Castles of Steel

by Robert K. Massie

  Jellicoe did not come back. Britain’s senior admiral had been dismissed by a costumed railway man, acting on behalf of a prime minister whose attitude toward the “High Admirals” was “Sack the lot!” The man who had trained the Grand Fleet for battle, who had issued the crucial deployment command at Jutland and sent the German navy fleeing into harbor, whose fleet had enforced the blockade that destroyed Germany’s will to fight, and who, before departing, had broken the back of the U-boat campaign, was gone. Three months later, Sir Edward Carson told the House of Commons what had happened: “The whole time that I was First Lord of the Admiralty, one of the greatest difficulties I had was the constant persecution—for I can call it nothing else—of certain high officials in the Admiralty who could not speak for themselves—constant persecution which, I have no doubt, could have [been] traced to reasons and motives of the most malignant character. Over and over again while I was at the Admiralty, I had the most constant pressure put upon me to remove officials, among them Sir John Jellicoe.”

  When Jellicoe left the Grand Fleet, David Beatty succeeded him as Commander-in-Chief. Promoted at forty-five to become the navy’s youngest full admiral, he had boarded Iron Duke, whose crew, devoted to Jellicoe, was unhappy to see him; as Beatty arrived, it took a direct order from the ship’s captain to wring a halfhearted welcoming cheer from the men. Nor did the relationship improve. Somehow, the flamboyant hero of the battle cruiser force cut a poor figure on Iron Duke. “At sea,” explained one young torpedo man, describing the difference between the two admirals, “a figure in a duffel coat and sometimes wearing a white cap cover would come through the mess decks with an ‘Excuse me’ and that would be Sir John making his way to the bridge. When Beatty came on board it was ‘CLEAR LOWER DECKS!’ and a file of marines wearing short arms with Beatty in the middle. We never liked him.” Beatty felt the antipathy and because, in addition, he wanted a newer, bigger, faster ship, he transferred his flag two months later to Queen Elizabeth. “There was,” he wrote, “too much of Jellicoe in Iron Duke.”

  The new Commander-in-Chief inherited an enormous, complex nautical war machine, trained by Jellicoe over twenty-eight months against the day when it would destroy the German navy. Under Beatty, the mission remained the same. The Grand Fleet, swinging on its moorings at Scapa Flow, commanded the surface of the sea, making possible both the blockade that was crippling Germany, and the effort against the U-boats. Had this massive surface sea power not existed, Germany would have won the war—without needing U-boats. Abruptly and catastrophically, Allied maritime commerce would have been disrupted and then severed by German surface ships; British soldiers and munitions would not have crossed the Channel into France; subsequently, American troops would not have embarked for Europe. Britain would have been forced to choose between starvation and surrender; either way, her participation in the war would have ended. The United States on its own would have confronted a victorious Germany able to draw on the combined resources of Europe. These facts seemed obvious, but not everyone was able to grasp them. “One of my difficulties during 1917,” Jellicoe said later of his tenure as First Sea Lord, “was to make the prime minister realise that the whole of the Allied cause was dependent on the Grand Fleet holding the surface command of the sea.” In any case, now that Jellicoe was gone, David Beatty became “the one man on either side who could lose the war in an afternoon.”

  Three weeks after taking command, Beatty led the Grand Fleet to sea to test his skill at controlling so large a body. There was a mishap that was not Beatty’s fault: two destroyers collided and sank, with most of their crews. Back in Scapa Flow, Beatty began rewriting the fleet’s tactical Battle Orders. Always critical of Jellicoe’s rigid system, under which the Commander-in-Chief controlled every movement of the fleet, he decentralized authority. Battle squadron and division commanders were encouraged to act independently and even to anticipate the Commander-in-Chief’s wishes. This loosening did not go too far: in action, the fleet was still to be concentrated in a single line of battle. If, however, enemy destroyers threatened a torpedo attack, as they had at Jutland, Beatty declared himself willing to face the risk rather than turn away. “Only by keeping the enemy fleet engaged can the initiative remain with the British fleet and a decision be obtained,” he said. “The torpedo menace will be accepted and the fleet turned toward the retiring enemy.”

  Aside from this important change in tactics, Beatty’s overall North Sea strategy became almost more cautious than Jellicoe’s. Maintaining British naval supremacy now was Beatty’s duty. On paper, the task seemed simple enough. Numerically, the British preponderance in dreadnoughts was even more overwhelming than it had been under Jellicoe. Three more 15-inch-gun Resolution-class battleships had been added to the fleet, and by March 1917, Beatty commanded thirty-two British dreadnought battleships; Scheer then had twenty-one.

  [Beatty’s dreadnought strength declined on the night of July 9, 1917, when the battleship Vanguard, lying at anchor at Scapa Flow, suddenly blew up. There were only two survivors of a crew of more than 800. The cause was assigned to a spontaneous explosion of powder in one of the magazines.]

  Similarly, British superiority in battle cruisers was comfortable. After losing three of these ships at Jutland, where the Germans lost one, the Grand Fleet had seven battle cruisers to Germany’s four. Then, in August and September 1916, the British added two more: Renown and Repulse, armed with six 15-inch guns. Not until February 1918 did Hipper received the new battle cruiser Hindenburg, sister of Derfflinger, with eight 12-inch guns. But numbers, as Jutland had taught, were not everything. Beatty now feared what Jellicoe had feared: that British ships, particularly the battle cruisers, were structurally inferior to German in armor and underwater protection. Equally worrisome to Beatty was the constant draining of Grand Fleet destroyer strength for the antisubmarine campaign. Beatty asked for help; possibly some destroyers could be sent from the Mediterranean. Unfortunately, the Admiralty replied, it was impossible to spare any from anywhere. Worried that his fleet had been left too weak in screening craft to fight a battle, Beatty told an Admiralty conference on January 2, 1918, that “the correct strategy of the Grand Fleet is no longer to endeavour to bring the enemy to action at any cost, but rather to contain him in his bases until the general situation becomes more favourable to us.” The Admiralty and the War Cabinet approved.

  It was the Germans who provoked the first surface action during Beatty’s North Sea command. Britain had promised a monthly shipment of 250,000 tons of British coal to Norway, and convoys composed largely of neutral ships were sailing daily, usually escorted by two British destroyers and several armed trawlers. U-boat success against the convoys had been minimal, so Scheer decided to try a surprise surface attack. The distance to the convoy routes from Horns Reef was between 300 and 350 miles; only twelve to fourteen hours’ steaming for a 30-knot vessel. Poor weather in autumn and winter decreased the likelihood of such vessels being observed. Scheer chose the fast new minelaying light cruisers Brummer and Bremse, each armed with four 6-inch guns and—more important—possessing a speed of 34 knots. On October 17, 1917, a westbound Scandinavian convoy of twelve merchant vessels was under convoy by two British destroyers, Strongbow and Mary Rose, and two armed trawlers. At dawn, lookouts on Strongbow reported two strange vessels on a converging course. The destroyer, taking them for British cruisers, flashed recognition signals. There was no response until suddenly, before the crew could reach action stations, Strongbow was smothered by accurate 6-inch gunfire at a range of 3,000 yards. Mary Rose hurried up and was dealt similar punishment. Both destroyers sank, and then nine merchant vessels were hunted down and sunk. No British ship was able to send a wireless report and, although at the time of the attack, sixteen British light cruisers were at sea south of the convoy route, the German cruisers returned to port unscathed. Beatty did not learn what had happened until 4:00 p.m.; “Luck was against us,” he said.

  Two months later, on December 12, Scheer attacked
again. The assailants this time were four modern German destroyers; the victims, an eastbound Scandinavian convoy of five neutral merchant ships escorted by two British destroyers. The attack took place twenty-five miles off the Norwegian coast in blinding rain squalls and a heavy sea that concealed all but the masts and funnel tops of the destroyers. Again, German gunnery was excellent: within forty-five minutes, all the ships in the convoy and one British destroyer were sunk. This time Beatty sent out battleships, battle cruisers, and twelve light cruisers to intercept, but the German ships escaped through the Skagerrak. “We do have the most cursed luck,” Beatty complained. “I never anticipated that the Hun would use destroyers so far afield.” Daily convoys to Scandinavia were terminated and larger convoys were dispatched every fourth or fifth day, now escorted by dreadnoughts of the Grand Fleet.

  This offered Scheer a different, perhaps greater opportunity. Aware that the convoys were being escorted by battleships, he decided on a bold stroke. The German battle cruisers and light cruisers and a flotilla of destroyers of Hipper’s Scouting Groups would attack the convoy and its escort while, with the rest of the High Seas Fleet, Scheer waited sixty miles to the southwest. If all went well and the British took the bait, he might at last be able to achieve what German admirals had sought since the beginning of the war: the destruction of an isolated dreadnought squadron of the Grand Fleet. At 5:00 a.m. on April 23, 1918, the German battle cruisers, three dreadnought battle squadrons, three light cruiser squadrons, and four flotillas of destroyers sailed from Schillig roads. Neither side had much information about the other. Scheer had restricted wireless to an absolute minimum, sharply limiting Room 40’s ability to provide useful information, and a dense fog over the entire North Sea restricted air reconnaissance by zeppelins. Nevertheless, all was going well; Hipper and the attack force were forty miles off the Norwegian coast in the vicinity of Bergen, when, at 5:10 a.m. on the twenty-fourth, Moltke suffered a mechanical breakdown. Her starboard inner propeller dropped off and before the turbine could be stopped racing, a gear wheel flew to pieces. Metal shards from the broken wheel tore into an auxiliary condenser, the engine room flooded, and the starboard and center engines ceased to work. Hipper ordered Moltke to fall back on the battle fleet. Moltke tried to obey, but salt water in her boilers reduced her speed to a crawl. At 6:40 a.m., she broke radio silence and told Scheer that her breakdown was serious and her speed only 4 knots. At 8:45 a.m. she reported that she was “out of control.” At 10:50 a.m. the battleship Oldenburg took Moltke in tow and the main fleet turned back for home. Scheer meanwhile ordered Hipper to go forward with the operation and the battle cruisers continued steering northwest at 18 knots. Hipper crossed and reconnoitered the convoy route, found nothing, and, at 2:10 p.m., turned back. In fact, there was no convoy; the Naval Staff had miscalculated its sailing date by twenty-four hours. British intelligence had been no better that day. Not until Scheer and Hipper began talking by wireless was the Admiralty even aware that a large German naval force was operating far out in the North Sea. Early that afternoon, the Grand Fleet cleared the Firth of Forth in a thick fog: thirty-one battleships, four battle cruisers, twenty-four light cruisers, and eighty-five destroyers. It was the last time during the war that the full strength of the Grand Fleet was set in motion, but once again Beatty’s luck was out. The High Seas Fleet was 100 miles ahead of him and out of reach. At 6:37 p.m., Scheer reached the swept channels through the minefields and Moltke cast off her tow from Oldenburg. She was lumbering home when a torpedo from the British submarine E-42 struck her. Eighteen hundred tons of seawater poured in, but Moltke still managed to reach the Jade under her own power. Considering what Scheer had hoped for, he, too, had been unlucky.

  In the winter of 1915, when the Admiralty first moved the battle cruisers to a permanent base in the Firth of Forth, Ethel Beatty established a residence for herself and her husband on shore. The place she chose was Aberdour House, a comfortable old stone and stucco house with a tiled roof on a hill overlooking the Firth from the north, about six miles from the fleet landing at Rosyth. Beatty promptly ordered construction of a clay tennis court, where, when his ships were in harbor, he played every fair afternoon. Usually, he came ashore in his admiral’s barge for lunch, being met by his automobile and driven the fifteen minutes up the hill to Aberdour House. Beatty loved tennis, “because it is exercise in concentrated form and you don’t waste valuable time chasing a miserable, helpless ball over the hills.” On the court, he played as if he were at war. He slapped his partner on the back, cheered good shots, and exhorted greater effort when they seemed to be losing. “Here, we can’t let it stand like this!” he would cry. “It will never become us to be beaten.” When it rained, Beatty and his guests—admirals or captains from the fleet—took long walks over the hills or joined the party dancing before a huge open fireplace in a large hall at nearby Aberdour Castle. Beatty seldom danced but he liked watching, enjoying the warmth, the music, and the presence of women. Reluctantly, he left to return to his ship for dinner, in obedience to his own order that all hands be back aboard by 7:30 in the evening. When he took command of the Grand Fleet and moved to Scapa Flow, this pleasant routine was interrupted, but the lease on Aberdour House and its tennis court was continued.

  The truth was that most of the activities centered on Aberdour House were a charade. Beatty was miserable in his marriage. His wife and her “utterly unpredictable moods” dominated his thoughts; Beatty described some nights with Ethel as “worse than Jutland.” Lady Beatty had always considered her husband selfish because he was so consumed by the navy and went off to sea, leaving her alone. As long as he commanded only the battle cruisers and they were based in the Firth of Forth, she could have him around and could play the grand hostess at Aberdour House. When he moved to Scapa Flow, in the far north, she felt herself abandoned again. Her response was renewed promiscuity, a matter that was common knowledge in the couple’s intimate society, but never mentioned. Beatty, however, was constantly reminded. Once, he left Aberdour House to return to his ship and then, remembering that he had left his cigarette case behind, returned to collect it. He found his wife in bed with one of his officers. Yet he never considered divorce. He continued to write to “Darling Tata,” and signed himself “Ever your devoted David.” He blamed himself for her moods and behavior. “Tata,” he wrote on one occasion, “you accuse me of being cross, bad-tempered, saying cutting things which indeed were far from my thoughts or intention.” A month later, he wrote again,

  You must give me a little more time to get accustomed to the new conditions and your changed feelings. You see, in the past you have spoiled me horribly and given me so much love and sympathy that it is difficult to realise that I must do without it or without so much of it. . . . Let me impress upon you that I am really tumbling to the altered conditions, that I in no way wish to monopolise your entire life, that I have no wish to be the orbit, against your will, round which everything will revolve, to be the center of your efforts to live, which, as you put it, makes me a horribly selfish, egotistical person. I truly am not that, really. . . . I realise you like to be more independent and indeed am thankful for it. All I ask is that you should do exactly as you wish at all times. All I truly care for is that you should be happy and contented.

  Rejected and lonely, Beatty found consolation. During the last two years of the war, the Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Fleet was deeply involved in a love affair with Eugenie Godfrey-Faussett, a woman in her early thirties with much-praised long golden hair. Eugenie’s husband, twenty-one years older than she, was Captain Bryan Godfrey-Faussett, of the Royal Navy, the intimate friend and equerry of King George V who had arranged Ethel Beatty’s presentation at court. Eugenie initiated the correspondence with Beatty, writing to him in June 1916 to congratulate him on his role at Jutland. His reply, addressed to “Dear Mrs. Godfrey,” noted properly that he had been glad to see her husband “looking so well” when he had visited the fleet with the king, and concluded, “Yours
ever, David Beatty.” Through the remainder of 1916, Eugenie kept writing. After becoming Commander-in-Chief, Beatty replied that, “exiled” to Scapa Flow, he appreciated “your letters more than ever, so will you write and tell me all the news?” Formality began to erode and Beatty wrote, “Bless you my dear (is that too familiar?) for your delightful letters, the best I ever get.” In January 1917 he began calling her Eugenie—“because Godfrey told me to”—and asked her to stop calling him Sir David. Boldly, Eugenie sent him a new mattress for the bed in his new flagship’s cabin and he replied that he would “dream all the pleasanter now that I know you tried it.” When she began doing volunteer hospital work, he wrote that he was “sure you look delicious in your hospital garb. I wish I could see you. Is that asking too much?” By April 1917, it was “Eugenie, you are a darling and I love you and your letters more than ever.” On April 17, he came to London for two days of Admiralty conferences and a private lunch with Eugenie. Returning to the fleet, Beatty wrote, “Eugenie, dear, was it a dream? That one perfectly divine day . . . three very short hours of intense pleasure.” At the beginning of May, he told her that he read “the nicest parts” of her letters “over and over again,” and, “I wish, how I wish, that it were possible for you to do all the nice things you said you would like to do.”

  In August 1917, Beatty brought the major part of the Grand Fleet down to the Firth of Forth and persuaded Ethel to invite Eugenie to come and stay at Aberdour House. (“Tata loves having you,” Beatty assured her.) Eugenie stayed a month; Beatty later wrote, “for four weeks I was able to see you almost every day.” Captain Godfrey-Faussett had remained on duty in London and Ethel was often away; as a result, says Beatty’s most recent biographer, “the indications are that Bryan was well and truly cuckolded.” Thereafter, Eugenie became Beatty’s “dearest comrade of Dreamland.” He reprimanded her when she told him that she had burned a letter written to him at midnight “because it was not respectable. There is nothing that could be ‘not respectable’ between us and I should have adored it and I don’t like respectable things of any sort anyway. . . . I love you all over from your glorious hair to the tips of your toes.”