302 Chapter Eight
value in the decade from 1895 to 1904, to 12.8 million francs annual
average value in the years 1905 to 1913–^73 Obviously, as Krupp’s
foreign markets shrank back, the firm needed a politically assured sub
stitute outlet. As is well known, Krupp’s managers found a solution in
the form of the German naval building programs, launched in 1898
and periodically renewed thereafter at an ever escalating scale until
1914.
At first the German naval program appeared as only one of several
similar challenges to the Royal Navy’s supremacy. Japan’s rise as a
naval power in the Far East was a good deal more urgent, in that it de
cisively altered the balance of forces in Chinese waters. The British
reacted by making Japan an ally in 1902. In addition, the rise of the
United States Navy,^74 registered by the defeat of Spain in 1898, as
sured an American sphere of influence in the Caribbean and Pacific. In
1901 the First Lord of the Admiralty informed his Cabinet colleagues
that a two-power standard that counted the Americans among poten
tial enemies was beyond Great Britain’s means.^75 Ostentatious cor
diality between British and American naval detachments in American
waters soon was followed by wholesale withdrawal of Royal Navy
squadrons and drastic cutbacks, amounting almost to closure, of Brit
ain’s naval bases in Nova Scotia, British Columbia, and the Caribbean.
This helped Admiral Fisher save money for H.M.S. Dreadnought
and, with the Japanese alliance, permitted him to concentrate British
naval units in home waters. Then, after 1904, rivalry with France,
whose submarines had begun to pose a nasty threat, gave way to en
tente; and Russia’s defeat by Japan, 1904–5, erased the Russian navy
as a serious factor in the balance of power. This left Germany as Brit
ain’s only remaining rival.
Admiral Tirpitz and his colleagues were, however, quite formidable
enough. As a faithful disciple of Mahan and a believer in decisive vic
tory as the ultimate goal of all naval policy, Admiral Tirpitz concen
trated on building battleships. This made the threat to Britain unmis
takable. Yet the German government was unwilling to state publicly
that the new navy was designed to drive the Royal Navy from the nar-
- François Crouzet, “Recherches sur la production d’armements en France, 1815–
1913 ’’Revue historique 251 (1974): 50. Alan S. Milward and S. B. Saul, The Development
of the Economies of Continental Europe, 1850–1914 (London, 1977), pp. 79, 86–89, note
the importance of armaments in French metallurgical expansion just before World
War I.
- For details, see Donald W. Mitchell, History of the Modern American Navy from
1883 through Pearl Harbor (London, 1947).
- Cf. Cabinet memorandum reproduced in Kenneth Bourne, The Foreign Policy of
Victorian Britain, 1830–1902 (Oxford, 1970), p. 461.
