Castles of Steel

by Robert K. Massie

  For the German navy, the loss curve had been in the opposite direction. Between May and July 1917, fifteen U-boats were lost, but the ratio remained favorable: fifty-three merchant ships were sunk for each U-boat lost. Moreover, twenty-four new U-boats replaced the fifteen lost. Even so, the German High Command now understood that the unrestricted campaign was not going to bring Britain to her knees within six months. Rather than give up, the Naval Staff extended its time limit. In early July, ninety-five new submarines were ordered for delivery beginning in the summer of 1918. German losses continued to be heavy: in the last five months of 1917, thirty-seven U-boats were sunk; from January to April 1918, twenty-four U-boats were lost. Beginning in April, American and British shipyards were building more merchant tonnage than was being destroyed. Through all of this, as Arthur Marder has pointed out, it was not the numbers of submarines sunk that truly counted in achieving victory over the U-boats; rather, it was the survival rate of the merchant ships that were their intended victims. Sinking submarines was a bonus, not a necessity. What mattered was that the merchant ships survive and deliver their cargoes. If they could do that—because the U-boats had been avoided or forced to keep out of the way—it did not matter how many U-boats were sent to the bottom.

  CHAPTER 37 Jellicoe Leaves, Beatty Arrives, and the Americans Cross the Atlantic

  John Jellicoe, slow to appreciate the value of convoy and hesitant to begin without sufficient escorts, nevertheless guided the navy in 1917 to the brink of victory over the submarines. Whereupon, on Christmas Eve, he was sacked—to use one of Lloyd George’s favorite words. Jellicoe had been appointed First Sea Lord by Arthur Balfour and arrived at the Admiralty a week before Balfour left for the Foreign Office. The new First Lord was Sir Edward Carson, a Protestant Irishman whose resistance to Home Rule had won him the prewar title of “uncrowned King of Ulster.” Carson did not pretend to any knowledge of the navy—“My only qualification is that I am absolutely at sea,” he told an audience—but he worked hard to learn, frequently visited the fleet, and won the admirals’ trust. “As long as I am at the Admiralty, the sailors will have full scope,” he told a public audience. “They will not be interfered with by me and I will not let anyone interfere with them.” This arrangement worked on Carson’s side, but Jellicoe still could not escape from meetings where every politician insisted on having his say. “I am overwhelmed with work at present. War Councils waste half my time,” he wrote to Beatty after two weeks in office. “I spent from 10.30 a.m. till 6.15 p.m. on War Council yesterday and decided nothing. This is the common routine,” he wrote soon after. And later still: “The Imperial War Cabinet meets three times a week besides the ordinary War Cabinet daily and I find as a consequence very little time for the work of the war. The waste of time is abominable, but I cannot be away or something may get settled to which I should object.”

  In his first winter at the Admiralty, Jellicoe suffered from influenza and severe neuritis. In January 1917, Fisher found him in bed, “seedy but indomitable. Poor chap! His one and only terror was the German submarine menace which, as he truly says, one and a half years of Admiralty apathy has made so prodigious as to be almost beyond cure!” By May 1917, what Lloyd George perceived to be Jellicoe’s unwarranted delay over the convoy decision placed the First Sea Lord high on the prime minister’s list of men who must be removed. For his part, Jellicoe regarded the prime minister as dangerously frivolous. On the eve of a visit by Lloyd George to Rosyth, the First Sea Lord warned Beatty: “You will remember no doubt what an impressionable man he is and how apt to fly off at a tangent. One has to be cautious in talking to him. He is a hopeless optimist and told me seriously the other day that he knew for a fact we could feed the population even if all our supplies were cut off!! He gets figures from any source and believes them if they suit his views.” Jellicoe knew, of course, that Lloyd George was displeased with him. “I have got myself much disliked by the Prime Minister and others,” Jellicoe wrote to Beatty on June 30. “I fancy there is a scheme on foot to get rid of me. The way they are doing it is to say I am too pessimistic. . . . I expect it will be done by first discrediting me in the press.”

  Carson vigorously defended his First Sea Lord. “Wherever you read criticisms of my colleague, Sir John Jellicoe, try to find out what is the origin of them,” he advised one audience. It did not matter. Jellicoe had no trouble identifying the source of his troubles: it was 10 Downing Street. Hankey noted early in July that “the PM is hot for getting rid of Jellicoe.” King George V later said that the prime minister “had his knife into him [Jellicoe] for some time.” Carson himself wrote later, “At one point, Lloyd George was so rude to Jellicoe that the First Sea Lord came to me and pressed me to accept his resignation.”

  “My dear Admiral,” I said, “who is your ministerial chief?” And he replied, “Why you, sir.”

  So I said, “Have you ever found that I lacked confidence in you?” and he was good enough to reply that there were the happiest relations between us.

  “Then my dear Admiral,” I said, “let me say to you what I should say to the youngest officer in the service—Carry on.”

  Nevertheless, the attack on the First Sea Lord and the Admiralty broadened. Lord Northcliffe, the owner of The Times and Daily Mail (the “reptile press,” according to Vice Admiral Sir Charles Madden, Jellicoe’s brother-in-law), commanded half of the London newspaper market and had trained his sights on Jellicoe. “You kill him. I’ll bury him,” the prime minister supposedly said to Northcliffe regarding the admiral. “No one can feel the smallest confidence in the present Admiralty,” editorialized Northcliffe’s Daily Mail. “If it does not fall soon, it will bring down our country with it.” The inventor-journalist Arthur Pollen assaulted Jellicoe in the press, at London dinner parties, even by writing to leaders of the American government. In a letter written to President Wilson’s press secretary and intended for the president’s eyes, Pollen declared, “The British Admiralty has done nothing of a constructive character since the war began and . . . if we [Americans] act on the assumption that they have, we will face disaster.” To Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt, Pollen spoke of the “extraordinary folly” of Jellicoe and the Admiralty.

  [Jellicoe responded to Pollen’s attacks by saying, “It fell to me to turn down his inventions on more than one occasion.”]

  Behind the First Sea Lord’s back, a group of young naval officers used the office of the War Cabinet secretary, Maurice Hankey, to place their complaints before the prime minister. Later, Jellicoe wrote: “One can gather from some books written since the war that there were apparently certain junior officers who went to, and were received by, Mr. Lloyd George, who gave him their ideas for dealing with the submarine menace. Personally, I never heard of their proposals. It is true that Mr. Lloyd George did make one or two suggestions to me for dealing with the menace, but these were of such a nature that they could not have emanated from the brain of any naval officer.”

  Beatty’s attitude toward Jellicoe at this time has been described as “ambivalent”; a better word would be “hypocritical.” To Jellicoe’s face, Beatty was supportive. On July 2, he urged the beleaguered First Sea Lord to ignore “what the intriguers set themselves to do. And you must stick at all costs to your intention of not volunteering to go, that would be fatal. Do not be goaded into any step of that kind no matter what the press or anybody else says. Keep yourself fit and damn the Papers and the Critics.” And yet the previous month, Beatty had written to a woman friend that “J. J. [Jellicoe] was always a half-hearted man . . . [who] . . . dislikes men of independence and loves sycophants and toadies.” Beatty assured this friend that if he wanted the Admiralty for himself, he could have it, “if J. J. departs, as he would if I started a war to the knife. . . . I am faced with a quandary. If I go the whole length of denunciation with the Admiralty and their ways and I am successful, it means that I should have to go to the Admiralty. That means leaving the Grand Fleet. It is a question of
which is the most important appointment to the Nation.”

  Meanwhile, whatever her private feelings toward her husband, Ethel Beatty worked faithfully in London to promote his career and to undermine Jellicoe as First Sea Lord. She made a friend of Arthur Pollen and in May 1917 wrote to Beatty, “I telephoned Mr. Pollen to come and see me which he did. He tells me he has declared open warfare against Jellicoe and he is going to have him removed in a month’s time.” Later, at a dinner party, “I talked to Pollen and he says in another two months Jellicoe will go. . . . The American admiral [Sims] was there. . . . Pollen had been putting him right about the battle of Jutland.”

  Lloyd George, meanwhile, had decided that he himself could best run the Admiralty but that “unless I were present at the Admiralty every day to supervise every detail of administration, it would be impossible for me promptly to remove all hindrances and speed up action.” As a first step, he removed Carson on July 17 and installed his own man. The new First Lord was Sir Eric Geddes, a Scot described by Sims as “a giant figure whose mighty frame, hard and supple muscles, and power of vigorous and rapid movement, would have made him one of the greatest [of] heavy-weight prize fighters.” In fact, Geddes was a railway man who had worked for the Baltimore and Ohio Railway, managed a railway in India, and then risen to the top of the British North Eastern Railway. In wartime, he went to the Ministry of Munitions and then was asked to reorganize the railway system behind the British front in France. Fond of medals and titles and saying that he needed status to facilitate his work, he had been given the honorary military rank of major general. In May 1917, Lloyd George moved him to the Admiralty as controller, to supervise all shipbuilding for the navy and the merchant marine. Before going, Geddes insisted on being made a vice admiral. He was supplied with a uniform, which he wore to work with his officer’s cap tilted down over one eye—in the manner of Beatty.

  The navy hardly knew what to make of this “masquerading” admiral; Lord Esher, the backstage close friend of King Edward VII, Admiral Jacky Fisher, and almost everyone else of consequence in British political life, described Geddes as a figure from Gilbert and Sullivan: “a general today and an admiral tomorrow.” Admiral Oliver, the Chief of Staff, was disgusted. “We have been upside down here ever since the North-Eastern Railway took over. Geddes is mad about statistics and has forty people always making graphs and issuing balance sheets full of percentages.” Geddes’s chief statistician, Oliver said, “used to bother me frequently for material to work on. To keep peace and to keep him away and occupy him and his staff, my staff used to make up data mixed with weather conditions and phases of the moon which kept them occupied. In a few months, wonderful graphs appeared.” It fell to Jellicoe to tell Geddes that his new methods were not working:

  I said that the organisation set up by him had failed to produce better results—if as good results—as the old organisation in the hands of naval officers and Admiralty officials. I mentioned that the shipbuilders could not work with the new officials . . . that their methods caused great and avoidable delays. I also found the armament firms very dissatisfied with the new organisation which delayed matters and was much inferior to working direct with the Director of Naval Ordnance. I knew well that great pressure was constantly brought to bear on the Director and Chief Inspector of Naval Ordnance to accept designs and munitions which were not up to the standard of efficiency required for the Navy.

  Ignoring protests, Geddes pushed forward. He was accustomed to being obeyed, and senior admirals were no more to him than subordinate railway officials. At one point, disputing Jellicoe’s attempt to recommend a knighthood for Admiral Duff, the First Lord withheld approval, saying that he did not like this admiral’s manner. Jellicoe replied that he was recommending Duff “for his services not his manner.” On Christmas Eve, 1917, Lloyd George’s ax, eagerly swung by Geddes, fell on Jellicoe. The First Sea Lord was in his Admiralty room, about to go home to his pregnant wife and his four young daughters. His last appointment that day was with a group of Grand Fleet captains who had presented him with a silver model of his flagship, Iron Duke. The visitors were leaving when at 6:00 p.m. a special messenger delivered a blue envelope marked “Personal and strictly private.” It was from the First Lord:

  After very careful consideration, I have come to the conclusion that a change is desirable in the post of First Sea Lord. I have not, I can assure you, arrived at this view hastily or without personal regret and reluctance. I have consulted the Prime Minister and with his concurrence, I am asking to see the King to make this recommendation to him.

  Jellicoe replied that night:

  I have received your letter. You do not assign a reason for your action, but I assume that it is due to a want of confidence in me. Under these conditions you will realise that it is difficult for me to continue my work. I shall therefore be glad to be relieved as soon as possible.

  The next morning, Christmas Day, Geddes telephoned Lloyd George and reported that the deed was done. “It’s a good thing,” the prime minister said. Then, addressing Jellicoe as “Dear Sir,” the Welshman wrote him a single sentence: “I have the honor to inform you that His Majesty has been pleased to approve of my recommendation that the dignity of a peerage of the United Kingdom should be conferred on you. Yours faithfully, D. Lloyd George.” Jellicoe pondered and then decided to accept for the sake of the navy and his children. He was made a viscount, “a title usually reserved for a moderately efficient Cabinet Minister on retirement,” said Jellicoe’s friend Admiral Bacon.

  Geddes said later that he fired Jellicoe “in the way I thought least likely to offend his feelings,” but the firing occurred at a moment when no newspapers would appear for two days. The Sea Lords—excepting Vice Admiral Sir Rosslyn Wester Wemyss, who had already agreed to succeed Jellicoe as First Sea Lord—were informed on Christmas Day. When Jellicoe told them that “the change was not of my seeking,” the admirals protested to Geddes: “We had full confidence in Sir John Jellicoe’s ability and fitness to perform his responsible duties and were most gravely concerned and disturbed by this sudden removal. . . . We therefore decided to request you . . . to inform us of the reasons which caused this step to be taken.” Geddes agreed to see the Sea Lords two at a time and informed them that, two months earlier, he had spoken to the two previous First Lords, Carson and Balfour, in the presence of Lloyd George, and that both former First Lords had told him that they did not consider Jellicoe the best man to lead the Admiralty. Carson vehemently denied ever having said this; Balfour was vague. Geddes then reversed himself and denied that he had ever quoted Carson against Jellicoe. Carson, now enraged, declared that not only had he never declared that Jellicoe was not the best man for the post, but indeed he had said that Jellicoe “was the only man for First Sea Lord.” Entangled in this briar patch, Geddes turned back on the Sea Lords and huffed, “I would remind you that the appointment and removal of Sea Lords is entirely a matter for His Majesty and His Majesty’s government.” Constitutionally, Geddes was correct. The Sea Lords, who had considered collective resignation, told Jellicoe that as “we have realised that we cannot possibly bring you back and we may do great harm to the country,” they had decided to remain.

  News of the dismissal spread quickly. Almost worse than the fact of it was the way it was done. Vice Admiral Sir Stanley Colville, Commander-in-Chief, Portsmouth, called it “disgraceful” and “a personal affront to the navy.” Madden, second in command of the Grand Fleet, was “mutinous, explosive and very bitter”; Vice Admiral Sir Cecil Burney, a former Grand Fleet battle squadron commander, called it “scandalous and wicked”; Prince Louis of Battenberg declared, “I cannot find words to express my disgust and indignation”; Goodenough said, “Never a man stood higher in the estimation of his friends, his brother officers and every man and boy in the Service.” Asquith wrote to Jellicoe, “No one knows better—perhaps no one as well as I—what the state and the Allied cause owe to you. When history comes to be written, you have no reason to fear
the verdict.” Margot Asquith declared flatly, “I look upon the Government as insane.” Messages of devotion came from around the fleet. “We want you back,” said the men of the 10th Submarine Flotilla. “You are our Idol and one who we would follow to the death. ‘Come back!’ is the message from the Lower Deck to you.”