by Deborah Lake
Beresford, displaying his characteristic refusal actually to consider the facts, stated without preamble that submarines could operate only in daylight – a restriction placed on them during exercises – and that a few rounds from a machine gun put them out of action.
Even Bacon joined in. He expressed astonishment that Scott, a gunnery specialist, published views on matters about which he was no expert. Bacon, himself retired after a number of bruising disputes with his seniors, alleged that it was extremely difficult to navigate a submarine, a strange claim given Bacon’s own extensive seagoing experience.
Press and experts alike rushed to join the debate. Percy Scott found himself in a definite minority. His self-evident point that enemy submarines were a threat to British naval supremacy sank from view. The debate rumbled on as Britain slipped nearer to the First World War.
If war did come, neither the Royal Navy nor the Kaiserliche Marine contemplated more than a few months of conflict. For the British, the programme was simplicity itself. The fleet would sally out to inflict a crushing defeat on the enemy. After that, the Navy would blockade enemy ports. Six months would see the end of the affair.
Berlin agreed that the conflict would end swiftly. The mailed fist of the German army would scatter opposition to the winds. If the British were involved, an unlikely prospect, the ‘beefeaters’ had few options. Their negligible army would not trouble Germany. The Royal Navy would do what it had always done and blockade the coastline. Single ships on patrol, unsupported, would prove easy pickings for hit-and-run attacks.
July days passed in a haze of heat. In Britain, Irish Home Rule dominated the headlines. Nobody was much concerned about events elsewhere. The kerfuffle in the Balkans would blow over. It didn’t concern anybody but central Europeans.
Then it was August 1914.
THREE
QUIT YE LIKE MEN. BE STRONG
The first two soldiers killed on the Western Front died on 2 August 1914. A French corporal and a German lieutenant fought each other thirty hours before the war officially began. They met on the sun-baked dusty road to Faverois in the sleepy village of Joncherey, close to the French border with both Germany and Switzerland.
Caporal André Peugeot of the 44th Infantry Regiment and Leutnant Albert Mayer of the Jäger zu Pferd Regiment Nr 5 died a little after ten o’clock on that hot summer’s day. Rich, yellow stooks of wheat dotted the fields. Spots of blue marked cornflowers basking in the warmth. A few lazy birds wheeled across a cloudless sky. Nothing much happened in Joncherey on a Sunday.
Peugeot and his four-man section passed an idle morning. The post orderly had just collected their letters home when a scream cut across the air. A village girl, crossing the road to fetch water, saw horsemen – in black helmets and dark-green uniforms.
‘The Prussians are here!’
Peugeot advanced, rifle at the ready. The riders came closer.
‘Halt! Halt!’
The riders charged. Mayer, in the lead, fired his revolver one, two, three times at the man in a dark-blue coat and red trousers who stood in his way. Peugeot managed a single shot before he crumpled. His men joined the sudden unexpected skirmish. French rifles cracked angrily. Mayer swayed in the saddle, galloped on for a few yards and then slid to the ground. His sweating horse, its saddle bloodstained, became the first booty of the war. The German patrol retreated.
A French corporal, 19 years of age. A 20-year-old German lieutenant. They were the initial dead, victims of two revolver shots fired far away in that obscure Balkan town of Sarajevo.
While Peugeot and Mayer bled in the hot sun, Britain enjoyed the start of the August Bank Holiday. At seaside resorts, excursionists relished the sunshine. Bands played, flags fluttered. Ice-cream sellers rejoiced. In the towns, the poorest sweltered in cramped rooms; children played in the street, the lucky ones splashing in park lakes. Newspapers mentioned that Russia had mobilised its army to protect her frontiers.
Germany mobilised in return, a move that prompted France to do the same. Enthusiastic hordes cheered Kaiser Wilhelm when, in full Guards uniform, he drove in an open carriage from Potsdam to Berlin. As German warriors strode through the streets to the waiting trains, excited onlookers threw roses. The troops tucked them into pockets, poked them down rifle muzzles.
France mobilised. Red-trousered soldiers marched to the railway stations. Loud cheers and spirited renderings of ‘La Marseillaise’ urged them on their way. It was all far away and little to do with Britain. The Manchester Guardian commented that ‘we care as little for Belgrade as Belgrade does for Manchester’.
For the British public, for most of its politicians, the prospect of conflict in Europe concerned them as much as an uprising in Outer Mongolia. Secure behind the grey steel shield of the Royal Navy, confident that no nasty Continental obligations ensnared the Empire, happy crowds basked in summer sunshine.
Everything changed within days. The network of alliances under which Russia supported Serbia against Austro-Hungary, Germany upheld Austro-Hungary against Russia, while France backed Russia against Germany, unravelled. Rather than keep the peace, they led to war.
German plans insisted that the only way to beat Russia was to remove France from the board. The quickest route to Paris went through Belgium. On Bank Holiday Monday, 3 August 1914, news filtered through that Germany demanded permission for its soldiers to march through Belgium. The Belgians refused, and asked for diplomatic intervention by Britain. The British government sent a polite message to Berlin. They asked that Belgium be left alone. It arrived several hours after the first cavalry units trotted down the road from Aachen to enter their neutral neighbour.
By midnight, Britain was at war for one single purpose. To remove the Germans from Belgium. With France as an ally, it would not take long. Everybody knew that the war would finish within months.
Thanks to the practice mobilisation, the Royal Navy was ready. Churchill, indeed, jumped the starting blocks. As Army officers took their swords to the armourers to be sharpened, as reservists piled back to regimental barracks, as harassed quartermasters presided over rapidly dwindling stocks of boots, entrenching tools, jackets, puttees, trousers, caps, mess tins, ammunition pouches, both left and right, haversacks, belts, badges, braces, rifles and the myriad of other items a soldier needed, the Grand Fleet rode serenely and safely in its war harbour at Scapa Flow.
Not all of the Royal Navy watched the sea, the sky, the clouds, the rain and the three types of birds that sailors could identify – big jobs, little jobs and seagulls – that were the free amenities at Scapa Flow. At ports and harbours around Britain, the Royal Navy prepared for war.
The blind goddess of chance, be it the Greek Tyche, the Roman Fortuna, or any other from the pantheon of the world’s deities, threw lives like dust into the air to watch them drift in the winds of war. Across the world, men and women left tiny villages or great towns to undergo mighty adventures. Men who had never ventured more than a dozen miles from home sailed across vast seas. They marched or rode through foreign lands to places they knew only from the Bible or wall maps in school. Jerusalem. Messines. Cairo. Bombay. Baghdad. Singapore. Riga. Caperneum. Salonika. Ypres. Villagers who had heard blackbirds sing from English trees listened to the sound of pi-dogs yapping in dusty streets. Men from the grimy slums of Hamburg saw spring flowers bloom in Anatolia. Chance chooses at random. Fame or ignominy. Life or death. Medals or maiming. Perhaps both.
At Devonport, Lieutenant Gordon Campbell, 28 years old, in command of the elderly Avon Class destroyer HMS Bittern, waited for orders. A Londoner by birth, the ninth son and thirteenth child of sixteen, Campbell grew up in genteel poverty. His father, Frederick, served in the New Zealand War of 1865 as a junior artillery officer. He left the Army soon after. He joined the Volunteers, eventually to become a lieutenant-colonel. The 14-year-old Campbell left Dulwich College to follow an elder brother into the Royal Navy. He entered HMS Britannia in September 1900 and passed out as a midshipman in January 1902.<
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His career followed the pattern of a hardly well-connected, middle-class Navy officer. He joined HMS Prince George, a seven-year-old Majestic Class battleship, in the Channel Fleet. By his own account, barely a week went by without his falling foul of authority. Most officers believed that midshipmen improved mightily if caned for misdemeanours. Campbell received twelve strokes at regular intervals.
After a short period with the Mediterranean Fleet, Campbell returned home. An old rugby injury suffered at Dartmouth came back to plague him. After a cartilage was removed, he eventually returned to duty after six months on the sick list.
Promoted, after examination, to sub-lieutenant, he served with HMS Arun. Once he became lieutenant, in October 1907, he went to HMS King Alfred, the flagship of the China Station.
Campbell came back to England in April 1910. After another short hospital stay, he ended up in Devonport, at HMS Impregnable. Not a dreadnought battleship, not even a cruiser, but almost a ‘stone frigate’. The honoured name was the training ship for boy ratings.
Service appointments are roughly ‘career-enhancing’, ‘marking time’ or ‘backwater’. All three are essential. Counting blankets in the Hebrides may not be the most glamorous job but it must be done. That such work does not thrust one under the benevolent gaze of an influential senior officer is simply another hardship of the service.
It helped not one iota that Campbell showed an independent spirit within weeks of his arrival. He decided to wed. His new commanding officer had other ideas. In the arcane world of the pre-1914 military, 25 was the minimum age at which an officer could marry without formal permission. Even then, matrimony was not a sensible career move for a junior officer.
Eight days after his 25th birthday, Campbell married. He believed that the Navy had no claim on his private life. As he did his duty efficiently, there could be no argument. His commander promptly asked for the removal of the rebellious new arrival. Only a time-honoured arrangement saved Campbell. The commandant of the boys’ school, usually an inflexible officer on his last appointment, received promotion to flag rank on retirement. The admiral’s flag arrived before officialdom acted.
After a little more than two years, Campbell took his first command, HMS Ranger. She formed part of the Devonport local defence flotilla. Its job was to patrol off the harbour and support local defences in the event of an enemy attack. The Royal Navy had three fleets. The First Fleet, which became the Grand Fleet in time of war, used the most modern ships, staffed with the officers deemed most likely to succeed. The Second Fleet’s ships spent most of their time in harbour with maintenance crews. The Third Fleet, of which the local defence flotillas were part, employed the oldest warships still floating. And officers who were not expected to shine.
A leftover Victorian relic from 1895, the Opossum Class destroyer was at least a ship. Six months later, Campbell moved to HMS Bittern, also part of the Devonport fleet. Like Ranger, she was no longer young. Launched in February 1897, she was, nonetheless, a fighting craft; and there was a war to be fought. Young ship’s captains have ambition; young ship’s captains dream of glory.
The news of the German invasion reached Charles George Bonner, an officer on a Johnston Line steamer, at Antwerp. He was born in 1884 at Shuttington in Warwickshire. His family moved to Aldridge in Staffordshire soon after his birth.
Bonner left school in 1899 to join the merchant training ship Conway, moored off Rock Ferry Pier in the Mersey. The Board of Trade accepted the two-year training course as equivalent to four years at sea for aspiring Merchant Navy officers. Every cadet absorbed the ship’s motto: ‘Quit ye like men, be strong’.
Cadet Bonner left Conway in 1901. He served his apprenticeship under sail in Invermark, a steel barque of Colonel George Milne’s Inver Line. Generally reputed to have the finest fleet of windjammers anywhere on the world’s oceans, the Inver Line worked between Australia, New Zealand and Great Britain. Charles Bonner became a master mariner by his 21st birthday.
For Lieutenant Commander Godfrey Herbert, the war presented a golden opportunity. He was ginger-haired, a muscular 13st. Acquaintances described him, not always kindly, as ‘the life and soul of the wardroom’. He enjoyed parties, told jokes well, encouraged confidences from others. He was brave. He was unconventional. He could be ruthless. He gambled with a cold eye for his chances. Some called him bombastic. Others thought him a poseur.
The son of a solicitor, Herbert entered the Royal Naval College in 1895. His first appointment was to the battleship HMS Resolution. Once promoted to sub-lieutenant, Herbert joined the cruiser HMS Blenheim. In a steady progression to smaller craft, he moved to the destroyer HMS Fervent.
Big ships, all spit and polish and fixed routine, bored Herbert. Smaller ships were better, although they lacked excitement. When the chance came, in 1905, to volunteer for the new submarine branch, Herbert grabbed it.
His first commission was as first lieutenant on A4, under the command of 22-year-old Lieutenant Martin Nasmith. He very soon showed his personal coolness under pressure. In October 1905, A4 took part in signalling trials. An anchored dinghy with an underwater bell bobbed at a distance. The A4 signalled if the sound of the bell reached them. To do this, a ventilator shaft remained open. A sailor pushed a flag, attached to a boathook, up to the surface each time he heard the bell.
On 15 October, in the open sea, the experiments went well. The next day, rougher weather kept A4 inside the breakwater. Nasmith used his previous trim settings. The water inside the breakwater had less salt in it. The more salt, the more buoyant the water, as the Dead Sea proves. The submarine sank. The sea poured through the open ventilator shaft to swamp the unfortunate A4.
She grounded 90ft down, a mere 10ft less than her designed safe limit. In darkness as black as Irish stout, with water flooding into the hull and chlorine gas seeping through the boat, Herbert stayed ice-calm. He groped his way to the blowing controls. Between them, Nasmith and Herbert restored power. They took the boat to the surface after four long, frightening minutes.
The inevitable court martial found Nasmith guilty of default. It acquitted him of negligence. Both officers received plaudits for their bravery and coolness. Herbert looked set for a promising career as a submariner. Some months later, he took command of A4 himself.
When he finished his tour, Herbert went to the China Station, to the battleship HMS Monmouth. To relieve the tedium, he spent happy hours designing a one-man midget submarine-cum-torpedo. Its crewman steered the projectile close enough to the target to ensure a hit before he went over the side.
Herbert named the project ‘Devastator’. He offered it to the Admiralty who rejected it on the interesting grounds that when other navies learned the details, they would simply copy the idea. The device thus nullified the advantages of a big fleet. As a sop to humanity, they also felt that it would be ‘too dangerous to the operator’.
The spurned inventor approached the Japanese navy. A swift, sharp rebuke thundered down from Whitehall. Herbert learned, with no room for doubt, that the Admiralty’s refusal was not an invitation to hawk the idea to a foreign power.
During the Second World War, Herbert’s former commanding officer, Martin Nasmith, wearing admiral’s rings and a Victoria Cross, revived the idea. Midget submarines finally appeared on the Navy’s inventory.
Herbert returned to Britain in 1911. He took command of the 300-ton, 140ft-long C36. Designed as a ‘coastal defence’ submarine, Herbert’s boat, in company with C37 and C38, stunned doubters by sailing 10,000 miles from Portsmouth to Hong Kong. It took eighty-three days, albeit with stops along the way.
A further clash with authority occurred. Herbert devised a ‘Messiah on the Water’ practical joke. Clad in a white sheet, he lashed himself to the top 6ft of the boat’s periscope. Entering Kowloon Harbour, C36 would submerge gently to leave Herbert apparently walking on the surface. Superstitious onlookers believed they witnessed the Second Coming, especially as some alleged that C36’s captain proclaimed th
e fact in his stentorian voice. The admiral failed to see the joke.
When war began, Herbert commanded the submarine D5. Diesel-powered, with a crew of twenty-five men, armed with six torpedoes, she had three torpedo tubes from which to fire them. One was at the stern; her bow held the other two. She reached her war station at Harwich and waited. Like every other man in the Royal Navy, Herbert hoped that glory was in store.
For New Zealander William Sanders, first mate on the barque Joseph Craig in August 1914, the war was far away. Three days after the news reached him, his ship was wrecked inside the Hokianga Bar, 140 miles north of Auckland. Sanders grabbed a boat and steered alone through a dangerous sea to summon help.
Sanders, generally known as Willie, was born in Auckland on 7 February 1883 to Edward Charles Herman Sanders, a bootmaker, and his wife Emma. Edward had arrived in New Zealand at the age of 9 with his parents. Emma, another immigrant, was the daughter of Captain William Wilson, a master mariner. He was part of the family that founded the Wilson Line, the largest privately owned shipping fleet in the world.
Genes and a sense of adventure led Willie to a sailor’s life. He left school in 1897 for an office job. All of his spare time, including his midday break, was spent at Auckland Harbour. He made friends with many of the ships’ crews. In February 1899, when he had just reached his 16th birthday, his chance arrived.
An officer of the Coastal Shipping Company offered Willie the job of cabin boy on the Kapanui, a pygmy steamer of about 80 tons. Willie went to sea on the ship that served the river harbours of the North Auckland area. He stayed with Kapanui until he was 20 years old. He then transferred to the SS Aparama, the training vessel of Union Steamships.
By 1906, Willie was on a New Zealand government ship, the SS Hinemoa. He joined as an ordinary seaman, grasping every chance to gain experience as he studied for his master’s certificate. The Hinemoa delivered provisions to government lighthouses and maintained, built and supplied castaway depots in the southern islands.
