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

  Between March and July 1918 repeated German offensives on the Western Front narrowly failed to break the Allied line. The Germans leadership had unwisely promised its troops victory and when it failed to appear, despite the willing sacrifices that had been made, trust in their leaders began to crumble. From the time of the British massed tank attack at Amiens on 8 August the German Army was in constant retreat.

  In the North Sea a major raid was mounted against German bases of Zeebrugge and Ostend on 23 April with the intention of closing the entrances of the Bruges canals with blockships. The raid was only a limited success but was remarkable for the courage with which it was carried out. That against Ostend was repeated on 10 May. German morale was lowered by the British ability to carry out such heavy raids against their vulnerable seaward flank while their own offensives were in progress. Although the canal mouths were re-opened quickly, the two ports were evacuated in conformity with the German Army’s general retreat and several U-boats and destroyers under repair had to be left behind.

  For a variety of reasons that will be described in detail, the High Seas Fleet, once the Kaiser’s pride and joy, refused to fight one final battle and mutinied, thereby provoking a revolution throughout Germany. On 21 November 1918 the major part of its strength sailed across the North Sea under humiliating escort, first to the Firth of Forth and then to Scapa Flow, where it scuttled itself seven months later.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Warlord

  Prinz Friedrich Wilhelm Viktor Hohenzollern von Preussen, the future Kaiser Wilhelm II, first saw the light of day on 27th January 1859. It was a difficult breech birth resulting in Erbs Palsey and it left him with a withered left arm. In later life he was able to conceal this disability by resting his left hand on his sword hilt or bridle if mounted, or by using it to carry a pair of white gloves or a cane to produce a fair impression of normality. It was also said that during his birth the supply of blood to the brain was interrupted for a period and this may have contributed to his erratic, impulsive and self-contradictory personality.

  For example, he was the first grandchild of the British Queen Victoria, whom he dearly loved and deeply mourned when she died. His mother, also named Victoria, had been the United Kingdom’s Princess Royal, although his feelings for her were very different. His father inherited the throne to become Kaiser Friedrich III, Germany’s second Emperor, but he reigned for only 99 days. Wilhelm’s view of these events was summed up in one unjustifiable and hysterical outburst: ‘An English doctor killed my father and an English doctor crippled my arm, which is the fault of my mother!’ Who, of course, also happened to be English.

  Wilhelm fitted perfectly into the militaristic society which was the Germany of the time. Depending upon any one day’s programme, he might change into different uniforms every few hours, requiring considerable forethought and activity on the part of his servants, all of which seemed quite unremarkable for the Supreme Commander of mainland Europe’s most efficient army. Parades, reviews and manoeuvres all enabled him to posture to his heart’s content, assisted by a distinctive turned-up moustache producing an impression of ferocity. Those with some knowledge of the subject recognised that he was affected by the disorder known as megalomania.

  As most of Europe’s royal families of the era were related, personal contact between their members played a large part in diplomatic activity. Unfortunately, while commenting that war between Germany and Great Britain was ‘a most unimaginable thing,’ Wilhelm harboured a strong dislike for his English uncle, King Edward VII, stemming from jealousy. Edward did indeed possess an empire on which the sun never set. Wilhelm declared that Germany, too, had a right to ‘a place in the sun,’ but few of the colonies he began establishing in distant parts of the globe produced an adequate return for their upkeep. Again, Edward’s Royal Navy was the largest and most prestigious in the world. Wilhelm admired it and was desperate for a large fleet of his own, the acquisition of which would mean that the German Empire, created as recently as 1870, had indeed become a world power.

  In this he was actively encouraged by Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, who sported the kind of forked beard favoured by pantomime demons. When he became virtual head of the Imperial German Navy in 1897, Tirpitz encouraged Wilhelm’s government to spend vast sums on building a battle fleet that would pose a threat to the Royal Navy’s dominance, arguing that the risk posed by a rival presence in the North Sea would discourage the British from interfering in Germany’s perceived interests around the world. British naval policy was already to maintain a navy equal in size to the combined naval strength of any two major powers. Tirpitz reasoned, therefore, that in any possible conflict between the British and German navies, the former would sustain losses that would destroy that ratio, even if the Royal Navy was victorious locally. This so-called ‘risk theory’ was wishful thinking at its worst, as British diplomacy quickly reached an amicable understanding with the United Kingdom’s most likely maritime opponents, France and Russia. The immediate result of Tirpitz’s avowed intentions was to sour Anglo-German relations and provoke a naval construction race between the two countries. Tirpitz immediately found himself to be at a major disadvantage as the Imperial Army had a prior claim on funds and resources. His construction programme was already lagging when, in 1906, HMS Dreadnought, armed with ten 12-inch guns, entered service with the Royal Navy, making every other battleship in the world obsolete. Tirpitz was forced to start from scratch again, not only in the field of designing dreadnought-type battleships, but also in building docks to handle them and widening the Kiel Canal, which was the Imperial Navy’s strategic means of passage between the North and Baltic Seas. To make matters worse, in 1908 the Royal Navy introduced an altogether new class of warship, the battle cruiser, which combined the hitting power of the battleship with the speed of the cruiser. As we shall see, there was an inherent flaw in the concept, but for the moment it rendered the heavy cruiser obsolete as a class and set the German designers yet another problem to be solved at short notice. As if this was not bad enough, in 1912 the Royal Navy began arming its latest class of dreadnought with 15-inch guns while the Germans had not progressed beyond a 12-inch main armament for theirs.

  By August 1914 the Royal Navy had 20 dreadnought battleships in commission, plus two due for completion by the end of the year, three due for delivery in 1915 and six more in 1916. In addition, three dreadnoughts being built for foreign navies were promptly requisitioned. Nine battle cruisers were already operational and a tenth was serving in the Royal Australian Navy. In contrast, only 15 German dreadnoughts had been commissioned by August 1914, with two more expected in 1915 and another two in 1916. Six battle cruisers were in service, with a seventh due in 1915 and an eighth in 1916.

  Tirpitz had annoyed a great many people with his anti-British attitude and incessant demands, but now, thoroughly alarmed, he began agitating for peace. Unfortunately, because of greatly improved relations between Great Britain and France, Germany’s historic enemy, there was now a ground-swell of anti-British feeling throughout central Europe. Even if his warnings had been heeded, events were rapidly spiralling out of control. On 28th June 1914 the Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife were murdered by a Serbian nationalist in Sarajevo, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. There was a horrible inevitability about the sequence of event that followed. Austria-Hungary threatened to invade Serbia unless the Serbs agreed to accept a series of impossibly humiliating demands. Serbia’s protector was Russia, who promised to come to her aid if she was attacked. The contents of this witches’ cauldron were already close to bubbling over when Wilhelm, whose forays into international relations were the despair of his diplomatic service, chose to toss in one of his hopelessly ill-considered comments: ‘The day of Austro-Hungarian mobilisation, for whatever cause, will be the day of German mobilisation, too!’ Then he went on holiday. Encouraged, the Austrians set their war machine in motion. Russia had no alternative but to respond by mobilising her huge army. B
y the time Wilhelm returned from his jaunt the situation was beyond control. France mobilised in compliance with her understanding with Russia, followed by the United Kingdom, which had similar understandings with both as well as a treaty obligation to protect Belgium, passage through which formed part of the German General Staff’s plan of campaign against France. All the major powers of Europe now found themselves embarked on a full-scale war, little understanding that modern weapons were capable of inflicting slaughter on a truly industrial scale.

  The Imperial German Navy might have been one of the Kaiser’s favourite toys, but the question of what to do with it now that Great Britain and Germany were actually at war was never satisfactorily resolved. In global terms, a number of German cruisers and gunboats were showing the flag around the world. No one expected them to survive for long and they didn’t, but that is another story. Most of the Imperial Navy, was optimistically named the High Seas Fleet, despite being confined to home waters from which it could only be deployed against Russia in the Baltic or the United Kingdom across the North Sea. Admiral Friedrich von Ingenohl, Commander-in-Chief of the High Seas Fleet, immediately dismissed the idea of a major action between his surface ships and the much larger British Grand Fleet as the outcome was entirely predictable. On the other hand, what was to be done with the surface warships on which so much treasure had been lavished and which required tens of thousands of men to man, men whom the Army would gladly have absorbed to replace the horrendous losses of the war’s early battles? In the view of Ingenohl, an innately cautious man, the answer was nothing, beyond mine-laying off the English coast, sinking a few British trawlers, regular defensive patrolling in the Heligoland Bight, and gunfire support for the ground troops fighting against the Russians on the Baltic coast. Again, the Kaiser himself insisted that the High Seas Fleet must be preserved as a bargaining counter in the peace talks that would follow shortly after his armies’ rapid destruction of their opponents. That, too, proved to be wishful thinking and in a matter of weeks Ingenohl would be forced to commit his ships to battle.

  CHAPTER 3

  Kicking in the Front Door – The Battle of Heligoland Bight

  During the first hour of 26 August 1914 the German cruiser Magdeburg ran aground in fog 500 yards off the Odensholm lighthouse in the Baltic. All efforts to refloat the vessel failed and her forecastle was blown off to prevent her falling into enemy hands. Some of the crew were taken off by an accompanying destroyer, but the captain and 56 of his men were taken prisoner when two Russian cruisers arrived on the scene and opened fire, causing the destroyer to beat a hasty retreat. To the Russians’ astonishment and delight, the Magdeburg’s signal code book, cipher tables and a marked grid chart of the North Sea were recovered from the body of a drowned signalman. They were promptly passed to the British Admiralty which set up a radio intercept intelligence branch known as Room 40. By mid-December the code breakers were able to listen to the Imperial Navy’s radio traffic to their hearts’ content.

  As if this was not bad enough, on 28 August a strong raiding force commanded by Commodore Roger Keyes penetrated the Heligoland Bight. The raiders were not merely on Germany’s doorstep – they were halfway through her front door. In the lead were two destroyer flotillas commanded by Commodore R.Y. Tyrwhitt, followed by the 1st Light Cruiser Squadron under Commodore W.R. Goodenough and Rear Admiral A.H. Christian’s 7th Cruiser Squadron. Standing off and ready to intervene or administer the decisive coup de grace was Vice Admiral Sir David Beatty’s 1st Battle Cruiser Squadron, consisting of the battle cruisers Lion, Princess Royal, Queen Mary, New Zealand and Invincible with their escorting destroyers. A flotilla of submarines was also attached to the force with the task of alarming the enemy and confusing his response.

  Map 2. The earlier phases of the Battle of Heligoland Bight. 7 to 11am.

  Map 3. The final phase of the Battle of Heligoland Bight. 11am to 4 pm.

  The subsequent engagement took place in a flat calm but was a confused affair in which visibility was limited to two or three miles, effectively denying the German coastal defence batteries on Heligoland Island the chance to join in. The British destroyers fought a fast-moving action, sinking one of their opposite numbers, V-187. However, at about 08:00, Tyrwhitt’s flagship, the light cruiser Arethusa, was engaged with a German cruiser, the Stettin. Unfortunately, the Arethusa had only been commissioned two days previously, so her crew had neither the benefits of a shakedown cruise nor gunnery practice – and, like the ship herself, her guns were also brand new and still prone to jamming. A second enemy cruiser, the Frauenlob, joined in the fight and Arethusa began to take a battering. Before long all her guns except for the forecastle 6-inch were out of action for various reasons, an ammunition fire had broken out and casualties were rising. Luckily, at this point the light cruiser Fearless, the leader of the 1st Destroyer Flotilla, arrived and drew off Stettin’s fire. At 08:25 one of Arethusa’s shells exploded on Frauenlob’s forebridge, killing everyone in the bridge party, including her captain. She sheered away out of the battle in the direction of Heligoland, covered by Stettin. The first phase of the battle was over.

  The High Seas Fleet command, believing that the only enemy ships in the area were Arethusa, Fearless and the destroyers, now began directing more of its own cruisers into the Bight. Fighting was renewed at about 10:00, by which time Arethusa had recovered the use of all but two of her guns although her maximum speed had been reduced to ten knots. Having seen Frauenlob safely out of the action, Stettin returned to the fray, followed by Stralsund, which immediately became involved in a duel with Arethusa. Four more German cruisers, Koln, Kolberg, Strassburg and Ariadne, entered the fight shortly after so that by 11:00 Tyrwhitt found himself in the midst of a thoroughly disturbed hornet’s nest. He sent a radio signal to Beatty, still some distance away to the north-west, requesting urgent assistance. Beatty despatched Commodore Goodenough’s light cruiser squadron immediately and followed with his battle cruisers at about 11:30.

  For those British cruisers and destroyers already engaged with the enemy, there was the constant fear that the German battle cruisers would emerge from their anchorage in the Jade River and send them to the bottom before help could arrive. They need not have worried, for in the present state of the tide the enemy’s heavy warships drew too much water for them to be able to cross the sandbar at the river’s mouth, a situation that would not change until the afternoon. In the meantime, senior German commanders could only fume with rage and frustration while the battle took its course.

  Goodenough’s light cruisers arrived at about noon. When, at 12:15, the battle cruisers, led by Beatty in Lion, burst out of the northern mist, there could no longer be any doubt as to the battle’s outcome.

  Three of the enemy’s light cruisers, Mainz, Koln and Ariadne, were sunk after fighting to the bitter end, and the rest escaped in a damaged condition. In addition, the battle cost Germany 1,200 officers and men killed or captured. Among those killed aboard the Koln was Rear Admiral Leberecht Maas, commander of the German light forces in the Bight. The British destroyer Lurcher rescued many survivors from the Mainz, including Lieutenant von Tirpitz, son of the German Minister of Marine. Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, chivalrously arranged for the International Red Cross to advise the Admiral that the young officer had survived the battle. British casualties amounted to 35 killed and some 40 wounded. Most of the damage sustained was repaired in a week.

  The outcome of the battle created a tremendous sense of shock throughout Germany. The Kaiser sent for his Chief of Naval Staff, Admiral Hugo von Pohl. He was horrified by the loss that had been incurred during a comparatively minor engagement and impressed upon Pohl that the fleet should refrain from fighting ‘actions that can lead to greater losses.’ Pohl promptly telegraphed Ingenohl to the effect that ‘In his anxiety to preserve the fleet His Majesty requires you to wire for his consent before entering a decisive action.’ In other words, before involving the High Seas Fleet in any sort of
large scale action, Ingenohl, a professional naval officer of many years standing, should seek the advice of that old sea dog, Wilhelm Hohenzollern.

  The battle and its aftermath marked the beginning of the end of Tirpitz’s career. The admiral had produced a fleet of fine ships that were in some respects better than those of the Royal Navy. They were, for example, compartmentalised to a greater extent, enabling them to withstand considerable punishment, and they were equipped with fine optical gun-sights. Understandably, he did not wish to see his creation destroyed in a fleet action, but neither did he want to see it tied up at its moorings for the duration of the war. In his memoirs, written in 1919, he expressed outrage at Wilhelm’s diktat:

  Order issued by the Emperor following an audience with Pohl – to which I was not summoned – restricted the initiative of the Commander-in-Chief North Sea Fleet. The loss of ships was to be avoided, while fleet sallies and any greater undertakings must be approved by His Majesty in advance. I took the first opportunity to explain to the Emperor the fundamental error of such a muzzling policy.

  This argument met with no success; on the contrary, there sprang up from that day forth an estrangement between the Emperor and myself which steadily increased.

  Today, Pohl’s name means nothing to most people, even in Germany, yet there were two remarkable things about him. First, in 1913 he had been honoured in Great Britain by an appointment as a Companion of the Order of the Bath, a surprising adornment for one of the most senior officers in a rival navy. Secondly, he was quick to realise that the Imperial Navy’s U-boat arm was capable of inflicting far greater damage on the enemy than the surface fleet. Although the German light cruiser Hela was torpedoed and sunk by the British submarine E-9 (commanded by the then Lieutenant Max Horton, who became Commander-in-Chief Western Approaches during World War Two) the months of September and October 1914 belonged to the U-boats, which fully justified Pohl’s opinion of their potential. On 5 September the light cruiser Pathfinder was torpedoed off the Scottish coast and sank with heavy loss of life. On 22 September Lieutenant Otto Weddigen’s U-9 sank, in turn, the elderly cruiser Aboukir, then her sister ship Hogue as she was picking up survivors, then a third sister, Cressey, which opened an ineffective fire against the submarine’s periscope. Of the 1,459 officers and men manning the three cruisers, many of them elderly reservists, only 779 were rescued by nearby trawlers. Weddigen’s remarkable feat earned him Imperial Germany’s most coveted award, the Pour le Merite. On 15 October U-9 claimed a further victim in the North Sea, the ancient protected cruiser Hawke which, having been launched in 1893, had really reached the end of her useful life. The same month saw the seaplane carrier Hermes torpedoed and sunk by U-27. In addition, U-boats had sunk a modest tonnage of Allied merchant shipping, although this would rise to horrific levels as the war progressed. To end a very depressing month, the dreadnought battleship Audacious struck a mine laid by the armed merchant cruiser Berlin off the north coast of Ireland and sank as the result of an internal explosion.