The Great War at Sea: 1914-1918

by Richard Hough

  The Royal Navy was blessed with an unexpected advantage when war became inevitable in the early days of August 1914. As long before as October 1913 Churchill and Battenberg had discussed substituting a test mobilization of the Third Fleet for the usual summer manoeuvres. The Third Fleet, or Royal Fleet Reserve, was made up of ships normally manned by skeleton crews, which could be brought to war readiness only if some 20,000 reservists were mobilized, an elaborate logistical exercise which had not recently been practised. This was also a costly business but nothing like as costly as the usual summer manoeuvres, which entailed not only the consumption of great quantities of fuel but also heavy wear and tear on the ships. It is not known whether Churchill and the Board of Admiralty were guided in their decision to call up the reserves in the summer of 1914 in preference to manoeuvres by prophetic powers or sound judgement, or for the political advantage of economy. It is most likely that Churchill thought that war was coming and Battenberg agreed.

  The calling up of the reserves went off without a hitch on 10 July 1914 as planned. A week later George V reviewed at Spithead what Churchill called ‘incomparably the greatest assemblage of naval power ever witnessed in the history of the world’.(1) Another week passed, the reserve ships dispersed to their home ports, the 20,000 men prepared to return to their homes. Following the assassination in Sarajevo of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria and his wife, the Austrians were mobilizing and had sent a threatening ultimatum to Serbia. On Saturday 25 July Churchill and Battenberg met briefly at the Admiralty before Churchill left for the seaside where his wife (who had been unwell) and his family were staying, leaving Battenberg in sole command, although Churchill made arrangements to be available on the telephone.

  Churchill was not the only member of the Cabinet to leave London at this time of crisis and imminent war. ‘Ministers with their week-end holidays are incorrigible’, complained the First Sea Lord to his young sailor son, Dickie, the future Earl Mountbatten.(2)

  On the Sunday, Battenberg learned that the Austrian-Serbian situation had worsened which, in the complex web of alliances and agreements involving also Russia, Germany, France, and Britain, brought war even nearer. He spoke to Churchill at Cromer in Norfolk. Within hours the reservists would have scattered, to remobilize them would be immensely complicated and take days or even weeks because many would then be joining their families on holiday. But to halt their dispersal (‘Stand the Fleet fast’) would be politically provocative. Battenberg was told that, as the man on the spot, the decision must be his. ‘Churchill wanted to pass the political buck’, observed Battenberg’s son many years later.(3)

  That evening as mobilization of armies began all over Europe and diplomatic relations were severed, Battenberg took the necessary steps to retain the reservists and ensure that the fleets remained concentrated. Then he told his cousin, the King, and Grey at the Foreign Office what he had done. Churchill returned to London where, over the next hours and days, the final preparations were made for war.

  By Wednesday 29 July all that remained to put the Navy on a war footing was to despatch the First Fleet (or Grand Fleet as it was renamed) to its war station at Scapa Flow in the Orkneys.

  ‘We may now picture this great Fleet, [wrote Churchill in his richest vein] with its flotillas and cruisers, steaming slowly out of Portland Harbour, squadron by squadron, scores of gigantic castles of steel wending their way across the misty, shining sea, like giants bowed in anxious thought. We may picture them again as darkness fell, eighteen miles of warships running at high speed and in absolute blackness through the narrow Straits, bearing with them into the broad waters of the North the safeguard of considerable affairs.(4)

  When at 11p.m. on 4 August 1914 the Admiralty flashed the signal, ‘Commence hostilities against Germany’, every vessel of the Navy’s vast armada was stationed according to the contingency plans long since prepared. The dispositions were limitless, the advantage of the advance planning and warning incalculable, and an unpleasant surprise to the enemy. The German Navy was to receive another shock when it was forced to recognize over the coming weeks that the British close blockade of their coast, upon which all their war plans were based, was not to materialize after all. Instead of being in a position to make harassing attacks on the blockading British battle fleet, the North Sea had been made a marine no man’s land, with the British Fleet bottling up the exits and patrolling only especially sensitive areas with light forces.

  As in the days of the Dutch wars of the seventeenth century, Britain held a priceless natural advantage in her geographic position. By closing the 20-mile-wide Channel in the south and the 200-mile-wide channel separating the Orkneys and Shetlands from Norway, Britain could block German trade with the outside world. Germany would have to smash the steel doors which had been slammed shut and chained the instant the British Fleet reached its war stations, before the High Seas Fleet could interfere with a single vessel of Britain’s 19 million tons of merchant shipping (almost half the world’s total).

  As one historian expressed it, ‘So long as Admiral Jellicoe and the Dover Patrol held firm, the German Fleet in all its tremendous strength was literally locked out of the world. The Hohenzollern dreadnoughts could not place themselves upon a single trade route, could not touch the outer hem of a single overseas Dominion, could not interfere with the imports on which the British Isles depended, could not stem the swelling stream of warriors who came from every land and clime to save the cause of civilization.’(5)

  This geographic advantage had been supplemented by recent weapons which could virtually close off narrow waters to enemy heavy ships. A Committee of Imperial Defence (CID) report of 29 November 1912 defined this advantage: ‘Owing to recent improvements in submarine mines, submarine boats, torpedo-craft, and torpedoes, the passage of the Straits of Dover and the English Channel by the ships of a Power at war with the United Kingdom would be attended with such risks that for practical purposes the North Sea may be regarded as having only one entrance, the northern one.’(6)

  It was upon this Grand Fleet at Scapa Flow that the survival of the nation now depended. It comprised 21 dreadnought battleships, 8 pre-dreadnoughts, and 4 battle-cruisers, against the High Seas Fleet’s 13 dreadnoughts, 16 pre-dreadnoughts, and 5 battle-cruisers. Both Fleets were supported by cruisers and destroyers. It was in this last category that the High Seas Fleet held the greatest numerical advantage, some 80 to 40.

  In the event of a mass surprise attack by the German Fleet on the Channel defences, the Channel Fleet’s three battle squadrons of nineteen pre-dreadnoughts would rapidly be reinforced from Scapa Flow, and from the Patrol Flotillas based on the east coast and the strong force of light cruisers and destroyers based at Harwich.

  British naval planners were confident that the locks and chains that secured these steel doors would hold under the severest test. But the Naval War Staff in all its deliberations and Winston Churchill and his Board in all their planning for every contingency, had wrought some weak links which were to become alarmingly evident in the first days and weeks.

  The first of these weaknesses, which could well have proved fatal, was the lack of suitably situated, fully prepared, and fortified bases on the east coast. That immense armada which Churchill proudly described silently and speedily slipping through the Straits of Dover into the North Sea was like an army stranded in the open country, without a fortification in which to restore and defend itself. The dreadnoughts’ compasses would lead the Grand Fleet to Scapa Flow. But that great anchorage with its inclement weather, bleak hills, and fast-flowing tides and currents was unprotected by a single fixed naval gun or even searchlight against surface attack, and lacked booms or nets to guard the entrances against surprise surface or submarine torpedo attack, or fast minelayers.

  It is difficult to account for the fact that there had been little outcry within or outside the service about this astonishing lapse in the nation’s defences, no shrieks of ‘Scandal!’ from the sensationalist Press, no secret enquiry f
rom the CID or the new Naval War Staff. The eyes of the steady, conscientious Battenberg and the all-enquiring Churchill never discerned the anomaly of a fleet upon which the security of the country rested having no secure place to anchor, coal, replenish its stores, repair, or refit. The tide ran so high at Scapa that a floating dock, even if present, could not reliably operate.

  For two centuries before the challenge of the new German Navy, any threat to Britain’s maritime supremacy had come from the south and the west, from France and Spain. Plymouth, from which Drake had sailed, and Portsmouth, where Nelson had embarked for Trafalgar, were the traditional homes of British sea power, well-defended and comprehensively equipped. They were supplemented by Milford Haven in Wales, Portland and Dover in the south. The only long-established and first-class naval base facing east was Chatham in the Thames estuary, an excellent base from which to operate a close blockade of the German coast but useless for the Grand Fleet in 1914.

  Paradoxically, the need for east-coast bases had been accepted in the highest quarters for eleven years. In 1903 the Cabinet approved an Admiralty request to build a first-class base at Rosyth, upriver from Edinburgh on the Forth. The advantage of this location was that it could be readily defended against sea attack and was equidistant from Heligoland and the Skagerrak in the heart of German seaspace. There was ample accommodation and rail communication was first class. One drawback was the giant railway bridge on the Edinburgh side which spanned the river and, if demolished by sabotage or shellfire, might trap the entire fleet.

  The creation of this Rosyth base was a fumbled exercise from the start. The defence of ports was a joint Army-Navy responsibility: the Navy fixed a notional ‘scale of attack’ for the guidance of the Army, which then took over, built the forts, supplied the guns and garrisoned the place. The friction between the Admiralty and War Office was ceaseless, the delays prodigious. Procrastination bred on matériel advances. The development of mines, torpedoes, and submarines, it was said, made the narrow estuary of the Forth dangerous for large ships. The dreadnought, by making earlier ships unfit for the line of battle, released them for shore bombardment with their heavy guns, requiring a new calculation of the ‘scale of attack’. Rosyth required the building of a small town to accommodate the dockyard workers, and money was short.

  The catalogue of delay and ineptitude swelled year by year. There were protests, but they were not vehement or sustained. Churchill blithely told the House on 18 March 1912 that the two docks at Rosyth would not be ready for another four years. At the same time, the secret decision to apply a distant instead of a close blockade made it essential to base the main body of the Fleet farther north. Already by 1910 Cromarty, outside Inverness, was being studied for suitability as an advanced temporary fleet base, and Scapa Flow as a base for minor forces.

  As the size of the Fleet increased, Rosyth’s accommodation was judged inadequate anyway, and even Cromarty with its generous firth would be a cramped anchorage. By early 1913 the Admiralty and the CID between them had reached the conclusion that Scapa Flow should be the war anchorage for light forces and Cromarty the main fleet base. At first the Admiralty asked for permanent defences for Scapa Flow and then withdrew the request when it was learned they would cost nearly £400,000 – the fifth of the cost of a dreadnought.

  In August 1914, therefore, of the east-coast bases considered for the Fleet in war, Scapa Flow was undefended, Cromarty incomplete and only lightly defended, Rosyth judged too limited in capacity and also incomplete, and the other bases too far south.

  The first reason for this grave deficiency, however, had nothing to do with changing conditions, policies, and weapons, tidal currents and the threat of toppling bridges. It was, as always, a matter of priorities. The Navy was restricted to a fixed annual sum of expenditure. It thought first of its guns and the ships in which to mount them, it thought of offence rather than defence, and – at least until 1912 – it did not think hard enough anyway. Fisher and his disciples, for all that they did to strengthen and modernize the Navy, were too preoccupied with the one offensive weapon. The power and awesome magnificence of the dreadnought hindered their sight of other considerations, and blinded them to the associated and equally important need for protective defences and bases when they were not at sea. A preoccupation with the big gun excluded thorough preparation of bases for the Fleet just as it excluded thorough research into alternative weapons such as the mine and the torpedo.

  The first shock experienced by the Grand Fleet was not warlike. No U-boat, no night attack by German torpedo boats or powerful battle-cruisers disturbed its passage north. But even before this armada dropped anchor in the wide, undefended spaces of Scapa Flow, it had lost its experienced and admired C.-in-C. George Callaghan, a man renowned for his cheerful toughness. His only offence was his age – he would be sixty-two in December – and this was used by Churchill as the reason for his sudden supersession by fifty-four-year-old Admiral Sir John Jellicoe. Jellicoe was about to leave overland to take up his post at Scapa as second-in-command when he was given this news. He reacted sharply. ‘The step contemplated is most dangerous’, he telegraphed Churchill, who stood firmly by the decision he had reached with Battenberg that Fisher’s nominee would make the best commander in war. David Beatty, the brilliant and dashing commander of the Grand Fleet’s Battle Cruiser Squadron since he had left Churchill’s side as his Naval Secretary, also believed that this was a disastrous step at the very outset of war. ‘The moral effect upon the Fleet at such a moment would be worse than a defeat at sea’,(7) he wrote in defence of Callaghan.

  Jellicoe despatched no fewer than six telegrams of protest. He believed that the timing and manner of Callaghan’s dismissal would arouse renewed suspicions of Churchill’s methods and resentment and jealousy among numerous flag-officers senior to himself. He was right on both counts. Churchill’s wife added her own note of warning. ‘Don’t underrate the power of women to do mischief,’ she wrote to her husband. ‘I don’t want Lady Callaghan and Lady Bridgeman [wife of the previous First Sea Lord] to form a league of retired Officers’ Cats, to abuse you.’(8) The King thought Callaghan had been ‘very badly treated’, and made him his Chief Naval ADC. Jellicoe wrote, ‘My position was horrible… the tragedy of the news to the C.-in-C. was past belief, and it was almost worse for me.’(9)

  The two admirals were good friends and Jellicoe was no doubt right when he said that he had suffered even more than Callaghan. He also added that it was ‘a grave error’, and this was not true. Churchill’s error was in failing to make the appointment earlier and at a much less critical time than at the outbreak of a war for which the whole Navy had been poised expectantly for so long. Callaghan’s appointment had already been extended by one year, and it was due to expire on 1 October anyway. By terminating it earlier the offence given would have been much diminished and Jellicoe would have had time to work himself into his appointment instead of being cast unexpectedly into the highest seagoing command. ‘Quite impossible to be ready at such short notice’, he complained in one of his telegrams of appeal.

  John Rushworth Jellicoe was a modest man who sincerely placed the unity of flag-officers and the well-being of the Fleet far above his own ambitions. There must be few occasions in history when an officer, appointed to the command of a great force at the outbreak of a great war, has acted so self-effacingly that his behaviour has bordered upon a disciplinary offence. Jellicoe’s appearance seemed to justify his modesty. He was short in stature (5 feet 6 inches), with a straight tight mouth and a prominent nose. Battenberg’s young son, a worshipper of the flamboyant David Beatty, described him as having the appearance of ‘a frightened tapir’. But at fourteen one tends to underestimate the importance of eyes. Jellicoe’s were clever and all-seeing as well as kind. Like the few officers of his generation who faced the challenge of battle, Jellicoe showed his physical courage during the Egyptian rebellion of 1882 and later in China. To be a gunnery officer of unusual distinction ensured promotion, and hi
s intellectual powers were spotted by Fisher when Jellicoe was still only twenty-nine, ensuring his appointment as Assistant Director of Naval Ordnance. From that time, Jellicoe could do no wrong in Fisher’s eyes, although he never became known as an inmate of the ‘Fishpond’.

  Jellicoe reached flag rank at fifty-seven and followed the sure way up the path to the summit by accepting sea and Admiralty appointments of ever increasing responsibility.

  The Grand Fleet rapidly transferred their loyalty and affection from Callaghan to Jellicoe. All ranks came to love and admire him, just as he had been universally loved and admired throughout his career. No detail of a rating’s domestic or professional woe was too small for his consideration and sympathy. And in this quality, alas, lay his greatest professional weakness.

  John Jellicoe was so conscientious that he wished the corrections of all troubles to be in his hands. Delegation was agony to him, and far too rarely practised. His staff were frequently at a loss to know how to release him from some of the weight of his burden so that they could carry out their own appointed tasks. He embraced the whole Grand Fleet and its more than 100 men o’war and 60,000 officers and men into his care, cherishing them all with proprietorial affection, as if they were his own family. Beneath his cool and agreeable exterior, Jellicoe was a worrier and also a hypochondriac. And like most hypochondriacs, he had reason to be one. He had always suffered from intermittent ill-health, and this had not improved with a bullet wound in his lung during the Boxer rebellion in China when he was forty.

  Jellicoe was an enlightened admiral and also a superb seaman and handler of ships. He was reckoned to have the swiftest brain of any serving flag-officer, and in a tight corner his orders were instant and crisp. By the standards of his time and his service, he was an intellectual who thoroughly understood the meaning of maritime power and its history. Except for his reluctance to delegate, he was a first-class administrator.