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Christopher Buckey on the Grand Fleet under Churchill and Fisher
- By WILLIAM JOHN SHEPHERD
- | December 31, 2021
- Category: Books
Christopher M. Buckey, Genesis of the Grand Fleet: The Admiralty, Germany, and the Home Fleet, 1896-1914. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2021, 392 pages, Amazon $44.95, Kindle, $33.99.
Christopher Buckey
…is a British-educated Californian and a longtime scholar of the Royal Navy before the World Wars. His book is part of the publisher’s Naval History and Seal Power series, which includes Graham Clews’s Churchill’s Phoney War. As with any study of this period, Buckey focuses on the controversial figure of renowned and volatile naval reformer Admiral Sir John Fisher. Fisher particularly dominates the first half of the book’s nine chapters. Churchill emerges in chapters 4 and 5, first as a Liberal social reformer trying to limit Royal Navy spending (1908-11). Churchill’s role significantly changes in the final chapters when he becomes First Lord of the Admiralty (1911-15). Now he was responsible for implementing a naval war staff, and leading preparations for the looming conflagration with Imperial Germany.
Churchill and Fisher
Buckey begins at the end, reviewing the Royal Navy’s victorious Grand Fleet in November 1918. By then it was the most powerful naval armada yet assembled: five aircraft carriers, 45 battleships, 40 heavy cruisers. He backtracks to trace the process of the previous quarter century that brought the Navy to that point. Fisher and Churchill are naturally prominent, and proponents of each should not be offended by Buckey’s traditional portrayals. Both were egoists with strategic vision and fervent promoters of emerging technologies.
Churchill, the proverbial “young man in a hurry,” was clever and hard-working, but also impulsive and obstinate. The fiery Fisher was a patriotic agent of change with a knack for cutting through red tape. As First Lord of the Admiralty, Churchill was civilian head of the Navy, then a cabinet–level position. Fisher was First Sea Lord (1904–10, 1914-15), chief of the Senior Service. Other first lords, such as Reginald McKenna, and first sea lords, including Prince Louis of Battenberg, were important too. But none were as crucial as Churchill and Fisher.
Naval challenges in a changing world
The two main issues leading to the creation of a Grand Fleet were rapid change in the naval balance of power and new technologies leading to vastly more powerful warships, capable of inflicting mass destruction on adversaries. Buckey documents and coherently presents these vital developments.
Strategically, Japan became a great naval power following its victories over China in 1895 and Russia in 1905. America’s victory over Spain in 1898 cemented the U.S. as a worldwide naval player. Britain’s traditional enemies, France and Russia, became less threatening than Germany. The German Naval Law of 1898 stoked the creation of the High Seas Fleet, second only to Britain’s. And unlike Britain, Germany’s navy had no other potential adversary. This necessitated Britain allying with Japan (1902), France (1904), and Russia (1907) while coming to a modus vivendi with the United States.
Meanwhile, technological innovation led to modern, mobile, fleets of “all big gun” battleships called Dreadnoughts. They were accompanied by fast but lightly armored heavy battle cruisers, submarines and torpedo boat destroyers. Britain’s various treaties enabled her to strip warships from the Atlantic, Mediterranean, and Pacific and concentrate them in the North Sea. Here was assembled the Grand Fleet that confronted and defeated Imperial Germany in the First World War.
A worthwhile contribution
Supported amply with extensive endnotes, bibliography, index, and photographs, this is a highly technical academic study. The Buckey treatise is more akin to Jon Sumida’s In Defense of Naval Supremacy (1989) than to Robert Massie’s popular history Dreadnought (1991), though complementary to both. Buckey offers a perceptive critique of recent revisionist historians, especially Nicholas Lambert. His book is also a substantial reaffirmation of the long-established works of Arthur Marder (1910-1980).
The author
William John Shepherd is a long time contributor to The Churchill Project and serves as the University Archivist and Head of Special Collections at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.