In Berlin, law and order broke down. The Kaiser had left Potsdam for his headquarters at Spa in Belgium on 29 October and the situation in the capital had deteriorated steadily ever since. During the days that followed he seemed divorced from reality. Having been informed that the Army was not prepared to fight any longer, he suggested that after the armistice had been signed he would personally lead the troops back to Germany. When told that this was not an option he demanded confirmation from the generals commanding the various German armies along the front and was horrified when this was forthcoming. He finally accepted the inevitable when a telephone call from Berlin confirmed that revolution had broken out and that the Berlin garrison, including the Kaiser’s favourite regiment, the Kaiser Alexander Garde Grenadier Regiment No. 1, had gone over to the revolutionaries and that his abdication had become essential if civil war was to be avoided. He replied that he would abdicate as Emperor of Germany but not as King of Prussia, but was told that this was not acceptable. On 10 November he signed a deed of abdication and left for exile in Holland the following day. It was one of history’s greatest ironies that the fleet that he had brought into being, nurtured and protected should be the principal instrument that brought about his downfall.
The date for the fleet’s internment was set for 21 November. Included in the orders given to Admiral Meurer by Beatty was that those ships involved would unload all their ammunition, remove the breech blocks and gun sights from their guns and render their central gunnery control equipment inoperable. These tasks were completed during the evening of 18 November and at noon the following day Meurer led his ships out on their last voyage across the North Sea.
The rendezvous with the Grand Fleet was to take place at 08:00 on 21 November at May Island off the Firth of Forth. Over 240 British warships and an American squadron were drawn up in lines through which the Germans would have to pass. The High Seas Fleet arrived exactly on time and was escorted to its temporary anchorage in the Forth. Throughout, the Allied crews remained at Action Stations with their guns trained on their former opponents. Inspection teams then boarded the German ships to verify that Admiral Meurer had carried out his orders. During the afternoon Beatty despatched a signal to Meurer: ‘The German flag will be hauled down at sunset today and will not be hoisted again without permission.’
Starting on 23 November and continuing for the next four days units of the High Seas Fleet reached Scapa Flow and were directed to what would be their last anchorages. Only skeleton crews were permitted to remain aboard and in due course the remainder were taken back to Germany in liners. Elsewhere, U-boats entered Harwich in small groups before being despatched to the breaker’s yard.
For the officers and men remaining at Scapa Flow a hard winter lay ahead, followed by months of boredom in which they were not allowed to set foot ashore. Denied up to date news, it appeared to them that the armistice would expire on 21 June 1919 and that the British would seize their ships. As internment differed from capture, Admiral von Reuter, commanding the Germans at the Flow, felt that he could not allow his country’s warships to fall into British hands. Lacking the means to resist, he devised a plan in great secrecy to scuttle the ships simultaneously upon a given signal. No one bothered to tell him that the expiry of the armistice terms had been extended by two days. Consequently, at 10:40 on 21 June the signal was given. Having opened then smashed the sea cocks and hoisted their ensigns for the last time, the German crews took to their boats with their personal possessions while spectators around the anchorage watched in astonishment as over seventy warships began sinking simultaneously.
In due course the crews, having spent a period in prison camp, were repatriated. Attempts to salvage the sunken wrecks met with mixed success. In some cases they were raised and towed away for breaking; in others the technical difficulties involved were immense and salvage was not even attempted. The latter remain, rusting steadily away until their steel crumbles and mingles with the silt producing reddish stains on the bed of the Flow. That is all that remains of the High Seas Fleet, once the pride and joy of Wilhelm Hohenzollern.
Appendix – The Admirals
Fisher, John Arbuthnot, 1st Baron (1841–1920)
Admiral John Fisher was born into a service family and was a veteran of the Crimean War. An unconventional and sometimes difficult man, he was also a sound administrator and gifted with a high degree of professional foresight. He became First Sea Lord in 1904 and instituted a series of reforms which, while unpopular with the more conservative elements of the Royal Navy, resulted in a thoroughly modernised service by the time war broke out in 1914. He is best remembered for the introduction of the Dreadnought,an all big-gun battleship that revolutionized warship design, but was also responsible for introducing the battle cruiser, which carried a battleship's armament and a cruiser's speed but lacked much of a battleship's protection, and for recommending the general use of fuel oil in place of coal. He retired in 1910 but was recalled to duty in October 1914. He resigned again in May 1915 following disagreement with Winston Churchill, the then First Lord of the Admiralty, over the Dardenelles campaign, which he felt was absorbing too many naval assets. While he was not personally involved in the North Sea battles, the Royal Navy that fought them was his creation.
Jellicoe, John Rushworth, 1st Earl (1859–1935)
Prior to his achieving flag rank, Jellicoe had enjoyed an adventurous career from which he was, at times, lucky to emerge with his life. He had taken part in the 1882 landing in Egypt, survived the notorious collision between the battleships Victoria and Camperdown in 1895 as a result of which the former sank with heavy loss of life and, as a captain, was seriously wounded during the Boxer Rebellion while serving with the international relief force attempting to relieve the besieged Legation Quarter in Peking. His particular skill lay in gunnery and in 1905 he was appointed Director of Naval Ordnance. As early as 1908 Fisher nominated him as the most suitable commander for the Grand Fleet in the event of war and he was appointed to this post on 4 August 1914. Churchill described him as the only man on either side who could have lost the war in an afternoon. Professionally, he has been criticised for being over-cautious, unwilling to delegate and needlessly concerned with comparatively minor matters. Disappointment that Jutland had not produced a second Trafalgar concealed the fact that he had achieved a strategic success that virtually reduced the High Seas Fleet to impotence for the rest of the war. He was removed from active command shortly after the battle and appointed First Sea Lord. While conscientious and hard working, he did not enjoy a happy working relationship with Prime Minister Lloyd George, who was disappointed by his lack of optimism. His reluctance to institute a system of escorted convoys contributed to heavy losses in British and Allied merchant ships and resulted in his being dismissed on 24 December 1917. However, this was considered to be somewhat over-harsh by many and the following month he was promoted to Admiral of the Fleet and raised to the peerage. His final years of public service were spent as Governor-General of New Zealand.
Beatty, David, 1871–1936, 1st Earl,
The son of a cavalry officer, David Beatty achieved flag rank at the early age of 39. He had commanded a river gunboat with distinction during Kitchener's Nile campaign against the dervishes in the Sudan and in 1900 saw further active service during the Boxer Rebellion in China. He developed what today would be called a personality cult, the most obvious aspect of which was the wearing of his cap at a rakish angle over his left eye. Nevertheless, he obviously possessed great abilities and these led to his serving as Winston Churchill's naval secretary between 1911 and 1913. During that period he made a number of influential connections which assisted in his securing his appointment as the commander of the Grand Fleet's battle cruiser squadron, a task for which his offensively minded temperament was well suited. He fought successful actions at Heligoland Bight and Dogger Bank but at Jutland the loss of three of his battle cruisers led to his being accused of impetuosity, although the real fault lay in the ships’ vul
nerable design. More telling was the criticism that during the early stages of the engagement he failed to keep Jellicoe fully informed as to what was happening. Despite this, he fitted the general public's idea of a fighting admiral and was appointed commander of the Grand Fleet shortly after Jutland. Ironically, no further opportunities for action came his way, although in November 1918 he was able to supervise the internment of the German High Seas Fleet. His rewards included promotion to Admiral of the Fleet and the award of an earldom. He became First Sea Lord in 1921 and held this appointment until 1927.
Tirpitz, Alfred von (1849–1930)
Born in Kustrin, then part of Prussia, Tirpitz was the son of a civil servant. As soon as he was old enough he joined the tiny Prussian Navy as a cadet and in due course became head of the torpedo branch. In 1897 he was appointed Secretary of State of the Ministry of Marine, a post he held for over eighteen years. It was he who suggested that the prestige of the recently created German Empire demanded possession of a navy to rival that of Great Britain, a suggestion adopted with enthusiasm by Kaiser Wilhelm II, anxious to prove that he was every bit the leader of a world power as were his British relatives. The concept was disastrous on several counts. First, it initiated a naval construction race between Germany and the United Kingdom in which the former lagged behind with no prospect of achieving parity. Second, it turned Great Britain into a probable enemy, without an adequate reason for doing so. Third, the creation of a new, modern navy was prohibitively expensive, absorbing funds and resources needed elsewhere, principally by the Imperial German Army. This led to considerable internal friction, but Tirpitz was a master of intrigue and invariably got his way, largely because he had the personal support of the Kaiser. Indeed, a dispute between Tirpitz and the Kaiser's brother Heinrich was neatly resolved when the latter was promoted sideways to a position where his opinions didn’t count. Tirpitz reached the zenith of his career when, in 1911, he was promoted to the unique rank of Grand Admiral, a rank unheard of even in the British Royal Navy. However, as the storm clouds began to gather in 1914, the enormity of what he had done suddenly dawned on Tirpitz. His High Seas Fleet could not hope to defeat the much larger Royal Navy and Great Britain had reached an understanding with Germany's two most probable enemies, France and Russia. He argued against war, but in Imperial Germany it was the Army that had the real power to influence decisions of that kind. Too late, he became a convert to submarine warfare, but by now his influence with the Kaiser had begun to wane.
In March 1916 he threatened to resign and the Kaiser called his bluff. He dabbled in politics for a while without achieving anything of note and gradually disappeared from view. Despite his reputation of being the father of the German Navy, he never held a major command at sea and his overall influence on his country's affairs can be seen as being catastrophic.
Scheer, Reinhard, 1863–1928
Scheer's first name was actually Arthur, following a family tradition, but this does not seem to have been taken into general use. He entered the Imperial Navy in 1879 and progressed steadily in rank despite his middle class origins. On the outbreak of war in 1914 he commanded in succession the IInd and IIIrd Battle Squadrons and took over command of the High Seas Fleet in January 1916. He was known as a strict disciplinarian and was given the nickname of ‘the man in the iron mask.’ During the Battle of Jutland he inflicted greater loss on Jellicoe's Grand Fleet than he sustained and managed to bring most of his badly mauled command home, enabling the German propaganda machine to claim a victory. This earned him the award of the Pour le Merite With Oakleaves and ennoblement by the Kaiser, although he refused to add the ritual ‘von’ prefix to his surname. He was, however, fully aware that he had had a narrow escape and when he next took the High Seas Fleet to sea the inaccurate report of a Zeppelin that the Grand Fleet was also at sea and closing on him was sufficient to make him head for home. After this experience he came to the view that the only way to defeat the United Kingdom at sea was by means of unrestricted submarine warfare, a view which he persuaded the Kaiser to share. In August 1918 he left the High Seas Fleet to become Chief of Naval Staff. In 1928 he accepted an invitation from his old adversary Jellicoe to visit England but contracted a fatal illness before he could make the journey.
Franz Hipper, 1863–1932
A Bavarian by birth, Hipper joined the Navy in 1881 and, like Scheer, rose steadily in rank until in 1913 he was appointed commander of the High Seas Fleet's Scouting Force. With this he made several raids on the east coast of England with varying degrees of success. At Jutland he inflicted heavy losses on Beatty's Battle Cruiser Fleet. Although he was scornful of some previous awards granted him by the Kaiser, he accepted the Pour le Merite in recognition of his ships’ part in the battle. He was also ennobled but declined to add the prefix ‘von’ to his name, although he did accept a knighthood from King Ludwig III of Bavaria. In August 1918 he took over the High Seas Fleet from Scheer. On occasion he could be impulsive and when Germany's defeat became inevitable he planned to take out the fleet to fight one last battle in which it would undoubtedly have been defeated but, in his eyes, saved its honour. His seamen, already demoralised by inactivity, recognised that in practical terms such a gesture was meaningless, and mutinied rather than put to sea. The mutiny grew and spread into a full-scale revolution that destroyed Imperial Germany.
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Index
Index of Ships
British and Allied Ships
FNN Mousquet, 25
HMS Aboukir, 23
HMS Ajax, 37
HMS Alcantara, 74
HMS Ambuscade, 39
HMS Andes, 74
HMS Antrim, 37
Arabic, 5, 71
HMS Argyll, 37
HMS Arethusa, 20, 21
HMS Audacious, 24, 31
HMS Aurora, 64, 67
HMS Barham,
92
HMS Black Prince, 100
HMS Blanche, 37
HMS Boadicea, 37
HMS Brilliant, 129, 134
HMS Broke, 7, 118–119
HM CML 110, 133
HM CML 282, 133
HM CML 424, 133
HMS Caledon, 121
HMS Calypso, 121
HMS Canopus, 28
HMS Centurion, 37
HMS Chester, 97
HMS Comus, 74
HMS Conqueror, 37
HMS Conquest, 76
HMS Courageous, 121
HMS Cressy, 23
HMS C-1, 129
HMS C-3, 129, 131–132
HMS C-7, 34
HMS C-9, 55–56
HMS Daffodil, 129, 130, 133
HMS Defence, 97
HMS Devonshire, 37
HMS Doon, 33, 56
HMS Dreadnought, 13, 77, 143
HMS Dublin, 100
HMS D-3, 28
HMS D-5, 28
HMS Empress, 81
HMS Engadine, 81
HMS E-9, 23
HMS E-10, 28
HMS E-11, 58
HMS E-42, 127
HMS Falmouth, 104
HMS Fearless, 20, 21
HMS Forward, 33, 55, 56
HMS Furious, 88
HMS Glasgow, 28
HMS Glorious, 121
HMS Good Hope, 28
HMS Halcyon, 27, 28
HMS Hampshire, 5, 113
HMS Hawke, 23
HMS Hermes, 24
HMS Hogue, 23
HMS Indefatigable, 94, 95
HMS Indomitable, 64, 65, 66, 67, 96
HMS Inflexible, 28, 96
HMS Intrepid, 129, 132
HMS Invincible, 20, 28, 96, 97
HMS Iphigenia, 129, 132
HMS Iris, 129, 133
HMS J-1, 114
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