Wilhelm II limits German Navy

What if Wilhelm II, while wanting a navy, had an attack of common sense, and had limited the size of the navy?

The reason: Germany had compared to England or France no experience in shipbuilding. And we all know that if you build a ship very fast the mistakes in design or construction show up. And while a battlehips is very expensive and designed to last about 25 years, it is not good if you have an ill-designed warship that makes the other countries have a few jokes at your expense and you have to wait 20 years before you have the money to replace it.

So, lets assume (and I just choose the numbers without regard to reality) that Wilhelm II Limits the German navy to 30 +2 Dreadnoughts/Battleships and all other ship classes are also with a fixed number.

The + 2 are the testing bed ships. Those are ships that are never finished, so either they have engines and armor and weights for guns, or they carry armor and guns, but engines are not working etc. And those Shops are confined to a testing area in the Baltic. And Germany invites the other powers to look that those ships are never finished. Of course what those ships are equipped with, either the new armor type or the new engine type, that is kept secret.

So, how would that Change the Outlook of England, France, Russia, USA? And what about Worldwar 1 if it still happens?
 

trajen777

Banned
I feel with out the threat of the German navy, the prob of England coming together with the Entente is minimal. Germany in the war had 21 BB (so u might want to down shift to 12 or 14 vs ramping up to 30
1. England is not in a massively expensive naval build out war vs Germany (if any it would be vs Russia)
2. The possibility of Germany invading GB is minimal so you dont have all of the popular books "GERMANY INVADING" that were popular at the end of the war
3. Germany expenditures would favor the Army which would then expand to a higher % of their population in military uniform (it was significantly lower then France as a % of manpower) so you end up with perhaps 9-10 armies vs 8
4. With the increased forces France and Russia would be less driven to war
5. With out GB France and Russia would be uncomfortable going to war (est with the increased German forces)
 
When is the limiting happening though? After 1909 when the first German dreadnought hits water? By that time the UK had already settled the problems with Russia and France, leaving only the problems with Germany which can not be solved as Germany has nothing to give.
 
While I will say the decision to try to compete navally against Britain was... dubious at best, the Kaiser and his government weren't behaving entirely irrationally when they wanted to build a fairly substantial navy. There were several major factors which actually made doing the build-up when they did a rather smart move.

1. The building of the Dreadnaught effectively reset the Battleship calculations as close to zero as could be hoped for by any nation who started from a poor position to get into the naval game. Previously dominant nations would also have to re-do their facilities, deal with mechanical/technical problems and crew training, ect., which limits their ability to parlay previous naval supremacy and experiance to counter industrial inferiority.
2. The Franco-Russian Alliance creates a naval and blockade threat to Germany via the North Sea and Baltic: theatures in which Germany's only dependable ally A-H can't effectively intervene. This means, in the event of war, not only is the High Seas fleet vulnerable, but so is the flow of goods from Scandinavia (Iron and Copper, in particular, which clearly qualify as "material of war" under international blockade laws) and from across the Atlantic (Nitrates, for example) which would be vital to any war effort.
3. The Navy served as a nation-building project, as it was a service under the Imperial government rather than being divided among the constituent Kingdoms during peacetime.
 
I think that without Russia stupidly throwing its navy away in the Russo-Japanese war few people would ever question the building of the German navy.

The initial impetus from building up the German navy was the combined power of the Russian and French navies, formally linked in an alliance from 1893, not the British who formally adopted the Two Power standard in 1889, 9 years before the first German naval law of 1898. The Russo-Japanese war caused a major resuffling of the deck in terms of the naval balance, Russia was gone as a European Naval power, as was the considerable power of the Franco-Russian alliance in European waters, both in the Med and in NW Europe, this automatically bumped Germany 1 or 2 steps up the naval ladder and bought it to the attention of the British. This would have been a fleeting thing without WW1, by 1915 the Russians would have had 12-13 Capital ships in European waters again, causing another re-balance of naval power and divert some British attention away from Germany be default.

I'd also like to address the Navy vs Army thing, there is a misconception that the German Army was small because the money was going to the German Navy. The reason why the German Army was kept small was because the conservative powers that be did not want to 'dilute' the power of the Aristocrats in the Officer Corps by bringing in more Middle Class officers, which would be an unavoidable consequence of Army expansion. The Army wasn't short of money, it already had the most heavy artillery in Europe and the largest stock of shells. Backing this class-based political bias against expanding the Army was that the Navy was an Imperial/Federal institution, unlike the Army which was made up of 'national' Armies, thus the Navy was popular with the Federal/Imperial politicians and the Middle Class.
 
I think a lot of people grab him violently and ask who he is and what has he done with the real Emperor...
 
Willy limited the Navy in another way,; he limited its effectiveness by giving it an appalling command structure in 1899 where he was the CinC of the entire Navy and the rest was a hodgepodge of diverse authorities and responsibilities with nobody but the Kaiser directing naval operations as a whole, and him doing a less than half-arsed job of it.
 
Firstly, Tirpitz always specified Squadrons not ships. This was so law makers could not try and trim ships from the budget as the Military were the experts and that things less than complete units were unsound. A battle-squadron was 8 ships so 8:16:24:32 or 40 ships.

The other thing was that Tirpitz carefully nurtured and grew the industry to expect a level of funding. This is far more efficient than lumpy funding from year to year. This is why the French spent more on their fleet than Germany but they dropped from 2nd to 3rd rank.

The navy was a way of reminding the millions of German diaspora (9million in USA alone) across the world that Germany had not forgotten them. Just as the Army was a Prussian preserve, the Navy was a Federal activity. Navies as nation building in this era is often over looked. Most countries were looking at some sort of 'navalism' for domestic policy and national spirit, these include Russia, Japan, Turkey and Australia. Even the USN went dry in 1914 to ecourage the perception of the service and America as 'new age' and 'new men'.

Tirpitz's original business case was that the Battleship plan would not cost any more than the current plan and he was able to sell it as such. The Alliance value worked until the Russian Navy was decimated. Interestingly it was Russia's plan to occupy the 'Alliance value' position between GB and Germany from 1912 to 1930 with a plan for 34 capital ships.

By 1914, the naval race and much of the rivaly was over. Tirpitz and Churchill were abiding by their 16:10 ratio of Battleships or as Tirpitz described it 8 squadrons to 5. German naval spending on construction had flattened out at about £11m per year in 1910 and had stayed there.

Arms races don't cause wars anymore than insurance causes accidents. Economic recovery causes wars.
 
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I disagree with the idea that chilly UK-German relations were simply due to german shipbuilding program: that was only the most apparent reason; the truth is tatUK feared Germany as they saw it a rising economical powerhouse that might soon challenge traditional british dominance over financial markets.
 
I disagree with the idea that chilly UK-German relations were simply due to german shipbuilding program: that was only the most apparent reason; the truth is tatUK feared Germany as they saw it a rising economical powerhouse that might soon challenge traditional british dominance over financial markets.
A major factor in the decline of Anglo-German relations was Edward VII's antagonism towards Wilhelm II. If Edward had died in the 1900 Brussels assassination attempt the UK and the world would have benefited.
 
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