Background
Alfred von Tirpitz was born at Küstrin on March 19, 1849, the son of a jurist.
Alfred von Tirpitz was born at Küstrin on March 19, 1849, the son of a jurist.
Tirpitz entered the Prussian navy in 1865, and from 1877 to 1888 headed the torpedo service in the Imperial German Navy. His great faith in torpedo boats, his so-called black host, was to be shattered in the First World War
In 1892 Tirpitz served as staff chief in the Supreme Command of the Navy, and four years later as head of the Cruiser Squadron in East Asia he helped to select Shantung Peninsula as the site of a German base. Promoted rear admiral in 1895, Tirpitz was appointed state secretary of the Navy Office in June 1897; he held this post until March 1916. Tirpitz's subsequent career was meteoric: he was promoted vice admiral in 1899, admiral in 1903, and the first grand admiral of Germany in 1911; in 1900 he was raised into the Prussian nobility; and in 1908 he became a member of the Prussian House of Lords.
Stout of figure and sporting the famous two-pronged beard, Tirpitz proved a stern leader, demanding the utmost of a coterie of aides with whom he prepared in detail the annual naval estimates. Future naval leaders such as Eduard von Capelle, Adolf von Trotha, and Reinhard Scheer served apprenticeships in this manner. Above all, Tirpitz was a master manipulator of men and of public opinion. He cleverly prepared the way for naval expansion by serializing sea novels and A. T. Mahan's The Influence of Seapower Upon History; he deployed pastors and university professors to spread the naval gospel to the remotest corners of the land; he plied parliamentary delegates with tours and information; he ruthlessly exploited every foreign development on behalf of navalism; and he totally captivated the kaiser through flattery, firmness, and, when needed, the threat of resignation.
Wilhelm II was no match for these tactics. Neither was the Reichstag. In 1898 it passed the First Navy Bill calling for a fleet of seventeen battleships and thirty-five cruisers, designed for limited offen-sives in a war against France and Russia. A radical change occurred, however, with the Second Navy Bill of June 1900, later augmented by Supplementary Bills of 1904, 1906, 1908, and 1912, which constituted a unilateral challenge to British control of the seas. The fleet, scheduled for completion by 1920/1921, would consist of forty-one battleships, twenty large and forty light cruisers. Moreover, there is sufficient evidence to suggest that Tirpitz was not content even with this force and that he was planning on the eve of the Great War a further increase to sixty capital ships. It should not be overlooked that under the Tirpitz plan, the ships were to be automatically replaced every twenty years, thereby removing, as Tirpitz promised the kaiser, "the disturbing influence of the Reichstag on Your Majesty's intentions."
There is no question that the fleet was designed first and foremost for a clash with England in the south-central North Sea, "between Helgoland and the Thames." To camouflage his intentions, Tirpitz developed the so-called risk theory, that is, he argued that he could create a navy of sufficient strength against which war would endanger the superiority of even the greatest fleet. Not only did the risk theory prove utterly fallacious in the Great War, but it was never intended to be more than a subterfuge. To trusted acquaintances, Tirpitz confided that his ultimate goal "really cannot be written down"; when pressed as to why he did not push harder for colonial expansion, the state secretary once replied that one could not "divide the bearskin" until the "bear had been slain." In short, as one historian has stated, the German fleet of sixty capital ships stationed in the North Sea was to constitute a "gleaming dagger" held ready at the jugular vein of Britain.
The Tirpitz plan ultimately, however, suffered shipwreck. The British introduction of dreadnought battleships in 1905/1906 erased the German matériel advantage, and by 1909 it was not England but Germany that faced bankruptcy by the horrendous expenditures on naval building. Parliament became concerned over Tirpitz’s anti-British policy and the Prussian army clamored for priority in German defense expenditures as the likelihood of war on two fronts became increasingly clearer by 1910-1912. Finally, engineer officers for the fleet became increasingly difficult to find, and German shipyards in 1914 were eight battleships and thirteen cruisers behind schedule.
It is, therefore, little wonder that Tirpitz desperately worked for peace during the crisis of July 1914. His fleet was at least seven years from completion and war with England at that time would jeopardize his life's work. Moreover, the army brusquely brushed aside naval considerations in August 1914, instructing the junior force not to attempt to interrupt English troop transports across the Channel as the army would mop these units up in the great Cannae around Paris. When victory faded early in September at the Marne, Tirpitz planned feverishly to regain control of naval affairs. He hoped to create a supreme command of the navy around himself or, failing that, to take charge of the fleet personally; he was denied both goals, partly because he had not commanded a squadron at sea for nearly two decades. In addition, the war also proved Tirpitz's inadequacies as a strategist. The British did not immediately descend into the Helgoland Bight, as German planners had stated they would owing to their mentality and tradition. And the distant blockade at Dover-Calais and Scotland-Norway finally revealed that Mahan's theories on navalism had as prerequisite free access to the world's major maritime arteries, a condition that Tirpitz either never learned or overlooked.
In 1915/1916 the grand admiral's position rapidly deteriorated. The kaiser blamed him for the lack of overseas cruisers and the loss of German ships at Falkland and at the Dogger Bank. In time, Tirpitz was removed from general headquarters and denied influence in major strategy decisions. His frantic efforts on behalf of unrestricted submarine warfare-coming after years of ignoring this weapon and refusing to create what he termed a museum of ex¬periments" only earned him further distrust with the supreme war lord. And on March 15, 1916, Tirpitz used the old strategem of threatening to resign once too often in the wake of yet another sharp protest note by President Woodrow Wilson over German U-boat warfare: Wilhelm II accepted his naval architect's resignation with the terse comment, "He is leaving the sinking ship."
In retirement, Tirpitz continued to exert influence on the navy through Admiral von Trotha and Captain Magnus von Levetzow, two fervent followers, and through the creation in September 1917 of the million-member right-wing Fatherland party, which called for vast annexations and indemnities as a sine qua non for a German peace.
Tirpitz became a parliamentary deputy for the German National People's party from 1924 to 1928; in 1925 he was instrumental in convincing Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg to make his successful bid for the presidency. Tirpitz died of heart failure in Ebenhausen, near Munich, on March 6, 1930. His Memoirs as well as a two-volume edition of Political Documents revealed him to be a bitter, vindictive, and shallow leader.
Tirpitz's role in German history was at once fateful and fatal. The naval race initiated by the Second Navy Bill was the single most decisive act in poisoning Anglo-German relations and assuring British membership in the Entente. And through a score of carefully chosen aides, Tirpitz's construction policies and strategy, especially his overemphasis on battleships, permeated also the navy of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich. Last but not least, Tirpitz's simple "friend-foe" mentality with regard to fellow naval officers deprived Germany of independent critics and first-rate minds.
Tirpitz's design to achieve world power status through naval power, while at the same time addressing domestic issues, is referred to as the Tirpitz Plan. Politically, the Tirpitz Plan was marked by the Fleet Acts of 1898, 1900, 1908 and 1912. By 1914, they had given Germany the second-largest naval force in the world (roughly 40% smaller than the Royal Navy). It included seventeen modern dreadnoughts, five battlecruisers, twenty-five cruisers and twenty pre-dreadnought battleships as well as over forty submarines. Although including fairly unrealistic targets, the expansion programme was sufficient to alarm the British, starting a costly naval arms race and pushing the British into closer ties with the French.
Tirpitz developed a "Risk Theory" whereby, if the German Imperial Navy reached a certain level of strength relative to the British Royal Navy, the British would try to avoid confrontation with Germany (that is, maintain a fleet in being). If the two navies fought, the German Navy would inflict enough damage on the British that the latter ran a risk of losing their naval dominance. Because the British relied on their navy to maintain control over the British Empire, Tirpitz felt they would opt to maintain naval supremacy in order to safeguard their empire, and let Germany become a world power, rather than lose the empire as the cost of keeping Germany less powerful. This theory sparked a naval arms race between Germany and Great Britain in the first decade of the 20th century.
This theory was based on the assumption that Great Britain would have to send its fleet into the North Sea to blockade the German ports (blockading Germany was the only way the Royal Navy could seriously harm Germany), where the German Navy could force a battle. However, due to Germany's geographic location, Great Britain could blockade Germany by closing the entrance to the North Sea in the English Channel and the area between Bergen and the Shetland Islands. Faced with this option a German Admiral commented, "If the British do that, the role of our navy will be a sad one," correctly predicting the role the surface fleet would have during the First World War.
Politically and strategically, Tirpitz's Risk Theory ensured its own failure. By its very nature it forced Britain into measures that would have been previously unacceptable to the British establishment. The necessity to concentrate the fleet against the German threat involved Britain making arrangements with other powers that enabled her to return the bulk of her naval forces to Home Waters. The first evidence of this is seen in the Anglo-Japanese treaty of 1902 that enabled the battleships of the China squadron to be re-allocated back to Europe. The Japanese fleet, largely constructed in British shipyards, then proceeded to utterly destroy the Russian navy in the war of 1904–05, removing Russia as a credible maritime opponent. The necessity to reduce the Mediterranean Fleet in order to reinforce the navy in home waters was also a powerful influence in its détente and Entente Cordiale with the French. By forcing the British to come to terms with its most traditional opponent, Tirpitz scuttled his own policy. Britain was no longer at 'risk' from France, and the Japanese destruction of the Russian fleet removed that nation as a naval threat. In the space of a few years, Germany was faced with virtually the whole strength of the Royal Navy deployed against its own fleet, and Britain committed to her list of potential enemies. The Tirpitz 'risk theory' made it more probable that, in any future conflict between the European powers, Britain would be on the side of Germany's foes, and that the full force of the most powerful navy in the world would be concentrated against her fleet.
Tirpitz spoke English fluently and was sufficiently at home in Great Britain that he sent his two daughters to Cheltenham Ladies' College.
On 18 November 1884 he married Maria Augusta Lipke (born 11 October 1860 in Schwetz, West Prussia, died after 1941).