North Sea Battleground: The War at Sea 1914-1918 Read online

  First Published in Great Britain in 2011 by

  Pen & Sword Military

  an imprint of

  Pen & Sword Books Ltd

  47 Church Street

  Barnsley

  South Yorkshire

  S70 2AS

  Copyright © Bryan Perrett 2011

  ISBN: 978-1-84884-450-6

  ePub ISBN: 9781848849884

  PRC ISBN: 9781848849891

  The right of Bryan Perrett to be identified as Author of this Work

  has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs

  and Patents Act 1988.

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  available from the British Library.

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  Contents

  Chapter 1 Introduction

  Chapter 2 The Warlord

  Chapter 3 Kicking in the Front Door – The Battle of Heligoland Bight

  Chapter 4 Off to Yarmouth for the Day

  Chapter 5 Admiral Ingenohl Decides to Go Home

  Chapter 6 Dawn Bombardment – The German Bombardments of Scarborough, Whitby and Hartlepool

  Chapter 7 Once Too Often – The Battle of Dogger Bank

  Chapter 8 Scheer Strikes Back

  Chapter 9 Strafing the Island (1)

  Chapter 10 A Battle Long Awaited – Jutland and Its Sequel

  Chapter 11 Strafing the Island (2)

  Chapter 12 North and South – Destroyer Actions, Attacks on Scandinavian Convoys, Second Battle of Heligoland Bight

  Chapter 13 End Game – The Zeebrugge and Ostend Raids

  Chapter 14 Envoie – The End of the High Seas Fleet – Mutiny, Internment and Scuttling 137

  Appendix The Admirals

  Bibliography

  Index

  Map 1. This chart shows the major British and German naval bases within the area covered by this book. It also includes some details concerning the Battle of Jutland.

  CHAPTER 1

  Introduction

  In 1914 it was fully understood by Germany’s higher naval and military authorities that, despite having acquired the largest empire in the world, the civilian population of the British Isles had not experienced war at first hand since the Civil Wars of the mid-17th Century, save for brief and mainly local hostilities resulting from the Jacobite risings, an abortive French landing at Fishguard in 1797, and an equally abortive rising, with French support, in Ireland the following year. This was considered to be an area of general weakness that could be exploited with the object of eroding the British will to continue fighting.

  This exploitation, it was believed, could be achieved in a number of ways. First, while a general engagement between the German High Seas Fleet and the British Grand Fleet would probably end in victory for the latter on the basis of size alone, a series of raids along the UK’s East Coast would erode the confidence of the British public in the Royal Navy’s ability to provide the same degree of protection that existed throughout the Napoleonic Wars. This would be aggravated by the Grand Fleet having been deployed to Scapa Flow in the extreme north, leaving large areas of the east coast protected by light naval units that could easily be overwhelmed at the point of contact. Civilian casualties incurred in this kind of raid would generate a sense of unease along the coast, together with the fear of a German landing in pursuit of local objectives.

  Second, air power could be deployed to generate further unease inland. Naval Zeppelin airships were already performing reconnaissance duties for the High Seas Fleet and, together with the Army’s Zeppelins, these could be armed with bombs and attack wide areas of the British mainland. It was true that the weight of munitions carried by the Zeppelins was only a fraction of that carried by, say, a battle cruiser, but the sheer unpredictability of raids that inflicted death, injury and destruction across a wide area would, it was believed, further damage British morale. The only property exempted from attack was that belonging to the Royal Family, by personal order of the Kaiser. Furthermore, to provide a defence against the Zeppelins, the British authorities would have to retain at home thousands of men plus hundreds of guns and aircraft that could have been put to good use on the Western Front.

  Much would depend on control of the North Sea. In this respect the British demonstrated an early superiority by carrying out a destructive raid into the Heligoland Bight, on the very doorstep of the High Seas Fleet. This resulted in several German cruisers being sunk at little cost to the Royal Navy. For their part, the Germans had to accept that naval attacks on the British mainland had to be hit-and-run affairs, conducted before the battleships and battle cruisers of the Grand Fleet could be brought south to deal with the attackers. In this respect, the Germans, little knowing that copies of their signal code books had fallen into British hands, were in for a most unpleasant surprise. Somehow, with the exception of the first raid, which simply resulted in a pointless bombardment of the Yarmouth foreshore and the loss of a German armoured cruiser in a minefield, the Royal Navy seemed to have an uncanny habit of appearing in strength whenever a raid was in progress. The raids on Scarborough, Whitby and the Hartlepools in December 1914 were at first considered to be a brilliant success, but subsequent analysis proved that they had been counterproductive. First, they involved heavy loss of civilian life although no military installations existed at Scarborough or Whitby. This wanton targeting of innocent civilians not only provided a spur to British recruiting, which was already good, but also earned the condemnation of neutral powers. Further examination revealed that thanks to a combination of poor visibility and sheer luck, the raiders escaped by the skin of their teeth. The following month a sortie to the Dogger Bank area resulted in a battle that ended with the loss of a heavy cruiser. The Kaiser was furious. It would be over a year before he sanctioned another foray by heavy units of his surface fleet and that ended in serious mine damage to one of his precious battle cruisers to little purpose.

  Meanwhile, the Zeppelin air offensive had started on the night of 19–20 January 1915 and gradually gathered pace throughout the year, involving naval and to a lesser extent Army airships. A small number of raids inflicted serious civilian casualties and damage, but most produced trivial results for the effort involved. The initial reaction was one of anger that the Royal Navy had permitted the raiders to get through. This was quickly followed by a realisation that there was little that the surface fleet could do to prevent Zeppelin raids and an acceptance that the Germans possessed air superiority over
large areas of the North Sea. However, once initial fears of wholesale death and destruction raining from the skies proved to be unfounded, public attitudes hardened. After the North Sea bombardments the general opinion was that this sort of cowardly attack on defenceless civilians was all that could be expected from the enemy. More subtle was the change brought about by the ever-lengthening casualty lists from the front, lists that would grow longer still and leave barely a family in the land untouched. For the first time the general public felt that they were as much part of the war as the citizen soldiers fighting in the trenches, so that instead of civilian morale cracking as a result of the air attacks, it actually hardened.

  The only real effect the raids had on the British war effort was the unwelcome diversion of numerous Royal Flying Corps and Royal Naval Air Service fighter squadrons to home defence, together with the creation of a substantial anti-aircraft defence organisation including early warning and ground control systems, anti-aircraft artillery batteries and searchlight units. To some extent this was made easier by the fact that the airships’ most favoured targets were situated in London and south-eastern England. This meant that they entered British airspace over East Anglia and, having completed their mission, left via Kent or Essex. It was easy, therefore, to construct defensive cordons across the entry and exit routes.

  At first the Zeppelins seemed invulnerable because they could reach greater heights than the fighter aircraft in service. Even if a fighter was able to engage at the same height, conventional machine gun bullets simply created punctures in the gasbags that could be sealed easily with patches. When better aircraft entered service they were sometimes able to operate above the Zeppelins and could inflict fatal damage by dropping small high explosive bombs or explosive darts on the envelope, starting fires that the airships could not control and which guaranteed most of their crews a horrible death. With the introduction of incendiary and explosive bullets, perfected by the fireworks industry, it became possible for a fighter to carry out a successful attack not only from above, but also from the side and below. Anti-aircraft fire also claimed a number of kills.

  There were also a number of problems inherent in Zeppelin operations. Any significant wind pushed the huge bulk and light weight of the airships about and made them difficult to navigate if landmarks were not visible. The airships were also extremely flimsy, so that bad handling in their hangars or a heavy landing could involve their being damaged beyond repair. Occasionally, Zeppelins damaged in action would be forced to ditch in the North Sea or on the coasts of neutral Denmark or Holland. By the end of 1916 even Count Zeppelin recognised that the number of losses caused by enemy action and other accidents made their continued use prohibitively expensive in relation to the damage they caused. As described below, from that point onwards the air offensive against the United Kingdom was progressively taken up by heavier-than-air bombers.

  Meanwhile, though not directly relevant to operations in the North Sea, the Imperial German Navy had embarked on a campaign of unrestricted submarine warfare. The sinking of the luxury liner Lusitania on 7 May 1915 off the southern coast of Ireland with the loss of 1,198 lives, including 128 Americans, caused widespread international protests which the Germans ignored. On 19 August the small Arabic was torpedoed and sunk with the loss of 40 lives, including three Americans. This also generated angry protests, causing the Germans to abandon submerged attacks. On 24 March 1916 the sinking of the French cross-Channel ferry Sussex, with some loss of life, led to such furious American protests that the policy was temporarily abandoned.

  In May 1916 the German High Seas Fleet, under the command of Admiral Reinhard Scheer, reverted to the strategy of trying to ambush a portion of the British Grand Fleet. The result was the Battle of Jutland, fought in bad visibility during the afternoon and night of 31 May–1 June. The British loss in ships and men was the heavier but it was the High Seas Fleet that fled to its harbours in critically damaged condition. On the basis of statistics, the German press claimed a victory, while British reports of the action were largely negative in their tone. The British public had been looking forward to a victory on the scale of Trafalgar and, following in the wake of the Royal Navy’s failure to force the Dardanelles the previous year and the enemy attacks on the coast, it was bitterly disappointed. This sense of gloom deepened when, on 5 June, Field Marshal Lord Kitchener was drowned when the cruiser Hampshire, in which he was travelling to Russia, struck a mine and sank off the Orkneys. The depression produced by these events failed to take into account the fact that Jellicoe was able to take the Grand Fleet to sea within days of the battle, whereas the High Seas Fleet remained incapable of fighting for many weeks. Indeed, informed opinion in Germany recognised that another such ‘victory’ would be disastrous.

  Not until 19 August was Scheer able to take the High Seas Fleet to sea again, but Jellicoe, forewarned as usual, was already bearing down on him with the entire Grand Fleet before he had fully cleared harbour. Once at sea a false Zeppelin report of a smaller British presence to the south caused Scheer to veer away in that direction, thereby inadvertently avoiding what would almost certainly have been a serious defeat for the Germans. Significantly, this was the last occasion on which Scheer was permitted to incorporate Zeppelins and U-boats in his fleet operations.

  On 3 November 1916 Scheer despatched six of his dreadnought battleships to the rescue of two stranded U-boats, only to have two of them torpedoed by British submarines. This would be the last occasion on which German capital ships entered the North Sea until April 1918. During that period the fleet’s morale began to rot as it remained in harbour and many of its men transferred to the U-boat arm, which was producing good results further afield. One curious result of this constant inactivity on Scheer’s part made Jellicoe suspicious of enemy traps and he confined the Grand Fleet’s operations to the north of latitude 55 degrees 30 minutes. For the moment, therefore, neither fleet engaged in active operations in the North Sea.

  For both sides, the pattern of operations now involved much smaller forces and centred on the north-eastern and south-western areas of the North Sea. The German Army’s advances of 1914 had left it in possession of most of the Belgian coast, including the ports of Ostend and Zeebrugge, from both of which canals ran inland to the dockyard facilities of Bruges. This area was developed into a base for U-boats and destroyers. On 26/27 October 1916 no less than 24 German destroyers, released from the need to screen the larger warships, penetrated as far south as Folkestone, bombarded the coast, sank a destroyer, an empty troop transport and six drifters, and seriously menaced British cross-Channel communications with France, all without loss. As John Buchan commented in his history of the war, ‘The wonder was not that it had happened, but that it had not happened before.’ This German success was offset by the loss of seven out of eleven destroyers in a Russian minefield in the Baltic on the night of 9/10 November 1916.

  On 17 March 1917 a further German raid into the Channel was foiled by the destroyer Broke, under Commander E.R.G.R. Evans, which sank two of her opponents in a sea fight reminiscent of the Nelson touch. In May and June Ostend and Zeebrugge were bombarded. Some damage was caused, but the ports continued to be used by U-boats and destroyers. On 15 July a sortie sank or captured German merchant shipping off the Dutch coast. Scheer, however, decided to exploit the fact that some British convoys, especially those to and from Scandinavia, were lightly escorted. On 17 October two German cruisers sank most of the merchant ships in one of these as well as two escorting destroyers, some 65 miles east of Lerwick. Off the German coast, constant activity by minesweepers was necessary to keep the approaches to the U-boat bases clear. On 17 November this led to the inconclusive Second Battle of Heligoland Bight in which the British sustained damage and the Germans lost a minesweeper. On 12 December four German destroyers all but wiped out another Scandinavian convoy. As a result of this, these convoys were subsequently escorted by a squadron of battleships which the Grand Fleet was able to spare after its strength ha
d been reinforced by the arrival of an American contingent.

  In the wider sphere, the Allied blockade had begun to bite deep into every aspect of life within Germany. It was believed by the German High Command that its effects could only get worse and that the risks involved in permitting U-boats to return to unrestricted attacks, governed only by the Prize Rules, were justified. It was felt that even if America entered the war, the United Kingdom could be starved into submission long before she could make a significant contribution. The strategy proved to be so successful that at one period Great Britain had only a few months’ supplies in hand. The situation improved dramatically when, finally, the Admiralty introduced escorted convoys for all sailings in addition to those bound to and from Scandinavia. As an additional precaution, escorted convoys frequently used routes that differed from the existing shipping lanes, while the recently developed depth charge proved to be a decisive anti-submarine weapon. Elsewhere, the German air offensive continued throughout 1917 with most of the effort being made by Gotha heavy bombers. This failed to have the decisive impact that had been hoped for as the British antiaircraft and fighter defences improved steadily.

  Overall, however, the year 1917 had not been a happy one for the Allies. The Passchendaele offensive had repeated the slaughter of the Somme, although the development of the tank seemed to offer grounds for hope. Russia had been knocked out of the war, the French Army was recovering slowly from the disastrous Nivelle offensive and it would be months before the United States could play a major role on the battlefield. Despite the introduction of conscription, the United Kingdom was reaching the end of its manpower resources. There were also acute shortages and price inflation. There seemed to be no end to the war in sight and serious concern as to what would happen when those German divisions released by the collapse of Russia reached the Western Front. Ironically, the first cracks in the enemy’s morale began to appear among the crew of the High Seas Fleet.