When Britannia Ruled

By John Elson

The year 1897 saw many celebrations of Queen Victoria's diamond jubilee, but none so grand as the naval review that took place on June 26. It was a humid, breezeless day, and flags hung limply on their staffs. Precisely at 2 p.m., the royal yacht Victoria and Albert, bearing an entourage headed by the Prince of Wales as surrogate for his frail, ailing mother, cast off from Portsmouth quay and steamed toward the flotilla. It was an awesome sight: 165 British ships of the line, plus vessels from 14 other nations including the U.S. and Japan. At a signal, seamen scurried to attention on decks and yardarms, and the warships boomed out cannon salutes as the yacht passed by. For three hours that evening, in a dazzling display of modern technology, every ship was outlined against the somber sky by hundreds of electric lights. It was, wrote a stunned British reporter, "a fairy fleet festooned with chains of gold."

As Robert K. Massie notes in Dreadnought (Random House; 1,007 pages; $35), the Portsmouth review marked "the high-water mark of British naval supremacy," which had gone virtually unchallenged since Admiral Horatio Nelson's victory over a French fleet at Trafalgar in 1805. During the latter years of the 19th century, however, France and Russia had constructed seemingly formidable armadas. More worrisome, Germany, under the prodding of Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, was rapidly building a war fleet to protect its commercial interests and colonial empire. The naval rivalry between Britain and Germany led to an arms race that in its consequence was deadlier than the postwar nuclear buildup of the U.S. and Soviet Union. For as Massie persuasively argues, that oceanic competition was a key factor in plunging Europe into the bloody morass still known as the Great War.

Without warships, Britain was perilously vulnerable to blockade or invasion. But Britannia's capacity to rule the waves, as Massie also points out, was somewhat illusory; the Royal Navy during much of Victoria's reign was largely unfit for combat. Weighed down by moribund traditions that Winston Churchill acidly defined as "rum, sodomy, and the lash," British tars were ill fed and worse led. While their social-climbing officers fopped and preened, sailors spent long days at sea scrubbing decks and polishing brightwork, or wielding cutlasses in boarding drills as if they were still in the age of sail. Meanwhile, gunnery practice was cursory even though naval bombardments were ludicrously inaccurate. In 1881, for example, eight British battleships fired 3,000 rounds at forts guarding the Egyptian city of Alexandria and scored precisely 10 hits.

The man who did the most to spare Britain from Armageddon at sea was a hot- tempered banty rooster of a martinet with, as a female admirer put it, eyes "like smouldering charcoals." (He was, among other things, a superb dancer.) Gritty, inexhaustible and ruthless, Sir John Arbuthnot (Jacky) Fisher rose from midshipman to First Sea Lord (1904-10) and transformed the Royal Navy along the way. Fisher was a true visionary. He devised and named the class of small, fast warships that navies still call "destroyers." He predicted that torpedoes would supplant long-range guns as the navy's primary weapon and that submarines were the warships of the future. He ordered and supervised the construction of H.M.S. Dreadnought, which became the eponym for swift, heavily armed super battleships. And in a welcome addition to the quality of life belowdecks, he had baking ovens installed on ships to provide fresh bread in place of hardtack biscuits.

Relations among European powers warmed and cooled in the crisis-fueled game of diplomacy played during the Edwardian era, but both Fisher and Tirpitz had a clear sense of what the future offered. Nine days after becoming naval secretary in 1897, the German admiral cited Britain as his country's "most dangerous naval enemy" -- a view from which he never wavered. Fisher similarly saw Germany as Britain's inevitable foe. In 1911 he predicted that in October three years hence his protege Sir John Jellicoe would command British forces "when the Battle of Armageddon comes along." Fisher was right about the year, although World War I actually began in August. And Jellicoe was in command when the Kaiser's High Seas Fleet met its Armageddon in 1916, at the Battle of Jutland.

Dreadnought's author is no stranger to this era. In 1967 he earned critical praise with Nicholas and Alexandra, which in many respects was a more inviting book. It had a relatively manageable cast and an agonizing family tragedy -- the hemophilia of the Russian imperial couple's only son -- at its center. By contrast, Dreadnought is almost too sprawling a canvas. Time after time the narrative creaks to a halt while Massie pauses to introduce yet another admiral, politician or royal personage or to explain the background of the latest diplomatic spat involving Morocco. Even so, Dreadnought is history in the grand manner, as most readers prefer it: how people shaped, or were shaped by, events that consensus has declared to be landmarks. At his vivid best, Massie does not simply retell the past. He allows one, in a way, to relive it.