The Imperial German Navy

Tirpitz inherited a small, coast-defence navy that barely featured in the national strategy of Imperial Germany. Between 1898 and the onset of the First World War, he built the fleet he, and his sponsor Kaiser Wilhelm II, wanted – a conventional battlefleet that looked like a smaller version of its British rival. Tirpitz was always playing catch-up in both quantitative and qualitative terms and German naval spending never amounted to more than half that of Britain. German ships were smaller, slower and less heavily armed than British ones as Germany tried to compete in numbers. When war came in 1914 (as a result of events on land, not at sea), the expensive battlefleet could not overcome the twin handicaps of an inferior force and unfavourable geography. Only then did Tirpitz turn to the weapon that might have delivered victory at sea – the submarine. At the end of the war, the German High Sea Fleet surrendered and the following year was scuttled by its own crews. Under the Treaty of Versailles, Germany was allowed just a handful of pre-dreadnoughts and no submarines at all. It was as if the “Tirpitz Plan” had never existed.