The Saber and Scroll Journal Volume 5, Issue 4, Fall 2016 | Page 8

unglamorous, the policy of weaker naval powers throughout history has often been
to further their strategic goals by keeping their fleets intact, avoiding risking them
against the enemy unless absolutely necessary. The fleet-in-being strategy—a term
coined around 1690 during the War of the League of Augsburg—is an appealing
option for naval powers that have little to gain and much to lose by risking their
few precious capital ships in tests of strength against superior enemy forces. By
keeping its fleet “in-being,” a weaker naval power risks little while possibly
gaining much—forcing the enemy to react in accordance with its wishes, to a
greater extent than if its fleet was squandered in costly naval engagements. 4
Figure 1. “The Lone Queen of the North.” Lurking in Norway’s picturesque fjords, Tirpitz posed a grave
menace to the Allied Arctic convoys. This is how the ship appeared during Operation Rösselsprung; she
is seen here in Altafjord sometime after the abortive sortie. (http://www.history.navy.mil/our-collections/
photography/numerical-list-of-images/nhhc-series/nh-series/NH-71000/NH-71390.html)
Tirpitz was commissioned into a fleet that had been thrown into war
prematurely with no hope of defeating the Royal Navy in open battle. When Hitler
plunged the Third Reich into world war in September 1939, the Kriegsmarine was
largely unprepared for a naval conflict. This lamentable situation (from a German
standpoint) was very different from that which had faced the Kaiserliche Marine
and the Imperial German Navy at the beginning of the Great War twenty-five
years prior. In 1914 the German Navy was the second largest in the world behind
the Royal Navy. Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, the one responsible for sparking a
battleship arms race with the British, had in fact contributed to driving that nation
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