Castles of Steel

by Robert K. Massie

Still, the ships gave out before the men. Hawke, one of the eight old cruisers, was sunk by a German torpedo on October 14. By the end of that month, Theseus reported bilgewater leaking into her feed tanks, Endymion declared urgent need for engine repairs, and Crescent, the flagship, developed a leaky condenser. At first, patchwork sufficed. Then, November 11 brought down on the squadron a full gale with monster waves. Edgar, with engine trouble, was ordered into harbor. Two ships had to heave to. Crescent was so battered that her admiral, Dudley de Chair, said later, “We rather feared she would go down.” Once the storm had passed, half the squadron went into the Clyde for repairs. There, inspectors reported so unfavorably on the condition of the ships that, on November 20, the Admiralty ordered all of the seven remaining Edgars withdrawn from service.

  Replacements were available, some of them already at work. These were civilian passenger liners, of which Britain possessed more than a hundred before the war. Weighing up to 20,000 tons, with speeds from 15 to 25 knots, they had been converted into armed merchant cruisers. They were, of course, unarmored, but this was irrelevant as they were not to face enemy war-ships. Equipped with 6-inch and 4.7-inch guns to intimidate enemy or neutral merchant vessels, they were manned in part by the crews of the seven retired Edgars. In December, Admiral de Chair gave up his 7,000-ton flagship Crescent for the 18,000-ton liner Alsatian, capable of 23 knots in pursuit, or, if maintained at a patrol speed of 13½ knots, of remaining at sea for forty-two days. By the end of December 1914, eighteen liners patrolled the blockade lines; eventually, there were to be twenty-four.

  Germany had counted on a short war in which a blockade of its coasts would not be a factor. In Count Alfred von Schlieffen’s mind when he drafted his great flanking movement for invading France through Belgium was fear of the dangers of a long war. “A campaign protracts itself,” he said. “Such wars are, however, impossible when a nation’s existence depends upon an unbroken movement of trade and industry.” Underlying this need for haste was the basic economic structure of a powerful young empire that had existed for only forty-three years. In 1914, the German Reich was still divided into two distinct economic units. The industrial cities and manufacturing towns of the west had always been supplied with food and raw materials from overseas, imported through Rotterdam and Antwerp and thence brought up the Rhine, while the eastern agricultural areas of Germany were accustomed to sending their surplus farm products into industrial Bohemia or on to Russia. The German railway system, therefore, had never carried the food surpluses of the empire’s eastern provinces to the west and now, largely diverted to military purposes, was unable to do so. Unless the flow of imports through neutral Dutch ports could be maintained, the food-consuming populations of the west were bound to suffer. It was because of this that Admiral von Tirpitz, fearing that the war would be longer than Schlieffen expected, and reviewing the potential impact of a British blockade, declared that neutrals must be used to bring supplies into Germany. Even so, German experts believed that the empire’s powers of resistance would depend on early and decisive military success; overall, the conclusion was that Germany could maintain itself on its own resources for nine or ten months but no more.

  Because the German government had invested so much in the Schlieffen Plan and believed so strongly in the power of the German army to deliver a quick victory, the Germany navy had been held back. The navy’s war plan, in any case, had been a defensive one, which called for awaiting an expected British offensive. German planners had been aware of Admiral Wilson’s earlier intention to attack Heligoland and seize islands on the German coast; anticipating this offensive, the Germans intended to turn it to their own use. The battle, the Germans hoped, would be fought in the inner Bight in the presence of their own minefields, where they could sink or cripple a significant portion of the attacking fleet. Somehow, through a failure of intelligence, the German Naval Staff remained unaware when in 1912 the Royal Navy abandoned its aggressive plan. There were suspicions that the Admiralty might adopt the strategic defensive by sealing off the North Sea at the Dover Strait and from the Orkneys to the Norwegian coast; shortly before the war, a German intelligence summary had hedged: “There is nothing certain about how Britain will wage war. A series of fleet maneuvers in previous years suggested a close blockade of our coasts; later maneuvers . . . suggest that a distant blockade had been chosen as the starting point of the British war plan.” But even had they been told that the British plan had changed, most German naval officers probably would not have abandoned their belief that the full might of the Grand Fleet would come charging into the Bight in the first weeks of war. When the expected onslaught failed to materialize, the premise on which German naval strategy had been based was overturned.

  Even so, the German Naval Staff still believed that the British would keep light forces within striking distance of the German bases and that these forces would be supported by heavy battle squadrons that from time to time would sweep into the Bight to flaunt their superiority. On these assumptions, the German navy continued to base its naval war plan. Because the kaiser refused to permit an early fleet action, the British fleet was to be reduced by attrition achieved by minelaying, by attack with minor vessels, including submarines, and by offensive sweeps by battle cruisers. When sufficiently large losses had been inflicted and the two battle fleets were approximately equal in strength, then the High Seas Fleet would steam out and force a major battle.

  This campaign of attrition began on the war’s first day when the converted steamer Königin Luise laid a long line of mines, one of which sank the light cruiser Amphion. Britain reacted quickly. The laying of mines in the open sea, beyond an enemy’s three-mile coastal limit, was in violation of the Second Hague Convention. (Germany, anticipating the potential of mine warfare, had refused to accept this portion of the convention.) On August 10, the British Foreign Office sent a note to neutral powers accusing the Germans of scattering mines illegally and indiscriminately around the North Sea, endangering merchant ships of all nations. This peril, the Admiralty warned, would increase because Britain reserved the right to lay mines of its own in self-defense. Further, the note declared, the Admiralty would begin to turn back ships of all neutral flags trading with North Sea ports before they entered areas of exceptional danger. The Dutch, believing these positions a pretext for diverting the Rotterdam trade, were furious; in any case, for the moment, most neutral vessels ignored the warning.

  On the night of August 25, two more German minefields were laid, off the Humber and off the Tyne. Although British minesweeping officers were convinced that the minefields had been laid by fully equipped German navy minelayers, the Admiralty concluded that the work had been done by fishing trawlers disguised as neutrals. Immediately, all east coast ports were closed to neutral fishing craft, and neutral governments were warned again about indiscriminate German mining. Near the end of October, the German Naval Staff decided to mine the approaches to a great commercial harbor; deciding on Glasgow, they dispatched the Berlin to the Firth of Clyde on the approaches to that city. Her captain instead mined the approaches to Tory Island where, on October 27, one of his mines sank the dreadnought Audacious. This shocked the British Admiralty and provided an excuse for a dramatic escalation of the war at sea. On November 2, during Jellicoe’s visit to London to confer with Jacky Fisher, who had just become the First Sea Lord, the British government issued a harsh proclamation:

  During the last week, the Germans have scattered mines indiscriminately in the open sea on the main trade route from America to Liverpool via the north of Ireland. . . . These mines cannot have been laid by any German ship of war. They have been laid by some merchant vessel flying a neutral flag . . . [which is an] ordinary feature of German naval warfare. [Therefore, the Admiralty] give[s] notice that the whole of the North Sea must be considered a military area . . . [where] merchant shipping of all kinds, traders of all countries, fishing craft and all other vessels will be exposed to the gravest dangers. . . . Ships of all countries
wishing to trade to and from Norway, the Baltic, Denmark, and Holland, are advised to come, if inward bound, by the English Channel and the Straits of Dover. There they will be given sailing directions which will pass them safely . . . up the east coast of England. . . . Any straying, even by a few miles from the course indicated, may be followed by fatal consequences.

  This declaration, in effect saying that the whole of the North Sea was out of bounds to world shipping without the express permission of the Royal Navy, brought a storm of anger and protest. Neutral governments read the announcement as a declaration that the British government meant to sever communication between Scandinavia and America. In Germany, the decree was interpreted as an illegal declaration of economic war. Admiral Scheer, who already considered the British “lords of hypocrisy” for not having ratified the Declaration of London, was bitterly indignant. “She [Great Britain] did not consider herself bound by any international laws which would have made it possible to get food and other non-contraband articles through neutral countries into blockaded Germany,” he wrote. “Thus, when the distinction between absolute and relative contraband was done away with, all German import trade by both land and sea was strangled, in particular the importation of food. . . . [Further,] neutral states were forced by England to forbid almost all export of goods to Germany in order to obtain any overseas imports for themselves. . . . Free trading of neutral merchant vessels on the North Sea was made impossible . . . because . . . all shipping was forced to pass through English waters and to submit to English control.” The blockade, intended to starve Germany, Scheer said, “required time to attain its full effect. . . . Success would be achieved gradually and silently, which meant the ruin of Germany as surely as the approach of winter meant the fall of the leaves from the trees.”

  Breaking the blockade imposed by British sea power was, properly, a mission for the German navy. In the war’s early months, however, the kaiser’s navy had shown itself glaringly—embarrassingly—ineffective. Offensive minelaying and submarine operations against British warships had produced paltry results. The Berlin’s expedition had resulted in the sinking of the Audacious, but the Naval Staff remained convinced that the British fleet could not be significantly reduced by this means, and minelaying was discounted as a major factor in the naval war. Expectations from a U-boat campaign against the British fleet were scarcely greater. It was true that the U-boats had inflicted losses—Pathfinder, the Bacchantes, Hawke, and Formidable—but the German Naval Staff did not rate these successes highly; the torpedoed ships were old and of little combat significance. More important, submarines had proved ineffective against modern, fast-moving, escorted heavy warships. They had failed to interrupt movement across the Channel and had not sunk a single troop transport. By December 1914, most German naval officers did not believe that submarines could play a serious role in the war of attrition against the Royal Navy. Increasingly, the Naval Staff and officers in the fleet demanded a new plan, new tactics, new leadership. How could the German fleet, the second most powerful in the world, contest the command of the sea? Mine warfare and submarine attacks on warships had failed, and the emperor had forbidden his navy to force an action between the battle fleets at sea. What other possibilities existed? It was in this state of embarrassment and frustration that the German navy and government considered proposals for a submarine campaign against merchant shipping.

  During the first months of war, when the offensive mission of German submarines was to locate and attack the British fleet and to sink British troop transports moving across the Channel, Allied merchant shipping was left mostly alone. Nevertheless, U-boat commodore Hermann Bauer, closely questioning his captains on their return to base, learned that through their periscopes these young officers were watching a heavy flow of seaborne commercial traffic moving along the English coasts. Early in October, Bauer reported these observations to his superior, Ingenohl. Stressing the deadly potential of using submarines to attack British trade, Bauer argued the uselessness of keeping the bulk of the U-boat fleet parked in defensive circles around Heligoland. Ingenohl, impressed, forwarded Bauer’s recommendation to the Chief of the Naval Staff, Hugo von Pohl. “From a purely military point of view,” Ingenohl wrote, “a campaign of submarines against commercial traffic on the British coasts will strike the enemy at his weakest point and will make it evident . . . that his power at sea is insufficient to protect his imports.” Pohl agreed that unleashing the U-boats against merchant shipping could usefully harm Great Britain, but he hesitated; submarine warfare against commerce would be a violation of international maritime law, to which Article 112 of the German Naval Prize Regulations conformed. Further, any accidental destruction of neutral merchant vessels might provoke neutral nations into war with Germany. Accordingly, it seemed to Pohl, U-boat warfare against merchant ships could be justified only as a reprisal for some flamboyantly heinous act by the enemy. Therefore, without consulting any political leaders, Pohl decided to ignore Ingenohl’s proposal.

  The British Admiralty’s declaration of November 2, declaring the whole of the North Sea a war zone, dramatically changed Pohl’s point of view. An effort to stop shipments of conditional contraband now appeared as a gross violation of international law and the beginning of a campaign to starve the German people. Accordingly, two days after the British declaration was published, Pohl reversed himself and laid before the German chancellor a proposal for submarine warfare against commerce.

  The concept of using submarines as blockading ships was technologically revolutionary and raised numerous problems. To follow the procedures of eighteenth-century sailing-ship days, the U-boat would have to surface, halt its intended prey by either a signal or a warning shot with its deck gun, send a boarding party to the vessel to establish its nationality, and, if it was an enemy, make adequate provisions for the safety of the crew and passengers before sinking it. It being patently impossible for a small, crowded U-boat to take aboard the crew and passengers of a large ship, the best that could be done was that they be allowed to enter their lifeboats before their ship was destroyed. If this happened far from land, with crew and passengers left to fend for themselves in open boats, such arrangements did not meet the requirements of international maritime law.

  Ultimately, U-boat warfare was refined into one or another of two basic operational strategies: restricted and unrestricted. “Restricted” submarine warfare meant that U-boats, before torpedoing enemy merchant vessels, would surface, warn their victims, and give them time to abandon ship. All neutral ships would be spared, and passenger liners of all nations, even enemies, might be spared. “Unrestricted” U-boat warfare meant that all the old formalities of “visit and search” would be ignored and that German U-boats would torpedo without warning all merchant and passenger ships, armed or unarmed, neutral or enemy, without distinguishing between absolute and conditional contraband and without regard for the fate of crew or passengers. The argument for this seemingly barbaric method of warfare rested, ironically, on the frailty of the attacking craft: U-boats were small, slow, unarmored warships, armed only with a small deck gun and a few torpedoes; their primary defense was their ability to operate hidden underwater; once surfaced to stop and examine a merchant vessel and wait while the crew boarded lifeboats, a submarine became the most vulnerable of all warships. For this reason, most German naval officers not only endorsed Bauer’s and Pohl’s proposal, but wished to go immediately to unrestricted submarine warfare. “The gravity of the situation,” said Admiral Scheer, “demands that we should free ourselves from all scruples which certainly no longer have any justification.”

  When the German chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, first heard Admiral von Pohl’s proposal, he was inclined to endorse it. “Viewed from the standpoint of international law, U-boat warfare is a reprisal against England’s hunger blockade,” he wrote to Pohl in December 1914. “When we consider the purely utilitarian rules by which the enemy regulate their conduct, [when we consider] their ruthless
pressure on neutrals . . . we may conclude that we are entitled to adopt whatever measure of war is most likely to bring them to surrender.” This was the pragmatic chancellor speaking, the man who a few months before had deplored Britain’s entry into the war merely to uphold “a scrap of paper”—the treaty in which Great Britain had promised to defend Belgian neutrality. But while the chancellor saw nothing illegal or immoral in the proposed U-boat campaign, he argued that the decision must be made on practical grounds, involving political as well as military considerations. He feared that a U-boat blockade of Britain would provoke neutral nations and therefore could be employed only when Germany’s military position on the Continent was so secure that there could be no doubt as to the ultimate outcome; once this was achieved, the navy could do as it wished because the intervention of neutral states would have no impact. Now—in December 1914—Bethmann-Hollweg told Pohl, these conditions did not exist.

  The kaiser was not ready to approve a submarine campaign and he supported the chancellor. William was well aware that neutral as well as Allied ships were carrying contraband war material from America to Britain and France, and he deeply resented this fact. He feared, on the other hand, that indiscriminate sinkings by U-boats would poison relations with Holland and Scandinavia and might pitch Germany into war with the United States. William’s gentler, more sentimental side also played a part. Unrestricted submarine warfare and the killing of civilians at sea conflicted with his notion of chivalry and his own self-image as a knightly figure. Wearing this mantle, he told a group of admirals in November 1914, “Gentlemen, always realize that our sword must be clean. We are not waging war against women and children. We wish to fight this war as gentlemen, no matter what the other side may do. Take note of that!”

  William was reluctant to use such moderate language when speaking to Tirpitz, of whom he was somewhat afraid. The following day, he explained defensively to the Grand Admiral that while he did not object to submarine warfare in itself, he was determined to wait until it could be waged effectively. Pohl, on the other hand, was a small man who possessed little power to intimidate, but had a large talent for guile. On December 14, only three weeks after the kaiser had said no, Pohl returned with a more specific U-boat campaign proposal: planning would be completed by the end of January; a declaration would give ample cautionary notice to neutrals; U-boat operations would begin at the end of February. Again, Bethmann-Hollweg objected. Why provoke antagonism just when Britain, by its coercive blockade, was exasperating most of Europe’s neutrals? At this point, Pohl received unexpected help. A month before, when Tirpitz had realized that his imperial master did not intend to risk his prized dreadnoughts, the Grand Admiral had begun to champion the idea of submarine warfare as the only alternative means by which England’s power at sea might be broken. On December 21, German newspapers published an interview given by Tirpitz at the end of November to Charles von Wiegand, a German-born American journalist. The circumstances of the interview had been unusual: Tirpitz received Wiegand in his bedroom at German Supreme Headquarters at Charleville in occupied France and the Grand Admiral sat in a chair beside his unmade bed. Before speaking, he asked the reporter to submit the interview to the Foreign Ministry for clearance. Wiegand agreed, and Tirpitz plowed ahead. “America has raised no protest and has done little or nothing to stop the closing of the North Sea against all neutral shipping,” he said. “Now what will America say if Germany institutes a submarine blockade of England to stop all traffic?”