Castles of Steel

by Robert K. Massie

  At 1:20 p.m., a torpedo struck Dunraven’s starboard side. The ruse of merchant seamen abandoning ship had already been exhausted. But a roaring fire now engulfed the greater part of the vessel and there is a moment when even a Q-ship must be abandoned. Hoping that the German captain would believe that this moment had arrived, Campbell gave the order “Abandon ship” for the second time. A second panic party, organized impromptu, went over the side into rafts. Still, twenty-three men remained on board: the gun crews of the two working guns still concealed, the men at the two torpedo tubes, the ship’s doctor, nine wounded men, and four men lying prone on the bridge. One of them was Campbell.

  U-61 rose to the surface. Was the burning ship finally abandoned or not? Uncertain, the submarine fired a few more shells into the wreck and then submerged. For forty-five minutes, showing only its periscope, the U-boat circled its listing, burning victim. During this time, the fire on Dunraven grew larger and boxes of gunpowder and 4-inch shells began exploding in the flames. At 2:30 p.m., the U-boat surfaced a few hundred yards directly astern of the Q-ship, where no gun could bear on her. For twenty minutes, more shells were fired into the stricken ship. The men on board remained motionless.

  At 2:50 p.m., U-61 ceased fire, submerged, and moved past Dunraven’s port side at a distance of only 150 yards. Campbell, his ship burning and sinking, decided to wait no longer. Only a small part of the submarine’s periscope was visible but it was enough to reveal depth and position. At 2:55 p.m., he fired a torpedo. Unfortunately, his ship was listing and his aim was spoiled. The bubbles passed just ahead of the periscope and the U-boat, unaware, came slowly around to the starboard side. Given a second chance, Campbell fired his second torpedo. This time, he and others heard a metallic clang: the torpedo had made contact, but had failed to explode. The submarine captain heard the same thing and promptly dived deep, gave up the battle, and returned to Germany. Campbell now genuinely signaled for help and an American armed yacht and two British destroyers arrived to rescue his crew. Dunraven was taken in tow, but that night, her White Ensign flying, she foundered. Two members of her crew, a lieutenant and a petty officer, were awarded the Victoria Cross. Gordon Campbell, in lieu of a second Victoria Cross, was given a bar to his first. This, along with his Distinguished Service Order with two bars, made him the most highly decorated man in the Royal Navy during the Great War.

  By the time of Dunraven’s epic battle, help was coming from America. At the end of March 1917, Rear Admiral William S. Sims, the president of the U.S. Naval War College at Newport, Rhode Island, was ordered to report immediately and secretly to Washington. He was not to appear at the Navy Department, but to contact his superiors by telephone. In this manner, Sims learned that United States probably would soon be at war with Germany and that he was to leave at once for England, where he was to coordinate American cooperation with the Royal Navy. Sims sailed for England as “Mr. S. W. Davidson,” wearing civilian clothes and carrying no uniform in his luggage. His American steamship struck a mine as it approached Liverpool; the passengers were transferred to another vessel and reached England safely on April 9. There, “Mr. Davidson” was met by a special train and hurried to London. By then, his alias was unnecessary; three days earlier, Congress had declared war on Germany.

  William Sims, a tall, erect, white-haired man born in Canada, became an American, entered the navy, and made his name as a gunnery specialist. He had been Inspector of Target Practice and had commanded the battleship Minnesota and then a flotilla of destroyers before going to the War College. The obvious reason for sending Sims to Britain was that five years earlier he had made a speech in London that at the time seemed likely to blight his career. At the Guildhall in 1910, then Captain Sims had promised the Lord Mayor and a large audience that in the event of a war with Germany, Britain could “rely upon the last ship, the last dollar, the last man, and the last drop of blood of her kindred beyond the sea.” For this bit of unauthorized, public Anglophilia, Sims had received a direct reprimand from President Taft. Now, however, when a senior officer was needed to coordinate planning with the British navy, Sims’s enthusiasm was remembered favorably. Not all American officers shared his views. Before Sims left Washington, the navy’s senior admiral, William S. Benson, Chief of Naval Operations, admonished him, “Don’t let the British pull the wool over your eyes. It’s none of our business pulling their chestnuts out of the fire. We would as soon fight the British as the Germans.”

  In London, Sims found the British public largely oblivious to the danger facing their country. The government had ceased to publish figures for tonnages sunk and the crowds packing the theaters every night were cheerfully ignorant of the fact that only six weeks’ supply of wheat remained in the country. The truth was that the Germans had discovered a way to win the war and were on their way to accomplishing it. Unless the appalling destruction of merchant tonnage could be substantially checked, Britain’s withdrawal from the war was not far off.

  On the morning of April 10, Sims called on Jellicoe at the Admiralty. The two men were friends; they had met in China in 1901 and had kept in touch because of their mutual interest in naval gunnery. Sims greatly admired the British admiral. The First Sea Lord, he said, was “a small man, powerful in frame . . . indefatigable . . . profound . . . simple and direct . . . the idol of the officers and men of the Grand Fleet. . . . Success made him more quiet, soft spoken and dignified. . . . He was all courtesy, all brain . . . approachable, frank, open-minded.” And Jellicoe’s “smooth-shaven face when I met him that morning was, as usual, calm, smiling imperturbable.”

  Greeting his visitor, Jellicoe took a paper out of his drawer and handed it across the table. It was a record of the tonnage of British and neutral shipping losses of the last few months.

  “I was fairly astounded,” Sims wrote later,

  for I had never imagined anything so terrible. I expressed my consternation to Admiral Jellicoe.

  “Yes,” he said, as quietly as though he were discussing the weather and not the future of the British Empire. “It is impossible for us to go on with the war if losses like this continue.”

  “What are you going to do about it?” I asked.

  “Everything that we can. We are increasing our anti-submarine forces in every possible way. We are using every possible craft we can with which to fight submarines. We are building destroyers, trawlers and other like craft as fast as we can. But the situation is very serious and we shall need all the assistance we can get.”

  “It looks as though the Germans are winning the war,” I remarked.

  “They will win unless we can stop these losses—and stop them soon,” the Admiral replied.

  “Is there no solution for the problem?” I asked.

  “Absolutely none that we can see now,” Jellicoe announced.

  Bad as it was, Jellicoe expected the situation to get worse. Summer was coming, which would give the submarines more daylight and milder weather. Jellicoe could calculate and apply the arithmetic as well as Holtzendorff could; it was relatively easy to determine how long the Allies could last. What the figures said was that, unless something could be done quickly, the end would come about November 1.

  Jellicoe was not alone in his alarm. King George V invited Sims to spend a night at Windsor Castle and after dinner, over cigars, told him that the sinkings must be stopped or the Allies would lose the war. Only the prime minister remained optimistic. Lloyd George—“a big, exuberant boy,” as Sims described him—was “always laughing and joking, constantly indulging in repartee and by-play. His face never betrayed the slightest anxiety. ‘Oh, yes, things are bad,’ he would say with a smile and a sweep of his hand. ‘But we shall get the best of the submarines—never fear!’ ”

  Sims told Jellicoe that no one in the United States realized that the situation was so serious and asked how America could help. The greatest need, Jellicoe stressed, was for “every available destroyer, trawler, yacht, tug and other small craft of sufficient speed to deal w
ith submarines.” He asked that America build more merchant ships to replace the losses. He also suggested that the United States might repair and put into service all German liners and cargo ships interned in American ports. Sims, listening to Jellicoe, immediately grasped the implications for the United States. If Britain and France were forced to surrender, the peace terms would include the surrender of the British and French fleets. The U.S. Navy would then be left alone to fight a German-British-French armada.

  Simms cabled Washington, describing for men separated from the war by 3,000 miles the gravity of the submarine crisis. The best way for the United States to help immediately, he said, was by sending destroyers and light surface craft to serve in the waters west of Ireland along which lay the shipping routes that meant life or death to the Allied cause. Ambassador Page wholeheartedly supported Sims and personally asked President Wilson to send thirty destroyers. On April 13, Sims was told that six U.S. destroyers were coming immediately, with more to follow. On April 14, Destroyer Divi-sion 8 of the U.S. Atlantic Fleet, based in York River, Virginia, departed for Boston to fit out for “long and distant service.”

  For the first thirty-two months of war, British and Allied merchantmen had sailed independently, setting their own courses and speeds, conforming vaguely to a system of advisory routing established by the Admiralty, but taking their chances on encountering submarines. Safety was seen to lie in large numbers of merchant vessels widely dispersed, in the cloak of night and storms, in equipping some merchantmen with deck guns, in occasional zigzagging, and, most important, in luck. As late as January 1917, an Admiralty memorandum specifically reiterated this policy and condemned any other: “Wherever possible, vessels should sail singly. . . . The system of several ships sailing in company as a convoy is not recommended in any area where submarine attack is a possibility. . . . It is evident that the larger the number of ships forming the convoy, the greater the chance of a submarine being enabled to attack successfully.” “A submarine could remain at a distance and fire her torpedo into the middle of the convoy with every chance of success.”

  By April 1917, the ferocity of the U-boat offensive had torn these assumptions to shreds. The new solution, reluctantly accepted by the Admiralty, was the convoy system it had just condemned. Ironically, the British navy had already had substantial success with convoy. Grand Fleet battle squadrons, escorted by destroyers, steamed in close formation through waters infested with U-boats—and no dreadnought had ever been sunk by a submarine. In effect, the dreadnoughts were under convoy. Troop transports were convoyed to the Mediterranean and Gallipoli. Closer to home, the British navy successfully convoyed troops and supplies across the Channel to France every day without ever losing a man, a gun, or a horse. In addi-tion, ships carrying coal to France were now under convoy. Coal was a major British export, essential to the economy and war production of her allies, France and Italy, as well as to the economy of neutral Norway. France alone needed to import 1.5 million tons of coal every month and cross-Channel colliers made 800 round-trips a month. In February, four convoys—which the Admiralty preferred to call controlled sailings—sailed every day under escort by armed trawlers. Between February 10, when the first convoy sailed, and the end of April, 2,600 convoyed crossings went back and forth to France and only 5 colliers were sunk; the rate of loss was 0.19 percent. From February through August, 8,900 ships were convoyed; 16 were sunk, a rate of 0.18 percent. On April 4, the decision had been made to place Scandinavian trade—British coal to Scandinavia; Scandinavian metal ores, nitrates, wood, and foodstuffs to Britain—under convoy. In the first month of this arrangement, the rate of shipping losses plummeted from 25 percent to 0.24 percent.

  Why, then, did the Admiralty wait so long before extending the convoy system to the larger arena of the Western Approaches? Jellicoe’s answer, in large part, was the lack of destroyers. When Sims asked whether convoys might work in this critical area, Jellicoe said the number of escorts available was “totally insufficient.” It was to make up this dearth that the First Sea Lord had pressed Sims, and Sims, in turn, had pressed the Navy Department to send American destroyers to Europe. But the Admiralty had other reasons for wariness. Naval officers doubted the ability of merchant vessels steaming in columns to keep close and accurate station, especially at night; merchantmen, the navy felt, would not be able to follow signals and zigzag in unison; they varied in speed and tended to straggle, a difficulty that could be overcome only by reducing the speed of convoy to that of the slowest ship. Further, the simultaneous arrival of a large number of ships would badly congest harbors and dock facilities, thereby slowing the rate and diminishing the volume of goods imported.

  The Admiralty’s hesitations were matched by those of the weatherbeaten, practical men who captained British merchantmen. On February 23, 1917, three weeks after the unrestricted submarine campaign began and eleven days before America entered the war, Jellicoe invited ten captains of cargo steamers then lying in the London docks to call on him at the Admiralty. There, the First Sea Lord asked for their views on the feasibility of placing ships in convoy as protection against U-boats. He emphasized the necessity of good station keeping in close formation; ideally, vessels should travel in lines only 500 yards apart. “Absolutely impossible,” the ten captains replied in chorus. “We have so few competent deck officers that the captain would have to be on the bridge the whole twenty-four hours.” Also, they lacked suitable engine-room telegraphs with which fine-tune speed; their inexperienced engineers could not make the delicate adjustments required; the poor quality of coal they burned delivered varying power to the propellers, making impossible the constant slight variations in speed required to keep station. In general, their ships were undermanned and the personnel were inexperienced. They could not maneuver at night or in fogs and gales in close formation without lights. They were certain they would lose more ships to collision than submarines could sink. Emphatically, the captains declared that they did not want convoys; they would rather sail alone and take their chances.

  This meeting at the Admiralty had taken place near the end of February. Between then and the end of April, the situation became much worse: within three months, almost 2 million tons of the world’s merchant shipping had been sent to the bottom. Meanwhile, in the same three months, Britain had sunk only seven submarines. These grim facts were forcing the Admiralty to reconsider beginning Atlantic convoys. Duff was already monitoring the results of the coal convoys to France and Jellicoe had approved institution of convoys to Scandinavia. The obstacle to extending convoy to the Western Approaches remained the lack of escorts. Jellicoe was heavily criticized for his tardiness in authorizing ocean convoy, but for him, it was a matter of drawing conclusions from technical data; he neither pushed nor opposed convoy purely on principle. His nature was to be cautious in a new situation. Jellicoe could make a quick decision—he had done so in deploying the fleet at Jutland—but he had not done so then, and would not do so now, until he possessed all the obtainable information. This was Jellicoe’s way.

  Lloyd George’s way was different. Watching the shipping losses soar, he roared with anger and poured contempt on the “palsied and muddle-headed Admiralty” with its “atmosphere of crouching nervousness,” its “condition of utter despair,” and its “paralytic documents.” He had looked, he announced, into the “fear-dimmed eyes of our Mall admirals” and seen only “stunned pessimism.” The “High Admirals” were “men whose caution exceeded their courage,” who “go about with gloomy mien and despondent hearts,” whose “reports are full of despair.” During the last week of April, the prime minister staged a drama—or so he later claimed. On April 23, he raised in the War Cabinet the question of shipping losses and the possibility of convoy. Jellicoe, who was present, said that convoy was under consideration; that the obstacle was the shortage of destroyers; that American destroyers had been promised but none had yet arrived. That night at the Admiralty, Duff came to Jellicoe’s office and told him that the shipping lo
sses had convinced him that a wider system of convoy must be attempted. Jellicoe asked Duff to draw up a minute putting this recommendation in specific detail. On April 25, the War Cabinet met and again discussed the submarine crisis. According to Lord Beaverbrook, who was not there, Lloyd George “announced his intent to go himself to the Admiralty and make peremptory decisions.” The visit was set for April 30. On April 26, Duff produced his minute for Jellicoe, and on April 27 the First Sea Lord approved the recommendations and authorized an experimental convoy from Gibraltar to the Channel. As a result, when Lloyd George arrived at the Admiralty three days later, Jellicoe told the prime minister that a convoy system was under trial. According to Hankey, who was present, Lloyd George was pleased “and spent the whole day there very pleasantly, lunching with Admiral Jellicoe and his wife and four little girls—Lloyd George having a great flirtation with a little girl of three.” Beaverbrook’s version—again, he was not there—was, “On the 30th of April, the prime minister descended on the Admiralty, seated himself in the First Lord’s chair, and took over the full reins.”

  Seventeen years later, Lloyd George announced in his War Memoirs that he was responsible for the decision to adopt convoy. “Apparently the prospect of being overruled in their own sanctuary galvanised the Admiralty. Accordingly, when I arrived at the Admiralty, I found the Board in a chastened mood. . . . I insisted on their giving a trial to the Gibraltar convoy.” Professor A. T. Patterson, Jellicoe’s biographer and the editor of his letters, labels Lloyd George’s account “a travesty of the facts.” Duff’s minute was of sufficient length and detail, says Patterson, as to “virtually preclude the possibility of its having been thrown together in a few hours” following the prime minister’s announcement of his intended visit. In 1928, Duff wrote to Jellicoe and stated emphatically that his own convoy proposal to Jellicoe had been influenced only by the mounting shipping losses: “My impression was that he [Lloyd George] came to look into Admiralty organization generally. There is no foundation for the belief that his visit was in any way the cause of my suggestion that the time had arrived for starting convoy.” Jellicoe himself later wrote that any statement that his approval of Duff’s minute and the decision to begin trial convoys “was the result of pressure brought to bear on the Admiralty from the War Cabinet is quite incorrect. The views of experienced naval officers on a technical question involving the gravest responsibility could not possibly be affected by outside opinion, however high the quarter from which that opinion emanated.” Sir Edward Carson, who was First Lord at the time, read Lloyd George’s claim in the former prime minister’s War Memoirs with indignation. “The little popinjay,” he said of Lloyd George, had told “the biggest lie ever was told! Jellicoe did not oppose the convoy system but required time to organize it. At first there were not enough ships available for that work. But the prime minister would not listen to reason. ‘Sack the lot!’ was his favorite expression. ‘Why don’t you get fresh men with sea experience?’ One day I said to him, ‘I must be under a strange hallucination, Prime Minister, for I thought that Admiral Jellicoe had just come from the sea.’ ”