Smoke and Mirrors

by Deborah Lake

  In June 1914, the Royal Navy sent some light cruisers to show the flag at Kiel Regatta. The Kaiser was in his element. Commodore William Edmund Goodenough, commanding the British 1st Light Cruiser squadron, recalled:

  The Kaiser, when visiting the British flagship, wore the uniform of a British Admiral of the Fleet and said in that somewhat exaggerated phrase of speech to which he was addicted, that he was proud to wear the uniform worn by Lord Nelson.

  His brother, Prince Henry, an honorary admiral in our own fleet said, ‘This is what I have long hoped for – to see a portion of the British and German Fleets laying side by side in friendship in Kiel Harbour.’

  The feeling between the more senior officers was friendly if rather dispassionate. With the more junior officers, the fraternisation was perfectly complete.

  The glittering occasion ended abruptly. News of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo on 28 June 1914 finished the festivities. The grey shapes of the British warships left Kiel. The ceremonial bunting vanished but HMS Southampton flew an unambiguous signal. ‘Friends in peace, friends for ever.’ Inexorably, the seconds ticked away to the outbreak of war.

  By chance, later presented as shrewd forethought, the Royal Navy and reserves mobilised on 15 July 1914, the result of a decision made a year earlier. Economy, rather than keen anticipation of international tensions, determined the move. Practice mobilisation came cheaper than exercising the fleet at sea. Two days later, the Spithead Review saw, in the words of the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Spencer Churchill, ‘the greatest assemblage of naval power ever witnessed in the history of the world’.

  Most Britons believed that the Royal Navy was infinitely better than Kaiser Bill’s. In terms of pure design, little separated British and German ships. More practical matters caused problems. British capital ships suffered in comparison because of their lack of beam. A series of Liberal governments, anxious to fulfil their promises of social benefits for all, kept beady eyes on military costs. They spent nothing on new docks. All new British ships had to fit existing facilities. This ensured that none of Fisher’s dreadnoughts exceeded 90ft in width. In Germany, as the Kaiser airily explained to Admiral Sir John Rushworth Jellicoe in 1910, they built the docks to take the ships, not the other way around. In practice, German big ships were 10ft wider than British. This allowed thicker side-armour, a feature that made them less vulnerable to mines and torpedoes.

  Technologically, King George’s fleet lagged behind Wilhelm’s navy. British ships still practised individual gun-laying in action. Their opponents used a director system in which all of the guns were trained, laid and fired by a master stereoscopic sight and rangefinder. The individual turrets merely followed the elevation and bearing of the master sight, every gun firing at the same target.

  With shells, mines and torpedoes, the same story applied. Jellicoe, as Third Sea Lord in 1910, asked for an armour-piercing shell to penetrate an enemy at an oblique angle and burst inside. When Jellicoe returned to sea, Admiral Sir John Briggs succeeded him. No live wire, Sir John failed to sprinkle salt on the tail of the Ordnance Board. Wartime British shells broke up directly they hit armour plate.

  Similar inertia dogged the development of British mines and torpedoes. To the Royal Navy, especially most of its gunnery specialists, such devices were the resort of weaker fleets. The gun, the queen of sea battles, sank enemy ships, not mechanical contrivances. Although the British pioneered the torpedo, development lagged behind that elsewhere. British torpedoes possessed a distressing ability to run deep or sink to the bottom when fired.

  The story with mines was worse. They often broke from their moorings. They usually failed to explode. No thoughtful tactics existed for their employment. From 1914 to much of 1917, British minefields were essentially a waste of time and money. A reliable mine finally appeared after three years of war, copied from the German version. Mines and torpedoes became the stock-in-trade of the U-boat.

  Admirals in neither Germany nor Britain really knew how to use the underwater arm. On both sides, initial thoughts suggested a defensive role. Both naval staffs agreed on one thing. The enemy would charge across the North Sea to attack battleships at anchor in ports and harbours.

  This theory obsessed the German Naval Staff. They agreed that the Army would finish any European war in short order. The only thing the British could do, therefore, was to mount a surprise raid into the Heligoland Bight in an effort to destroy the High Seas Fleet. This led the U-boats to sway at mooring buoys, 20 miles out to sea. Ten miles beyond them, German destroyers patrolled. When the British hove in view, the destroyers retreated, chased by their enemy. The U-boats submerged and prepared to devastate the pursuing Royal Navy with mass torpedo attacks.

  A study of previous wars convinced the Kaiserliche Marine that the Royal Navy would closely blockade the German coast. This would give the U-boats and destroyers generous chances to pick off enemy capital ships and detached vessels. This steady erosion of British numerical superiority would finally allow the High Seas Fleet to chance a full-scale engagement.

  The British Admiralty, soon after the end of the Boer War in 1902, decided that Germany was the next enemy, not France. British sea policy in time of war had always been one of close blockade. To apply this to Germany needed Royal Navy control of the German North Sea coast, best described as a right angle. A close blockade needed to command the 150-mile hypotenuse between the Danish and Dutch borders. This, in turn, required the capture of one or more of the offshore islands – Sylt and Heligoland being particular favourites – for use as a forward base by British light forces. Behind them the First, or Grand, Fleet would steam ready to engage the High Seas Fleet when, in desperation, it tried to break out. The result, nobody doubted, would be another Trafalgar.

  This rosy scenario created several problems. The Royal Navy’s three major dockyards were Chatham, Portsmouth and Devonport. Ideally positioned for wars against the French, the Dutch and the Spanish, they had little use unless the Western Approaches, the southern half of the North Sea and the English Channel became battle arenas.

  The arrival of Germany as the foe posed a difficulty. Attention had to be focused on the north. If the High Seas Fleet sallied out from Kiel, Cuxhaven and Wilhelmshaven, a clutch of British battleships cruising around the Isle of Wight could do nothing to stop them.

  In 1903, the Admiralty decided to develop Rosyth on the Firth of Forth as a first-class naval base. ‘First-class’ in ‘navalspeak’ meant a port with a dockyard able to construct, equip and repair warships of any tonnage in every way. It would have a permanent stores depot that could supply every item a navy needed. In addition, its defences could see off any intruder.

  As First Sea Lord, Jackie Fisher turned up his nose at Rosyth. He wanted to go further north, to the Cromarty Firth, to command the passage from the North Sea into the Atlantic. Still further north lay Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands, 15 miles by 8, an enormous haven that could shelter the entire Royal Navy with room to spare.

  Fisher failed to win that particular struggle. Rosyth was chosen. To sweeten the pill, either Cromarty or Scapa would become a second-class base, one that could do smaller repairs and held only essential stores. After some heated moments, the admirals chose the Cromarty Firth. They adopted Scapa Flow as a fleet anchorage in war, a consolation prize of little value as the Treasury decreed that it was too expensive to erect any defences there.

  It took some while for dreams of a second Trafalgar to vanish. In 1911, the Commander-in-Chief Home Fleet issued a memorandum that set out British strategy if Germany and Britain went to war:

  The present War Plans provide for a blockade of the Heligoland Bight by the 1st and 2nd Destroyer Flotillas, supported by the 1st, 2nd and 3rd Cruiser Squadrons, with the principal objects of:

  preventing raiding expeditions leaving German ports in the earlier stages of hostilities:

  preventing the German Fleet putting to sea without the British Commander-in-Chief knowing
it and, when it is known to be at sea, conveying him such information as to its movements as will enable it to be brought to action by the British Main Fleet.

  It was a plan worthy of Horatio Nelson. Sadly, mines, torpedoes, U-boats, destroyers and long-range coastal artillery made it an absurdity. Heligoland and Sylt dripped fortifications and defences. Even the crustier seadogs in Whitehall admitted defeat.

  The new War Plan of 1912 tossed out the close blockade in favour of an ‘observational blockade’. A line of destroyers and light cruisers would patrol from the south-western tip of Norway to the Dutch coast. Behind them, to the west, the First Fleet would wait. Dreams of Trafalgar still lived, for the Plan emphasised that ‘the general idea . . . is to exercise pressure . . . by shutting off German shipping . . . through the action of patrolling cruisers . . . and supporting these cruisers and covering the British coasts by two battle fleets stationed so as to . . . bring the enemy’s fleet to action should it proceed to sea with the object of driving the cruisers off or undertaking other offensive action’.

  The new blockade line was 300 miles in length. It left unanswered the question of German hit-and-run attacks. Not even the British could manage an unbroken line of ships from Norway to Holland. U-boats and destroyers could pick off the blockaders, one by one, with little danger to themselves.

  Only in July 1914 did the Admiralty’s new War Plan embrace reality. Coincidentally, it also propounded the policy that helped win the war. The ‘distant blockade’ became the new policy. It proposed to close the two exits from the North Sea. The Channel Fleet would seal the Straits of Dover. The First Fleet, based in the Orkney Islands, would guard the line from the Norwegian coast to the Orkneys. It was sensible, practicable and the Law of Unintended Consequences duly clicked in. It handed the U-boats a prime part to play.

  German naval policy never intended to send the High Seas Fleet on a desperate venture to destroy the Royal Navy in one mighty battle. The Kaiser’s admirals based their hopes on piecemeal, isolated actions, to destroy a battleship here, to sink a cruiser there. The Kaiser personally decided on a strategic defensive policy, a policy supported by his Chancellor. An intact High Seas Fleet was a powerful counter when it came to imposing peace conditions on France and her allies after the Army won the land war.

  As for the Unterseeboote, they were part of the fleet’s defences. In Britain, however, despite the prevailing view that submarines did little more than get in the way of proper ships while simultaneously ruining exercises, some admirals and politicians feared their potential.

  Churchill, the civilian First Lord of the Admiralty, had no doubt that the Germans intended to use U-boats against the Royal Navy. In a survey to the Committee of Imperial Defence on 11 July 1912, he observed:

  If ever there was a vessel in the world whose services to the defensive will be great, and which is a characteristic weapon for the defence, it is the submarine. But the German development of that vessel, from all the information we can obtain, shows that it is intended to turn even this weapon of defence into one of offence, that is to say, they are building not the smaller classes which will be useful for the defence of their somewhat limited coast-line, but the larger classes which would be capable of sudden operation at a great distance from their base across the sea.

  One advocate of the submarine was Arthur Balfour, Prime Minister in 1902–5, a staunch supporter and partisan of Jackie Fisher. Balfour, convinced that it was a weapon for the weaker fleet, in letters to the former First Sea Lord pointed out that the real question was not whether Royal Navy submarines would make the enemy’s position intolerable but whether his submarines would make the British position impossible. There was, Balfour believed, nothing to prevent German U-boats sealing every port whatever the British superiority in service vessels. An infestation of enemy submarines rendered a surface fleet impotent. Almost as an afterthought, he mentioned that a submarine could not capture a vessel at sea.

  Fisher, on half-pay, remained as forthright and emphatic as ever. Among other ideas, he proposed a pre-emptive strike against Germany, a suggestion that filled even the bellicose Churchill, the political First Lord of the Admiralty, with dismay. International opinion, if not law, condemned such an idea.

  In June 1913, Fisher turned his attention to the use of submarines and blockades with a long, written appraisal. He expanded on Balfour’s gentle hint. An individual submarine, Fisher argued, could not ‘capture the merchant ship; she has no spare hands to put a prize crew on board . . . she cannot convey her into harbour. . . . There is nothing else the submarine can do except sink her capture.’

  This statement of the seemingly obvious shocked Prince Louis of Battenberg, the First Sea Lord. He was hardly mollified when Fisher admitted that such behaviour was ‘freely acknowledged to be an altogether barbarous method of warfare’, although he then added that ‘the essence of war is violence, and moderation in war is imbecility’.

  Churchill, ever anxious to demonstrate pugnacity, queried some of Fisher’s assumptions:

  There are a few points on which I am not convinced. Of these the greatest is the question of the use of submarines to sink merchant vessels. I do not believe this would ever be done by a civilized power. If there were a nation vile enough to adopt systematically such methods, it would be justified and indeed necessary, to employ the extreme resources of science against them; to spread pestilence; poison the water of great cities, and, if convenient, proceed by the assassination of individuals.

  These are frankly unthinkable propositions and the excellence of your paper is, to some extent, marred by the prominence assigned to them.

  Churchill’s view, seemingly, was that if, for instance, German U-boats sank merchant ships, Britain had free rein to spread pestilence throughout the Black Forest, pour cyanide into the River Spree and send teams of crack assassins to Potsdam. The Geneva Convention outlawed plague, poison and murder as acceptable policies, although subsequent politicians have expressed a wish to abandon the only rules that make warfare’s horrors even vaguely acceptable to those who fight them.

  The Admiralty drew precisely the wrong interpretation from Fisher’s outburst: if a submarine used barbarity as its only resort, clearly it had no place in naval warfare.

  The 1909 Declaration of London, a document that attempted to civilise the whole business of blockading, supported this comforting thought. It attempted to lay down some rules of civilised behaviour. Merchant ships openly flying an enemy flag were legitimate targets. They could either be seized as a prize or scuttled. The crew became prisoners.

  Neutral ships were a three-way problem. ‘Absolute contraband’ covered goods used exclusively for war and consigned to an enemy port. Outright seizure was authorised.

  ‘Conditional contraband’ described cargoes which might or might not be used for warlike purposes. Food, animal fodder, oil, petrol and coal were examples. These could be seized only if clearly consigned to the enemy via an enemy-held port. They could not be taken if destined for a neutral port even though they could be shipped onward.

  The third category was ‘free goods’, items that were not contraband in any way. Examples of this innocuous group included copper, iron ore, wool, cotton, flax, rubber, a whole variety of raw materials, machinery and various manufactured items, none of which had any possible use in such activities as making munitions.

  As a final blow, the Declaration decreed that blockade should only apply to enemy coasts, a condition that rendered the whole document meaningless.

  Clearly, a blockade required ships to be stopped, manifests to be scanned and decisions taken. Seized neutrals went to a home port under a prize crew. Cargoes were compulsorily purchased, the crew repatriated. Inconvenient, certainly. Without doubt, annoying. But not lethal. And not something a submarine could do.

  Admiral Sir Percy Scott, one of the finest gunnery experts the Royal Navy ever produced, did little to quell unease when he wrote to The Times in June 1914. Firmly of the opinion that capital ships
were doomed dinosaurs, he suggested that no more should be built. The money for them should go on aircraft and submarines. With some foresight, he prophesied that capital ships at sea would be in grave danger of torpedo attack from submarines. If war came, the big ships on both sides would retreat to safe anchorages. Submarines, he declared, could deliver a deadly attack in broad daylight. If they patrolled off the British coast, they would destroy everything they found.

  He attracted criticism, not least from the patrician Admiral Lord Charles William de la Poer Beresford, who nursed a fierce dislike of the plebeian Percy. Beresford loathed Fisher and his entire coterie, of which Scott was a member. In a Royal Navy split by cliques and cabals, whose labyrinthine convolutions rivalled any modern television series of betrayal and deceit, enmities died hard.

  Scott, as commander of the 1st Cruiser Squadron, served under Beresford as part of the Channel Fleet. The second son of the 4th Marquess of Waterford harboured a dark suspicion that the solicitor’s son reported secretly to ‘Chinese Jack’. Scott, in turn, nursed a low opinion of Beresford, both professionally and as an individual.

  An extra twist of the knife came in 1907. Scott sent one of his cruisers back to port. His order, read by every ship in the area, contained the acid comment that ‘Paintwork appears to be more in demand than gunnery, so you had better come in, in time to make yourself look pretty by the 8th’, a reference to a forthcoming visit by the Kaiser with which Beresford was much concerned. When Beresford heard of this ripe piece of sarcasm, he sent an abusive signal round his command, designed to humiliate Scott.

  The following year, at sea, Beresford signalled a manoeuvre that would have caused a collision. Scott ignored the fluttering flags until Beresford cancelled the signal. At which point, Scott acknowledged the order, an action which emphasised his disdain.