Extended Edition: A Better High Seas Fleet for World War I

EA Baker
3 hours ago
5 min read

The year is 1912. Since 1898, Germany's defense policy has been a naval buildup that has turned into an arms race with Great Britain, the world's most powerful maritime power. Realizing they could not outmatch Great Britain, Germany shifted its spending from the navy to the army as threats on the continent, including Russia, became more apparent. This is remembered as the Rüstungswende, or “armaments turning point.”

In the original blog, I expanded upon a forum post that asked what conditions or events would’ve produced a better High Seas Fleet by the outbreak of war in 1914. I put forth two main considerations: economy and doctrine. I will take a deeper look at each of these considerations, clarify some points I made in that blog that I think were unrealistic, and add the geopolitical factors that influenced Germany’s shift in our timeline.

Economy

The Germans had a lot of ground to catch up to the mighty British Empire, especially in industrialization, to match them in a shipbuilding arms race. This started before the First Fleet Act of 1898. After 1890, Germany’s industrial maturity rapidly advanced, as evidenced by these key data points:

Between 1895 and 1907, machine-building workers doubled from just under 500,000 to over one million.
This reduced emigration, with Germany averaging 130,000 people leaving the country in the 1880s, to 20,000 a year by the mid-1890s. The surplus population left Eastern Prussia for industrial centers like Berlin and the Ruhr.
German steel production exceeded Britain’s in 1893, producing twice as much by 1914.
One-third of German exports in 1873 were finished goods; by 1913, that figure had risen to 63%, with Germany dominating all major continental markets except France.

Elderly man with a long beard in a double-breasted, decorated uniform, poses against a dark background. Stern expression, historical vibe. — **Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, champion of the German Naval Acts.**

Yet Germany still faced some economic disadvantages. Britain was still the world’s largest shipbuilder, outproducing all other nations while employing 300,000 workers. It was also the world’s leading trading and lending nation, with merchandise imports and exports 33% larger than Germany's. Britain and France combined held the largest gold reserves at the time and had larger foreign assets.

Yet Germany attempted to challenge this, as its production and military priorities expanded its heavy industry base. As many people shifted from agriculture to industrial jobs, these factors combined to drive a spike in German production from 1900 to 1914. Despite the gargantuan task, the Germans started pumping out war vessels but couldn’t keep pace with Britain, especially when both sides began to focus on constructing dreadnoughts, as seen in the following chart.

Bar chart titled "Dreadnought Building" shows Germany (black) vs Britain (red) shipbuilding from 1906-1914. Britain leads in 1907, 1912, 1913.

What Germany accomplished before the outbreak of war was largely due to the five fleet acts supported by Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, Wilhelm II, and Bernard von Bulow. Each act called for the German navy's expansion, setting target dates and specifying which ship types to focus on. In 1898, the law fixed the fleet's strength at 12 battleships, 8 armored cruisers, 12 large, and 30 light cruisers.

For subsequent acts, I found a transcript of the First Lord of the Admiralty, Reginald McKenna, who outlined before parliament the changes made in subsequent acts:

Black-and-white portrait of a man in a suit. Blue background text discusses the German Fleet Law. Quote marks and signature below.

By August 1914, here’s how the two navies compared:

Bar chart comparing British (red) and German (black) naval forces in August 1914. Categories include dreadnoughts, cruisers, and submarines.

These numbers show Britain's surface fleet of 536 vessels with 73 submarines. The Germans had built a surface fleet of 303 vessels and 31 submarines, giving the British a near 2:1 advantage. The largest and most significant naval battle between these two fleets during the war, the Battle of Jutland in 1916, resulted in the Germans failing to ambush the British fleet. They did not intend to take on the entire Grand Fleet but wanted to whittle it down. Realizing that the numbers were not on their side and the British knew what the Germans were up to, more focus was put on using U-boats, which peaked in construction in 1917 with approximately 140 vessels.

Doctrine

Economically, the Germans would never outproduce the British (which they realized and why they shifted their strategy). Yet we arrived doctrinally, as both nations knew and adopted ideas from Alfred Thayer Mahan, the famed American naval strategist who championed the importance of sea power. With Britain’s “Two-Power” doctrine, where its navy would always be larger than the next two powers combined, the country would never let Germany overtake its fleet.

Large vintage ship with four smokestacks sailing on the ocean. Crowded deck, flags flying. Black and white photo, calm waters. — **RMS Lusitania six days before U-20 sinks her on 7 May, 1915.**

As I suggested rather carelessly in the original blog, I don’t think the Germans could’ve successfully used sabotage to stymie Britain’s shipbuilding. And building the High Seas Fleet in secret would be a very difficult feat to accomplish. It’s hard to hide the building of dreadnoughts. The only thing that would’ve helped Germany earlier on was more U-boats.

However, submarines were still considered new at the start of World War I. The infamous U-boats (short of unterseeboot or Undersea Boat) came of age during the war. A radical change in naval thinking would’ve had to occur in the German Navy much earlier for the nation to commit more to submarine building than to its surface fleet.

Damage on HMS Warspite from a German shell, dry dock, with two men inspecting. Below, SMS Seydlitz battleship at Wilhelmshaven for repairs. Text: Jutland Battle Damage.

Geopolitical

In the buildup to the outbreak of war in 1914, a series of events continued to make the nation feel isolated and threatened. From 1894 to 1907, Germany saw relations between France, Great Britain, and Russia improve. Amid multiple crises in the Balkans and other Mediterranean regions, German authorities knew a war was coming. Furthermore, after Russia's defeat by Japan, the Russian military was completely overhauled starting in 1905.

While some overhauls were stymied and not fully completed by 1914, which would prove consequential on the battlefield, Russia, by 1913, had an army of nearly 1.5 million men. With mobilization, they could expand it up to 5 million, though they couldn’t fully equip them. These things concerned Germany so much that it finally abandoned the naval arms race and focused more on building up its land army to deal with these threats on the continent.

As such, in looking at the numbers, the situations in which Germany could’ve obtained a better High Seas Fleet are as follows:

Three colored boxes (green, orange, red) display alternate history scenarios labeled 1, 2, and 3, detailing hypothetical outcomes in world history.

The most plausible that requires the least change would be a German Navy that adopts the U-boats much earlier in the arms race. Yet, this might’ve just forced the United States into the war even earlier (assuming Wilson is still the president in this timeline). In the end, the only way Germany could end up with a better High Seas Fleet is by significantly altering the timeline. I’ll leave that to other writers out there to explore.