the aircraft carrier club 59
Britain and Germany in the years leading up to World War I offers an-
other striking example that can serve as a useful starting point for an ex-
ploration of this tension.
The first decades of the twentieth century were the high point of the
“battleship era.” With the introduction of bigger and more impressive
ships, navies were generally ranked according to the number of battleships
they possessed. The great battleship became an obsession of naval plan-
ners, often at the expense of smaller vessels (Kennedy 1989 , 163 ). In a
study of Wilhelmine Germany’s naval buildup, Robert Art ( 1973 ) finds
that because battleships were considered the most appropriate vessel for a
great power, the Germans neglected an advantage they had in submarine
technology. They allocated more resources to battleship procurement not
because it made strategic sense but because it conformed with the norm. A
navy could not gain respect if it did not have the right type of vessels. The
battleship was regarded as an “essential instrument of a great power wish-
ing to represent and enforce world- wide interests” (Rahn 1991 , 81 ).^4 By
1905 the British government was spending more money on the navy alone
($ 36. 8 million) than on all other civilian services combined ($ 28 million)
(Kennedy 1983 a, 340 ). In the winter of 1913 – 14 , Churchill, as the First
Lord of the Admiralty, requested an additional investment of £ 5 million in
naval procurement, stirring up significant political opposition and growing
fears that the British economy “would not stand the strain of ‘wasteful’
naval expenditure” (Weinroth 1971 , 94 ).
Yet this prewar obsession with battleship procurement proved to have
limited operational value during the war. The role played by the great
British and German battle fleets in World War I was anticlimactic consid-
ering the amount of resources, attention, and political capital that was in-
vested in naval competition before the war.^5 The great battleships proved
too valuable and too vulnerable and were mostly kept out of harm’s way,
justifying Churchill’s depiction of the German navy as a “luxury fleet”
(Herwig 1980 ).^6 The Dreadnought, the ultimate battleship of its era, sank
only one vessel during the Great War, and even this was accomplished by
ramming the enemy ship rather than using gunfire (Herman 2005 , 343 ).
Instead, smaller vessels and submarines, which were mostly discounted
before the war, proved to be of greater value: “one is struck by the im-
portance and ubiquity of small ships, the sheer variety of tasks they were
required to carry out in the ‘Great War at Sea,’ and the absence of any
reference to them in the maritime strategy of both the British and Ameri-
can navies” (Kennedy 1989 , 179 ).
