318. How to spend money #2
“Nobody know what is it but everybody wants to possess it.”
‘Beast master 2’
“I’ll take two” [1]
‘Robin Hood, man in tights’
“-Doorman, call me a taxi!
-I’m not a doorman, I’m an admiral!
- In this case call a cruiser!”
Dialog from the times when the doormen had been wearing fancy uniforms.
“You can look down on money, but in no case should you lose sight of it.”
A. Prevost
“It may not look like that but we had been backing you all the time.”
‘Support your local sheriff’
Some numbers. [2]
- To put numbers in a perspective, at the time in question, 1 British pound (£) was approximately equal to:
- 10 yens (¥)
- 20 German marks (ℳ)
- 10 Gold Russian rubles
- 24 francs
- $4.8
- In Britain in the decade 1899 - 09 annual average of the government expenditure was £36,400,000. The naval spendings in 1897-89 were £21,800,000 and kept growing to £38,300,000 in 1904-05.
- German Naval Bill of 1898: 5,000,000 marks (£250,000) annually allocated to run the navy, with a total budget of 408,000,000 marks for shipbuilding in 1898 - 1904 (annual average 68,000,000 marks = £3,400,000). German budget by 1899 was approximately 7,680,000,000 and in 1900 7,741,616,000 marks.
- Japanese naval plan of ¥280,000,000 in 10 years would mean annual average £2,800,000. Japan’s public debt rose from ¥255,000,000 in 1890 to ¥506,000,000 in 1900. State budget in 1897 was ¥240,500,000 or £24,050,000.
- In OTL state income of the Russian Empire in 1900 was 1,704,100,000 rubles out of which 78,700,000 - naval expenses. In 1913 - 3,417,400,000 and 244,800,000 with the budget surplus of 48,000,000. ITTL I’m going to jump to 1913 numbers (but will cut the naval expenses approximately in half because development of the dreadnoughts at least doubled cost per capital ship): after all, RE is doing much better than in OTL. This will make the annual budget £341,740,000 with the naval expenses approximately £10,000,000. [3]
Late 1890s, pretty much everywhere.
With the new German, British, Japanese and French naval programs “everybody” had to jump into a bandwagon, willingly or not.
Sweden had to consider a possibility that, with its considerable deposits of gold and coal, New Zealand may became a target of somebody else’s interests and that there is a need to build a fleet of the armored cruisers.
According to the Swedish admirals, these cruisers would have to combine a good protection, powerful weapons and speed that allows to get away from a stronger enemy. And of course, the Swedish budget was not ready to pay too much for them. The common sense was requiring that they are to be designed and built in Sweden. “
Fylgia” was the first one to be built.
With a small (4300 tons) displacement, the ship had powerful armament of 8 six-inch Bofors guns, located in two-gun turrets according to the French "rhombic" standard. As a result, the modest Swedish cruiser could snap at enemies with six guns from almost any side. In addition, the cruiser received 51 mm armored deck and a 100 mm armored belt in the central part, near the engine rooms, although not very wide and long. It’s top speed was 21.5 - 22 knots.
The ship was not very good, to put it mildly, for operations on the ocean lines: its coal storage was small and accommodations for the sailors were very crumpled. But, once it arrived to the destination, part of a crew could stay in the barracks and it will be a valuable addition to the coastal defenses. It was planned to add one or two more and few destroyers, when money and resources will permit.
However, the task of an adequate defense of the home coast remained the top priority and the British-German naval competition was making general situation unstable and, in a view of the venerable Baltic League now being allied with Germany, the Baltic Sea had to be protected against the hostile incursions. Which meant that Sweden had to upgrade its coastal defense fleet by building a number of small but well protected battleships with 8”-10” artillery.
Denmark. Formally, by the 1890s Denmark had 6 armored ships but 2 of them had an armor of under 2” and had to be converted into the training vessels, 3 were seriously outdated and only one, “Rolf Krake”, monitor with two towers, was fit for service.
Following the example of neighboring Sweden, which built battleships exclusively on its own, the Danes also decided to develop national shipbuilding. Numerous business trips of specialists to the most advanced enterprises in the UK have begun, but alas, the limited capabilities of the Danish budget made it impossible to establish their production of armor and guns.
Minister of the Navy Nils Frederick Ravn pursued a cost-saving policy, as a result, in the first half of the 1870s the Danish fleet was replenished with five small gunboats with 254-mm guns, which were supposed to bear the task of artillery support. It was only after his resignation that the military managed to "push through" in 1876 the new battleship,
Heligoland, of 5,000 tons with a single main caliber gun of 305mm, 4 260mm guns and 5 120mm guns. Heligoland's side armor consisted of slabs 8 to 12 inches thick, mounted on a 12-16-inch thick teak lining. The top layer of 12-inch armor was 1.3 m wide, the lower belt of 8-inch armor was 0.7 m wide.
The next ship,
Tordenskjold, on which the Danish Parliament decided to save money, had displacement 2534 tons, a single 355 mm gun (one shot in 10 minutes), 4 120mm guns, 4 37mm Hotchkiss guns, speed of 13 knots, range 2,800 km and no side armor. Small wonder that he was obsolete few years after entering service.
The next ship (lesson about the economy was learned),
Iver Hvitfeldt, was much better but in the 1890s they built only 2 coastal defense ironclads,
Skjold and
Herluf Trolle.
The main costs went to the coastal defenses of the Kiel Canal, the Sunds and important points of the Danish and Norwegian coasts.
Spain.
In 1895 Spanish fleet had a very impressive record … of self-destruction: cruiser
Reina Regente - missing in March, cruiser
Sanchez Barcniztegui - sunk in a collision with a steamer near Havana in September, the cruiser
Cristobal Colon - sunk near Cuba in October. There was obviously a good time to upgrade navy ASAP. As the first step, there was a serious upgrade of the only Spanish battleship,
Pelayo.
During the modernization, the old boilers were completely replaced. Now sixteen Nikloss water-tube boilers have been installed on the battleship. With new boilers and disassembled engines, the ship was able to develop a speed of 16.7 knots during tests with traction boosted to 9473 hp. The ship had 2 320mm guns, 2 280mm guns and a big number of the smaller calibers. But its range of 3,620 miles made it more suitable for a coastal defense than for the long-range operations. There was a rather ambitious plan of a naval expansion proposed in the 1880s but never-ending bickering in the Corteses resulted in a chronic shortage of the funds. However, the general developments everywhere more or less forced the Corteses to stop ignoring the navy and a new program was adopted. In accordance with the program, the creation of a new navy began with a radical reform of the Spanish shipbuilding industry. Ultimately, private Spanish shipbuilding companies had to be able to ensure the construction of ships of all classes with the help of foreign firms. Socied Espana de Conctruccion Naval (SECN) has entered into an alliance with the English arms companies Armstrong, Vickers and John Brown. With their help, the shipbuilding base was reconstructed or even recreated: shipyards, weapons factories, turbine workshops. All this was to serve the creation of a new fleet, the core of which was planned to make three battleship dreadnoughts with a displacement of 15,000 tons (size of the existing docks was limited and so were Spain’s finances). The planned battleships would have relatively weak armor and limited speed but each was going to have 8 305mm/50 main caliber guns in 4 two gun turrets with a hydraulic control and ability to load at any angle. But the process from design to completion was going to be a very long one. In 1896 Spain bouth one of the Italian-built
Garibaldi class armored cruisers and called it
Cristobal Colon after one that sunk in 1895.
Cruisers of
Garibaldi class had displacement 6,800 - 7,700 tons, speed up to 20 knots, range 10,200 km at 10 knots, 2
gun turrets, each with 1 ×
254 mm (10 in) gun
or2 ×
203 mm (8 in) guns, 10–14 × single
152 mm (6 in) guns, 0–6 × single
120 mm (4.7 in) guns, 10 × single
76 mm (3 in)guns, 6 × single
47 mm (1.9 in) guns, 4 × single 450 mm (17.7 in)
torpedo tubes. Armor belt was 70 - 150 mm, barbette 100 - 150 mm, deck 20 - 40 mm, conning tower 150 mm.
6 of them had been sold to Argentine, which resold 2 to Japan, 1 to Spain and 3 remained in Italy.
In a meantime Spain still had few cruisers, built in 1887 - 1892 in Britain and Spain and for the operations on other side of the Atlantic and on the Pacific it mostly relied on the navies of the “Spanish Commonwealth” which, was still holding notwithstanding numerous diplomatic quarrels between its members and even a couple of the minor armed conflicts. None of these navies was big but together they were presented a factor that could not be easily ignored. If not necessarily due to the combined strength of their navies but due to the political implications of spoiling relations with all countries of the “Spanish America”.
Italy surprised everybody in 1870s with its Duilio-class battleships having huge 4 ×
450 mm/20 (17.7 in) guns, speed 15 knots, displacement over 11,000 tons and no armor on bow and stern (they were extensively subdivided into a cellular "raft" that was intended to reduce the risk of flooding). The big guns were muzzle-loading and had a range of under 6,000 meters and could fire at a rate 3 - 4 shots per hour. By 1890 they launched a new series of the battleships, which would be the first in the world made of steel. They also had placement of the main caliber guns in 2 turrets placed along the diameter.
But the plans were one thing and budgetary and technical limitations quite another and implementation of three ships took more than a decade. Displacement was over 13,000 tons, speed 18.5 knots, range up to 11,000 km, main caliber 4 ×
343 mm (13.5 in)/30 calibers guns in twin-gun turrets and a long list of the smaller guns. They were protected by
belt armor that was 102 mm (4 in) thick, with an armored deck that was 76 mm (3 in) thick. Their forward
conning towers were armored with 300 mm (11.8 in) of steel plate on the sides. Their main battery turrets had 4 in thick faces and the supporting barbettes had 349 mm (13.75 in) thick steel. The secondary guns had 51 mm (2 in) thick
gun shields. The belt armor was made too light to allow a high speed.
Russia.
So far, Russian navy was predominantly concentrating on the defenses of the Baltic and Black seas with a limited scope of the operations on the Med (naval base on Corfu was relatively small) and beyond, which shaped stress upon the coastal defense battleships backed up by the destroyers, gunboats/monitors and torpedo boats. Exceptions were the armored, protected and light cruisers intended for the operations on the ocean routes. However there were not too many of them even if one adds a potential of the converted merchant ships of the Dobroflot.
In general, the fleet, formally numerous, tended to be rather “collection of the ships”: only a fraction of the ships belonged to the “series” and, even then, due to a rather lax oversight by the Naval Ministry, they tended to vary in the details, sometimes even significantly. With the fast changes in the naval construction some of the older ships had been getting clearly obsolete but still were kept in the navy (to preserve numerous commanding positions). It was still OK for the very limited actions in which Russian navy participated from time to time but the Sino-Japanese war demonstrated a danger related to having an obsolete fleet and the following naval race was creating a clear and present danger of ending up with a fleet which is totally powerless.
Prior to the Sino-Japanese war the only “open ocean” battleship was “Three Saints”, which was used as a “power projection” factor during the negotiations at the end of this war. The world-wide “naval frenzy” and territorial readjustments following this war forced RE to review its naval policies and, of course, as usually happens in an absence of a figure dominating the subject, the first stage was a heated debate regarding intended intended course of actions because there was no prevailing opinion of
what is the problem.
At present there were two potentially dangerous developments:
- British-German naval race which could easily grow into a military conflict. While Russia did not have formal military alliances (except for the mutual defense treaties with Sweden and Denmark), it had friendly relations with Germany. Taking into an account Germany’s extensive trade activities within the Baltic Sea it could be expected that in the case of war the RN will try to get into the Baltic Sea and try to destroy these supply lines all the way to a possibility of attack on the Russian and Swedish ports. Which meant that the Baltic League (mostly Russia) must be able to prevent a hostile breaking into the Baltic by a hostile power.
- The active Japanese naval development did not imply an immediate danger to the Russian Far East but projection of a weakness may prompt Japan to some aggressive actions or some kind of a bullying. The problem was that at least in a short term Russian Far East was going to remain vulnerable. Even with the TransSib completed, population could not overnight jump to few millions. The same goes for the infrastructure: Vladivostok and Nikolaev-on-Amur were still in a process of the development and the local industry was on various stages of development. Posting a big squadron there was not to be productive because there still was no adequate infrastructure for maintaining a major naval base. Pretty much the same applied to the army force: during the last war up to 80,000 had been mobilized locally for a short time. But infrastructure for a sustainable deployment of a much greater force including units arriving from the West had to be created. Anyway, immediate arrival of a major naval force will be considered by the Japanese as a challenge and can prompt actions to facing which Russia will not be prepared for the next few years. So Japan has to be treated in a most friendly way.
- After Sino-Japanese war Japan had Liaodong peninsula and Germany a naval base at Tsingtao, which it was actively fortifying. Combined with Japanese influence in Korea and, obviously, presence in Japan (😉), that meant control of these two powers over the access to the Yellow and Bohai seas.
- Which caused hysteria among some “patriotic” members of the Duma concerned about Russian access to <what exactly none of them had been completely sure> will be denied to a great damage to the Russian prestige and trade. It took some effort to convince them that (a) one of these powers is Russian ally and with another Russia had traditionally friendly relations and (b) that the Russian naval trade with this part of China is almost absent and the ongoing railroad construction across Mongolia is going to extend all the way to Pekin, Chinese concession is already obtained.
- Then (or rather in parallel) there was a loud moaning coming from “under the Spire” [4]. The distinguished admirals, and not only them, had been complaining that by letting Japanese to keep Liaodong Russia deprived itself of a warm water port and that Russia must, with the diplomatic help of Germany and France, to force the Japanese to return the peninsula to China after which China will be forced to lease it to Russia: the retirement rules for the high-ranking military personnel were quite lax and, as a result, some of these admirals were really old and had a long and very distinguished service record so sending the whole bunch of them to a well-deserved retirement could cause unnecessary scandal. Admiral-general, Grand Duke Alexei Alexandrovich, had been summoned to his brother’s presence, ordered to shut up, listen, remember and then communicate to his subordinates the main points:
- The whole Liaodong schema politically dangerous because it will immediately alienate Japan pushing it into a close alignment with Britain.
- Defense of the peninsula is impractically costly (report with the assessments had been given to him to allow impressing the idiots with the numbers).
- Russia has a warm water naval base on the Barents Sea at Severomorsk with the railroad just being completed.
- Ice at Vladivostok in the coldest winter so far was under 50 centimeters and in he gulf of Peter the Great less than 1 meter [5] and a big icebreaker is almost finished and will arrive to Vladivostok next year.
- Last but not least, there is an open vacancy of a commander of the Aral Sea flotilla …
- Tsesarevich Nicholas had been sent to Germany to deliver his (six times removed) “Cousin Willy” what he wanted for quite a while, uniform of the Russian Admiral, and to get the German one in exchange (photo above). Wilhelm had to be assured that he has a complete Russian (and Swedish and Danish) support for his naval programs and that the Baltic Sea is going to be completely secure from any hostile third party so that he can fully concentrate on the Northern Sea, Atlantic and the German colonies. Similar assurances of support had been sent from France.
- Discussion about the mutual economic interests had been started with Japan.
All this did not put away the obvious fact that Russia is more or less being forced to start modernization and expansion of its navy. Even the most modern “Three Saints” needed replacement of its armor with the newest Krupp cemented steel and retrofitting of its propulsion system. Besides the armor upgrades, most of the ships in service had to adopt the lessons of the last war: the exposed wooden parts and unprotected structures has to be cut to a necessary minimum.
So far, all Russian warships outside the Caspian Sea had been running on coal as everybody else’s. But coal had considerable disadvantages. It was labor-intensive to pack coal into the ship's bunkers and then feed it into the boilers. Loading in the open sea was practically impossible. The boilers became clogged with ash. Airborne coal dust and related vapors were highly explosive. Burning coal as fuel also produced thick black smoke which gave away the position of a fleet and interfered with visibility, signaling, and fire control. In addition, coal was very bulky and had comparatively low
thermal efficiency.
OTOH, oil-fired propulsion reduced smoke, making ships less visible. It could be fed into boilers automatically, rather than needing a complement of
stokers to do it by hand. Oil has roughly twice the
thermal content of coal. This meant that the boilers themselves could be smaller; and for the same volume of fuel, an oil-fired ship would have much greater range. With most of the traffic by the Caspian Sea and a considerable part of the traffic by the Volga, Amur and other internal water arteries running on oil for quite a few years, the experience was there and, with the big volumes of oil-based products being easily and cheaply available, it definitely made sense to consider a massive switch of the Russian navy. But, as always, there were issues to resolve:
- Did it make sense to retrofit all existing fleet or limit the change to a limited number of most advanced existing ships and use oil for the newly-constructed ones leaving the rest on coal at least for a while. Retrofitting all ships including the oldest ones was impractical: it would stress available construction resources slowing construction of the brand new ships.
- Oil was not a problem in the home waters but, with coal still being prevalent around the world, how to guarantee supply in the far-away places? As long as the Russian allies are using coal, they fueling stations are pretty much useless unless they are going to adopt the change or unless Russia is permitted to add their own fuel storages to the allied fueling stations or the neutral ports.
One of the intermediate solutions was to use coal
sprinkled with oil which was increasing efficiency while limiting the needed amounts of a liquid fuel. Or there could be the tanker ships, similar to those operating on the Caspian, following the warships’ squadrons or having the rendezvous in pre-arranged places. OTOH, if the main task of a modernized fleet still is going to be a defense rather than the open ocean operations, then most of the problems are going away.
The next problem was the ordinance. So far, the explosive used in the shells was
pyroxylin but the French came with much more effective
melinite (picric acid). The main problem with it was that being placed into a shell it war reacting with the iron creating the volatile substance, which was regularly leading to the catastrophic explosions. So pretty much everybody interested (French, Japanese, Russians, etc.) had been trying to figure out a practical way to isolate the charge from a shell.
The Japanese cast molten melinite (shimose) in the shape of a shell chamber. Each piece was covered with waxed paper in several layers, then wrapped with tin foil, then again with paper and inserted into the projectile in this form. Indeed, the insulation from the body was complete. However, in a long run the charge was getting sensitive to the storage conditions and still could explode on its own, which was happening on a regular basis. The positive factors were: huge force of an explosion with a high temperature and dense black noxious smoke. In the naval usage it would cause cause fires of the exposed wooden parts, force of the explosion could shatter fixtures of the armor plates and leave the big holes in the unarmored parts. But these shells would explode immediately upon contact without ability to penetrate the armor.
After a number of the disastrous experiments, in one of which the leading explorer was killed together with all his crew, the Russian military decided to opt for TNT (trinitrotoluene), industrial production of which started in Germany in 1891. Technology had been purchased (admiral’s uniform was a good investment) and production started on Okhta plant and then on few more plants. TNT was not as powerful as melinite but still quite effective and had a number of advantages:
- It has low impact sensitivity (4-8% of explosions when a load falls 10 kg from a height of 25 cm while for melinite 24 - 32%). TNT does not explode if it is dropped or even shot with a rifle (melinite would catch fire orvexplode). A strong shock wave (detonation) is required for the explosion. This would allow to create the effective armor-piercing shells with a delayed fuse.
- Storage life is about 25 years, after which TNT becomes more sensitive to detonation.
- The difference in the explosive characteristics [6] is not too different:
- fougasse (a measure of overall performance, destructive, throwing and other action of the explosion) in the lead block: melinite - 310ml, TNT 285 ml.
- brisant (a measure of ability to cause local crush on the environment in which the explosion occurs): melinite - 17 mm, TNT - 16 mm.
Now, with all these technicalities being more or less figured out, the questions were:
- What to build? In other words, what should be composition of a new navy.
- What these ships should look like?
If by whatever reason someone thinks that the Naval Ministry could come with a clear answer to the first question, it is a highly optimistic view of how the things were done in the Russian Empire. While the Naval General Staff was still preparing its report on short-term plan, the Naval Minister submitted to the Council of Ministers a request to allocate funds for two new battleships without any general plan. The main motive that was presented by him in favor of the immediate start of shipbuilding is the fear of leaving the plants unemployed.
To avoid possible confusion, while Admiral General was, formally, the top authority in the Russian Navy, nobody, including himself, had illusions regarding his ability to do any comprehensive planning, or being able to discuss it, or to do pretty much anything beyond performing the ceremonial duties and, upon the emperor’s orders, to preform the …er… disciplinarian duties. He was holding this position pretty much because it was traditionally held by a Grand Duke and the only Grand Duke competent in the naval area, Alexander Mikhailovich [7]
, was too junior in the rank to take this position.
The Council of Ministers bumped the issue to the State Defense Council where the opinions regarding composition of the Russian Navy were split: not-naval members of the Council had been favoring the mine fleet while the naval ones - the battleships. The question was formulated as following: “
Is it recognized that it is possible to discuss the issue of two designed battleships without any shipbuilding program, or is it necessary to solve this issue a preliminary detailed development of a shipbuilding program, at least in the near future, indicating which of the works should be delivered first and which in the future?"
The naval representatives (minority) insisted that the program is not a pre-requisite but majority disagreed. The Emperor’s resolution was “agree with the majority’s opinion.”
So the plan had to be prepared.
Seemingly a straightforward task but at that point the Main Naval Staff had been split into two institutikns:
- Naval General Staff responsible for collecting and processing data about the Russian and foreign navies, development of the regulations related to the preparation to war, shipbuilding programs, etc.
- Main Naval Staff which now was in charge of the issues related to a personnel.
Naval General Staff was created without participation of the Minister of Navy and he was trying to impede its work at each opportunity. So he sent order to prepare a plan to both institutions even if Main Naval Staff now had nothing to do with this function. Small wonder that the result were two different plans.
Naval General Staff: 4 battleships, 1 armored cruiser, 3 light cruisers, 10 destroyers. Plus, expansion and modernization of the ports.
Naval Main Staff: 4 battleships, 8 light cruisers, 12 destroyers.
Instead of coordination of these plans, the Minister presented both of them losing whatever credibility he still had and his position as well.
Naval General Staff kept doing its work and presented general considerations regarding the potential Baltic Theater:
1) Russia has no offensive tasks in the Baltic Sea and cannot pursue them, and therefore the nature of the war will be exclusively defensive for us.
2) The creation of reliable defense of the Baltic waters must be completed as soon as possible.
3) The immediate task of our foreign policy should be to maintain an alliance with France and Germany.
The proposal was to build within 10 years two naval squadrons
each of them having an adequately equipped base and including: 8 battleships, 4 armored cruisers 1st class, 9 light cruisers, 36 destroyers. “
The specifications for ships of the line should be such that this squadron, if necessary, can be sent anywhere.” Additionally, there have to be 180 mine (torpedo) boats organized in 20 groups by 9.
For the case of the potential “third pary’s” penetration into the Baltic Sea fortifications of the Gulf of Finland have to be upgraded. There had to be transport ships, floating repair bases, coastal equipment, etc.
Naval General Staff in an absence of the clear directions regarding the naval policy kept coming with the new plans contradicting each other and widely varying in composition and cost. The additional negative factors were:
- State Defense Council dominated by the army and generally considering fleet as a strictly auxiliary branch.
- Self-imposed isolation of the Naval Ministry from other ministries.
The first factor became too obvious and the Council was abolished but the damage was done: Cabinet of Ministers got a strong impression that the Naval Ministry has no clue about what has to be done and decided to save money by allocating for the naval needs an annual credit of 30,000,000 rubles for the next 4 years.
After prolonged discussions the Naval General Staff came with a very modest proposal of a 4 years plan strictly for the Baltic Fleet with a price tag 31,000,000 rubles per year. It included: 2 battleships, 72 mine boats, 2 light cruisers, 18 destroyers, 3 transport ships, equipment of the naval stations, and 10,000 mines. Total 124,000,000. This program did not satisfy anybody and there was a new proposal squeezed within the same budgetary limits. It included 4 battleships for the Baltic Fleet, 14 destroyers for the Black Sea fleet plus repair bases, etc.
The program was presented to the Cabinet. “
Discussing the need for accurate justification not only of the maritime, but also military estimates, the Council of Ministers noted that at present, the government does not have a definite and coordinated program for the development of the armed forces of the empire in all parts of government, and above all parts of the military and naval departments… The most serious attention should be paid to the speedy implementation of this task, because without such a plan and program, all undertakings designed for the military, sea and other in contact departments will not have a solid foundation and proper regularity, desirable in all state events and strictly necessary in the now upcoming Russia for the extremely important task of reviving its naval power.” The Emperor’s resolution was: “
A general plan for the defense of the state should be developed, short and clear, for one or two decades. Upon its approval, it must be steadily and consistently enforced.”
Council of the Ministers did not change the funding and sent it to the Duma’s Budget Sub-commission of the state defense. Sub-commission responded with an extensive report in which it expressed a deep distrust to the Naval Ministry in the terms of the adequacy of its structure to the task of a major upgrade of the Russian Navy and requested a serious administrative reform because otherwise a proper usage of the allocated funds can’t be guaranteed and the money allocated for construction of the battleships will be wasted. It was underscored that the problem is not in the technical readiness of the shipbuilding industry but in a chronic mismanaging of the projects. On this Commission had a valid point: construction of the capital ships always suffered from the technical and budgetary miscalculations, last minute changes, overlooked issues, etc. As a result, Duma voted for a resolution which was stressing importance of the fleet for country’s defense and stated that this goal can be achieved only by reform of the Naval Ministry and creation of a comprehensive long-term naval program. The credits for completion of the battleships under construction, purchase of the artillery, construction of the destroyers and naval bases were approved but credits for construction of the new battleships, were put on hold. The government did not agree with the resolution of the State Duma and made an estimate to the State Council, which supported its point of view. Loans for shipbuilding were made to the list in accordance with Article 13 of the rules on consideration of state expenses. Construction of 4 battleships was approved but did not start immediately due to various administrative issues.
Within next two years a thorough reform of the Naval Ministry had been conducted and position of Admiral-General was abolished. By 1897 Naval General Staff had time to develop the needed experience and finally was ready to prepare a new meaningful program which was approved by the the government and voted for by the Duma.
This was a 5 years plan with a goal to build 12 battleships (approximately 15,000,000 per ship [8]), 10 armored cruisers (approximately 7,500,000 per ship) and 46 destroyers not counting the torpedo boats, transport ships, repair ships, etc. Price tag of approximately 500,000,000 rubles for 5 years also included a serious upgrades of the industrial plants involved, ports’ facilities, etc.
During the following 5 years the plan considered construction of 12 more battleships and 4 1st class armored cruisers.
Now, with the general outlines being defined the Hell was in the details: what will be specifications of these new ships and where are they going to be deployed. Such a trifle.
(to be continued)
____________
[1] Just as with the modern battleships, there was certain confusion: an offering was of a circumcision. 😂
[2] Tried to find budgets 1900 for Japan and Germany on Google and gave up: was receiving huge numbers of the irrelevant references. In an act of a desperation decided to try Yandex (never used it before but recently heard that it is one of very few that does not use Google search engine. It took one hit per country to get what I needed. 🤗
[3] Even this will be
absolutely dishonest toward Britain (nothing personal, except that I did not like the food and they are driving cars on the wrong side making crossing streets dangerous; exception in attitude is for Scotland due to the single malt Scotch) but so is a big part of this TL and so far I did not see too many objections. 😜
[4] Russian Admiralty building in St. Petersburg.
[5] Of course, in OTL, Russia was not in the metric system but do you want “arshin” and “vershok”?
@Aluma, this is a purely rhetorical question: the only acceptable answer is “no”. 😜
[6] If somebody is under impression that I understand that stuff, thanks for overestimating my erudition.
[7] By that time in OTL he already was quite active. From 1891 he initiated and founded the first edition of the Russian annual directory of Military Fleets, in 1895 he developed a program of strengthening the Russian Navy in the Pacific. Starting in 1896, he taught the
Naval Game at the Naval Science Classes in the
Naval Academy.
[8] This was still a pre-dreadnought era.
