Read Online A Higher Form of Killing by Diana Preston - Free Book Online

American delegate at the conference, unable to make his sterner views on the need to allow greater freedom of action by navies toward their enemies prevail even within his own U.S. delegation. However, after the conference ended he continued to voice his concerns. They were taken up by some of his followers in Britain who argued that by ratifying the conference decisions, Britain would forfeit its naval supremacy. A heated debate followed in Britain further fueled by the 1909 “naval scare” resulting from a German decision to accelerate its battleship-building program. As a consequence, Britain never ratified the revised rules agreed to in London. Neither, under renewed pressure from Mahan, did the United States. Without the signature of two of the leading maritime nations the new provisions never came into force. First Sea Lord Jacky Fisher took little part in the debates about the British attitude, either cynically content to disregard the rules if Britain ever went to war or more likely too preoccupied with the feuding over new training procedures and gunnery practice with more hidebound colleagues which would soon precipitate his retirement in January 1910.
     
    By now the Balkans were the most likely source of conflict. In 1908–9, a prolonged confrontation stopping short of war flared up between Serbia—backed by Russia—and Austro-Hungary after the latter took Bosnia-Herzegovina from the crumbling Ottoman Turkish Empire. In 1912–13, the independent Balkan states, Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria, and Greece, first combined to defeat the Ottoman Turks and seize from them nearly all their remaining European territory and then fell out among themselves about the division of the spoils. Serbia was the principal winner, emerging with a doubling of its territory and increased national self-confidence. Austro-Hungary, since 1879 bound in tight alliance to Germany, felt it had lost out by not intervening in the 1912–13 conflicts and saw inherent problems for its diverse empire if pan-Slavism, and with it Russian influence, grew further.
    Many observers comforted themselves that the Balkan conflicts had been confined to that region. Nevertheless the European arms buildup continued. In 1911, thirty-six-year-old Winston Churchill, then a member of the Liberal Party, had been appointed First Lord of the Admiralty—the overall head of the organization to whom the professional head, the First Sea Lord, reported. The First Lord of the Admiralty in turn reported to Parliament and the cabinet, and was a member of both. Churchill, described in his early years in Parliament by an opponent as “restless, egotistical, bumptious, shallow-minded and reactionary but with a certain personal magnetism, great pluck and some originality,” had in 1911–12 headed inconclusive discussions with Germany about a pause in the naval arms race. The British naval budget, with its emphasis on high technology had, at more than forty-five million pounds, quadrupled over the last quarter of a century and was taking an increasing proportion of the rising national defense budget. Churchill tried again in 1913, contacting the German naval attaché in London, but he was thwarted by the response of Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz who suggested that the approach was a mere ploy to delay Germany’s naval program.
    The kaiser had appointed Tirpitz—then still to earn his ennobling ‘von’— Germany’s secretary of state for the navy in June 1897. Nine days later, Tirpitz had written in a memorandum: “For Germany at the moment the most dangerous naval enemy is England . . . The strategy against England demands battleships in as great a number as possible.” Thereafter he had been the inspiration and architect for Germany’s naval expansion, his views on naval matters mirroring those of Fisher and Mahan. Just as the latter two could not always effectively control their changing political masters, he could never be certain of the febrile, inconsistent