by Peter Hart
Yet, despite it all, one 13.5-inch shell from the Lion, fired at 09.50, did crash down on her opposite number, the Seydlitz. It tore through the quarter deck and partially penetrated the barbette armour of the aft turret. The burst ignited the cordite charges in the working chamber and triggered a flash that spread in an instant into the magazine handling room and up into the turret above. As desperate men tried to escape they opened the door connecting with the adjoining superimposed turret, thereby inadvertently allowing the flames to rip through both to deadly effect. For a few moments a magazine detonation which would have doomed the ship seemed likely, but was narrowly averted by the timely flooding of the after magazines. Nevertheless, 159 men were killed in the conflagration.
In response, the German fire was concentrated on the Lion at the head of the British line, hitting her fifteen times and causing serious damage. Listing to port, she began to fall out of line at around 10.50. Despite this Hipper and his ships were still in dire straits; the Blücher was by this time on fire and slowing down. But then fate intervened as Beatty sighted what he thought was a periscope and feared he had led his precious battlecruisers into a deadly submarine trap. He ordered an immediate turn to port, which had the effect of rapidly opening the range from his quarry and this coupled with the signalling blunder thereby allowed Hipper the precious breathing space to try to escape away to the south-east, abandoning the Blücher to her fate. Her crew fought to the end, but for the British the dramatic photos of her turning turtle as she sank were small compensation for the escape without further interference of the rest of the German battlecruisers. Yet the Germans were chastened by their experiences and shortly afterwards Admiral von Ingenohl was dismissed. It was considered he had been remiss in not sailing with his fleet in support of the Dogger Bank operations and had taken unnecessary risks without the chance of any significant gain. He was replaced on 2 February 1915 by Admiral Hugo von Pohl, a man who was to prove equally uninspired and hamstrung by the overall caution urged on the High Seas Fleet.
The Battle of Dogger Bank was a partial victory for the British, but its real importance arises from the lessons learnt, or ignored, by the two protagonists. The Germans were horrified by the near destruction of the Seydlitz, which had nearly exploded after the cordite fire. After a careful investigation, considerable precautionary measures were introduced to try and prevent such a flash travelling anywhere between the turret gunhouse, the handling chamber and the magazine. By contrast, the British appeared to have learnt little and there were no corresponding improvements in working practices in the chain from magazines to turret. Indeed, in an effort to improve their rate of fire, the British gunners began to take suicidal short cuts in the magazines and working chambers. The magazine doors were propped open and cordite charge linen bags piled up outside the doors ready to be hoisted up to the turret gunhouses. Such slack safety measures would have a considerable effect on the outcomes of future battles, especially as the armour protecting the British battlecruisers was much less extensive than that on their German counterparts. Once these thin skins were pierced the seeds of their destruction lay within them.
The British also failed to learn much from the demonstrable fallibilities in their command and control systems, in particular the weakness revealed aboard Beatty’s flagship Lion in the process of generating and signalling orders without incorporating ambiguities which fatally confused his subordinates in the stress of battle. Furthermore, the overall standard of gunnery demonstrated by the British battlecruisers was simply dreadful; while they could hit the Blüche r well enough when she was a crippled standing target, they scored only a handful of hits on the other German ships. While excuses could be made – lack of experience under battle conditions, the poor visibility caused by palls of smoke and spray from German shells – the fact remained that they were poor in the extreme, with the bulk of their shells sailing thousands of yards over their targets. Jellicoe was aware of the problem but it was difficult to secure increased opportunities for long-range practice for the battlecruisers in the relatively cramped and narrow confines of the Forth. In contrast, the Grand Fleet could practise with impunity in the far reaches of its huge Scapa Flow anchorage.
The blockade of Germany
The opening stages of the naval war saw the Grand Fleet exercise a brooding distant presence while cruisers guarded the northern exits to the North Sea enforcing the blockade which sought to prevent raw materials and supplies from reaching Germany. When it became apparent that the land war would not be over quickly, this became a key part of the Allied global strategy; this was after all why Britain was such a coveted ally. The 10th Cruiser Squadron assigned to the task consisted of eight protected cruisers of the Edgar class. These were old ships dating back to 1891. The North Sea was a hostile environment for such elderly matrons and the winter storms proved almost too much for them.
It was blowing a full gale and it looked doubtful if the ship would weather it. My cabin was on the upper deck, in the after superstructure, and I lay down on my bunk in my clothes and being very tired I dozed off. I was awakened by a terrific crash and my cabin door was burst open and water poured in. All I could see outside was a swirling mass of foam on the upper deck. I thought the ship must be sinking. I swung myself out of my bunk and, up to my knees in water, waded up the slope through the doorway. The ship seemed on her beam ends and it looked as if nothing could save her. As I watched she slowly – miraculously – righted herself. A minute later another great wave swept her from stem to stern. It was then that a Midshipman was carried overboard from the foremost gun and on over the nettings aft and laid almost at my feet. After that there was a lull and I could take in the scene. The gun crews were clinging to the guns or whatever they could hold on to, while live ammunition rolled across the deck.18
Lieutenant Harold Bowen, HMS Edgar, 10th Cruiser Squadron
Several of the other ships were caught in this terrible storm and it was decided to replace them with twenty-four armed liners.
It was the role of the 10th Cruiser Squadron to intercept merchantmen that were suspected of carrying contraband goods to Germany. Originally there was a narrow definition of prohibited goods, but this gradually broadened to include almost anything of value bound for Germany, or indeed for a neutral port from which it could then be re-exported. By rationing the amount of supplies they let through to that which a neutral country needed internally, Britain sought to prevent any significant re-export trade. Protests from neutral Scandinavian countries were inevitable, but Britain applied commercial pressures on them and also defined the North Sea as a military area, requiring all neutral traffic to be inspected before proceeding. This was an endless chore.
I sighted and closed a steamer and found her to be the Norwegian steamer Henrik from New York to Bergen or Christiania, boarded her with some difficulty and found she had a general cargo of very considerable value, mainly copper ingots and wire, aluminium, flour, petroleum, motor-car parts, castings, etc., in fact most things which Germany is believed to want. It was more or less of a chance that I sighted this ship as I happened to be a good bit north of my line, and I do not think that there is much doubt that this ship was trying to get through unseen, for when I first saw her and stood towards her she altered course and was apparently inclined to run, but finally decided not to. Her captain was somewhat indignant at being boarded at all, and he produced the inevitable British Consular Certificate which he seemed to think cleared him of any further trouble. The mere fact that this ship was bound for Bergen or Christiania with such a cargo seems to me to be in itself gravely suspicious, and from what I gathered from my boarding officer as to the demeanour of the captain and mate I do not think there is much doubt that they were quite aware that they were running a very doubtful cargo, and their indignation was doubtless mainly due to the prospective loss of their bonus for getting safely through. This ship’s cargo was some 5,000 tons or more. I had not time to make a careful examination of the manifest as the weather was
threatening and I was anxious to get a prize crew on board before the sea got up.19
Captain Gerald Vivian, HMS Patia, 10th Cruiser Squadron
The British restrictions were not popular and indeed probably caused more disruption to neutral shipping lines than did their occasional losses to German submarines. There was the enduring risk of a clash with the United States and it would appear that American ships received special treatment with only the most perfunctory of inspections to avoid triggering too much American angst. The blockade would endure throughout the whole war.
German submarine blockade
When the war began submarines were regarded as a tactical adjunct to conventional surface ships. They would clearly be useful in both the defensive and offensive naval operations conducted by both sides, as had been proved in the early exchanges in the North Sea. Yet a true commerce destroying role was considered largely impractical due to the limited range of many of the early submarines and the difficulties of following the dictates of international law when sinking merchantmen. Civilian shipping – even from a hostile country – must not be sunk without proper warning and nor could crews be abandoned in lifeboats on the open seas. Neutral shipping was almost untouchable and could not be sunk, even if a search revealed the presence aboard of contraband goods intended for the British Isles. It is strange but this perception continued to exist on all sides for several months before gradually the penny (or pfennig) dropped that the more modern classes of submarines were capable of a great deal more. The first merchant ship was not sunk by a U-boat until 20 October 1914, when, still sticking to the rules, the U-17 sank the small British steamer Glitra by boarding her and opening her sea cocks off the coast of Norway. It was a first, but only nine more British merchantmen had been sunk by the end of January 1915. Yet endemic dissatisfaction with the progress of the naval war, coupled with an unwillingness to risk the fleet in action left the Germans casting round for alternative plans in their efforts to inconvenience their naval adversaries.
The solution set upon was to make a bonfire of international law and the code of conduct hitherto assiduously followed. Instead of surfacing to stop, search and sink a ship, the U-boats would if necessary sink them by torpedo with no warning of any kind. On 4 February 1915, the Germans declared a war zone of the seas surrounding Great Britain and that any ship, Allied or neutral, caught inside its boundaries could be sunk at once. Justification for this action was based on the assertion that the British had already broken international law by changing the definition of contraband goods for the Royal Navy blockade of Germany. But the real reason was to allow the U-boats to attack while still preserving their invisibility. Freed from their shackles, the relatively small number of modern U-boats capable of reaching the western approaches to British ports were soon taking a cruel toll on shipping. The British seemed to have forgotten the value of convoys: the time-honoured method of warding off predators by gathering merchantmen together under the protection of armed vessels when passing through dangerous waters. Instead, destroyers and armed merchantmen roamed the seas randomly looking here, there and everywhere for the elusive U-boats in the vast emptiness of the seas. In the end the Germans were the victims of their own success when there was a series of high-profile scandals provoked by the sinking of civilian liners with a terrible loss of life – including American passengers.
A large outcry followed the sinking of the Lusitania by the U-20 on 7 May 1915. It was some ten miles off the Old Head of Kinsale, near Queenstown, Ireland, when it was struck by a torpedo fired by Lieutenant Walther Schwieger at 14.10.
Torpedo hits starboard side right behind the bridge. An unusually heavy explosion takes place with a very strong explosion cloud (cloud reaches far beyond front funnel). The explosion of the torpedo must have been followed by a second one (boiler or coal or powder?). The superstructure right above the point of impact and the bridge are torn asunder, fire breaks out, and smoke envelops the high bridge. The ship stops immediately and heels over to starboard very quickly, immersing simultaneously at the bow. It appears as if the ship were going to capsize very shortly, Great confusion ensues on board; the boats are made clear and some of them are lowered to the water with either stem or stern first and founder immediately.20
Lieutenant Walther Schwieger, U-20
The ship sank within twenty minutes amidst many scenes of terror.
The sea was calm; if the water had not been like that, there would have been many more lost. The most vivid scene of all was when it first started, when the explosion came. We were in the dining room. Everybody was frightened then – they panicked. Had we not been by a door we would never have got out, because a stream of people came down the dining room, there were others following at the back, and people were being stepped on, walked on. That was the most terrible thing – they just couldn’t help themselves, the crowd was too strong. And when we were going down the staircase towards the boats someone fell on top of me – I would never have survived if my husband hadn’t got hold of me and had the strength to pull me out.21
Jane Lewis, passenger, RMS Lusitania
In the end, of 1,959 passengers and crew 1,195 were killed, of which 128 were American civilians. The uproar was enormous but the Germans were defiant, claiming that the liner was carrying contraband munitions and that their detonation had contributed to the ship’s speedy demise. But then on 19 August the U-24 sank the liner Arabic off Ireland. This time fatalities amounted to forty-four, of which only three were American citizens. Yet it sparked another furious round of US protests.
However, Germany was not alone in bending to destruction the international rules of law at sea. One of the British answers to the U-boat menace was the ‘Q’ Ship. This was a deeply unsporting measure, reliant as it was on the U-boats obeying the rules of war and being lured into surfacing by seemingly unarmed merchantmen. In the immediate aftermath of the sinking of the Arabic feelings ran very high. This boiled over into the infamous Baralong incident, which occurred the same day. The Baralong had arrived as the U-27, commanded by Lieutenant Bernard Wegener, was engaged in sinking the British steamer the Nicosian. On board the ship was a cargo of mules bound for the Western Front. Wegener let the crew and American muleteers board their lifeboats, but just as he was about to sink the ship by gunfire, the ‘Q’ Ship Baralong arrived on the scene. Disguised and flying the US flag, she approached signalling that she intended to rescue the Nicosian’s crew. At the last minute the Baralong unmasked her concealed 12-pounder guns.
We could see the submarine lying above the surface on the water. Our captain commanded the chief gunman to fire, whereupon three shots were fired by our boat at the German submarine. The first shot took off the periscope. The second shot hit about 15 feet in the water before it reached the submarine. The third shot hit the gas tank, which exploded, and the submarine sank. In the meantime, the crew on the submarine, after the second shot, began to jump into the water. There were about fifteen of them and they began to swim to the Nicosian. While they were in the water our gunman shelled them by orders from our commanding officer, with 15-lb shells and also fired rifles at them. From the best I could see several of the crew on the German submarine were killed by our shell and rifle firing while in the water. Others were killed while attempting to climb up the ropes which had been thrown to them from the Nicosian. I should judge that three or four or five were killed while on these ropes. Some of our shots hit the side of the Nicosian. After our crew boarded the Nicosian we found the only one of the crew of the submarine who had escaped on the deck, and found him to be the commander of the submarine. Our captain and others of our crew asked him for information concerning other German submarines. He refused to give such information. He was also asked if his submarine had sunk the Arabic. I do not remember certainly his reply. He was commanded to stand back and hold up his hands. He asked, as he stepped back and held up his hands, ‘What for you shoot?’ One of our marines, known as our engineer, fired one shot from his pistol into the body of the
German Commander. He fell upon the deck on his face. Our crew, after ascertaining that he was dead, picked him up and threw him overboard.22
Ordinary Seaman Larimore Holland, HMS Baralong
Holland was a US citizen who had enlisted into the Royal Navy under the guise of being Canadian. There is considerable confusion as to what really happened aboard the Nicosian – lurid stories even circulated of a German sailor being disposed of in the furnace. There is little doubt, however, that it was a brutal and unnecessary exercise in vengeance.
Yet the intense storm of American protest over the Lusitania and the Arabic dwarfed the relatively small-scale uproar over the manifest criminality of the Baralong incident. Germany was forced to institute a moratorium on attacks on any liners without prior warnings. In addition, her U-boats were redeployed to operations centred in the North Sea and Mediterranean where there was far less chance of annoying the Americans. This had the effect of releasing the pressure on Britain. During 1915 some 748,000 tons of merchant shipping had been sunk by U-boats. This was a serious loss, but not enough to bring the British to their knees. The overall pattern of the naval war was unbroken and the stranglehold held by the Royal Navy over Germany would endure into 1916.
