Smoke and Mirrors

by Deborah Lake

  The mere appearance of U-boats caused consternation at Scapa Flow. The ‘War Harbour’ had no defences against underwater attack. Jellicoe fretted about the chance of a U-boat sneaking into Scapa to play havoc with his dreadnoughts. Driftwood, floating bottles, a thoughtless seabird, all set alarms ringing. U-boat warnings became a regular feature in the northern waters. On one occasion, Jellicoe moved the whole fleet to Loch Ewe on the north coast of Scotland. It returned almost at once because of another false alarm, this time that the Germans were about to invade Britain.

  By the end of August 1914, the Royal Navy had every reason to feel smug. A venture into the Heligoland Bight was a triumph. Harwich destroyers under Roger Keyes joined Vice-Admiral Sir David Beatty’s battlecruisers from Rosyth to hunt the enemy. Three German light cruisers, Mainz, Ariadne and Köln, were sunk. Poor communications, the curse of the Royal Navy, nearly caused disaster, but the propaganda value of a victory in the enemy’s back yard convinced the public that the Navy had the measure of the Germans.

  Whitehall unilaterally made alterations to the Declaration of London. On 20 August 1914, an Order in Council flatly abolished the different categories of contraband. The same order introduced the concept of ‘continuous voyage’. All prohibited goods destined for enemy countries, in neutral ships bound for neutral ports, became contraband. Seizure became the order of the day. Germany promptly replied that she would abide by the Declaration of London. As a countermove, she laid mines along the shipping routes to Britain’s east-coast ports.

  The Royal Navy’s distant blockade enjoyed immediate success. The High Seas Fleet skulked behind its defences. The war was as good as won. Churchill, in typical fashion, wrote that ‘the German Navy was indeed muzzled. Except for furtive movements by individual submarines and minelayers, not a dog stirred from August until November.’

  The German Naval Staff was also reasonably pleased. The High Seas Fleet remained in being. German armies were within days of Paris. Once that city fell, the generals would deal with Russia. Not that they need hurry: the German Eighth Army had annihilated the Russian Second Army and thrashed their First and Tenth Armies in the forests and lakes of East Prussia. The war was as good as won.

  Although the U-boats failed to find any sign of the Grand Fleet on missions into deep water throughout August, prudence dictated more mines in the Heligoland Bight to deter any further British raids. The Staff concluded that no worthwhile targets were in range of the U-boats. As a result, U-boat activity could cease until the Royal Navy came closer to German waters.

  The heady days of August 1914 ended in a haze of golden sunshine. Soon, the leaves would turn from green to yellow, brown or red. By then, the war would be over. Everything would be back to normal by Christmas.

  FOUR

  A WEAPON TO TURN THE TIDE

  The steady tramp through France of advancing German army boots came to an unscheduled halt in September 1914. In a welter of confusion, rumours spread throughout the German army’s High Command. On 5 September, Oberstleutnant Richard Hentsch on the staff of the Oberste Heeresleitung, or Supreme Command, delivered an ominous, albeit inaccurate, assessment to Generaloberst Alexander von Kluck, commanding the First Army: ‘The news is bad. The Seventh and Sixth Armies are blocked. The Fourth and Fifth are meeting with strong resistance. The English are embarking fresh troops continuously on the Belgian coast. There are reports of a Russian expeditionary force in the same parts. A withdrawal is becoming inevitable.’

  Von Kluck, on the right flank of the advance, had seriously overextended his army. They had marched the furthest and the fastest in response to the Generaloberst’s fierce desire to seize the glittering prize of Paris. Orders to von Kluck to close the gap between himself and the Second Army had exposed its flank to the enemy. Even as Hentsch delivered his dispiriting words, the French Sixth Army was moving to attack.

  The Battle of the Marne exposed a collective loss of nerve that gripped OHL ever more firmly as the days passed. The Germans retreated to the line of the River Aisne. The Schlieffen Plan, designed to conquer France within forty days, had failed. The war, it seemed, would not be over as quickly as promised by the Army. Hopes of a fast, decisive victory in the west died.

  On 5 September, the same day that OHL’s messenger spoke to von Kluck, Kapitänleutnant Otto Hersing of U 21 put a torpedo into the 2,940-ton HMS Pathfinder, a light cruiser. She sank inside four minutes. Of the 268 officers and men on board, only 12 survived. In the Admiralty, the loss of Pathfinder created alarm. The cruiser was hit in home waters, at the very entrance to the Firth of Forth.

  Two weeks later, on 22 September, Kapitänleutnant Otto Weddigen nailed home the lesson that U-boats were a serious weapon.

  Weddigen’s U 9 left Heligoland on 20 September on war patrol. He had orders to attack British transports approaching the Belgian coast. The strict morality of not hitting unarmed ships had already slipped. Two days later, U 9 ambled serenely on the surface to the west of the Hook of Holland. She was 50 miles out of position, thanks to a faulty gyrocompass. Oberleutnant zur See Johannes Spiess, the first officer, or ‘Heinrich’, had the watch. ‘Heinrich’ was a pleasantry in the Imperial U-boat arm, used by the captain to his second in command. It came from a quotation wearily familiar to every German schoolchild, from Goethe’s Faust: ‘Heinrich, mir graut’s vor dir’, which loosely translates as ‘Henry, I have a horror of you’.

  Weddigen and his chief engineer strolled casually on the narrow deck, enjoying the fresh air after a night on the seabed. The Körting engines pushed a plume of telltale white smoke skywards as U 9 recharged her batteries.

  Spiess, mildly distracted by the white smoke, stiffened when a shape jumped into the view of his Zeiss binoculars. A mast. Dark smoke. A patrolling British warship. Weddigen submerged. The batteries were not fully charged but that could wait.

  The mast became upperworks. Not one ship but three, all with four funnels. Four funnels. Weddigen knew they were a feature of the Birmingham Class, so he identified them to the attentive Spiess. Weddigen watched the shapes grow in the attack periscope. With luck, sweet revenge for U 15 hovered.

  Four funnels were not unique. Cressy Class cruisers, built at the turn of the century, also had them. In Weddigen’s sights were HMS Aboukir, HMS Hogue and the class name-ship, HMS Cressy of the 7th Cruiser Squadron. They came on, steaming at a steady 9 knots, in line abreast, 2 miles apart. The three 12,000-ton ships should not have been sandwiched in the waters between the Dutch coast and a German minefield. With no escorts, steaming at a dangerously low speed, the pre-dreadnoughts were hideously vulnerable. The 7th Cruiser Squadron enjoyed the nickname of the ‘live-bait squadron’, a phrase that came to Churchill’s ears. He had ordered them out of the narrow seas but events conspired against him.

  Weddigen waited. His boat was not the most modern in the Kaiserliche Marine, but he compensated for its deficiencies by remarkable skill and determination. In prewar manoeuvres, Weddigen had regularly ‘sunk’ his targets. Now it was for real.

  At 0620 British time, Aboukir was 500m from U 9. A single bow torpedo bubbled towards her. Weddigen immediately dived, down to 15m. Porpoising was a fault of early U-boats. When the torpedo launched, the boat’s bow broke the surface. The crew acted as mobile ballast. They pelted forward to keep the trim even. As seawater gurgled in to compensate for the loss of weight, they scampered aft.

  Weddigen brought U 9 to periscope depth. He stared through the sight, waiting, counting the seconds. After half a minute, the torpedo struck. A fountain of water, smoke, a flash, followed by a dull thud, a crack of sound. U 9 shuddered as the blast pushed through the water. Aboukir settled wearily, stern first.

  Aboukir’s commander, Captain John Drummond, decided that his ship had struck a mine and called for help. Hogue and Cressy rushed to aid their sinking sister. At 0640, Aboukir turned turtle and went to the bottom.

  Fifteen minutes later, U 9 fired two bow torpedoes, ten seconds apart, at Hogue, stationary in the water
as she picked up survivors. Both torpedoes struck. The U 9’s crew galloped aft and back. Weddigen ordered one motor full astern as U 9 nosed towards her huge target, close to collision with the steel monster.

  When the second torpedo struck home, Hogue started to heel over. One of her officers recalled:

  Within three minutes of the first torpedo hitting, the list had increased to about 40 degrees, and realising that her end was very near all hands began to tear off their clothes and crawl down the high side or jump overboard to leeward. To add to the general confusion the stokehold crowd suddenly poured up on deck, their blackened faces dripping sweat and tense with apprehension. It was now a case of every man for himself, and tearing off my boots and clothing and then fastening to my wrist by its chain, my gold watch, which I greatly prized, I walked down the sloping deck into the water and struck out for dear life.

  As British sailors struggled to survive, Weddigen moved into position for a third attack. The chief quartermaster on the diving planes was grey with exhaustion. Weddigen nodded encouragement for him to carry on. The chief engineer, as engineers are wont, winced at the captain’s abuse of much-loved machinery. The batteries, he believed, were exhausted. ‘How much longer’, he demanded, exasperated, ‘are we doing this?’ He received a curt reply: ‘We are going to attack.’

  At 0717, two torpedoes from U 9’s stern tubes sped towards Cressy, 1,000m away. A lookout caught a glimpse of U 9’s periscope as she fired. Captain Robert Johnson called for full speed. The engines worked up. Seconds ticked by. It was too late. One torpedo caught her. Weddigen finished her off with a bow shot. All torpedoes were gone. So had the Royal Navy’s belief in its invincibility. In less than an hour, one obsolescent U-boat sank three admittedly aged cruisers. Technology that started before Nelson’s victories had reached fruition. A vessel, inferior in size and armament, destroyed an infinitely more powerful opponent before vanishing beneath the waves.

  Some 63 officers and 1,397 ratings of the Royal Navy died. More telegrams. Of the survivors, one midshipman, Kit Wykeham Musgrave, achieved a remarkable treble. When Aboukir sank beneath him, he swam towards Hogue. Pulled on board, he soon found himself back in the water. He swam to Cressy. After she sank, he hardly believed it when he was pulled aboard a ship whose crew spoke a guttural language. Resigned to becoming a prisoner, he then discovered his rescuer was the Koninklijke Nederlandsche Stoomboot Maatschappij ship Titan.

  Outrage. Disbelief. Anger. The British public felt all three. Rumours abounded. Many believed that such desperate damage could be done only by a whole fleet of submarines. The realisation that it was the work of a single U-boat was hard to bear. Although the loss of three veteran ships had not destroyed Britain’s overall naval supremacy, this did not appease press and public.

  Commodore Roger Keyes chose to ignore Weddigen’s undoubted skill when he later wrote that the exploit ‘in the early days of the war . . . was about as simple an operation for a submarine captain as the stalking of tame elephants, chained to trees, would be to an experienced big-game hunter, who wished to kill them unseen and unsuspected’. Keyes did not apply his strictures to his own commanders. Max Horton received generous approval when he despatched the antiquated 2,000-ton armoured cruiser Hela, whose main claim to fame was that she was often the escort to Wilhelm’s yacht.

  The Kaiserliche Marine considered options. Clearly, the Army had failed to deliver a knockout blow. The war would probably drag on, even into 1915. Hersing and Weddigen had laid bare the weakness of British naval power. Formidable on the surface, vulnerable beneath it. The U-boats had a task to perform. Admiral Reinhard von Scheer commented in 1920: ‘Weddigen’s name was on every lip, and for the Navy in particular, his exploit meant a release from the onerous feeling of having done so little in this war in comparison with the heroic deeds of the army. But no such victory was necessary to totally reveal the value of the U-boat for offensive operations, especially after it had given such unanticipated and convincing proof of its ability to remain at sea.’

  In Britain, the Admiralty wondered how to counter the threat. The committee that studied anti-submarine warfare was disbanded when the war began, a decision that is hard to grasp. The Navy itself was totally unprepared. No depth charges to destroy an underwater enemy, no hydrophones to hear submerged U-boats were in service. Anti-submarine detection simply did not exist.

  Fantastic proposals flowed into the Admiralty throughout the war. One suggested that seagulls could be trained to hunt U-boats. All this required was a British submarine to cruise back and forth with its periscope smeared with fish oil. At regular intervals, the crew would release titbits. The gulls would quickly associate periscopes with food. When a U-boat appeared, the birds would congregate around it. The Navy could do the rest.

  A similar plan suggested using seals and sea lions. This scheme’s proposer felt that they could be trained to bark when the sound of U-boat diesels reached them. Admiralty desperation accordingly led to the expensive hire of several sea lions from an astute trainer. Like their feathered comrades, they failed to understand the problem. The U-boats remained safe from detection by British fauna.

  Jellicoe recorded that he received a letter that earnestly suggested that the Royal Navy fill the North Sea with effervescent salts. The resulting bubbles would lift lurking U-boats to the surface, where they could be picked off at leisure.

  The Navy pinned its hopes on its anti-submarine picket boats, a motley collection of yachts, trawlers and motor launches that patrolled the coastal waters. Their equipment to fight U-boats consisted of a canvas bag and a heavy hammer. When a periscope appeared, the intrepid crew would slip the bag over it, then smash the glass with the heavy hammer.

  Hardly more effective was the other method of attacking Weddigen and his comrades. In an adaptation from an equally optimistic method of minesweeping, two ships, well apart, towed an explosive charge between them at slow speed. If a U-boat got in the way, it would detonate the explosive. To be really effective, this method required the cooperation of the U-boat. It either had to poke up its periscope or fire a torpedo. After a year, this cumbersome procedure gave way to the high-speed sweep of the paravane with an explosive charge of 400lb. This, too, failed to yield the results for which its users hoped.

  The British blockade of Germany caused great resentment in Berlin. The Royal Navy’s command of the sea automatically cut off Germany from most of the world when war began. German access to the oceans was from her North Sea ports. Ships could then go south, through the Channel, or between the Shetland Islands and Norway to reach the Atlantic.

  It was easy to police the Straits of Dover. They were no more than 21 miles wide, and passage was restricted even more by a minefield. All surface vessels were forced into a narrow seaway between the Kent coast and the Goodwin Sands. To evade the ships and vessels of the Dover Patrol was a virtual impossibility.

  The northern route was a different proposition. At 150 miles, it was substantially wider. Moreover, the long, neutral Norwegian coast offered sanctuary to ships avoiding interception. As an additional drawback for the British, lengthy northern winters made the waters some of the stormiest in the world. Long nights, appalling weather, seemingly incessant gales and driving snow when the rain stopped made the Northern Patrol a grim test of endurance for the blockaders.

  One sea alone was outside British control. The Baltic. Danish minefields effectively blocked its entrance. The ramshackle Tsarist navy had little success in imposing a blockade. As a result, Germany enjoyed easy access to Swedish iron ore and other goods. Only the arrival of British submarines countered German trade.

  For Germany, the only way she could continue to trade was to sink the Grand Fleet or, at the very least, confine it to port. As long as the Royal Navy controlled the North Sea, the Dover Patrol and the Northern Patrol could do what they wished, confident in the protection of Jellicoe’s dreadnoughts.

  German inability to deny that protection justified every last penny spent on the Gr
and Fleet. For Berlin, angry at the almost total effectiveness of the Royal Navy’s blockade and an almost equal inability to harm the Grand Fleet, something else was needed. A weapon to turn the tide. In short, das Unterseeboot.

  Otto Weddigen and U 9 continued their winning ways on 15 October 1914. HMS Hawke, an Edgar Class cruiser of 7,735 tons, went down in eight minutes with the loss of 524 men. Reservists and young trainees made up much of the crew. The popular press questioned whether they should have even been at sea. The agitation grew. Amphion, Aboukir, Cressy, Hogue, Hawke. Someone was responsible, had to be responsible, for these disasters.

  That someone was the First Sea Lord. Prince Louis of Battenberg. Born in Austria, Ludwig Alexander von Hesse was the eldest son of Prince Alexander of Hesse and Countess Julia Theresa von Haucke. His mother was a firm friend of Princess Alice, one of Queen Victoria’s daughters, who had married Prince Louis of Hesse. This close relationship with the British royal family changed Ludwig’s life. He moved to England when young. He changed his name to Louis and took British citizenship. Finally, Prince Louis Alexander entered Britannia as a cadet in 1868. He turned into an extremely competent naval officer, with the added advantage of highly desirable social connections. For the seekers of a sacrificial goat, Louis Alexander was ideal. He was clearly as German as leberwurst and sauerkraut and no doubt sent messages to Berlin in invisible ink by messenger pigeon. Vociferous ‘patriots’, spurred on by the newspapers and magazines that pandered to them, demanded his scalp. His position rapidly became untenable and he resigned on 29 October 1914.

  Churchill recalled Jackie Fisher as First Sea Lord. Nobody had the nerve to suggest that ‘Chinese Jack’ took the Kaiser’s gold.

  Apart from Weddigen’s trophy, 20 October 1914 witnessed the first sinking of a merchant vessel by a U-boat. Six days later came the first attack without warning. Even more disturbing was the report of a U-boat at Loch Ewe, the alternative anchorage favoured by Jellicoe. If the enemy could get there, nowhere was safe.