles the evolution of the German navy and the origins of Tirpitz’s plan for naval expansion. Compares the development of the German navy before World War I with simultaneous developments in the United States, Britain, and France, describing how the expansion of naval power ultimately led these countries into war.

Marder, Arthur J. From the “Dreadnought” to Scapa Flow: The Royal Navy in the Fisher Era, 1904-1919. 5 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 1961-1970. This is a comprehensive, often highly detailed, study of the Royal Navy of the period. There is much material here on Tirpitz’s counterpart, Admiral John Arbuthnot Fisher, and his efforts to meet the German challenge.

Massie, Robert K. Castles of Steel: Britain, Germany, and the Winning of the Great War at Sea. New York: Random House, 2003. Massie examines the role of sea power in winning World War I, and includes a look at Tirpitz and his role in the war.

Padfield, Peter. The Great Naval Race: Anglo-German Naval Rivalry, 1900-1914. New York: David McKay, 1974. While utilizing mostly secondary sources, Padfield nevertheless provides an introduction to the broader area of the development of German and British naval policies and the effects of their ensuing rivalry.

Scheer, Reinhard. Germany’s High Sea Fleet in the World War. New York: Peter Smith, 1934. Although egocentric and often unreliable, this memoir by the admiral who commanded the High Seas Fleet at Jutland is useful for its discussion of the decision making regarding tactical employment of the Tirpitz fleet in World War I.

Steinberg, Jonathan. Yesterday’s Deterrent: Tirpitz and the Birth of the German Battle Fleet. London: Macmillan, 1965. There is much useful material here on Tirpitz, especially on his early career. It lacks the documentation of Herwig’s study but is particularly helpful in understanding the politics involved in the higher echelons of the German navy.

Tirpitz, Alfred von. My Memoirs. 2 vols. London: Hurst and Blackett, 1919. Tirpitz’s own defense of his policies. Although these recollections are entirely self-satisfied and self-righteous, they are indispensable in understanding his point of view.