298 Chapter Eight
tial enthusiasm for Pollen’s invention evaporated when his subordi
nates told him that their cheaper device would do. Fisher’s tactial con
ception for the new battle cruisers was never even established as
doctrine. Instead, Admiral Lord Beatty, who took command of the
battle cruiser squadron in 1913, regarded his ships as a kind of sea cav
alry whose superior speed should be used in reconnaissance and to lead
the charge in battle. Traditionally minded naval officers, perhaps, felt
that there was something sneaky and un-Nelsonian about trying to
hover beyond the enemy’s reach while pounding him at extreme range.
It could not be done anyway with the navy’s existing fire control
devices. Hence, regulations prescribing target practice at 9,000
yards—a distance likely to be suicidal for thinly armored battle
cruisers—remained in force. Bureaucratic inertia, however irrational,
prevailed.^60
In retrospect, at least, it seems clear that factional infighting and
technical illiteracy combined with penny-pinching (what was Pollen’s
£100,000 compared to the cost of a battle cruiser?) to make a botch of
things. The Royal Navy paid for these errors at Jutland, where the
long range at which the battle was fought, and the changes of course
that took place during the encounter, diminished British chances of
winning decisive victory of the kind they had counted on.^61
Thus it seems correct to say that technical questions got out of con
trol on the eve of World War I in the sense that established ways of
handling them no longer assured reasonably rational or practically
satisfactory choices. Secrecy obstructed wisdom; so did clique rivalries
and suspicion of self-seeking. Most of all, the mathematical complex
ity of the problem—a complexity which clearly surpassed the compre
hension of many of the men most intimately concerned—deprived
policy of even residual rationality.
The technical revolution so brashly unleashed in 1884 could
scarcely have had a more ironical outcome. Like so many other aspects
of the naval race of the first years of the century, this, too, was a
foretaste of things to come, anticipating the technologically uncon
trolled and uncontrollable age in which we currently find ourselves. A
colossal paradox lay in the fact that energetic effort to rationalize
- Stephen Roskill, Admiral of the Fleet Lord Beatty: The Last Naval Hero (London,
1980), pp. 59–72.
- My understanding of these fire control controversies depends on Jon T. Sumida,
“British Capital Ships and Fire Control in the Dreadnought Era: Sir John Fisher, Arthur
Hungerford Pollen and the Battle Cruiser,” Journal of Modern History 51 (1979):
205–30, and on his remarkable Ph.D. dissertation “Financial Limitation, Technological
Innovation and British Naval Policy, 1904–1910” (University of Chicago, 1982).
