A Sickly Season and a Bloody War

In 1911 Winston Churchill decided to convert the whole of the Royal Navy to operate with oil rather than coal. This is a quick short story to explore what might have happened had he decided otherwise. A big smiley face to who ever can work out why Rogerson laughs when he notices that its a Thursday.


A Sickly Season and a Bloody War

As he looked out from the bridge of his carrier, the HMS Jutland , Captain Rogerson RN, reflected once again, that though he might command one of the most impressive ships in the fleet, his job was still one most of the time, of variable boredom. The most excitement he had suffered all day was running a charge against a rating who had managed to sunburn herself on the deck. Docking a few days wages might be an effective way to enforce discipline, but it hardly made up for the lack of a decent war. There hadn’t been a war of any note of course in decades, and indeed his ship was named after the Royal Navy’s last great victory, but still, a man could dream. He sighed inwardly, and mentally tried to drag himself again to the paper he was supposed to be working on for the Staff College course at Dartmouth he was supposed to be attending in two months time. The title of the paper was dullness itself;

“The Decision by then First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill, to stop the conversion of the Fleet from running on Coal to Oil, was of what influence on the length of the Great War?”

Rogerson tried to think of the pertinent facts as he could remember them. When he had taken charge of the Navy in 1911 Churchill came to an admiralty headquarters which was locked in an internal battle as to whether oil or coal should be the fuel of choice for the fleet. Oil was easier to store and move from ship to ship, burned more cleanly, and removed the need for stokers. Coal was none of these things, but it did have one great advantage. It could be found in Wales. Oil was at that time to be found nowhere in the empire. The main sources were then, as now in the Ottoman Empire’s Persian region. The debate had raged until it had come to a head in the now legendary stand up argument, in front of Churchill, between Admiral John Fisher and Lord Selborne. The conclusion of the argument, voiced by Churchill in his statement to the House of Commons was that, “Though the ordeal of coaling ship exhausts the whole ship's company and in wartime it robs them of their brief period of rest, the oil supplies of the world are in the hands of vast oil trusts under foreign control. To commit the navy irrevocably to oil is indeed to take arms against a sea of troubles, and not a risk I believe this country needs to take.”

How then had this influenced the length of the Great War. Not much was the best answer Rogerson had come up with so far. Churchill need not have feared for the supplies of oil as it turned out. The early delivery of the three warships to Constantinople just before the start of the war had pretty much guaranteed that the Ottomans entered on the ailed side, thus the British had access to all the oil they wanted and indeed did convert the fleet to Oil shortly after the war, relying on promises of an uninterrupted supply which existed to this day. The use of coal had of course had little or no effect on the land war in the West. To think of the near two years of hell in the trenches still had the power to make Rogerson shudder. It was a story of pluck of course, the British Volunteer Army holding the line till the fleet could end the war, but a small part of him wondered what massacres might have resulted had the regiments of Pals been thrown into actual battle rather than just defending the line, had the war not ended in May 1916.

What staff college question was really asking he suspected, was what the influence of the choice of fuel was on the Battle of Jutland itself. Again he concluded, not much. The British had perhaps a few more ships than they might otherwise have done, had they had to take the time to covert to oil and stop building ships. This delay he supposed might also have meant that the Ottomans would have been only given two battleships and not gifted the third though he thought this unlikely to have influenced their entry into the war much. Also though it was not really related to the question, the armour plating on the Dreadnaughts had been improved after the loss of HMS Indefatigable in 1913 when a tragic training accident had revealed some possible flaws in the system of magazine storage used on every ship. Rogerson tried to remember the name of the Admiral who had been blamed for the accident, but who honorably, not that he had much choice in the matter been killed when it had blown up. Beatty…. Betty, something like that, all those old admirals tended to sound the same. There had come to think of it been some discussion that the initial explosion on board and been due to a coal dust ignition, but this had been dismissed by the board of enquiry.

So even with oil, the Battle of Jutland would, he thought, would still have been the massacre of the German high fleet which it had been anyway. Resulting in the suicide of the Kaiser and the end of the Great War, 1914 -1916. The decision not to change to oil would have made no difference to history at all. The stable Muslim Ottoman Empire would still have been reinvigorated by the war, and remain the greatest ally of the Anglo-French Alliance well into the new millennium.

For a second or two Rogerson allowed his mind to explore the possibility of this not having happened. That the British and the French might have invaded Persia to secure their oil supplies, occupy the Sultans Holy Lands in order to keep their fleets moving, and possibly even stirred up a hatred and nationalism which might have lasted for years, perhaps even decades. But he quickly dismissed the thought. Success at Staff College was the only way to get promoted in these days of peace and stability where a sickly season and a bloody war were only a distant dream, and there was little chance of succeeding in that if he went off on a flight of fancy. His eyes flicked to the date on the calendar, and he laughed out loud, as he realised it was a Thursday.
 
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