A Naval History of World War I

by Paul G. Halpern

  The attempt on Ostend was less dramatic and a complete failure. The wind shifted suddenly, ruining the smoke screen laid by the motor launches and exposing the calcium-light buoys the British had laid to mark the entrance to the harbor. They were sunk by German gunfire. The Germans had also shifted the light buoy marking the entrance to the harbor a mile to the east, and the result was that the blockships Brilliant and Sirius sank a mile to the east of the harbor entrance.

  Keyes repeated the attempt on Ostend the night of 10–11 May with the battered Vindictive and old cruiser Sappho serving as blockships. The Sappho suffered a boiler accident that reduced her speed to only 6 knots and she had to drop out. The Vindictive at first had difficulty making out the harbor entrance in the fog and smoke, came under heavy fire, grounded, and was sunk by her crew in a position that, unfortunately, blocked only a third of the fairway. Keyes’s flagship Warwick was mined while retiring with Vindictive’s crew, which she had embarked from the battered motor launch that had picked them up. The destroyer was lucky to avoid sinking and had to be towed back by the destroyer Velox.31

  Keyes planned a third attempt for June, using the Sappho and the old battleship Swiftsure. The ships were fitted out and the crews exercised, but the Admiralty canceled the attempt as unnecessary for the moment as the Germans did not appear to be using Ostend for fear of British siege guns and monitor bombardments.32 It is a minor footnote to history that the officer selected to command the Swiftsure in this desperate venture was Commander Andrew Browne Cunningham, the future Admiral of the Fleet Viscount Cunningham of Hyndhope, probably the most famous of Britain’s naval leaders during the Second World War. Cunningham wrote more than thirty years later that he still thought it a pity the operation never came off.33

  Notwithstanding the failure at Ostend, it seemed as if the raid had succeeded in blocking Zeebrugge. The cost had been high: 170 killed, 400 wounded, and 45 missing. The destroyer North Star had been sunk by the batteries at Zeebrugge along with two motor launches. It all seemed worth it to the British public. At last the navy had done something, acted offensively instead of reacting to some German initiative. Keyes was created a Knight Commander of the Bath, and eleven well-merited Victoria Crosses were awarded for the operation. The story of the raid was thrilling and cheered not only the British but the Allies as well. They needed cheering, for the apparent success and great gains achieved by Ludendorff’s offensive on the western front had been alarming. There can be no doubt it was a gallant tale to which this sparse summary cannot do justice.34 The reaction in the navy was similar, for many had the feeling that in the absence of great battles at sea they suffered in public opinion in comparison with the army. The comments of Captain William W. Fisher, then director of the Anti-Submarine Division and a future Mediterranean commander in chief (1932–35), are typical. He wrote Keyes: “You have earned the gratitude of the whole Navy. We feel vindicated. We can put up our heads again.”35

  But what were the real results of the raid? Aerial photographs seemed to confirm week after week that large German destroyers were bottled up in Bruges, and until mid-June large submarines also could be seen in the open, exposed to air attack and indicating the submarine shelters were full. Consequently Keyes believed—and would continue to believe for the remainder of his life—that the Zeebrugge-Bruges canal was blocked for a long period of time.36 The real situation appears to be different. The Germans were apparently able to widen and deepen the channel between the stern of the blockships and the western side of the canal where they also removed two piers. The Germans claimed that within two days of the raid, small shallow-draft torpedo boats and submarines were able to use the canal, and that on 14 May four 950-ton destroyers were able to transit the Zeebrugge locks. The destroyers in aerial photographs may not have been the same ships. Furthermore, the author of the German official history has pointed out that in order for Operation Z.O. to have been successful the British would have had to block both Zeebrugge and Ostend, for ships could have proceeded via canal from Bruges to either place. It is also evident that NID knew of this situation soon after the raid, but understandably did not see any purpose in publishing the news.37 The psychological impact of the raid far outweighed the importance of its actual results, although in the relevant volume of the British official history published more than a decade after the war there is a frank admission that the average number of submarines entering or exiting the Flanders bases did not decline until five weeks after the Zeebrugge raid.38

  Another aftermath of Zeebrugge was an indication of future difficulties. Keyes requested four squadrons of aircraft to be placed under his direct orders to carry on an incessant attack against the destroyers and submarines the aerial photographs had revealed at Bruges. When Keyes assumed command of the Dover Patrol he had under his orders the Fifth Group of the Royal Naval Air Service consisting of five squadrons with approximately ninety aircraft based on airfields to the west of Dunkirk. On 1 April 1918, the Royal Flying Corps and Royal Naval Air Service were joined to form the Royal Air Force. Keyes therefore lost direct control of his aircraft and the Admiralty had to apply to the newly formed Air Ministry for assistance.39 The air force reply was prompt, but Keyes received only a fraction of what he wanted and the British air attacks were neither sufficiently heavy nor sustained long enough for really effective results. The official history of the war in the air admits that “it is probably true to say that the Royal Air Force had contributed the most important part of its share in the enterprise before the event” in the form of reconnaissance and aerial photography.40 The problem was that the Air Ministry had other priorities, for Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, the hard-pressed commander of the British Expeditionary Force in France, attached the greatest importance to heavy and continuous bombing of railway junctions, concentrations of troops, and German air fields.41 Keyes believed that “golden opportunities were missed of inflicting heavy losses on the enemy.”42 The argument the aircraft were urgently needed elsewhere may not be valid. There had been a lull in fighting on the western front during May, and once again the official history of the air war admits that a temporary concentration “could, and should” have been made against Bruges.43

  The actual tactical cooperation with the Royal Air Force—for example, reconnaissance and diversionary raids during the operation—had been good. The basic problem was one of establishing priorities, and in this case naval interests had come second.44 It is not surprising that Keyes after retiring from the navy and entering Parliament spent much of his career fighting for the navy to regain control of its air service.45

  The Zeebrugge-Ostend raid in the long run did contribute to the success of the Dover Patrol, for it might be viewed in conjunction with the Dover barrage and there was no doubt of the success of that. The British official history takes the view that “Zeebrugge was no longer as easy of access as a destroyer base must be if it is to be used as a starting and returning point for raiding forces. The stealthy exit, and rapid return of the raiders—which are the first necessities of such operations—were no longer possible.” This is opposite to the assertion in the German official history—published much later—that the conduct of the war from Zeebrugge suffered “only minor and temporary restrictions.”46 However, neither the destroyers of the Flanders flotilla nor the High Sea Fleet repeated their raid on the Dover barrage, and we have seen how the number of submarines passing through the Dover Strait steadily declined to virtually nothing. Yet there was no further attempt to shake that barrage.

  The losses of the Flanders U-boat flotillas rose. In the first quarter of 1918, the cruises ending in loss totaled 8 percent; in the second quarter, the loss rose to 33 percent; and in the third quarter, it rose still further to 40 percent. The success of the east-coast convoys and effective counterattacks by their escorts certainly contributed to this. In the summer of 1918, the east coast of Britain became as dangerous for submarines as the Straits of Dover. During 1918 six submarines were lost and one put out of commission in thi
s area. The submarines and their bases also were subject to incessant pressure from aircraft. The decline in the effectiveness of the Flanders flotillas was therefore due to a number of factors, but with this decline the value of the German bases in Flanders was eroded. On 1 October there were only nine or ten effective submarines in the Flanders flotillas. When the bases in Flanders were threatened by the Allied advance into Belgium at the beginning of October, the few Flanders submarines at sea were ordered to return to Germany at the end of their cruises. Five submarines, either obsolete or damaged, were blown up along with a few torpedo boats, but the majority of the Flanders destroyers and torpedo boats were able to escape.47 The German bases in Flanders, despite their strategic location in the “cockpit of Europe”—a position traditionally of great concern to the British—did not really fulfill their potential. The British may have been worried at times, but the lines of communication between Great Britain and France were never seriously threatened or disrupted for long. The British were simply too strong.

  THE LAST SORTIE OF THE HIGH SEA FLEET

  Although the great majority of operations in the first three months of 1918 concerned either submarines or small ships such as destroyers and torpedo boats, the High Sea Fleet remained a potential threat. The fleet-in-being can always act given the inherent mobility of ships, and the Grand Fleet, now joined by the Americans, always had to be ready to counter that action, conscious also of the fact that the High Sea Fleet could choose its most advantageous moment to sortie. There was at the beginning of 1918 concern that the German heavy ships might raid the Dover Strait and break out into the Channel with the objective of inflicting heavy losses on the forces making up the Dover barrage, disrupting communications between England and France, and, possibly, drawing the Grand Fleet southward into a mine and submarine ambush. The light cruisers and destroyers of Tyrwhitt’s Harwich Force would not have been able to stop them. The British had the Third Battle Squadron stationed in the Swin—off the Thames estuary—but this only consisted of the Dreadnought and two predreadnoughts of the King Edward VII class. The latter were laid up at the end of March, their crews used for antisubmarine craft. They were not replaced by dreadnoughts, for Beatty consistently opposed any diversion of this sort. The Grand Fleet frequently had either a division (four) or squadron (eight) of battleships out to support the Scandinavian convoy, and these ships could not be relied upon all the time to join any concentration of forces. There were also four battleships continuously under refit. To detach three dreadnoughts to the Swin might therefore mean a reduction of the Grand Fleet by as many as eleven ships on the day the High Sea Fleet chose to do battle. The Germans might reduce their numbers still more by clever deployment of submarines and mines before a battle. Building on this “worst case scenario,” Beatty concluded: “The combined reduction might well cause the Grand Fleet to be inferior in numbers of ships capable of lying in the line.” Whatever force the British put into the Swin, the Germans could bring a superior force against them.48

  There was another reason as well. The memory of Jutland was still a powerful one. As Beatty explained to his wife about a fortnight after the Ludendorff offensive had begun, the internal situation of Germany was an unknown quantity and Germany was ruled by a military party which had to obtain a great success or be discredited and might gamble on a naval victory. Beatty wrote:

  With such in my mind one cannot afford to run the shadow of a risk, as an indecisive action on the sea with the main fleets, would amount to a German victory. Therefore, at all costs we must aim at annihilation. To obtain this is indeed a difficult problem. The North Sea is so small and the spread of ships so great, that in a few hours the beggars can retire behind minefields and submarine screens in their own waters. I often wonder what Nelson would have thought of it. His high spirit would have chafed him to death by this time.49

  The strategic situation improved somewhat when the Grand Fleet was finally able to make its long-delayed move to Rosyth on 12 April, although the practice remained of detaching a squadron at a time to Scapa Flow for full-caliber gunnery and other exercises that could not be carried out in the south.50

  The High Sea Fleet struck, but not toward the south. The Scandinavian convoy covered by a detached battleship force was an attractive target, and the Germans had demonstrated its vulnerability on two occasions the previous autumn (see chapter 11). It would have been quite possible for them to send a force superior in strength and overwhelm the British with battleships and battle cruisers instead of the light cruisers and destroyers used against the destroyer escorts in the autumn of 1917. The British were well aware of the danger, and in January the convoys were run at three-day intervals instead of daily in order to avoid having two convoys at sea at the same time. At the beginning of March, they shifted the interval of the convoys to four and at the end of April to five days. Unfortunately, the need for safety had to be balanced against the need to maintain the volume of traffic with Scandinavia. Longer routes and longer convoy intervals meant, in effect, some diminution of carrying capacity.51

  Scheer explained his motives for the sortie of the High Sea Fleet in simple terms:

  Our U-boats had learnt that the steamers were assembled there [between England and Norway] in large convoys, strongly protected by first-class battleships, cruisers and destroyers. A successful attack on such a convoy would not only result in the sinking of much tonnage, but would be a great military success, and would bring welcome relief to the U-boats operating in the Channel and round England, for it would force the English to send more warships to the northern waters.52

  The German chances for success were enhanced by the exceptional measures they took to conceal their departure, notably, strict wireless silence. This would nullify the advantage the British might hope to enjoy through the wireless intercepts and activities of Room 40. The German plan was for Hipper with the battle cruisers, light cruisers of the Second Scouting Group, and destroyers of the Second Flotilla to attack the convoy and its covering force on Wednesday, 23 April. All available ships of the High Sea Fleet, namely, the flagship (Baden) and three battleship squadrons (minus the Markgraf), the Fourth Scouting Group (minus the Stralsund), and four destroyer flotillas, would proceed to a position from which they could support Hipper if necessary. U-boats that had recently sailed on patrol were ordered for a 24-hour period to look for opportunities to attack off the Firth of Forth and report all sightings of warships and convoys. The Germans could only stay one day off the Norwegian coast, for the range of the destroyers and some of the light cruisers restricted them to a sortie of no more than three days.

  The Germans assembled at Schillig Roads on the 22d, ostensibly to conduct maneuvers and exercises in the Helgoland Bight. They sailed at 6:00 A.M. on the 23d but immediately ran into heavy fog, which eventually forced them to anchor on reaching the edge of the minefields. There was sufficient visibility for them to proceed after half an hour, and Scheer thought the poor visibility actually helped them to avoid detection from the British submarines he assumed were deployed about the edges of the minefields on the approaches to the Bight. He was not completely correct. There were four British submarines on patrol, and one, J.6, stationed to the west of Horns Reef, spotted the Germans on the evening of the 23d. Her commander, however, had been told there might be British ships in the area covering a minelaying operation and therefore made no report.

  At 5:20 A.M. on the 24th, Hipper was approximately 60 nautical miles west of Egerö steering a northwesterly course with the High Sea Fleet approximately 80 nautical miles behind him. The Germans had been unreported and now seemed to have every chance of overwhelming the Scandinavian convoy and its escorts. There was, however, a fatal flaw in the German plan. Despite all the tactical skill in preparation and assuring the sortie had been undetected, Scheer was acting on faulty intelligence. He had assumed from U-boat reports that convoys usually sailed at the beginning and middle of the week and therefore chose Wednesday as the day for an attack. The intelligence
was not correct. A convoy of 34 ships, escorted by the armed boarding steamer Duke of Cornwall (1,528 tons) and two destroyers, had left Bergen on the preceding day, the 22d, was about 140 miles east of the Orkneys when Scheer sailed, and would arrive at Methil in the late morning of the 24th. The convoy was covered to the south by the Seventh Light Cruiser Squadron and the Second Battle Cruiser Squadron (the Australia, Indomitable, Inflexible, and New Zealand). An eastbound convoy sailed from Methil at 6:30 A.M. on the 24th under escort of two destroyers. This meant that there was no convoy or its covering force for the Germans to intercept off the coast of Norway.

  High winds prevented the Germans from undertaking airship reconnaissances on the 23d or 24th. There was good visibility on the 24th, and Hipper searched as far as 60° north and subsequently as far east as Utsire light before turning for home at 2:10 P.M. Several hours before the Germans had suffered another stroke of bad luck, which might have proved fatal because it forced them to break radio silence. At 5:10 A.M. the battle cruiser Moltke lost her starboard inner screw, which caused the turbine to race, and before the governor could cut off the supply of steam, a wheel on the engine turning gear disintegrated. Fragments of metal pierced the discharge pipe of an auxiliary condenser, several steam pipes, and the deck leading to the main switch room. The central engine room and main switchboard room were immediately flooded, the starboard engine room took on water, salt water entered the boilers, and the starboard and center engines were put out of action. The Moltke took on 2,000 tons of water before a diver managed to close the valves controlling the flow of water to and from the auxiliary condenser. Hipper signalled—visually—for the crippled ship to close on the main fleet and continued his search for the convoys. The Moltke’s situation steadily deteriorated, however, and at 6:43 she was forced to signal the flagship that she could only make 4 knots and at 8:45 that she was out of control. Scheer was obliged to close on her, and at 10:50 the battleship Oldenburg took her under tow. The High Sea Fleet turned for home, and by afternoon the port engines of the Moltke were able to run at least temporarily at half speed. The High Sea Fleet limped homeward at 10–11 knots.