by Deborah Lake
Berlin dearly wished to strike at the British. The Royal Navy was not prepared to fall in with German hopes by mounting a mighty attack on the Heligoland Bight. In turn, the High Seas Fleet, at least in the early days of the war, needed to keep a beady eye on the Baltic. If the Army went astray on the Eastern Front, command of the Baltic would be essential. A foray in strength to meet the Grand Fleet was not possible. In particular, the Kaiser would not approve. But, however the Staff looked at the problem, one fact was crystal-clear. Germany had to break the British blockade.
On 2 October 1914 the Admiralty advised the world that a 1,365-square-mile area of the Channel was mined. The only safe passage was through British territorial waters.
One month later, on 2 November 1914, the Admiralty issued a further proclamation. The whole of the North Sea was declared a war zone. Any ships that crossed it on routes other than those laid down by the Admiralty did so at their own risk. Mines were laid. Any ship outside the prescribed routes was liable to interception and seizure. Germany seethed. Something had to be done.
The first retaliatory shot came from Admiral Friedrich von Ingenohl, Jellicoe’s opposite number. The Commander-in-Chief of the Hochseeflotte delivered a broadside. In a closely argued submission, he pointed out that submarines were used by every state. This alone gave Germany the right to use U-boats in the manner to which they were best adapted. They could appear unexpectedly, cause fear and panic. They could escape by diving. U-boats were ideally suited to attacking merchant shipping. If crews and passengers on merchant ships ignored German warnings, so be it. They were no different from those who took passage in a ship that dared British minefields.
England, von Ingenohl and his supporters claimed, was trying to destroy German trade. Germany had exactly the same right as her enemy to declare a blockade of Britain.
On 7 November 1914, Admiral Hugo von Pohl, Chief of the Naval Staff, submitted the formal proposal to Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, the Chancellor. His recommendation was simple. There must be a U-boat blockade of Britain.
The proposal met with immediate opposition. The Chancellor was a shrewd politician. He knew that von Pohl’s proposal, which presumed sinking without warning and without surfacing, would outrage world opinion. Neutral shipping would be in danger. Of the world’s neutrals, the most important was the United States. Already, some neutral vessels tried their luck against the blockade, among them US-registered ships. Dodging the gentlemanly British was one thing. Running the risk of a German torpedo was another entirely.
The admirals pressed their case. Nobody could deny that the U-boats could destroy enemy shipping. Already, Britain had lost 60,000 tons in August 1914, half as much again in September, to mines and surface raiders. Add in the U-boats and the English would be in a world of nightmare. They had proved that they sank ships. Pathfinder, Hogue, Cressy, Aboukir, and Hawke gave ample proof of their abilities. If the U-boat men were let loose to turn their attention from warships to cargo vessels, they could win the war. Britain had no answers to the hidden killers in the depths of the sea. As a footnote, by the end of the year the U-boats had sunk three merchant ships for a mere 2,950 tons. Things would change.
Opposition to the Naval Staff came from the Kaiser himself as well as the Chancellor. And, perhaps surprisingly, from the head of the U-boat arm, Fregattenkapitän Hermann Bauer, Senior Officer of the U-boat Flotilla since March 1914. At the outbreak of war, Bauer acquired the title Führer der U-booten, abbreviated to ‘FdU’. His staff for this new appointment and responsibility was a solitary Kapitänleutnant whose duties included keeping the FdU war diary. With no secretary, the diary was written in longhand, a practice that possibly accounts for its brevity.
Bauer explained that Germany possessed less than thirty U-boats. For various reasons, it was hard to maintain more than four on patrol. And, he emphasised, a prewar study by an experienced U-boat captain, Korvettenkapitän Otto Blum, concluded that an effective blockade of Great Britain required precisely 222 U-boats.
As the German Naval Staff wondered how to break the blockade, a blockade that became more effective day by day, the Admiralty considered the problem of destroying U-boats. Not, some thinkers noted, preventing their onslaughts, but destroying the attackers.
It took no genius to realise that the first priority was to find the prowling killer. Enormous metal nets, supported by buoys and laced with mines, in strategic locations were one answer. Minefields provided another.
The greater problem lay in the miles of open sea. Mines failed to discriminate between friend and foe. Patrol boats were a limited answer at best. Any halfway competent U-boat commander could see them and escape by diving. With neither depth charges nor sound detection equipment to worry about, a submerged U-boat was as safely bedded as in dry dock at Kiel.
With no technical aids, Admiralty minds cast around for other means, any means, to bring U-boats to book. Merchant shipping was suffering. What was more, the U-boats by and large, observed the rules. They stopped ships flying the Red Ensign. They allowed the crew to take to the lifeboats. The U-boat then either sent a boarding party to scuttle the victim or the deck gunners spent a happy time aiming at a real target. Neutrals, too, were treated in accordance with recognised procedures.
Thus the weakness in the U-boat’s armour was found. It is impossible to pin down who first suggested the idea of a decoy, a snare for the U-boats. Some officers had served on Arab dhows in the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea, dhows that not only carried a local crew, but a naval one as well. Their business was to wipe out pirates and slave raiders who infested the coasts. A fat dhow, sailing comfortably along a pirate coast, invited attack. When the raiders struck, they were met by a 3-pounder and a machine gun.
Clearly, the principle could be moved from the Indian Ocean to the Western Approaches and the English Channel. Decoy dhows changed into decoy merchant steamers. When the U-boat surfaced in accordance with the Prize Regulations, hidden guns would blast her to eternity.
Decisions came quickly when reports arrived of periscopes sighted near Le Havre. On 26 November 1914, a signal chattered across the ether from Whitehall Wireless, the Admiralty’s transmitting station, to the Commander-in-Chief, Portsmouth. He was to fit out a ship with concealed guns. She was to cruise off Le Havre in the guise of a merchant ship.
SS Victoria had a brief career as a decoy. Sent to sea, her guns screened by crates of vegetables, she failed even to sight a U-boat. Unserviceability struck. On 9 December 1914, the C-in-C Portsmouth wrote to advise that she had been paid off.
In Germany, the argument for a wider use of the underwater arm gathered strength. Stalemate beckoned on the Western Front. The offensive at Ypres, designed to capture the Channel ports, had failed. Long casualty lists gave a grim reminder of the human cost of modern war.
Elation in November, when news came that von Spee’s Ostasiengeschwader had destroyed Admiral Sir Christopher Cradock’s elderly West Indies Squadron off the coast of Chile, vanished a few weeks later. SMS Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, Nürnberg, Dresden and Leipzig met HMS Invincible, Inflexible, Cornwall, Kent, Carnarvon and Glasgow. The Royal Navy’s two battlecruisers, three armoured cruisers and one light cruiser, under the command of Vice-Admiral Sir Frederick Doveton Sturdee, massively outgunned the two armoured cruisers and three light cruisers of the Kaiserliche Marine. Admiral Maximilian, Graf von Spee and his two sons, Heinrich and Otto, perished. The isolated Germans’ outstanding gallantry could not compensate for inferior machines in the new era of mechanised warfare. Dresden alone escaped.
In January 1915, Beatty’s battlecruisers failed to crush a German force in the Battle of the Dogger Bank. Appallingly bad gunnery and ambiguous signals allowed the Kaiserliche Marine to avoid a shattering defeat. For German admirals, the affair reinforced their professional opinion. The damnable English still controlled the seas. Only Unterseeboote could redress the balance. The Kaiser, alarmed at the possible fate in store for his beloved big ships, reluctantly agreed.
&n
bsp; On 4 February 1915, the German government issued its own declaration of a war zone:
1. The waters around Great Britain and Ireland, including the whole of the English Channel, are hereby declared to be in the War Zone. From February 18 onward, every merchant ship met with in this War Zone will be destroyed, nor will it always be possible to obviate the danger with which passengers and crew are thereby threatened.
2. Neutral ships, too, will run a risk in the War Zone, for in view of misuse of neutral flags by the British Government on January 31, and owing to the hazards of naval warfare, it may not always be possible to prevent the attacks meant for hostile ships being directed against neutral ships.
The acid reference to 31 January concerned Admiralty advice to ship owners. Their Lordships pointed out that the hoisting of a neutral flag was a perfectly acceptable ruse of war. Previous wars had seen its use. It breached no international conventions as long as no hostile act took place under the cover of the neutral ensign.
This, in due course, became the policy for Q-ships. As long as they did not fire until the British flag fluttered in the breeze, no breach of international law occurred. The Germans did not agree. The use of the neutral flag to disguise a warship, crewed by sailors in plain clothes, until it could surprise an enemy was a breach of accepted conventions.
On the same day as Germany declared its war zone, the SS Lyons, under the command of a prickly, slightly dubious, hastily commissioned officer, Lieutenant Commander C.A.P. Gardiner, became a decoy. In August 1914, the Admiralty requisitioned the salvage vessel Lyons for service with the Royal Fleet Auxiliary, complete with crew. She came from a Poole company, the National Salvage Association. Its managing director was a certain Charles Alfred Parfoy Gardiner. Lyons was the company’s major, if not sole, asset.
A snowstorm of vitriolic paperwork filled the files as Gardiner and the Admiralty crossed swords. His initial instructions were a mixture of hope and wishful thinking. Worse followed.
Lyons collected her concealed guns and other decoy gear in a secluded spot at Poole. The engineering company that modified her came under the ownership of a Charles Alfred Parfoy Gardiner. An invoice duly found its way to Whitehall. Lyons also acquired a venerable Maxim machine gun, thirty-six rifles and a selection of revolvers, with stocks of the appropriate ammunition. Whether the small arms were to round up surrendering German prisoners or to sink U-boats is not clear.
Gardiner’s orders instructed him to hurry to an attacked ship to help survivors. He learned that a ship under submarine attack ‘will hoist her largest flag half-mast at foremasthead or on triatic stay, and make calls with her syren [sic]; if fitted with wireless she will make “S O S” followed by a repeated letter S.’
Even before Lyons went to hunt U-boats, another decoy ship was in the offing. An attack on the Great Eastern Railway’s ferry Colchester on 11 December 1914 probably suggested that a similar packet ship, sufficiently armed, might tempt an unwary U-boat. In January 1915 the mills of the Admiralty ground into action.
The ideal ship was, like Lyons, already in naval hands. Again leased for the Royal Fleet Auxiliary, the 1,800-ton SS Vienna came from the Great Eastern Railway. Pressed into service as officers’ accommodation at Harwich, she still wore GER colours of black hull, white upperworks and buff funnels. She had plodded regularly across the North Sea for years. On her return to seagoing duty as a Q-ship, still in her distinctive livery, it took no great effort to change her name from the capital of a foe to Antwerp as a graceful tribute to a gallant ally.
Even more fortunately, a man to captain her kicked his heels in that same port of Harwich. It was, for the Admiralty postings staff, akin to a marriage made in heaven.
Using decoys remained secret. Not even all members of the Board at the Admiralty knew of these tentative steps. On 3 February 1915, the Fourth Sea Lord, Cecil Foley Lambert, wrote to the First Lord, Sir John Fisher. The Fourth Lord explained that he attached no little importance to the use of merchant ships, armed with hidden guns, to trap U-boats. They could, he suggested, cruise in areas where submarines lay in wait. When challenged, they should stop and allow the U-boat to send a boarding party. They could then sink the U-boat with gunfire. The boarding party would become prisoners or casualties if they tried to escape.
Lambert was not naive. Although sinking without warning became a parrot cry in the British press, the facts tell a different story. Just one-fifth of sinkings by U-boats in the months to follow ignored the accepted code of behaviour. U-boats stopped ships, checked papers, allowed crews to row away before sinking their prey.
But during those months, the Q-ships began to roam.
FIVE
BOIL PRISONERS IN OIL – IF YOU TAKE ANY
Lieutenant Commander Godfrey Herbert’s war had been less than successful by the time he boarded his first Q-ship in late January 1915. Command of the submarine D5 wrote an inglorious chapter in his chequered career. During the early days of the war, as the British Expeditionary Force crossed to France, Herbert patrolled the Channel, alert for any ambitious German destroyer. He repeated his ‘Messiah’ act with serious intent. Minus the white sheet, he took the post of lookout. A heavy boot stamped signals to the crew below.
While the BEF marched north to Belgium, D5 headed for German waters. Off Denmark, Herbert’s luck was in. On 21 August 1914, SMS Rostock, a Karlsruhe Class cruiser, 139m long at the waterline, appeared in Herbert’s sights. One of the most modern warships in the Kaiser’s fleet, she entered service a mere six months earlier at a cost to the German taxpayer of a trifle over 8 million marks.
From 600yd, Herbert knew he could not miss. A gambler by instinct, he decided to make doubly sure. Although Admiralty orders prohibited the simultaneous firing from the bow tubes of two expensive torpedoes, Herbert knew the chance to send 4,900 tons of best Solingen steel to the bottom of the sea more than justified a minor breach of a rule dreamed up by Whitehall.
D5 crept into position. Rostock and her destroyer escort steamed on, oblivious. Herbert rapped out firing orders.
‘Fire one!’
‘Fire two!’
Both torpedoes headed directly towards the enemy cruiser. Herbert counted the seconds before they turned the German ship into a costly collection of scrap metal.
The torpedoes serenely sped a few feet underneath Rostock’s keel. Herbert, sure he was on a winner, discovered only later that the live missiles weighed 40lb more than training dummies. They ran deeper than he calculated. Rostock sailed on while her attendants, like maddened hornets, homed in on the telltale wakes. It took three hours for Herbert and D5 to lose their pursuers.
Back at Harwich, Herbert confessed to Commodore Keyes. Two torpedoes fired simultaneously, two torpedoes that both missed. Keyes always forgave much of brave men. In his opinion, Herbert showed plenty of dash and spirit, was gallant, determined. He would undoubtedly do better in the future. And that was the end of the matter.
Opportunity beckoned once more for D5. On 4 November 1914, Konteradmiral Franz von Hipper’s battlecruiser squadron of the High Seas Fleet, Seydlitz, Von der Tann, Moltke, Blücher, with four light cruisers, Stralsund, Strassburg, Graudenz, Kolberg, dashed across the North Sea to England. The heavy ships were to shell the coast while the light cruisers laid mines off Lowestoft and Yarmouth.
As dawn crept across the water, Hipper’s ships were at Yarmouth Bay. A relic of Queen Victoria’s Navy, HMS Halcyon blinked a challenge with her Aldis lamp when she spotted two four-funnelled ships, 5 miles distant. Once a torpedo gunboat, now converted to a fleet minesweeper, Halcyon had the dreary job of clearing the coastal shipping lanes. She was no match for cruisers.
Two miles astern of Halcyon, in drifting mist, two time-weary destroyers, HMS Lively and HMS Leopard, trudged along on their own routine patrols.
Strassburg and Graudenz unambiguously answered Halcyon’s query. Gunnery officers snapped out range, elevation. Gun muzzles swung into line. The British ship found herself in the middle of cascading water s
pouts. Shells crashed into the sea around her.
Hipper, fearful that his two light cruisers might stray into a known British minefield, ordered them to cease fire. Seydlitz alone would deal with the upstart.
Seydlitz spoke. The other battlecruisers, anxious not to miss their chance, joined in without orders. Their gun crews, keyed up by the knowledge that they were deep in English waters, wanted to grab the chance to sink an enemy. Enormous splashes engulfed Halcyon. Fire control officers on the big ships swore as Halcyon vanished in walls of spray.
Lively hurtled up towards the sound of battle, her four funnels billowing smoke. Leopard closed to the action, wireless room stuttering urgent Morse.
Fifteen minutes passed before Hipper called off the fight. Acutely aware of the danger of entering a minefield, he ordered his ships back to deep water. At 0740, the departing battlecruisers hurled a few shots in the general direction of Yarmouth. The shells landed on the beach to make a collection of craters for the curious to admire. And all the while, Stralsund laid a 5-mile trail of mines off Yarmouth Bay.
Halcyon escaped nearly unscathed. One German shell had hit her bridge. It wounded three crew and damaged a quickly repaired wireless room. As Hipper’s ships vanished, the old ship spread the alarm. Leopard and Lively, joined by another veteran, HMS Success, shadowed Hipper’s fleet as it retreated eastward.
Excitement ran high at Yarmouth as news of the German incursion raced round the port. Three off-duty destroyers hastily raised steam. The submarines E10, D3 and Herbert’s D5 hurried out to sea. A chance, however slender, to sink a capital ship, was not to be ignored. Triumph was promotion, medals, fame.
Herbert pushed D5 along at her top surface speed of 14 knots – 16 miles per hour. Diesel engines clattered. D5 headed towards the action. Expectation ran through the crew. One opportunity, one strike, the destruction of a major enemy ship, would make heroes of them all.
