Castles of Steel

by Robert K. Massie

  The Admiralty’s reply to Jellicoe was austere: “The inferiority of the 1st Battle Cruiser Squadron to the German [Battle] Cruiser Squadron . . . is so slight that it should not make any difference in the Vice Admiral’s duty to engage the latter if opportunity offers.” Nevertheless, Fisher, recognizing his own words and beliefs in Jellicoe’s language, attempted to make amends. He summoned the battle cruiser Indomitable from the Mediterranean to join Beatty, and two armored cruisers to join Jellicoe. On November 28, he wrote Beatty a remarkably conciliatory letter: “I admit the force of all your arguments. . . . The eventuality (not yet improbable) has still to be faced of the Scharnhorst and Company coming through the Panama Canal to New York to release the mass of armed German liners ready to emerge into the Atlantic. Why the Vaterland has not ‘nipped out’ already is beyond me! Remember, the last new German battle cruiser, Derfflinger . . . is even later commissioned than the Tiger, and we know has had very little gunnery practice. . . . As I told Jellicoe, had I known of the New Zealand having more coal endurance, I would have taken her. I am in the position of a chess player coming into the game after some damned bad moves have been made in the opening of the game. . . . It’s very difficult to retrieve a game badly begun.”

  As November progressed, Jellicoe’s anxieties grew. He worried about the three absent battle cruisers and he worried even more about his day-to-day strength in the basic unit of naval supremacy, dreadnought battleships. On paper, which was where Churchill viewed and compared numbers, the Grand Fleet had a comfortable superiority over the High Seas Fleet. On August 2, when Jellicoe took command, the Grand Fleet had nineteen dreadnought battleships and four dreadnought battle cruisers.

  [Six other British battle cruisers were scattered around the world: Inflexible, Indomitable, and Indefatigable in the Mediterranean, hunting Goeben; Invincible at Queenstown in southern Ireland, guarding the Atlantic trade route; Australia in the Pacific; and Tiger in training.]

  Since then, the former Turkish battleships now named Erin and Agincourt had come to the fleet and Iron Duke’s sisters, Emperor of India and Benbow, were coming in December. Meanwhile, the German High Seas Fleet, which had begun the war with thirteen dreadnought battleships and four battle cruisers, had received or was about to receive three new dreadnought battleships. Each fleet had been augmented by one new battle cruiser, the British Tiger and the German Derfflinger.

  On paper, this arithmetic—nineteen battleships to thirteen in August; twenty-three to sixteen in December–January—was always favorable to Jellicoe. These were the numbers the First Lord saw and they satisfied him that all was well. But numbers on paper told only part of the story. During the war’s first months, the Grand Fleet, lacking a secure base, was constantly at sea moving at high speed to thwart the U-boats. By November, continual high-speed steaming had taken a toll on condensers and other propulsion machinery. Breakdowns were occurring and Jellicoe was compelled to establish a regular repair schedule, sending ships, one from each battle squadron at a time, down to their home ports on the south coast for refits. Sadly, these ailments most affected the newest 13.5-inch-gun dreadnoughts, including Jellicoe’s own flagship, Iron Duke. Thus, during one two-week period, Iron Duke and Ajax both had leaking condenser tubes, which affected their speed, Orion had gone to Glasgow for examination of her main turbine supports, Superb had turbine trouble with stripped blades, Conqueror was refitting at Devonport, and New Zealand was in dry dock at Cromarty. At best, the result was the permanent absence from the Grand Fleet of two or three of its most important vessels as well as perhaps one battle cruiser, one or two armored cruisers, a light cruiser, and six destroyers. Recalculating relative strength on the basis of these additional factors, Jellicoe’s arithmetic differed from Churchill’s. He reckoned that, allowing for breakdowns and refits, he had nineteen dreadnoughts against sixteen German dreadnoughts. And since the competent but uninspired Admiral von Ingenohl could always choose a day to come out when all sixteen of his dreadnought battleships and four battle cruisers were available, the effective strength of the Grand Fleet was no more than that of the High Seas Fleet. On this point, no one at the Admiralty disputed Jellicoe. Indeed, Churchill himself had offered the maxim that “We must always be ready to meet at our average moment anything that . . . [the] enemy might hurl against us at his selected moment.”

  Jellicoe’s pessimistic arithmetic and cautious hoarding were subject to criticism during and after the war. But he refused to give way, knowing that the gray ships stretched out in lines at Scapa Flow were the primary defense of the nation. Nor was this all. Jellicoe knew or suspected something that Churchill did not know and that Jacky Fisher would never admit: vessel for vessel, German ships were better constructed than British ships. It was Jellicoe’s conviction, derived from years at the Admiralty and considerable experience with the German navy, that in matters such as armor plating, underwater protection, watertight subdivision of compartments, gunnery control, and some types of shells, the British fleet was inferior to the German. If so, the Grand Fleet was not the overwhelmingly superior weapon the country, Churchill, and many in the navy believed it to be.

  Churchill found Jellicoe’s constant complaints hard to bear. He believed that Jellicoe always magnified his own disadvantages and credited the enemy with more ships than he actually possessed. Not having a naval background, Churchill tended to compare ships solely by the size of their guns and he could not understand Jellicoe’s insistence that until her crew was properly trained and her machinery thoroughly tested, a ship was virtually useless. When the Admiralty sent the Grand Fleet a new ship, the First Lord counted it; until the ship was ready, Jellicoe did not. A tone of exasperation crept into the First Lord’s relationship and correspondence with Jellicoe:

  “The requirements of the Commander-in-Chief were hard to meet,” Churchill wrote after the war.

  If at any time two or three [capital] ships were absent from the Grand Fleet for a week or two, the Commander-in-Chief drew severe comparisons between the High Seas Fleet and his own. He was a master of this kind of argument. From his own side he deducted any ship which had any defect, however temporary, however small—even defects which would not have prevented her from taking her place in the line in an emergency. He sometimes also deducted two or three of the most powerful battleships in the world because they were not trained up to the full level of efficiency of the others, and these were absolutely blotted out as if they were of no value whatever. The enemy he always credited with several more ships than we now know they had or were then thought likely to have. . . . Unable to deny that the British line of battle could fire a broadside double in weight to that of the Germans, he developed a skilful argument to prove that this advantage was more than counteracted by other disadvantages. . . . He dwelt on this even at a period when his fleet had been reinforced by seven or eight additional units of enormous power without any corresponding accession to the enemy’s strength.

  Jellicoe’s argument with the Admiralty extended beyond dreadnoughts to include the eight predreadnought battleships of the King Edward class, each of which carried four 12-inch guns. Jellicoe wanted them stationed as far north as possible in order to bring thirty-two additional heavy guns to bear on the High Seas Fleet when Ingenohl came out to fight; the Admiralty wanted to keep them farther south to help defend the east coast from raids or invasion. On November 13, Churchill attempted a general mollification of the Commander-in-Chief: “Since war began you have gained two dreadnoughts on balance and will by 20th have twenty-seven superior units to twenty. We intend Princess Royal to join you as soon as Scharnhorst is dealt with. During the next month you should suspend sending ships away for refit, doing the best you can at Scapa. . . . If . . . you still feel need for further reinforcement, we propose stationing King Edwards at Rosyth, where they can join you for general action or repelling invasion. . . . If you agree, the eight King Edwards will be ordered to sail tonight.”

  But Jellicoe did not want the King Edwards at Rosy
th; he wanted them farther north—at Scapa Flow or Cromarty. Further, he replied, the twenty-seven dreadnoughts cited by the Admiralty included two ships that had never fired a gun and a third whose crew was only partially trained. The Admiralty, however, refused to change its orders. “We cannot reinforce you at present, nor alter our dispositions,” Churchill wrote on November 17. Taking these positions, Churchill had the support of Fisher and Sir Arthur Wilson. “I think we have to stand fast,” Fisher had written to Churchill regarding Jellicoe’s request to move the King Edwards north. “The Tyrwhitt mob and our overseas submarines are our sole aggressive force in the South.” But Fisher did not blame Jellicoe for requesting reinforcements. Writing to Churchill, he noted, “As A. K. Wilson observed a moment ago, both he and I would probably have written exactly the same letter as Jellicoe, trying to get all we could! Yours till death, F.”

  The Admiralty, having told Jellicoe that it was sending the King Edwards to Rosyth, then inflicted fresh pain by insisting that he surrender some of his Grand Fleet destroyers to screen the old battleships. Churchill’s letter had a defensive tone: “The coast has been so denuded of destroyers for sake of strengthening the force with you (amounting now to seventy-one) that there is only a skeleton force between the Naze [Harwich] and St. Abbs Head [Rosyth], a distance of 300 miles. . . . You should detach half a flotilla [that is, ten destroyers] of the seventy-one destroyers at Scapa to act with . . . [the King Edwards]. . . . We are sending a comparative table of your fleet and German High Seas Fleet which makes it quite clear that, without the King Edwards, you have such a preponderance of gun power that with equal gunnery efficiency, a successful result is ensured.” To soothe, Churchill added, “The Admiralty have in mind the importance of getting back the Princess Royal as soon as the situation admits.”

  Jellicoe reacted with controlled anger. He declared that the seventy-one destroyers mentioned by the Admiralty included ten that were absent from his fleet, refitting. He pointed out that the forty destroyers of the Harwich flotillas had been omitted from Churchill’s mention of the “skeleton force” between the Naze and St. Abbs Head. “I regret to appear importunate,” he continued, “but must beg for reconsideration of the order detaching a half flotilla” to join the King Edwards at Rosyth. Without these ten destroyers, he said, the safety of the dreadnought battle fleet was endangered. A U-boat attack on Scapa Flow was quite feasible and “as I am directed to use this base, I trust I shall not be held responsible for any disaster that may occur.” As for a major fleet action, Jellicoe did not take the Harwich Force destroyers into account as he felt that they could not be counted on to join the Grand Fleet at the moment the Germans chose to come out. “I know perfectly well,” he wrote to Fisher on December 4, “that the Harwich flotillas will not join me in time.” Jellicoe also knew that the Germans had eight flotillas comprising eighty-eight destroyers assigned to the High Seas Fleet and that every one would certainly be there on the day Ingenohl chose to come out. The German destroyers “have five torpedoes each—total four hundred forty torpedoes,” he continued. He himself might arrive for this battle bringing as few as thirty-two or even twenty-eight destroyers. The result, he warned the First Sea Lord, might be retreat. “You know the difficulty and objections to turning away from the enemy in a fleet action, but with such a menace, I am bound to do it unless my own destroyers can stop or neutralize the [enemy’s] movement.” “I cannot but feel,” he concluded, “that with my present weakness in destroyers, I am greatly handicapped in obtaining the crushing victory over the High Seas Fleet that is expected of me.” In reply to this argument, the Admiralty gave little ground, declaring only that eight, not ten, of Jellicoe’s destroyers must leave Scapa Flow for Rosyth.

  Overall, Churchill found these discussions “wearing,” but, counseled by Fisher, he never considered making a change in command. “No one can blame the Commander-in-Chief for endeavouring to keep his command up to the highest level of strength,” he wrote of Jellicoe after the war. “I always tried to sustain him in every possible way. He bore with constancy the many troubles and perplexities of the early months. . . . Even when I did not share his outlook, I sympathised with his trials.”

  If Jellicoe objected to the Admiralty taking three battle cruisers from the North Sea to deal with Spee, and stripping away Grand Fleet destroyers to meet other needs, he was certainly not mollified when Churchill began sending him “battleships” and “battle cruisers” that he had not asked for and did not want. These were not real warships, but dummies—old merchant ships transformed into likenesses of dreadnoughts, intended to deceive the enemy as to where the real battleships and battle cruisers might be. The idea—to create a make-believe battle squadron that could pass itself off at sea as real—was entirely Churchill’s. On October 21, he wrote to Prince Louis, then still First Sea Lord:

  It is necessary to construct without delay a dummy fleet; ten merchant vessels . . . mocked up to represent battleships. . . . The actual size need not correspond exactly, as it is notoriously difficult to judge the size of vessels at sea, and frequently even destroyers are mistaken for cruisers. We are bearing in mind particularly aerial and periscope observations where deception is much more easy. It is not necessary that the structures be strong enough to stand rough weather. Very little metal would be required and practically the whole work should be executed in wood and canvas. . . . Even when the enemy knows we have such a fleet . . . he will always be in doubt as to which is the real and which is the dummy fleet. . . .

  The matter is urgent. . . . The utmost secrecy must be observed and special measures must be taken to banish all foreigners from the districts where the mocking up is being done. I should hope to receive the list of ships which are selected for conversion tomorrow. . . . I should expect in a fortnight, or at the outside in three weeks, that ten vessels will actually be at our disposal.

  Admiral Sir Percy Scott, the famous gunnery expert, was called from retirement to supervise this structural chicanery and, before the end of the month, steamships were commandeered and brought to the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast. The first ten vessels selected were elderly liners, the oldest being thirty-four years old. To determine how each transformation was to be accomplished, an Admiralty draftsman made a tracing of the steamer and placed it over a battleship design on the same scale. “The next day,” according to Scott, “Messrs. Harland & Wolff had about two thousand men cutting . . . fine merchant ships to pieces.” Within a week, wood and canvas structures were reproducing guns, turrets, boats, tripod masts, and bridges. Because a liner rises higher out of the water than a battleship, the merchantmen were filled with thousands of tons of ballast to push the hulls lower. The shapes of bows and sterns were altered. False funnels were added and were equipped with fireplaces to burn combustible materials that would emit thick clouds of smoke. Navy anchors were made of wood or were simply painted on the bows. Once these vessels were ready, they came under the command of Captain H. J. Haddock of the White Star Line, now himself transformed into a commodore in the Royal Navy Reserve. Only two weeks before, Haddock had been master of the 52,000-ton transatlantic liner Olympic; his seamanship in the attempt to tow the sinking dreadnought Audacious had attracted the admiring attention of the Admiralty.

  Only five weeks after Scott took charge, the first dummies put to sea. On December 7, the Grand Fleet at Scapa Flow looked on with amusement as two 7,000-ton dummies, the thirty-two-year-old former City of Oxford and the twenty-seven-year-old former Michigan, masquerading as 25,000-ton St. Vincent–class dreadnoughts, arrived in the anchorage. Other dummies followed. As they came in—Montezuma, Ruthenia, Tyrolia, Oruba, Mount Royal, Montcalm, Perthshire—they were officially referred to by their warship names—“Iron Duke,” “King George V,” “Orion,” “Marlborough,” and “Vanguard.” No one was fooled. Real battleship squadrons were usually made up of generally homogeneous ships. But when the dummies came together, some were twice the size of the others. Their speeds varied greatly. Some could
make 15 knots, others 10, others only 7, and, as a squadron’s speed must be that of the slowest member, 7 knots became the speed at which the dummies could steam together. A 7-knot squadron could not operate with the 20-knot Grand Fleet. “The ships,” said Jellicoe, “could not accompany the fleet to sea and it was very difficult to find a use for them in home waters.” The suggestion that they be used as bait was rejected. An encounter with the enemy would have led to massacre.

  Despite Churchill’s insistence on secrecy, the existence of the dummy squadron quickly became known in Germany, prompting the German Naval Staff to wonder about its purpose. Toward the middle of January 1915, Ingenohl convinced himself that a British naval offensive was imminent and that the dummy warships were part of a plan for running block ships into Hel-igoland Bight and sinking them in the mouths of the Elbe, the Weser, and the Jade. This idea had not occurred at the Admiralty.

  Finding no way to use them, the Admiralty sent the finished dummies from Scapa Flow to Loch Ewe where, as new units were commissioned, Commodore Haddock’s collection continued to grow. Four more steamers were commandeered and turned into battle cruisers: “Queen Mary” (formerly Cevic), “Tiger” (formerly Merion), “Indomitable” (formerly Manipur), and “Invincible” (formerly Patrician). By January, fourteen imitation battle-ships and battle cruisers were ready for sea, still without purpose, but absorbing the services of a number of valuable officers and seamen. At the end of April, the dummy Queen Mary was sent to patrol off New York City as a message to the German liners interned in the harbor that, if they violated their internment and tried to break out, a British battle cruiser was waiting to gobble them up. The assault on the Dardanelles suggested another use; the dummy battle cruisers Indomitable and Tiger departed Loch Ewe on February 19. To avoid being seen, they passed through the Strait of Gibraltar at midnight, and they were forbidden to enter the harbors of Gibraltar or Malta where they could be studied close up. The dummy Invincible followed six weeks later. Churchill hoped that by sending them to the Mediterranean, where they might be seen at a distance, they might “mislead the Germans as to the margin of British strength in home waters” and tempt the enemy to come out and do battle in the North Sea. The Turks did misidentify the dummy Tiger and reported her to a German submarine. On May 30, she was hit and sunk by torpedo and four British seamen drowned. A British midshipman with the Dardanelles fleet found grim humor in the event, imagining the U-boat captain “astonished to see the surviving crew clinging to the floating wooden turrets.”