Blackett's War

by Stephen Budiansky

  I regularly attended Sunday morning service and no doubt it did me a power of good by extracting me for a restful hour from the wooden hut in our garden where I spent every hour out of school making wireless sets and model aeroplanes. I found that I could turn this Sunday ritual to good effect when I discovered that the enforced repose of a sermon was excellently conducive to bright ideas as to how to mount a galena crystal or to carve the propeller of a model aeroplane.3

  In the spring of 1910 Blackett’s parents entered him as a candidate for one of Fisher’s new naval cadetships. “I do not remember any strong wish to go into the navy,” Blackett would later remark, “nor any marked reluctance,” but his enthusiasm for airplanes stood him well in the interview:

  There were many tales of these ordeals and of the unexpected questions which might be shot at one, such as, “What was the number of your taxi?” or some other test of the applicant’s powers of observation. I was lucky, for the first question I was asked was what did I know about Charles Rolls’ flying machine, in which he had made the first double crossing of the Channel the day before my interview. I … proceeded to bore the admirals by telling them more than they wanted to know about Rolls and his machine.4

  For the next four years he received “an excellent modern and scientific education, with a background of naval history, and the confident expectation that the naval arms race with Germany then in full swing would inevitably lead to war.” Blackett graduated second in his class at Osborne and was the top cadet at Dartmouth. A half century later his former divisional officer at Dartmouth dropped him a congratulatory note on the occasion of his being awarded the Order of Merit and quoted from the notes he had made about his former cadet at the time: “Games. Does not shine. Remarks on Character. Clever, quiet, and nice. Works & does well, and should turn out well.”5

  On August 1, 1914, the cadets were abruptly told to pack their sea chests; by nine o’clock that night they were on their way to the train station and then the naval barracks at Devenport. Blackett, sixteen years old, was assigned as a midshipman to the cruiser Carnarvon. Delayed at the dockyards, the Carnarvon almost missed a rendezvous at the Cape Verde Islands with HMS Monmouth, which had carried Blackett and eleven of his fellow cadets from England. Two months later Monmouth was sunk by German gunfire from the cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau at the Battle of Coronel off the coast of Chile, killing all aboard. Carnarvon was assigned to a quickly assembled force dispatched to hunt down the two German cruisers, and on December 8, the unsuspecting German squadron stumbled right into the powerful British force, which included two battle cruisers, at the Falkland Islands. The Germans turned and fled to sea and the British steamed out in full pursuit. Carnarvon was the slowest of the British ships but arrived in time to take part in the bombardment that sank the Gneisenau and to take her survivors on board.

  The young midshipman kept a desultory diary full of complaints about the tedium of patrolling vast expanses of empty seas, the incompetence of admirals, the mediocrity of the food, along with enthusiastic observations about seabirds, photography, reading (bird books, Sherlock Holmes, Kipling—“my favourite”), and a Miss Macpherson, whom he had met in Quebec. His ship touched at Rio, Montevideo, Bermuda, Barbados, and Montreal; from Montreal he sailed home for leave in June 1915 aboard the White Star liner Megantic.6

  His next berth was the new fast battleship Barham. Flagship of the Fifth Battle Squadron anchored at Scapa Flow, she was part of the Grand Fleet still awaiting the elusive, decisive battle with the German High Seas Fleet.

  The much anticipated chance came on May 30, 1916. Room 40, the Admiralty’s small code-breaking unit, intercepted a German wireless message indicating that Admiral Scheer’s High Seas Fleet was preparing to sortie the next day. But a fatal misunderstanding on the part of the navy’s director of operations, Rear Admiral Thomas Jackson—an old-school, anti-intellectual sea officer, Jackson “displayed supreme contempt for the work of Room 40” in the bitter recollection of one of the code breakers—led to Britain’s bungling her best chance.7 The next morning Jackson concluded on his own misinformed analysis that the Germans had delayed their sailing; Britain’s main battle fleet was accordingly biding its time, still seventy miles away, when the Battle Cruiser Fleet under Vice Admiral Sir David Beatty ran directly into the Germans off Jutland, Denmark. Further hesitation, miscalculation, and tactical blunders ruled the day. The battle could easily have been a victory of crushing annihilation over the Germans but ended in a tactical draw, with heavy casualties on both sides.

  The accuracy of the German gunfire, and the inadequate protection of the British battle cruisers, also came as a shock. “There seems to be something wrong with our damned ships today,” Beatty reportedly exclaimed to his flag captain after two of his battle cruisers were blown to bits in the first forty minutes of the battle. “Half an hour later,” Blackett would recall, “the Fifth Battle Squadron passed the spot where the Queen Mary had disappeared. That patch of oily water, where a dozen survivors of the crew of 1,200 were clinging to pieces of wreckage, as I saw it through the periscope of the front turret of the Barham, gave me a strong awareness of the danger of assuming superiority over the enemy in military technique.”8 Barham’s squadron, deployed with the battle cruisers, was caught silhouetted against the western sky and found it hard to spot the enemy to return fire. “It was very horrible seeing the flashes, then waiting for the salvoes to fall,” Blackett recorded in his diary. Some five hundred 12-inch shells were fired at the Barham and the rest of the squadron: “How we survived with so few hits I have no idea.”

  Toward evening the battleships of the Grand Fleet at last joined them but Scheer executed a well-rehearsed withdrawal in the fading light and broke off the action. It was only then that the immediate toll came home to Blackett and his crewmates:

  We were then allowed to leave our stations to get some supper.… Many people did not know till then that we had been hit, but one realised it terribly then. There was an extraordinary reek of T.N.T. fumes, which mixed with the smell of disinfectant and blood was awful. Nearly all the killed, some twenty-four in number, were lying laid out on the deck, and many were terribly wounded, limbs being completely blown off and nearly all burnt.… The Padre and Paymaster had been killed in the Forward Medical Distributing station.… The night was very trying, waiting closed up—trying to sleep in turns.9

  The British had lost more than 6,000 killed; 3 battle cruisers, 3 cruisers, and 8 destroyers were sunk. German losses were 1 battleship, 1 battle cruiser, 4 light cruisers, 5 destroyers, and 2,500 men. At the cabinet’s insistence Churchill issued a communiqué putting a positive face on the battle, but the confusing and incomplete reports in the newspapers left most of the British public uncertain whether Jutland had been a triumph or a disaster. In Germany the Kaiser exulted. “The spell of Trafalgar is broken,” he crowed. But Scheer privately told his monarch that the battle had only proved once and for all the impossibility of taking on the British navy in a head-to-head trial of strength. “There can be no doubt that even the most successful outcome of a Fleet action in this war will not force England to make peace,” he wrote in a confidential report to the Kaiser on July 4. “A victorious end to the war within a reasonable time can only be achieved through the defeat of British economic life—that is, by using the U-boats against British trade. In this connection, I feel it my duty to again strongly advise Your Majesty against the adoption of any half-measures.”10

  ONE MONTH AFTER the inconclusive battle off Jutland, the British Army launched the largest offensive in the history of warfare. Previous attempts to break the grinding deadlock on the Western Front had failed repeatedly, at horrific cost. Even when small advances through the German lines had been gained in frontal assaults carried out with dogged courage over the tops of the trenches and through barbed wire, machine gun fire, and poison gas, they were quickly driven back by counterattacks and artillery fire from the flanks of the German line; the small breaches were never wide
enough, or held for long enough, to allow the masses of cavalry held expectantly in reserve to charge through in the decisive breakthrough to the enemy’s rear that would send the Germans fleeing.

  The Somme was going to be different. Learning from these previous failures, the British staff spent six months drawing up plans for a massive coordinated attack along a twenty-five-mile sector. For a week, British heavy guns fired a million and a half shells at the German trenches and fortifications. A quarter of a million of those shells were sent over in the final hour before the assault began at 7:30 a.m. on July 1, 1916, with more than 100,000 men moving methodically out of the trenches and advancing toward the enemy lines.

  Staggering under sixty-six-pound packs and bunched together as they tried to get through the far-too-small gaps that had been cut in their own wire the night before, the attackers made a pathetically easy target.11 Nearly 50,000 British soldiers were killed or seriously wounded that first day, most of the 20,000 dead probably cut down in the first hour by a hundred German machine guns that had survived the bombardment in concealed, heavily fortified emplacements, and which swept no-man’s-land in remorseless waves.

  Meanwhile, 120 miles to the southeast, the German high command had abandoned even the pretense of engaging in anything but slaughter for slaughter’s sake. In a million-man offensive begun in February against two French fortresses that guarded the road to Paris at Verdun, the German commander declared it was his intention not to capture the forts, not to break through the French lines, not to open the way for maneuver on the gridlocked battlefield, but simply to grind the French down through sheer attrition of numbers. “The forces of France will bleed to death,” declared General Erich von Falkenhayn.12 When it was over 300,000 were dead. But France had not bled to death, and the war went on.

  In the middle of 1916 the explorer Ernest Shackleton, stranded in the Antarctic with an expedition that had left England shortly after the war began, arrived at the British whaling station on the island of South Georgia after a harrowing open-boat journey and a perilous traverse across the ice-and snow-covered peaks of the island.

  “Tell me, when was the war over?” was the first thing he asked the station’s manager.

  “The war is not over,” the man replied. “Millions are being killed. Europe is mad. The world is mad.”13

  The sheer, terrible anonymity of the slaughter was brutalizing to sensibilities accustomed to more heroic ideas of military valor. H. G. Wells recalled the way the Boer War, scarcely a generation earlier, had been to the ordinary Briton “a vivid spectacle” that he could look upon like “a paying spectator at a cricket or base-ball match.”14 But the collective, industrialized brand of war that the machine gun and high-explosive shell had brought left little place for heroes. The trenches of the First World War were, in the words of the French poet Blaise Cendrars, a “troglodyte” world, where soldiers literally burrowed into the ground seeking to be as inconspicuous as possible. “War, which used to be cruel and magnificent,” Winston Churchill would later write of the conflict, “has now become cruel and squalid.… Instead of a small number of well-trained professionals championing their country’s cause with ancient weapons and a beautiful intricacy of manoeuvre, sustained at every moment by the applause of their nation, we now have entire populations, including even women and children, pitted against one another in brutish mutual extermination.”15

  A war without heroes, where death was faceless and numbered in the millions, was a war with little place left for chivalry, or lingering moral scruples. In Germany, where the grip of the British blockade was beginning to take a dreadful toll, thousands of civilians were dying of starvation and food riots broke out in thirty cities.16 When the United States in April 1916 sent a protest over yet another deadly torpedo attack by a German U-boat on a passenger ship—she was a French cross-Channel ferry, the Sussex (which the Germans unpersuasively insisted had been mistaken by the captain of UB-29 for a troop transport, though the attack occurred in broad daylight under excellent visibility)—Germany again promised to adhere to prize regulations, but added that it would feel perfectly justified in unleashing the U-boats to carry out unrestricted attacks without warning:

  In self-defense against the illegal conduct of British warfare, while fighting a bitter struggle for her national existence, Germany had to resort to the hard but effective weapon of submarine warfare. As matters stand, the German Government cannot but reiterate its regret that the sentiments of humanity which the Government of the United States extends with such fervor to the unhappy victims of submarine warfare are not extended with the same warmth of feeling to the many millions of women and children who, according to the avowed intentions of the British Government, shall be starved.17

  The U-boat campaign held an appeal for the German populace that went beyond retaliation for their suffering. It also was one of the few fronts left in this war of “brutish mutual extermination”—the air was the other—where individual heroes could still come forth and fire the public imagination. The U-boat crews were seen as daring young champions, venturing into a dangerous new realm where they pitted their dash and wit against the enemy. Successful U-boat captains had their portraits taken by the official court photographer and were presented with the Iron Cross, or the even more coveted Pour le Mérite, by the Kaiser himself. Commanded usually by a Kapitänleutnant, the equivalent of a full lieutenant in the British or American navies, the U-boats offered a rare opportunity for an ambitious junior officer to distinguish himself.

  The U-boat service was like the glamorous new air service in another way: it offered an excellent opportunity for an early death. Antisubmarine warfare was in its infancy; only in 1916 did the British navy begin to acquire depth charges and hydrophones that could pick up the sound of a U-boat’s propeller underwater, and even then supplies were short and effectiveness distinctly limited. Still, U-boats continuously fell prey to accidents, mines, and the simple but deadly countermeasure of ramming by destroyers or other warships that chanced to catch one on the surface. By the end of the war almost exactly half of the approximately 370 German submarines that had ventured to sea during the war had been sunk, taking 6,000 men to their deaths.

  Throughout the fall of 1916 a barrage of studies and official memoranda from the German army and navy staffs kept up a drumbeat of arguments in favor of resuming all-out war on British shipping. General Erich Ludendorff, who with Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg now effectively headed the army high command, contemptuously dismissed the American threat as empty saber rattling; the Americans had only a small professional army and the transports that would carry their troops across the Atlantic if they sought to join the fight could be easily dispatched by the U-boat fleet. The German naval staff in late December produced a study concluding that if the U-boats could sink 600,000 tons of British shipping a month, “we can force England to make peace in five months.” The unrestricted U-boat campaign was not only “the right means” to achieve victory, “it is only means to that end.”18 Anticipating that it was now only a matter of time before the U-boats would be allowed to slip their leash, the navy stepped up construction and training. By the beginning of 1917, 120 oceangoing boats were in service and young officers were being rushed through an intensive three-month course at the German navy’s U-School to prepare them for their new role.

  OBERLEUTNANT ZUR SEE KARL DÖNITZ was one of them. In background and upbringing, he was strikingly similar to Patrick Blackett. Dönitz was six years older, but because German naval cadets entered at age eighteen he had become a naval cadet the same year as Blackett, 1910. Dönitz’s family had been small farmers, pastors, scholars, part of Prussia’s rising or at least aspiring middle class; his father was employed by the Zeiss optical firm. Karl collected rocks and fossils, founded a literary society and managed to convince six of his classmates to join, played the flute, and studied art.

  If there was one striking difference between the two young naval officers-to-be, it was Dönitz’s burning
ambition to fit in. Like the Royal Navy, the Imperial Navy took a hard look at cadets’ social status and charged their parents a fee that effectively limited admission to the upper middle classes; unlike the Royal Navy the German service maintained an air of Prussian aristocratic exclusivity even as its ranks swelled with the sons of the middle class inculcated with the Second Reich’s hyperpatriotism and cult of soldiership. Admiral Fisher had done away with distinctions between executive and specialist officers; the German navy exaggerated them, demanding almost feudal deference to shipboard commanders. Officer cadets were subjected to arduous physical tasks bordering on hazing; they were taught gentlemanly refinements such as fencing, riding, and dancing; a rigid aristocratic code of honor still condoned dueling to settle tiny perceived slights.19

  Dönitz excelled in it all. Reports by his commanders praised his diligence, enthusiasm, and perspicacity as well as his charm, popularity with fellow officers, “very good military appearance,” and social deftness. A memoir the young officer published in 1917 reveals a bright but exceedingly shallow young man, describing his part in sea battles and visits to foreign ports without a hint of self-awareness or irony. The language reads like a cross between a Boy’s Life adventure story (“There, now our salvo lands and the foremost destroyer sustains three hits! There, now another five! Suddenly, there is only his bridge foc’s’le to be seen. He has had enough!”) and a third-rate travelogue (“the fairy-tale town of Istanbul”). He passed out of the U-boat course in January 1917 and was preparing to take up his first posting when, at Admiral Scheer’s headquarters, the long-awaited telegram from the Kaiser arrived instructing that “the unrestricted campaign shall begin on February 1 in full force.” Dönitz was assigned as a watch officer on U-39, commanded by Kapitänleutnant Walter Forstmann, already a legendary ace who had sunk 300,000 tons of shipping and been awarded the Pour le Mérite. Later in the year Dönitz received his first command of his own, the minelayer and attack boat UC-25. “I felt as mighty as a king,” he said.20