Smoke and Mirrors

by Deborah Lake

  Querulous orders came thick and fast. Lyons was to remain available for salvage work although all her gear vanished when she became a decoy. Gardiner should pick up survivors from stricken vessels. He was to escort important passenger ships into Liverpool. Lyons was to intercept suspicious surface ships, for the Admiralty was convinced that a U-boat supply vessel operated in the area.

  On top of these demands, Gardiner received details of an enemy minefield he had to clear. The minefield was probably the result of fevered speculation and Lyons was not a minesweeper. Gardiner, for once, did not argue. He bloody-mindedly pursued the order in exact detail, despite his normal inclination to question any instruction from higher authority as absurd, impracticable or lacking in vision. Finding the area awash with debris, Gardiner and his crew spent a pleasant time as they machine-gunned and sniped at all the wreckage they saw in case it hid mines.

  Gardiner, at 52 years of age, remained undaunted by their Lordships’ testy calls. He replied in kind with a stream of memoranda, suggestions, letters, proposals and complaints. In due course, Lyons ceased to be employed on special duties. She sailed to Kirkwall with the acid comment of an Admiralty minute bouncing off her hull. ‘Lieutenant Commander Gardiner has given trouble before,’ wrote the exasperated officer, ‘and appears unable to accept an order without questioning it.’ The sentiment was echoed by the short-tempered Oliver who observed: ‘The captain of Lyons had a very free hand to catch submarines for over six months, he has been well tried at the work and not made good, and has been a source of trouble owing to his disinclination to do as he is told and to always make excuses to refit and stay in harbour.’

  At the end of the year, Gardiner and his ship went back to Poole. Six years later, his shipbuilding and engineering company went into liquidation through a pressing lack of funds. The former lieutenant commander, who had ambitions of standing for Parliament, revived his fortunes with a profitable line in gun-running as well as a variety of other distinctly unethical ventures.

  Herbert and Baralong, the flag of the United States of America at the stern, spent the first two weeks of April slogging along St George’s Channel, the strait which separates south-east Ireland from Wales and joins the Irish Sea to the Atlantic Ocean. For fourteen days, she plied between the Scilly Isles, Smalls, Queenstown and the Fastnet. Nothing happened. No periscopes appeared. No U-boats surfaced. Herbert became bored and steered his ship to Jersey on 14 April. She spent the next night at Falmouth. On 17 April, Torquay was close to hand, followed by Swanage the following day. On 18 April, Herbert ended his diversionary cruise at Portland.

  Two weeks of idleness without the sniff of action did little for crew morale or discipline. Herbert’s casual approach, that worked well with small numbers of regular ratings in the cramped and dangerous confines of submarines, had less success with the mixed complement of SS Baralong. Discipline wavered. Herbert’s habit of inviting the chief engineer and his acolytes into the saloon for drinks did not help.

  Steele was disconcerted. Merchant officers generally supposed their Royal Navy counterparts to be at least archangels if not minor deities. The captain of Baralong scarcely fitted the mould of the Dartmouth-trained permanent officer. Steele’s doubts increased when Herbert announced a new identity. Henceforth he was Captain William McBride, a ruse, he explained, to mislead any casual listener.

  For the same reason, Herbert followed Admiralty instructions to employ harbour pilots as little as possible. The fewer people who boarded Baralong, the fewer people to be curious about her. In some ports, the captain or navigating officer collected an appropriate fee if no pilot was used. Herbert turned matters to his own advantage. Baralong frequented ports where a pilot was not mandatory. Herbert conned the ship himself and pocketed the proceeds.

  April became May. Herbert kept Baralong at sea for long stretches. The ship entered harbour only to take on coal and supplies. In part, this was to head off even greater trouble from the motley crew. Herbert finally banned shore leave for both disciplinary and security reasons. At Dartmouth, his men wrecked a public house in an orgy of fighting and drunkenness. Arrests followed. Herbert stood bail. At the magistrates’ court the next morning, not a single sailor answered his name. Baralong had weighed anchor and skipped during the dark hours.

  At various times, some of his merchant seamen simply swam ashore to get drunk. Three deserted.

  Baralong saw no U-boats. On 7 May 1915, as she patrolled the waters off Jersey, her wireless room picked up an urgent cacophony of Morse code. Lusitania, sinking, cried for assistance. A single torpedo strike from U 20, under the command of Kapitänleutnant Walter Schwieger, sealed the great liner’s doom.

  The tramp’s engines went to full power as Herbert headed for the Old Head of Kinsale. They arrived too late to help. Lusitania sank in less than eighteen minutes, taking with her 1,250 boxes of field artillery ammunition, eighteen boxes of percussion fuses that contained fulminate of mercury, a potently explosive material, and most of the souls on board. Of 1,957 passengers and crew, 1,198 lost their lives. Men, women, children, infants. 1,198 casualties of war.

  Three weeks later, Herbert and his men paced angrily between the rows of bodies laid out at Queenstown. In an era accustomed to atrocities, wearily familiar with a world in which cluster bombs never kill children or pregnant women but simply cause collateral damage, it is almost impossible to recapture the feeling of shock, of anger, of rage which the sinking created. To most men raised in Victorian and Edwardian England, the killing of non-combatants was anathema, a convincing proof of barbarity. The realities of industrial warfare, of mechanised slaughter, had not hit home.

  The depressing truth was that the Lusitania sinking proved that warfare had changed for ever. Civilians were no longer sacrosanct in times of conflict although, in truth, they never had been. In earlier years, the killing was usually close-up and personal. The advent of the torpedo, the aerial bomb, long-range artillery and the mine allowed slaughter to be conducted from afar. And mines, shells, torpedoes and bombs did not discriminate.

  Germany had already accepted the brutal realism that total war was just that. Any ship could carry munitions, articles to aid the prosecution of the war, a word and a phrase that resembled Auntie Mabel’s fabled knicker elastic. It went not merely twice round the dining table but stretched to take in a sideboard, four chairs and a Welsh dresser. Anything that helped the enemy’s cause was a target.

  The logic was inexorable, inescapable. The banker who financed a factory making Army boot laces, the theatrical producer presenting morale-lifting stage shows, old ladies knitting socks, sister Suzie sewing shirts for soldiers, the crew and the ship carrying comforting letters and parcels to the troops. They all were as much a target as soldiers in the front line.

  Although Schwieger claimed that he did not know the identity of his victim before he sank her, this was a touch of Teutonic sophistry. A mere handful of enormous four-funnelled passenger liners plied the world’s oceans. Schwieger knew that it was either the Lusitania or her sister, Mauretania, in his attack periscope. He had no doubts that he attacked a legitimate foe. There was no debate, no searching of conscience. She was, as Jane’s Fighting Ships and Lloyd’s Register made clear, an armed merchant cruiser and a legitimate target.

  Despite, or because of, widespread condemnation of Schwieger outside Germany and her associates, few tears were shed when he was killed in command of U 88. Fate tossed an ironic smile in his direction for his boat went down when it struck a newly laid British mine near Terschelling on 5 September 1917.

  To Herbert, to his men, to much of the world, the sinking of passenger ships was an atrocity. It mattered not a jot that Lusitania was technically an auxiliary cruiser. Everyone knew she was really a passenger ship. The German claim that she carried munitions for the Western Front, that there were soldiers on board, was enemy propaganda. That the great liner flew the neutral Stars and Stripes from her jack rather than the Red Ensign signified nothing. It was a sensible pr
ecaution in dangerous waters. The Germans had shown themselves to be barbarians, killers of women and children, not worthy of respect. Torpedoing passenger liners was at one with raping Belgian women, butchering babies, executing innocent villagers, using poison gas and routinely crucifying prisoners. The destruction of the Lusitania proved the essential evil of the Second Reich and Kaiser Wilhelm II personally.

  A coin and medal designer in Munich, Karl Goetz, offered the Allies an unexpected propaganda coup. He produced a commemorative piece. On one side, Lusitania, her deck crammed with armaments, sank stern first. On the other, Death sold tickets to a queue of passengers. Above ran the slogan, in German, ‘Business Above All’. Goetz made his medal as a vicious satire on the hypocrisy and money-grubbing antics of Cunard. They used innocent people to disguise the ‘Lucy’s’ true role as a military transport and charged them for the privilege.

  Goetz took the details from his local newspaper. That gave the wrong date for the sinking. Goetz copied it. 5 May 1915, two days before Schwieger’s attack: Britain and others briskly produced thousands of copies. Proof inescapable that the Kaiser and his minions planned mass murder by sinking innocent liners.

  Jackie Fisher considered the whole business an inescapable fact of war. The admiral had startled delegates to the 1899 Hague Peace Conference when he suggested that common sense meant it was reasonable to ‘hit your enemy in the belly, and kick him when he is down, and boil his prisoners in oil – if you take any – and torture his women and children. Then people will keep clear of you.’

  Herbert’s first lieutenant, Gordon Steele, later recalled the high emotion which ran through Baralong’s crew:

  It was just the culminating point of a long series of minor violations of war, and inhuman practices . . . it just required the sight of those silent figures of drowned children from the Lusitania, as they were laid out on the front at Queenstown in a temporary mortuary to rouse the deepest hatred in the Baralong’s crew, composed as they were of a mixed collection – naval, mercantile and marine ratings – who had never so hated before.

  At an impromptu meeting, the crew agreed to show no mercy to any U-boat man who fell into their hands.

  Herbert was left in no doubt what to do if he engaged a U-boat. ‘The Lusitania’, he learned from Captain Herbert Richmond, who had joined Grant at the Admiralty, ‘is a shocking business and our unofficial answer is – take no prisoners from U-boats.’

  This was simple and direct. All Baralong had to do was to find her quarry.

  SIX

  AND THE SEA TURNED RED

  Q-ship commanders, like every other seagoing officer in the Royal Navy, yearned to destroy a U-boat. Unlike their contemporaries in the ‘Grey Funnel Line’, however, they positively invited U-boats to attack them. They had only sharp eyes aided by the best binoculars the Admiralty could beg, borrow or buy, and wireless distress calls to help them hunt U-boats. To find the enemy needed that capricious ally, good fortune. As May turned to June, Herbert and Baralong tramped the waters of the Channel and the Western Approaches with growing frustration.

  For seven weeks, until 29 May 1915, not a single merchant ship was sunk by a U-boat in the English Channel. In the Western Approaches, the Kaiser’s U-boats spent their days despatching a small collier here, a three-masted schooner there, with an apparent disregard for larger targets.

  A spell of fearsome weather hindered the decoy’s chances. Grey skies, howling winds, slate-grey seas added to Herbert’s annoyance. When blue skies returned, Baralong still failed to find the enemy.

  Herbert snarled his opinion of uncooperative U-boat captains in a report on 12 June 1915 to the long-suffering Henry Grant at the Admiralty. ‘If they will persist’, he wrote, ‘in sinking things like Plymouth schooners, with 150 tons of coal aboard, when the ocean is thick with large steamers, I can’t help it.’ Ten days later, his frustration mounting, he complained again. He was, he felt, destined to suffer ill luck. Baralong had steamed nearly 18,000 miles without sighting a U-boat.

  Grant dealt relatively patiently with Herbert’s stream of reports, comments and suggestions. He rejected a request for Baralong to have her own seaplane. He adamantly refused to provide a motor boat for Herbert’s use. Either would destroy Baralong’s guise as an unloved tramp steamer.

  Grant was equally unsympathetic to another request on 27 July 1915 when Herbert bluntly asked for promotion to acting commander ‘in view of the fact that I have got two ships beside my own? Of course I shouldn’t expect to keep the rank as soon as I go back to submarines, but just while I have command of this show I thought possibly the extra “guns”, so to speak would be an advantage.’ Anticipating a refusal, he continued, ‘I am reluctant to make such a suggestion, not having scored a hit up to date. . . . I hope you will forgive me suggesting it, but I see fellows junior to me holding acting ranks and wondered whether my job is worth it.’

  A touch disheartened, a little disgruntled, Herbert carried on. On the morning of 19 August 1915, Baralong patrolled the Western Approaches. She played the part of a conspicuous neutral who had taken unmistakable precautions in perilous waters. The flag of the United States fluttered from her stern and masthead. On each of her sides, 16ft by 12ft boards proclaimed she was Ulysses S. Grant. Each board carried the letters ‘USA’, reinforced by a painted ‘Old Glory’.

  Sunlight sparkled off a gentle swell. A blue sea, its waves capped with white foam, a sharp horizon, perfect weather, with not a U-boat in sight. Just wreckage or smoke in the far distance as another freighter met her doom. Lifeboats with desperate survivors were ignored. Rescued, they might discover Baralong’s true purpose. Personal belongings, floating, abandoned, forlorn. And sometimes bodies of seamen like themselves. Herbert and his crew developed a hatred of U-boats and all who sailed in them. Wreckage, unending wreckage.

  For word had gone out. To Kiel, Cuxhaven and the Baltic ports, to Heligoland, to Bruges and the Flanders Flotilla. U-Boote heraus! Gegen England! Fregattenkapitän Hermann Bauer, in charge of the U-boat arm, issued a typically aggressive order.

  The boats were there. Hunting. Searching for rich pickings. Supplies flowed across the Atlantic from America. Weapons, shells, animals, food. Troop ships left Liverpool and Southampton for France and the new battle front at the Dardanelles, for Egypt and India. Britain’s lifelines were strings across great waters. U-boats could slice them in two.

  In the Western Approaches, three of the Kaiser’s determined U-boat captains were ready. Kapitänleutnant Max Valentiner with U 38 from II Flotilla. Kapitänleutnant Rudolf Schneider in U 24 of III Flotilla; IV Flotilla’s Kapitänleutnant Barnard Wegener with U 27. All three were good, very good, at their job.

  Chance had given Wegener mostly military targets. He torpedoed a British submarine, the E3, on U 27’s maiden voyage. For the first time one submarine destroyed another. For good measure, he subsequently sank HMS Hermes, a venerable cruiser converted to a seaplane carrier, as she crossed from England to France. He later destroyed HMS Bayano, a banana boat pressed into service as an armed merchant cruiser. He torpedoed her as she sailed to Liverpool from Clyde to take on coal. Wegener was not totally scrupulous, as U 27’s log of the incident shows: ‘0500 March 11 1915 Large blacked-out steamer – initially mistaken for a warship – sighted from a coastal inlet. Target engaged. Bow torpedo struck steamer for’ard. Range 2–300 metres, vessel about 8,000 tons. Steaming under blackout. Nationality unknown. Steamer went down by the head in about 10 minutes. Three life boats with flares on the water.’

  Schneider was heartless. Any ship, military or civilian, that flew an enemy flag was fair game. He was the man who first attacked a merchantman without warning on 26 October 1914. He torpedoed the French ship Amiral Ganteaume in the Channel. She did not sink, and was towed to safety. The 2,000 Belgian refugees on board were confirmed in their hatred of Germans.

  Of the three, Valentiner, proved to be most ruthless. From the later months of 1915 onward, he terrorised the Mediterranean. In all, 300,000
tons of enemy shipping fell to U 38’s shells and torpedoes. To the British, he became a war criminal. The Germans saluted him as a hero. Valentiner could claim that he had done no more than his duty. Admiral von Ingenohl had himself declared in 1914 that ‘we should free ourselves from all scruples which certainly no longer have justification’.

  After the war, Britain accused Valentiner of fifteen war crimes. He never faced trial. Allegations are easily made; proof is another matter.

  On 13 August 1915, U 38 met U 27 off the Welsh coast, close to the Liverpool sea lanes. Valentiner and Wegener studied their orders, made decisions. The Wilhelmstrasse wanted massive attacks on enemy shipping. Additionally, a chance existed to pick up three escapers: Kapitänleutnant Heinrich von Hennig and two other Kaiserliche Marine officers, who had escaped from Dyffryn prisoner-of-war camp. If all went to plan, the trio would be on the beach at Great Ormes Head.

  A well-experienced submariner, a prewar instructor at the Kiel U-boat school, Valentiner took the job of making the rendezvous. Wegener was to head towards the Scillies. Schneider would join them after he created tremors of panic by shelling oil tanks near Whitehaven. Wegener left. Valentiner waited.

  For three successive nights U 38 nosed to within 300m of land. For three successive nights, at the agreed time, a lamp flashed briefly towards the dark shore. For three nights, keen eyes with powerful binoculars scanned the beach for a reply. Nothing.

  Meanwhile, 500m away, on a different beach, hidden from U 38 by a jumble of rocks, the hungry escapers blinked a signal out to sea. For three nights. Nothing.

  Valentiner finally gave up. Von Hennig, captured in an attempt to take U 18 into Scapa Flow, and his companions would have to surrender to the Tommies. A disappointment, but war was full of hardships. U 38 surged south.