Castles of Steel

by Robert K. Massie

  My dear Jellicoe:

  My disappointment has been made much easier to bear by the very kind letters I have been receiving these last few days.

  Yours of the 13th which has just reached me is one of them and I am indeed grateful to you for all you say. It was a hard time, but we will forget it as we doubtless will both have many more shocks before it is all over.

  The King was most kind and did a great deal to put me right with myself.

  Good luck, old Chap

  Three and a half years later, when Jellicoe’s only son, George, was born, Cosmo Lang, the Archbishop of Canterbury, came to the Isle of Wight to christen the child. Crossing the Solent on the same boat, Admiral Sir George Callaghan told the archbishop that all the admirals who had served with Jellicoe in the Grand Fleet had subscribed to purchase a gold christening cup, which he would present to Jellicoe. After the dinner following the service, Jellicoe took Callaghan aside and said to him, “Look here, old chap, I have long waited to have a chance of showing you some papers to prove that I did everything I could to avoid that painful episode which neither of us can forget. Here they are.” Instantly, Callaghan replied, “Damn your papers, my dear fellow, I don’t want to see them. I have never had any doubt about it.”

  Burdened by the suddenness of his appointment and the pain it had inflicted, Jellicoe took up his immense responsibilities. With the great weapon placed in his hands, he had not only to shield the coasts of Britain from invasion, to guard the exits from the North Sea, and to foil the purposes of the German High Seas Fleet; he had to do more. The nation, the navy, the Admiralty, and the ebullient First Lord expected far more. All believed in Britain’s invincibility at sea and all looked to this small man to bring them victory. And it was not just victory they demanded, but the absolute, annihilating triumph at sea bestowed upon England a century before by another small British admiral: Horatio Nelson.

  CHAPTER 4 First Days

  Jellicoe would have been happy to give England the glorious victory for which it yearned; the problem was to arrange that victory and persuade the Germans to cooperate. For more than a century after Trafalgar, the British navy possessed no detailed, carefully worked out war plan. Instead, British naval officers universally assumed that when war broke out, the fleet would immediately take the offensive. In 1871, when Vice Admiral Sir Spencer Robinson was asked how the navy would be employed in wartime, he replied, “The only description I could give is that wherever it is known that the enemy is, our ships would go and endeavour to destroy him. If you saw a fleet assembling at a stated port, you would send your fleet to that port to attack it. That is my view of the way in which war should be carried out.” This virile opinion was shared by successive Boards of the Admiralty; they restated it in writing on July 1, 1908, when the Sea Lords instructed the Commander-in-Chief of the Channel Fleet that “the principal object is to bring the main German fleet to decisive action and all other operations are subsidiary to this end.” The theme of the instant, all-out assault was drummed into the British public. Nelson had won at Trafalgar, The Spectator declared on October 29, 1910, “because our fleet, inspired by a great tradition and a great man, recognised that to win you must attack—go far, fall upon, fly at the throat of, hammer, pulverise, destroy, annihilate—your enemy.”

  But what if the enemy refused to cooperate? Suppose, in this new war, the Germans, despite possessing the second largest navy in the world, held their ships out of reach inside heavily fortified harbors, awaiting their own moment to strike? Until 1912, when Churchill came to the Admiralty, the Royal Navy had planned to deal with this possibility just as Nelson had dealt with Napoleon’s navy before Trafalgar: with a close, inshore blockade, monitoring every action of the enemy fleet and bringing it to battle if and when it came out. This time, a close British blockade of the German North Sea coast would be established with destroyers and other light forces constantly patrolling a few miles offshore, ready to report any German sortie before falling back on the British battleships cruising nearby. Fisher was the first to recognize that the submarine, the torpedo, and the mine had tossed this policy of close blockade on the scrapheap. No British admiral would be allowed to keep a fleet of battleships cruising back and forth in the Heligoland Bight in the close and constant presence of German submarines, destroyers, and minefields. This would mean, the Admiralty explained to the Committee of Imperial Defence in 1913, “a steady and serious wastage of valuable ships.” In addition, there was the problem of fuel. Sailing ships in Nelson’s day required only the wind; steel warships needed coal and oil. Destroyers patrolling the entrance to Heligoland Bight would have to return to port every three or four days to refuel; with a third of the force always absent, a close blockade would require twice as many modern destroyers as the Royal Navy possessed.

  By 1913, the British navy had accepted these realities, abandoned close blockade, and adopted a new policy of distant blockade. In essence, this meant that rather than blockading the German coast, the British navy would close off the entire North Sea. Here, geography lent a powerful helping hand. As the naval historian Arthur Marder put it, “In a war with Germany, Britain started with the crucial geographic advantage of stretching like a gigantic breakwater across the approaches to Germany”; Mahan had said the same thing: “Great Britain cannot help commanding the approaches to Germany.” The existence of the British Isles, stretching over 700 miles from Lands End to the northern tip of the Shetlands, left only two maritime exits from the North Sea into the Atlantic. The first was the Straits of Dover, twenty miles wide at their narrowest point. Here, the new technology of undersea weaponry came down in Britain’s favor. “Owing to recent developments in mines, torpedoes, torpedo craft and submarines,” declared a Committee of Imperial Defence paper on December 6, 1912, “the passage of the Straits of Dover and the English Channel by ships of a power at war with Great Britain would be attended with such risks that, for practical purposes, the North Sea may be regarded as having only one exit, the northern one.” This “northern one” was the 200-mile-wide gap at the top of the North Sea, between northern Scotland and the southern coast of Norway. In these stormy waters, the blockade would be enforced by cruiser patrols supported by the dominating presence of the Grand Fleet at Scapa Flow. With these two exits barred, then, in the words of the naval writer Geoffrey Callender, “so long as Admiral Jellicoe and the Dover patrol held firm, the German fleet in all its tremendous strength was literally locked out of the world. The Hohenzollern dread- noughts could not place themselves on a single trade route, could not touch a single overseas dominion, [and] could not interfere with the imports on which the British Isles depended.” Distant blockade did not mean that British ships and sailors would simply sit as watchmen at the ocean gates and surrender the North Sea to the Germans. A new Admiralty war plan defined the Grand Fleet’s new role: “As it is at present impracticable to maintain a perpetual close watch off the enemy’s ports, the maritime domination of the North Sea . . . will be established as far as practicable by occasional driving or sweeping movements carried out by the Grand Fleet . . . in superior force. The movements should be sufficiently frequent and sufficiently advanced to impress upon the enemy that he cannot at any time venture far from his home ports without such serious risk of encountering an overwhelming force that no enterprise is likely to reach its destination.” This was a practical strategy to contain the threat of the German fleet, the best that could be devised with the resources available. Unhappily for British jingoists, in uniform and out, it was not a strategy that guaranteed an immediate, annihilating victory over the High Seas Fleet.

  Britain’s abandonment of close blockade came as a blow to the German Naval Staff, which had planned to turn the Royal Navy’s traditional offensive exuberance to its own purposes. Most German naval officers had expected that the British navy would begin the war with an immediate effort to destroy the High Seas Fleet. “Before the war,” wrote Captain Otto Groos, the official German naval historian, “the whol
e training of our fleet and to some extent even our shipbuilding policy and even certain constructional details (for instance a small radius of action of a large number of our destroyers) was based on the assumption that the British would organize a blockade of the Heligoland Bight with their superior fleet.” A major attack, the Germans believed, was coming. “There was only one opinion among us, from the Commander-in-Chief down to the latest recruit, about the attitude of the English fleet,” said Reinhard Scheer, commander of the German fleet at Jutland. “We were convinced that it would seek out and attack our fleet the minute it showed itself and wherever it was.” The battle, close to German ports, might go either way, the Germans thought, but damaged German ships could be expected to limp or be towed home; damaged British ships retreating across the North Sea would be subject to further German attacks—as well as the perils of bad weather, engine failure, or rising water inside their hulls. Because of this, English losses were expected to be greater; this would help create the “equalization of forces” that the German navy urgently desired. Thus it was that when the expected British onslaught into the Bight failed to materialize, the premise on which the Germans had based their strategy was overturned. And when the British navy failed to establish even a semblance of a close blockade, German U-boats and torpedo-carrying destroyers were deprived of any ability to harass and diminish the blockading fleet.

  The war had scarcely begun when Germany’s admirals and captains, robbed of their intended wartime strategy, finding the exits to the North Sea barred and the lower and middle North Sea turned into a watery no-man’s-land, discovered that they did not know what to do.

  Because each side was waiting for the other to act, nothing so dramatic as the British pursuit of Goeben occurred in the North Sea during the first weeks of the naval war. The Grand Fleet went to sea under Jellicoe, spreading its battle squadrons and flotillas for miles across the gray waves. They saw nothing. On August 6, Jellicoe dispatched his light cruisers to search the coastal waters of Norway. They found nothing. At dawn on the morning of August 7, the fleet returned to Scapa Flow to coal; by twilight, it was back at sea. This routine, exhausting for men and wearing for ships, became the normal life of the Grand Fleet for the next fifty-two months.

  The war’s first blow in home waters was struck, not by this enormous fleet, but by a single, humble vessel. In the misty dawn of August 5, when the war was only five hours old, the British cable ship Teleconia dragged her grappling irons along the muddy bottom of the southern North Sea. Five German overseas cables, snaking down the Channel from the port city of Emden, on the Dutch frontier, were her quarry: one to Brest, in France, another to Vigo, in Spain, a third to Tenerife, in North Africa, and two to New York. One by one, Teleconia fished up and cut all five of the heavy, slime-covered cables. That same day, a British cruiser severed two German overseas cables near the Azores. Thus, from the war’s first day, Germany was cut off from direct cable communication with the world beyond Europe.

  Meanwhile, as Jellicoe’s armada cruised in the north, the light forces based at Harwich sank their first German ship—and suffered Britain’s first loss. At dawn on the fifth, Commodore Reginald Tyrwhitt of the Harwich Force took his two destroyer flotillas to sea in a sweep toward the coast of Holland. At 10:15 a.m., this sortie produced a result: a British fishing trawler informed the destroyer Laurel that a vessel in its vicinity was “dropping things overboard, presumably mines.” Two destroyers investigated; at 11:00 a.m., through rain squalls, they sighted a steamer ten miles away. The vessel resembled one of the Hook of Holland steamers providing peacetime ferry service for the Great Eastern Railway between Harwich and the Netherlands. Captain H. C. Fox, commanding the 3rd Destroyer Flotilla from the light cruiser Amphion, joined the chase and soon the destroyer Lance fired “the first British shot in the war.”

  The target was the 1,800-ton Hamburg-America Line excursion steamer Königin Luise, whose peacetime work was ferrying passengers back and forth from Hamburg to Heligoland. On the eve of war, she had been moved into a dockyard, repainted in the colors of British Great Eastern Railway steamers plying between Harwich and the Hook of Holland, and loaded with 180 mines. On the evening of August 4, while the British ultimatum still waited unanswered in Berlin, Königin Luise slipped out to sea with a patchwork crew of peacetime sailors and navy regulars. Her mission was to use her disguise to sow mines in the shipping lanes off the mouth of the Thames.

  Königin Luise’s first mine went over the side at dawn, and others followed through the morning. Then Amphion, coming up behind her own destroyers, opened fire and by noon, Königin Luise was lying on her port side in the water. Fifty-six of a crew of 130 were rescued by Amphion. Half of these prisoners were incarcerated in a compartment in the light cruiser’s bow, for the grim reason that “if we go up on a mine, they might as well go first.”

  Returning to Harwich and attempting to avoid the area in which he thought Königin Luise’s mines might be floating, Fox sighted another suspicious steamer. This vessel, like the Königin Luise, wore the colors of the Great Eastern Railway, but unlike the ship Fox had just sunk, it was flying a large German flag. Seeing this, the flotilla opened fire. The steamer quickly hauled down the German flag and hoisted the Red Ensign of the British merchant marine. Eventually, it became clear that the vessel was a genuine Great Eastern Railway steamer, St. Petersburg, flying German colors because she was carrying the German ambassador to Great Britain, Prince Karl Max Lichnowsky, and his wife and staff from Harwich to the neutral Netherlands for repatriation to Germany. The German flag had been raised to give her immunity from attack by any German ships she might encounter. Her identity and mission established, she was permitted to steam away toward Holland. Fox continued toward Harwich.

  Suddenly, a mine exploded against Amphion’s bow. The explosion killed and wounded many British seamen and, among the German prisoners in the bow, only one survived. With his ship ablaze and sinking, Fox gave the order to abandon ship. Just as he did, a second explosion occurred. “The foremost half of the ship seemed to rise out of the water,” Fox said later. “Masses of material were thrown into the air to a great height, and I personally saw one of the 4-inch guns and a man turning head over heels about 150 feet up.” The cause of the second explosion was never established, although Fox believed that it was another mine. Within fifteen minutes, his ship went down. One hundred and thirty-two British seamen were killed or wounded along with twenty-seven men from the Königin Luise. Twenty-eight German prisoners were brought back to England. When Fox reached Harwich on a destroyer, his friend Commodore Roger Keyes rushed aboard and was shocked to see Fox “stagger out of the chart house horribly burnt and disfigured.”

  Four days later, at the northern end of the North Sea, the next encounter occurred. Near noon on August 8, south of Fair Island, between the Orkneys and the Shetlands, the British dreadnought Monarch, conducting gunnery practice with her sisters Ajax and Audacious, was attacked by a submarine torpedo, which missed. Then, at dawn the next day, August 9, the light cruiser Birmingham sighted a submarine lying motionless on the surface in a thick fog. The U-boat was stationary, and Birmingham’s crew could hear hammering inside. The cruiser immediately opened fire and the submarine, U-15, slowly got under way. Birmingham, her wake boiling, turned and at high speed rammed U-15 amidships, slicing her in half. The wreckage sank quickly, carrying down all twenty-three men of the crew and leaving behind on the surface only “the strong odor of petroleum and . . . rising air bubbles.” It was the first U-boat kill of the war. Birmingham, suffering only superficial damage, was able to continue with the fleet. The triumph pleased the Admiralty, but the fact that a U-boat was operating so far north alarmed Jellicoe, who suggested that he withdraw the fleet from Scapa Flow to bases farther west. The Admiralty replied that this was impossible; for the next eight days, the Grand Fleet’s presence was needed to safeguard the passage of the British Expeditionary Force to France. On the morning of August 8, Churchill had signaled Jellicoe: �
��Tomorrow, Sunday, the Expeditionary Force begins to cross the Channel. During that week the Germans have the strongest incentives to action.”

  During the period from August 9 to August 22, when 80,000 British infantrymen and 12,000 cavalrymen—with their horses—were crossing to Le Havre and other French ports, the Admiralty did not know what to expect: a surface attack by German destroyers into the Channel to savage the transports; a concentrated submarine assault on the vessels crowded with soldiers; or a massive challenge to the Grand Fleet by the dreadnoughts of the High Seas Fleet. On August 12, the bulk of the expeditionary force began to cross. During the days of the heaviest transportation—August 15, 16, and 17—Heligoland Bight was closely blockaded by British submarines and destroyers, supported by the Grand Fleet in the central North Sea. On August 18, the last day of heavy traffic, thirty-four transports crossed in twenty-four hours. During this time, the German navy did not appear. No ship was molested or sunk; not a man, soldier or sailor, was drowned. The concentration of the British Expeditionary Force in France was completed three days earlier than anticipated in the prewar plan and, on the evening of August 21, British cavalry patrols made contact with the Germans in Belgium. Three days later, the British army was heavily engaged near Mons.