Castles of Steel

by Robert K. Massie

  Oh dear, I am so tired and bored. Winston talks about nothing but the sea and the Navy. Old Asquith spends his time immersed in a Baedeker Guide and reading extracts to an admiring audience. Prince Louis is, of course, charming but not terribly exciting . . . that old rascal Fisher never stopped talking and has been closeted with Winston. . . . I find this wretched party on board getting duller and duller. Mrs Winston is a perfect fool. Old Asquith is a regular common old tourist. . . . On shore it makes one ashamed to have to introduce him as the Prime Minister of Great Britain.

  Churchill, of course, did not know what Beatty was writing to his wife, and over the next fifteen months, the young First Lord decided that Beatty “viewed naval strategy and tactics in a different light from the average naval officer; he approached them, it seemed to me, much more as a soldier would. His war experiences on land had illuminated the facts he had acquired in his naval training. His mind had been rendered quick and supple by the situations of polo and the hunting field.” In addition to winning Churchill’s favor, Beatty’s work positioned him splendidly to help himself. It was his duty—as it had been Troubridge’s—to keep track of appointments, to know what posts were becoming vacant, and to supply the First Lord with suggestions in assigning flag officers. From this vantage, a naval secretary could virtually arrange his own next post. In the spring of 1913, command of the Battle Cruiser Squadron, the most coveted appointment possible for a rear admiral, became available, and everything fell into place. “I had no doubts whatever,” Churchill wrote of Beatty later, “in appointing him over the heads of all to this incomparable command, the nucleus as it proved to be of the famous Battle Cruiser Fleet—that supreme combination of speed and power, the strategic cavalry of the Royal Navy.” On March 1, 1913, David Beatty hoisted his admiral’s flag in Lion, flagship of the 1st Battle Cruiser Squadron.

  Command of these fast, powerful ships perfectly suited David Beatty; he led them with the dash and flair that characterized him in the saddle. In war, his tactic was to attack; in peacetime, he burned his restless energy in riding, hunting, or tennis—he played until darkness made the ball invisible. His Flag Captain—the captain of his flagship—Ernle Chatfield, described him as having “a love of doing everything at high pressure and high speed.” His ships and squadron began exercising at 24 knots rather than the usual 14, and firing at 16,000 yards rather than the customary 9,000. His tactics, pushing the offensive and courting risk, differed greatly from those of the Home Fleet commander, Sir George Callaghan, whom Beatty described to Ethel as “a nice old thing, full of sound common sense.” Nor did Beatty wish to keep the image of himself and his squadron hidden from the public. Less than two months after taking command, he invited a well-known naval journalist, Filson Young, to visit Lion and observe the battle cruisers exercising at sea. Young took a long walk with Beatty over the Scottish hills, dined with the five captains of Beatty’s force, watched the battle cruisers firing at long range, and was given plenty of time to observe the admiral controlling everything from the flagship’s bridge.

  Ethel, whatever the distinction of her husband’s new command, did not change. She continued trying to adjust his schedule to accommodate her own. At one point, Beatty discovered that she was suggesting to the First Lord and to Admiralty officials whom she met in society that the battle cruisers be shuttled from one place to another to suit her own convenience. This time, Beatty’s letter was sharp: “You must not bother Prince Louis or Winston by asking them where we are going and to send them here or there because you want to spend Whitsuntide with me. It won’t do. The Admiralty have a good deal to do without having to consider which port will suit the wives best.”

  Nevertheless, Ethel was very much a part of David Beatty’s greatest social triumph when together in St. Petersburg they acted as host and hostess to the Emperor and Empress of Russia. At the end of May 1914, the Admiralty decided to display British naval power in the home waters of the German and Russian empires. In June, Vice Admiral Sir George Warrender led four new dreadnought battleships, King George V, Ajax, Audacious, and Centurion, into Kiel at the time of the annual yacht races attended by the kaiser. At the same time, Beatty took the 1st Battle Cruiser Squadron, including Lion, Princess Royal, Queen Mary, and New Zealand, farther up the Baltic, to St. Petersburg. Because the head of the Gulf of Finland was too shallow to permit the big ships to come up to the city, they moored in the naval harbor of Kronstadt, twenty miles from the mouth of the Neva River. And no sooner were the four giant ships swinging on their moorings than a smaller vessel, a 200-ton yacht, appeared and dropped her anchor within shouting distance of Lion. It was Ethel’s yacht Sheelah. During ten days of ceremonial lunches and banquets and visits to the theater, opera, and ballet, Ethel never left David’s side. When Nicholas II, his wife, Alexandra, and their four daughters came to lunch on Lion, the tsar was shown through the gun turrets and magazines while his daughters were escorted around the deck by four British midshipmen. When Beatty and his captains lunched with the imperial family at the country palace at Tsarskoe Selo, Ethel accompanied them. His own hospitality, Beatty decided, had been too meager, so he invited 2,000 Russian guests to a ball on board the British warships. As this number of guests was beyond the capacity of Lion’s broad quarterdeck to accommodate, New Zealand was made fast alongside. Her deck provided space for dancing, while the flagship’s deck, covered by red-and-white-striped awnings, was set with 200 circular supper tables. Covered gangways joined the two ships, which were hung with bunting and colored lights. With the help of the British embassy in St. Petersburg, 1,200 bottles of champagne were wrested from diplomatic cellars all over the city. Twenty whole salmon weighing twenty pounds apiece were set in blocks of ice on the serving tables. For Ethel, it was a culmination: here was Ethel Field Tree Beatty of Chicago acting as hostess to the representatives of a 300-year-old imperial dynasty. Nor was this the last of Beatty’s successes that summer. On returning from Russia, he was knighted and on August 2, with war imminent, he was promoted to the rank of acting vice admiral.

  Jellicoe and Beatty presented such immense contrasts in temperament, dress, style of life, professional experience, and command behavior that it is difficult to imagine them working together. Jellicoe was a consummate professional, calm, deliberate, and meticulous, with a thorough mastery of his ships and guns acquired over a long career afloat and ashore. As a result, he was always greatly admired in the navy. He had come up the traditional way, and in his steady upward progress there was never any question that he was bound for the top. As for Beatty, the navy was not so sure. In many ways, Beatty was the antithesis of Jellicoe. He was brave, high-strung, impatient for action. His career had advanced in fits and starts. Brilliant performance under fire had led to rapid promotions, leapfrogging him over his contemporaries—but then he had held himself back by his own unorthodox and, many thought, arrogant behavior. Jellicoe had been at the top of every class; Beatty had scraped through with Second and Third Class certificates. Beatty’s meteoric career was due to forceful, almost instinctive action in moments of crisis; seizing these opportunities, he had bounded up the ladder of promotion. A commander at twenty-seven and a captain at twenty-nine, he was promoted so quickly that he outstripped his technical education and had performed no particularly distinguished service to the navy on shore or in routine assignments at sea. The difficult technical issues and decisions that dominated Jellicoe’s naval career never much interested Beatty, and he never became deeply involved in any particular branch of his profession. He lacked Jellicoe’s knowledge of the vulnerability of British ships to enemy weapons; indeed, this information burst on Beatty suddenly at Jutland when two of his six giant battle cruisers blew up under German shellfire, each explosion killing a thousand men. Beatty’s response was “There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today.”

  In intellectual ability and professional knowledge, Jellicoe stood far above Beatty. The naval journalist Bennet Copplestone made the point that Jellicoe wou
ld have risen to the top in peace or war, whereas Beatty’s success was likely only in wartime; his qualities needed battle to bring them out. Nevertheless, war came, and when it did Beatty, like Jellicoe—both placed in their respective commands by Winston Churchill—seemed to be in the right place. After the war, Admiral Sir William Goodenough, whose light cruisers fought every battle alongside the battle cruisers, said of David Beatty:

  I have often been asked what it was that made him so preeminent. It was not great brains. . . . I don’t know that it was great professional knowledge, certainly not expert knowledge of gun or torpedo. It was his spirit, combined with comprehension of really big issues. The gift of distinguishing between essentials and not wasting time on non-essentials. The spirit of resolute, at times it would seem almost careless, advance (I don’t mean without taking care; I mean without care of consequence) was foremost in his mind on every occasion.

  CHAPTER 6 The Battle of the Bight

  During the first three weeks of war, while the Grand Fleet was constantly at sea and the strain on ships and men was heavy, most vessels of the High Seas Fleet remained tied to their quays in Wilhelmshaven and other naval harbors. The British, unable either to reach their enemies deep inside the Heligoland Bight or tempt them out into the North Sea, were frustrated. “We are still wandering about the face of the ocean . . . entirely in the hands of our friends the Germans as to when they will come out and be whacked,” Beatty wrote to Ethel on August 24. “For thirty years I have been waiting for this day, and have as fine a command as one could wish for and can do nothing. Three weeks of war and haven’t seen the enemy.” The press and the public shared the navy’s frustration. The BEF was retreating in France and the German advance on Paris seemed irresistible, but land war was one thing, naval war another. At sea, Britons expected another Trafalgar the day after war was declared. When this did not happen, the cry arose, “What is the Navy doing?” In response, and in keeping with his own aggressive nature, Winston Churchill constantly demanded “offensive measures” from the Admiralty.

  The First Lord’s impatience was shared by two high-spirited second-level naval officers, Commodore Reginald Tyrwhitt of the Harwich destroyer flotillas and Commodore Roger Keyes, who commanded the long-range submarines, also based at Harwich. The two commodores were close friends, and their shared eager belligerence endeared them to their subordinates and to the youthful First Lord, but not often to senior admirals. Tyrwhitt and Keyes believed that it was not enough to patrol outside the Bight, hoping the Germans would come out; they wanted their Harwich forces to go in. “When are we going to make war?” Keyes demanded. The British fleet, he declared, possessed “absolute confidence” that “when the enemy come out we will fall on them and smash them.” What Keyes wanted was to implant this same belief in the Germans: that “when we go out, those damned Englanders will fall on us and smash us.”

  Keyes was the British naval officer most familiar with what was happening inside the Heligoland Bight. Since the war’s first hours, his submarines had been patrolling these waters and their captains thus acquired extensive knowledge of the enemy’s movements and habits. They had learned, for example, that every evening German light cruisers escorted destroyers to a point twenty miles northwest of Heligoland; from that point the destroyers fanned out farther north to patrol against British submarines and minelayers. Returning at daylight, the German destroyers were met by light cruisers and escorted home. Keyes believed that this information could be put to use. His plan, which Tyrwhitt enthusiastically endorsed, was described by Churchill as “simple and daring”: as the German destroyers returned to their dawn rendezvous, a superior force of British cruisers and destroyers, coming down in darkness from the north, would sweep in behind them from east to west across the Bight and catch them in a trap. The plan would involve the thirty-one destroyers of Tyrwhitt’s two flotillas and nine of Keyes’s long-range submarines. Three British submarines were to be employed as bait, showing themselves on the surface west of Heligoland, then turning and running before submerging; if they were successful, the pursuing German destroyers would be drawn out to sea, where Tyrwhitt would intercept them. Other British submarines would lie close off Heligoland to attack any German cruisers or capital ships coming out of the Jade to assist their destroyers.

  When Keyes first took his plan to the Admiralty, he found the War Staff “too fully occupied with the daily task to give the matter much attention.” Undaunted, the young commodore asked for an interview with the First Lord, who saw him on August 23.

  [Keyes was “young” relative to the admirals, not to the First Lord. In 1914, Keyes was forty-two, Churchill thirty-nine.]

  The meeting, Keyes said, “gave me an opportunity of bursting into flame . . . which fired the First Lord.” The following morning, Churchill presided over a conference at the Admiralty, attended by Prince Louis, Sturdee, Tyrwhitt, and Keyes. Here Keyes’s plan was approved, with modifications. Instead of reaching the German rendezvous point at dawn and attempting to catch the returning German night destroyer patrols, the operation would begin later, at eight in the morning, when the night patrols were back in port and the German day destroyers were coming out to take station. As in the original plan, these would be lured out to sea by three surfaced British submarines, E-6, E-7, and E-8. And then Tyrwhitt’s destroyers, sweeping between the Germans and their base, would intercept, trap, and devour them. The plan involved risk: it meant exposing almost fifty British warships within a few miles of Germany’s principal naval base. For this reason, the Admiralty insisted that the operation be conducted rapidly and the ships withdrawn before the High Seas Fleet could raise steam, emerge into the Bight, and, in their turn, entrap and destroy the British light forces. To provide insurance, Keyes and Tyrwhitt suggested that the Grand Fleet be brought down from Scapa Flow. And to add strength to the destroyer sweep, they asked that the six modern light cruisers of Commodore William Goodenough’s 1st Light Cruiser Squadron be available as close support. Sturdee vetoed both of these requests; neither Churchill nor Prince Louis chose to overrule the Chief of Staff. In place of the massive support for which Keyes and Tyrwhitt were hoping, Sturdee approved only the positioning of the battle cruisers New Zealand and Invincible forty miles northwest of Heligoland and the stationing of four old Bacchante-class armored cruisers a hundred miles to the west. The operation was scheduled for August 28. Keyes’s submarines were to leave Harwich on the twenty-sixth, and Keyes himself would follow in the destroyer Lurcher to coordinate the operations of his undersea craft. Tyrwhitt’s destroyers would sail at dawn on August 27.

  On August 26, the day before he was to leave Harwich, Tyrwhitt had taken possession of a new flagship, the recently commissioned light cruiser Arethusa. For some time, Tyrwhitt had been complaining about his previous flagship, the light cruiser Amethyst, commissioned in 1904. The older ship was “damned slow,” he had grumbled, pointing out that it was impossible to lead and coordinate flotillas of 30-knot destroyers from a flagship with a maximum speed of 18 knots. Now, to his delight, he had transferred “from the oldest and slowest to the newest and fastest light cruiser.” As designed, Arethusa had a speed of 29 knots and two 6-inch and six 4-inch guns; supposedly, she could outrun and outfight any German light cruiser in the High Seas Fleet. In fact, on August 26, 1914, the new ship was scarcely in condition to fight at all. She had been in commission only fifteen days; her new crew was untested; her highest speed in trials had been only 25 knots; her 4-inch guns frequently jammed when fired. Tyrwhitt boarded his new flagship at 9:00 a.m. on August 26 and immediately took her to sea for firing practice. When the 4-inch guns jammed, firing was discontinued. Never-theless, at 5:00 on the morning of the twenty-seventh, Tyrwhitt sailed on Arethusa, leading the 3rd Flotilla of sixteen modern L-class destroyers. His subordinate, Captain Wilfred Blunt, followed in the older light cruiser Fearless, leading the 1st Flotilla of fifteen slightly older destroyers.

  The unreadiness of Arethusa was the first of many flaws in
the execution of Keyes’s plan. A second, more serious error threatened the entire success of this first British naval offensive of the war. The plan conceived by the two Harwich commodores had been approved by the First Lord, the First Sea Lord, and the Chief of Staff, but not until August 26, two days after the Admiralty conference, did anyone inform the Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Fleet. Even then, Jellicoe was told only that “a destroyer sweep of First and Third Flotillas with submarines suitably placed is in orders for Friday from East to West, commencing between Horns Reef and Heligoland, with battle cruisers in support.” Jellicoe was immediately alarmed. He was certain that the force assigned was too weak to operate so close to the enemy’s base—that if the light forces became entangled and were unable to withdraw, and if the High Seas Fleet came out, two British battle cruisers and a quartet of elderly armored cruisers would be unable to deal with the German dreadnoughts. Less than two hours after receiving Sturdee’s signal, Jellicoe responded to the Admiralty: “Propose to cooperate on sweep on Friday moving Grand Fleet cruisers and destroyers to suitable positions with Battle Fleet near. Request I may be given full details of proposed operations by land-wire tonight. I am leaving at 6 a.m. tomorrow.” After he had sent this signal, Jellicoe continued to worry. Why, he wondered, would the Admiralty keep the Commander-in-Chief in ignorance of so large and risky an operation? At 6:00 that evening, he signaled again: “Until I know the plan of operations, I am unable to suggest the best method of cooperation but the breadth of sweep appears to be very great for two flotillas. I could send a third [destroyer] flotilla, holding a fourth in reserve, and can support by light cruisers. What officers will be in command of operations and in what ships so that I can communicate with them? What is the direction of the sweep and [the] northern limits, and what ships will take part?” Sturdee’s reply was brief and surly: “Cooperation by battle fleet not required. Battle cruisers can support if convenient.” Given qualified permission, Jellicoe immediately ordered three of Beatty’s battle cruisers, Lion, Queen Mary, and Princess Royal, to sail from Scapa Flow at 5:00 the following morning, August 27, to join New Zealand and Invincible. He also ordered Goodenough’s six modern light cruisers, Southampton, Birmingham, Nottingham, Lowestoft, Falmouth, and Liverpool, to accompany Beatty from Scapa Flow. Ultimately, it was this action by Jellicoe—adding Beatty’s battle cruisers, plus Goodenough’s light cruisers, to the forces approved by the Admiralty—that saved the day. And once Beatty and Goodenough had sailed, Jellicoe himself followed them to sea with the four battle squadrons of the Grand Fleet. Only when all of his ships and squadrons were at sea did Jellicoe inform the Admiralty of what he had done.