Castles of Steel

by Robert K. Massie

  Rumors of this kind reverberated not just among the boys at Osborne but in Belgravia drawing rooms and the clubs of St. James, where Louis’s old enemies, a group of elderly retired admirals, gathered. This “syndicate of discontent,” as Fisher called it, had always been envious of Battenberg’s relations with the court and hostile to his advancement to the navy’s highest post. The most bigoted was Beresford, enraged that Fisher, a middle-class nobody, and now Louis, a German prince, had both become First Sea Lord, an office he never had reached. At one point in his vendetta, Beresford wrote an article belittling Louis’s record as a naval officer and demanding that he be expelled from the navy because of his German birth. He sent this to the editor of every London newspaper, asking that it be published anonymously. No one agreed.

  Before the war, this cabal had limited itself to spasmodic attacks, expecting that Batttenberg would resign from the Admiralty if war were declared. When Prince Louis did not do so, his enemies became choleric. On the evening of August 28, a group of members of the Carlton Club, among them Beresford and Arthur Lee, a onetime Civil Lord of the Admiralty and a future First Lord, was standing in a hallway. According to Lee, “the conversation having turned upon German spies, Lord Charles Beresford expressed the opinion that all Germans, including highly placed ones, ought to leave the country as they were in touch with Germans abroad. Louis’ name was not mentioned, but soon after . . . Beresford said that ‘good taste’ should lead Louis to voluntarily resign his position. However good an officer he might be, ‘nothing could alter the fact that he is a German, and as such should not be occupying his present position. He keeps German servants and has property in Germany.’ ”

  Lee protested and praised Louis. “I admit all that,” said Beresford, “but none the less he is a German and he entered the Navy for his own advantage, not ours. Feeling is very strong in the service about his being First Sea Lord—it is strongly resented.” When Lee expressed surprise at this statement, Beresford continued, “I am entitled to speak for the service. I know the opinion of my brother officers on the subject. It is very strong.” Lee referred the matter to Churchill, who immediately took it up with Beresford: “In time of war, spreading of reports likely to cause mistrust or despondency is certainly a military offence.” Beresford at first denied Lee’s story and then told Churchill that what went on in London clubs was private and that Lee had no right to draw attention to the conversation. Whereupon Churchill replied:

  Dear Lord Charles Beresford:

  I am clearly of the opinion that the safety of the state overrides all questions of club etiquette and that personal ties must give way to public requirements at a time like this. Free expressions of opinion which are legitimate in time of peace, cannot be permitted now. Everyone has to uphold confidence or be silent. . . . We have an absolute right to your aid and influence in this and I hope it is on this footing that I may continue to address you. Yours sincerely.

  This closed the incident but did not end the malevolent gossip. Horatio Bottomley, scenting the kill, stepped up his campaign. Scurrilous letters to Louis began to appear in the Admiralty mail. Others came to newspaper offices. The First Sea Lord was pinioned and increasingly helpless. He knew about the calumnies uttered at the Carlton Club and about the vicious letters arriving at the Admiralty; he saw the constant erosion of his role at the Admiralty; he knew that he was losing the confidence of the First Lord, the Cabinet, and his fellow officers. Gout, from which he had suffered for years, chose this moment to strike him down.

  [“Prince Louis was a big man and had a big appetite,” said his colleague the Director of Naval Intelligence, Rear Admiral Henry Oliver. “At breakfast, he had porridge, fish, eggs, bacon, a large plate of cold ham, hot muffins or crumpets, then a lot of toast and butter and jam, and finished on fruit. His meal was enough to have fed an officer’s mess.”]

  To Churchill, it became obvious that Battenberg often was trying to hide his pain. Demoralized, realizing that his health and capacity for work were failing, Prince Louis sank into depression. Decisions became difficult. Officers entering his room at the Admiralty were shocked to see the First Sea Lord sitting alone, quietly reading The Times.

  Meanwhile, Churchill knew that if the clamoring public was to be given a head from the Admiralty, that head would be his or Battenberg’s. The Lord Chancellor and former war minister Richard Burdon Haldane, eventually to be forced out of office himself because he had been to a German university and admired German culture, wrote to Churchill on October 19, 1914, that, whatever else happened, “you must not ever consider leaving the Admiralty at this period of crisis. You are unique and invaluable to the nation. . . . Do not pay the least attention to the fools who write and talk in the press.” Haldane suggested another remedy: “I should like to see Fisher and Wilson brought in, and Prince Louis kept with them as Second Sea Lord.” Churchill grasped this suggestion and, on October 20, first spoke to Fisher about returning to the Admiralty. The next day he discussed the idea with the prime minister. “Winston has been pouring out his woes in my ear,” Asquith wrote to Venetia Stanley. “I think Battenberg will have soon to make as graceful a bow as he can to the British public.”

  The press campaign against the Admiralty intensified. On October 21, the Morning Post assaulted Churchill, declaring that “grave doubt is expressed on every hand . . . there is a First Lord who is a civilian and cannot be expected to have any grasp of the principles and practice of naval warfare . . . [but who] now seeks to guide the operations of war.” Unless Churchill departed, the paper said, “further mistakes and further disasters” could lead to “the destruction of the empire.” Bottomley resumed his cannonade against Battenberg: “Blood is said to be thicker than water; and we doubt whether all the water in the North Sea could obliterate the blood ties between the Battenbergs and the Hohenzollerns when it comes to a question of a life and death struggle between Germany and ourselves. We shall further repeat our demand that Prince Louis of Battenberg be relieved.”

  On October 27, the navy suffered its heaviest material loss of the war to that point, the sinking of the dreadnought Audacious. The tension at the Admiralty was extreme. Churchill walked to 10 Downing Street and, later in the day, Asquith wrote to Venetia Stanley, “Winston came here before lunch in a rather sombre mood. He has quite made up his mind that the time has comefor a drastic change in his [Admiralty] Board; our poor blue-eyed German will have to go and (as W. says) he will be reinforced by two ‘well-plucked chickens.’ ” The reference was to the retired former First Sea Lords Fisher and Wilson. From Downing Street, Churchill went to the palace and informed the king that he and the prime minister wished to replace Prince Louis. Reluctantly, the king consented and informed his uncle, the Duke of Connaught, of “poor Louis B’s resignation.” The last of Churchill’s interviews was with Prince Louis himself; it was made the more painful because that morning Louis had learned that his twenty-three-year-old nephew, Prince Maurice of Battenberg, had died of his wounds in France. Churchill told Louis that he and the prime minister requested the First Sea Lord’s resignation. “Louis behaved with great dignity & public spirit and will resign at once,” Asquith told Venetia.

  Prince Louis resigned on October 28. “Dear Mr Churchill,” he wrote, “I have lately been driven to the painful conclusion that at this juncture my birth and parentage have the effect of impairing in some respects my usefulness on the Board of Admiralty. In these circumstances, I feel it to be my duty, as a loyal subject of His Majesty, to resign the office of First Sea Lord, hoping thereby to facilitate the task of the administration of the great service to which I have devoted my life, and to ease the burden on H.M. Ministers.” Privately, Louis wrote to Churchill: “I beg you to release me. I am on the verge of breaking down and cannot use my brain for anything.” The following day Prince Louis went to the palace to say good-bye to the king. “There is no more loyal man in the country,” George V wrote that night in his diary. Leaving the king, Louis returned to the Admiralty and d
id a remarkable thing: he sent a personal message asking his daughter to come to see him. In his last hour at the Admiralty, Prince Louis of Battenberg met his daughter Jeanne-Marie Langtry for the first time.

  The resignation provoked another storm, this time in support of Prince Louis. Jellicoe telegraphed his “profound sorrow” and “deepest possible regret.” J. H. Thomas, a prominent Labour MP, wrote to The Times that the campaign against the First Sea Lord was “the most mean and contemptible slander I have ever known.” Lord Selbourne declared “that anyone should have been found to insinuate suspicions against . . . [Prince Louis] is nothing less than a national humiliation.” Louis himself, assessing the event, blamed the government’s weakness. To a friend, Battenberg admitted, “It was an awful wrench, but I had no choice from the moment it was made clear to me that the Government did not feel themselves strong enough to support me by some public pronouncement.” To Jellicoe, he wrote that Churchill “up to the end stood by me and, at first, the prime minister too, but the pressure from without became at last too strong—at least the Cabinet did not feel themselves to be strong enough to protect one of their principal servants. The moment this was made clear to me I walked out of the building and gave those in charge to understand that they would neither see nor hear from me until Peace was signed.”

  Battenberg’s departure did not snuff out anti-German feeling in Great Britain or put an end to its toll of prominent men. Of these, Haldane was the most significant. His famous 1912 mission to Berlin, attempting to negotiate an end to the dreadnought-building competition, was characterized in the press as treason; he was accused of being in secret correspondence with the German government; he was charged with having delayed mobilization of the army and the dispatch of the BEF; he was said to have a German wife and to be the illegitimate brother of the kaiser. “On one day,” Haldane wrote, “in response to an appeal in the Daily Express, there arrived at the House of Lords 2,600 letters of protest against my supposed disloyalty to the interests of the nation. These letters were sent over to my house in sacks, and I entrusted the opening and disposal of the contents to the kitchen maid.” Haldane resigned from the government in May 1915 and “before the war ended was threatened with assault in the street and was on some occasions in some danger of being shot at.” Nor did the rising xenophobia threaten only admirals and Cabinet ministers. In June 1917, when King George V heard that people were saying he was pro-German because his family had German names, “he started and grew pale.” Hurriedly, English names were proposed: Plantagenet, York, Lancaster, and England. Eventually, by royal proclamation, the new family name of the dynasty became Windsor. Soon after, Prince Louis wrote to his daughter Louise, who became Queen of Sweden: “George Rex . . . wished to see me. . . . I was closeted with him a long time. . . . [He was] being attacked as being Half-German and surrounding himself by relatives with German names. . . . [His conclusion] was that he must ask us Holsteins, Tecks, and Battenbergs to give up using in England our German titles and to assume English surnames. . . . [He] suggested we turn our name into English: viz Battenhill or Mountbatten.” Prince Louis of Battenberg’s metamorphosis into Louis Mountbatten, Marquis of Milford Haven, was finalized while he was visiting a country house. He noted the change by writing in the guest book, “Arrived Prince Hyde. Departed Lord Jekyll.”

  Two weeks after the armistice, a gratuitous act of official cruelty was inflicted on the new Marquis. The First Sea Lord, Rosslyn Wester Wemyss, a protégé of Beresford, sent Louis a letter telling him that he would not be employed again and suggesting that he might wish to retire from the service to make room for younger men. Louis retired at once, writing Wemyss that he had remained on the active list when he left the Admiralty only because Churchill and the government had promised him another active assignment once the war was over. In 1921, this hostile attitude was reversed when First Lord Arthur Lee proposed that “to right a great wrong,” the Marquis of Milford Haven be promoted to Admiral of the Fleet, only the second time in history this had been done for a retired officer. King George agreed at once and Louis was promoted. Five weeks later, he died.

  Louis’s son, who with the change of name became Lord Louis Mountbatten, never forgot what had happened to his father. He made the navy his career, resolving to reach the same office from which his father had been forced to resign. Along the way, Mountbatten served in the Second World War as Supreme Allied Commander in Southeast Asia, as the last British Viceroy of India, and as the first Governor General of independent India. Known as Earl Mountbatten of Burma, he became an Admiral of the Fleet and First Sea Lord and then rose higher to serve for six years as Britain’s first interservice Chief of the Defence Staff.

  Prince Louis’s resignation as First Sea Lord on October 28, 1914, spared him from having to deal with what would have been still another cause of accusation. On November 1, 1914, three days after Louis left the Admiralty, Vice Admiral Maximilian von Spee inflicted on the Royal Navy its worst defeat in over a century.

  CHAPTER 10 Admiral von Spee’s Voyage

  Framed by ancient hills and cooled by fresh breezes from the sea, the German town of Tsingtao on the north China coast prepared for summer. At the beginning of June 1914, the gardens were in bloom and all was in order in this distant outpost of the German empire. Constructed in only seventeen years, the European town seemed older and more settled than that. The broad roads were shaded by acacias, the brick houses had red-tiled roofs reminiscent of Central Europe, the modern Prinz Heinrich and Strand hotels were filled with visitors from Germany, England, and America. There was an impressive library, an observatory, a grammar school where Chinese children learned German, a high school where they would be taught trades, the yellow brick German-Asiatic Bank, and the famous Tsingtao brewery, then—and still today—producing exceptional beer. Above the trees rose the towers of Christ Church and of the station of the Shantung Railway, which communicated with the rich German-administered coal mines in the interior. Europeans could stroll on the Kaiser Wilhelm Embankment, go to the racecourse, or swim from the pebbly bathing beach on Empress Augusta-Victoria Bay. Hills with green meadows, pine woods, mountain streams, bamboo groves, and plantations of mulberry trees where silkworms were raised encircled the town. In the hills, too, a new Chinese quarter had been built, “to keep the native population as far as possible away” from the Europeans.

  This German colony on the Yellow Sea, 6,000 miles from Berlin, had been created by an investment of 50 million marks for a single purpose: to serve as the base of a cruiser squadron of the Imperial Navy. The site had been selected by the founder of the navy himself, Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, during his brief tour of command at sea before Kaiser William II summoned him home to manage the building of the High Seas Fleet. In the spring of 1896, Tirpitz had cruised up and down the China coast and had selected this harbor on the Shantung peninsula. The German government offered to buy the territory, but the Chinese, although militarily impotent following their defeat by Japan in 1895, refused. Then, by one of those happy coincidences that sometimes assist in overcoming obstacles to imperial ambition, two German Catholic missionaries were murdered in the province on November 1, 1897. “We must take advantage of this excellent opportunity,” announced the kaiser in Berlin, “before another great power either dismembers China or comes to her aid! Now or never!” The German East Asia Squadron appeared in the bay, German marines were landed, and, on March 6, 1899, Germany was granted a ninety-nine-year lease on the port and its hinterland. “Thousands of German Christians will breathe again when they see the ships of the German navy in their vicinity,” the kaiser exulted. “Hundreds of German merchants will shout with joy in the knowledge that the German empire has at long last set foot firmly in Asia. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese will shiver if they feel the iron fist of the German empire lying firmly on their neck. I am determined to show once and for all that the German emperor is a bad person with whom to take liberties or have as an enemy.”

  Now, in early Jun
e 1914, four German warships, painted white against the Pacific sun, lay in the Tsingtao roadstead. The mission of these vessels, the armored and light cruisers of the East Asia Squadron of the Imperial Navy, was to police the kaiser’s possessions scattered across the expanse of the Pacific Ocean. In the central Pacific, there were the Marianas, the Carolines, the Marshall Islands, and Samoa, some annexed outright, some purchased in 1899 from an impoverished Spain after the naval disaster at Manila Bay had rendered the Spaniards powerless in the Pacific. To the south lay other German colonies: the Bismarck Archipelago, the Solomon Islands, German New Guinea, Neu Pommern (which British maps called New Britain), and Neu Mecklenberg (formerly New Ireland). The guarding of these territories—a collection of volcanic islands, coral atolls, and swatches of jungle—was the responsibility of the East Asia Squadron. If war broke out against France or Russia, the East Asia Squadron was expected to do well. If war came with Japan—routinely described by the kaiser as the land of “yellow monkeys,” or the “Yellow Peril”—little success was anticipated against the powerful Japanese fleet. Against Great Britain, war was not contemplated.