The Great War at Sea: 1914-1918

by Richard Hough

  I would put the Admiralty second in my list of culprits for the silly signals they sent, no doubt some of them drafted by Churchill personally but others coming from the half-baked Naval Staff. But Milne had no right to shelter behind Admiralty signals. His classic remark ‘They pay me to be an Admiral: they don’t pay me to think’, sums him up pretty accurately.

  Finally Troubridge. I think his culpability falls into a different category; virtually in sight of the enemy and turning away. Wray was quite entitled to make his representations to Troubridge: the fault lay in Troubridge listening to them and accepting them.’(3)

  In spite of all that had been accomplished in a decade, the Royal Navy was not suitably equipped, organized, or prepared for modern war when it came. The Staff was deficient in quality and experience and there had been too little thinking. No one had given thought, for example, to the consequences of wireless telegraphy in combination with a Staff. Instead of providing information for the commander on the spot, W/T was used – or misused, like the false Austrian declaration of war signal – to give direct operational orders, often in absurd detail. This was a privilege and right but one that was much abused. In the W/T records of the time there are signals such as. ‘Has Herbert Brown, A.B., been discharged to hospital’ from the Admiralty; and ‘Permission is requested to issue an extra ration of lime juice’ from a ship to the Admiralty.

  Although W/T had been in use for ten years, the Admiralty had only recently possessed such wide control over fleets and individual units world-wide. Churchill, with his need to dominate and control everything, rapidly became heady with the power W/T offered, and as he himself wrote, ‘I claimed and exercised an unlimited power of suggestion and initiative over the whole field, subject only to the approval and agreement of the First Sea Lord on all operative orders.’(4)

  In fact Battenberg was no more than a rubber stamp that Churchill often failed to use anyway and Vice-Admiral Doveton Sturdee, the Chief of Staff, was frequently bypassed. There was, Sturdee later told Jellicoe, ‘very little united decision’. The transcripts of important operative W/T signals during Churchill’s tenure of office sometimes bear the unmistakable style and vocabulary of the First Lord. The woolliness of definition and unprofessional phrasing were Churchill’s own. His claim in his war memoirs that the Staff ‘arrived at a united action on every matter of consequence’ is simply not true. The direction of the war at sea, except on matters of routine detail, was under the control of one man whose military experience extended to the responsibilities of a lieutenant in the 4th Hussars, and whose naval experience was little longer than that of a naval cadet at Osborne.

  Churchill’s understanding of foreign policy was much more profound and extensive, as his numerous communications to Grey bear witness. Perhaps, therefore, the greatest mystery of the Goeben affair is that neither Churchill, who had just given substantial grounds for Turkish hostility, nor Battenberg, who had always been acutely suspicious of Turkey anyway, appear to have thought there was any possibility of the German Squadron seeking shelter in the Bosphorus. (That the Foreign Office failed to pick up any hint of German-Turkish actions is equally extraordinary but outside consideration here.)

  There remain two minor but puzzling details. In all discussions on the rights and wrongs of Troubridge’s decision at his court martial and elsewhere, every argument rested upon his strength in relation to Souchon’s. Not once did Troubridge’s defenders point to the vulnerability of his ships to 11-inch plunging shellfire due to their thin armour, and the relative invulnerability of the Goeben to British 6-inch, 7.5-inch, and even 9.2-inch shellfire due to her rugged construction and ample armour. The Defence was sunk at Jutland after receiving seven hits; at the same battle the Seydlitz, similar in construction to the Goeben, survived some twenty-two hits from 12-inch, 13.5-inch, and 15-inch shells, each with many times the penetration and destructive power of a 9.2-inch shell.

  At the court martial there were one or two references to armour, but only of a passing nature. When Milne was being cross-examined he was asked, ‘What are the chief elements that enter into this question of comparative force?’ His answer was, ‘Gun power, weather and speed. I do not know anything else.’ As one naval historian has noted, ‘So all the ships, both sides, could have been built of tin plate! But neither the court nor the accused’s friend commented on that.’(5)

  The last puzzle is a human one. No one appears to have commented on the apparently extraordinary relationship between Troubridge and his flag-captain. Here we have an Admiral of great experience and stature at 3.30 at night taking his squadron towards a dawn engagement with the enemy, the outcome of which – win or lose – must bring further glory to the name of Troubridge and his beloved service; then after no more than a few pleading words from his flag-captain suggesting likely defeat, turning away in order to allow his quarry to escape. Troubridge spoke at his court martial of his ‘mental struggle between my natural desire to fight and my sense of duty in view of my orders’. But this did not satisfy his fellow officers, who were tempted to ask, ‘Why did he allow himself to be swayed by his subordinate over the most important and critical decision of his life?’ That is a question that neither Troubridge nor anyone else has satisfactorily answered.

  TRAGEDY IN THE PACIFIC

  The search for Admiral Spee – His interference with Pacific commerce and troop movements – Admiral Cradock takes up the hunt in the Atlantic, and, later, off the Chilean coast – His inadequate force – Spee at Easter Island, Cradock at the Falkland Islands The clash off Coronel and defeat of Cradock – Escape of the Glasgow – The mystery of the Canopus

  The tide of naval events continued to flow unfavourably in more distant seas, too. At the end of July 1914 there were a number of German men o’war and armed merchantmen in the Atlantic and Pacific. They were not, in total, a very menacing force, even if they had been concentrated. They were, in fact, widely scattered. In the West Indies there were two light cruisers, the Dresden and Karlsruhe; off the west coast of America the light cruiser Leipzig; and on the other side of the Pacific, based on Tsingtao, China, a powerful armoured force, the German East Asiatic Squadron, commanded by ViceAdmiral Count Maximilian von Spee.

  Spee was an able, aggressive admiral, a brilliant leader who had brought his force to a high pitch of efficiency. His squadron had won the top gunnery award of the Kriegsmarine for two successive years. His two armoured cruisers were the Gneisenau and Scharnhorst (flag), of similar power to Troubridge’s f1agship but better protected and with a higher speed. His light cruisers were of recent construction, he was well provided with colliers and supply ships and at the outbreak of war, thanks to German colonizing, had the use of a number of island bases in the Pacific.

  On 6 August, the same day that Admiral Souchon departed from Messina with the Goeben and Breslau on the other side of the world, Spee slipped out of Ponape in the Caroline Islands with the Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, and light cruiser Nürnberg. For both commanders it was the opening of a pursuit by the enemy, and Spee faced odds as overwhelming as Souchon’s. But from this point the parallel ceased. Souchon’s task was to fly a few hundred miles to a neutral port to make a politico-military gift of his force. Spee’s was to range across the vast expanse of the Pacific as a threat to British trade and shipping movements for as long as his resources and luck lasted and then try to get home. Souchon was a quarry for six days; Spee’s pursuit was to last for five anxious and frequently exciting months.

  On paper, a couple of light cruisers in the Atlantic and two armoured and three light cruisers in the Pacific did not pose much of a threat when seen against the vast areas and quantity of shipping involved. But even a single raider appearing unexpectedly, making its ‘kill’ and disappearing over the horizon, can create a degree of nervousness among seamen and shipping insurance companies alike out of all proportion to its real destructive ability. It also requires naval forces of seemingly disproportionate numbers and strength to hunt it down.

  Aga
inst these widely scattered German men o’war, and possible armed merchantmen, Britain and her allies and empire could call upon a modern dreadnought battle-cruiser, the Australia, more than a match alone for Spee’s armoured cruisers; some one dozen armoured cruisers; and about twenty light cruisers of widely varying ages and effectiveness. When Japan declared war on Germany she reinforced this strength with a navy already challenging the US Navy, comprising fast, modern, powerful men o’war of all classes.

  It could be thought that with this protection, the threat from the German cruisers might safely be ignored. In fact, New Zealand and Australian commerce was at once much disturbed and those Dominions’ first troop convoys, bound for the mother country, were forbidden from sailing until adequate protection could be provided.

  When Spee shrewdly detached to the west his light cruisers Emden and Königsberg, Indian Ocean shipping came to a standstill after they began their attacks. In three months the Emden alone accounted for seventeen merchantmen, while in the Atlantic the Karlsruhe, which eluded her pursuers among the West Indies islands to prey on Atlantic shipping, was almost as successful.

  But Spee and his two big ships were the Admiralty’s greatest worry. While they remained afloat, Britain could not claim complete control of the seas, and must suffer serious commercial loss and – above all damaging loss of prestige among neutral nations, notably the United States and the republics of South America. Meanwhile Spee began an odyssey among the islands of the Pacific. Wireless which should have been a blessing in an ocean-wide hunt confused the hunters as much as it helped them because its range varied widely according to conditions and poor reception led to misidentification. By destroying the widely spread German wireless stations instead of using them to confuse Spee and assist themselves, the Allies threw away an advantage.

  Spee made his slow and tortuous way cast, leaving little evidence of his whereabouts. At one point he detached a light cruiser to Honolulu for supplies. On 30 September his squadron appeared off Tahiti’s capital and port, Papeeté shelled the French installations, sank a gunboat and disappeared again, feinting a north-easterly course.

  At last, on 4 October, one of the joint British-AustralianFrench-New Zealand-Japanese forces, with their widely scattered squadrons from Sasebo to Rabaul, intercepted a distant, crackling message from the Scharnhorst. The reputation of W/T was redeemed. The German flagship was ‘en route Marquesas and Easter Island’. There could no longer be any doubt that Spee was also en route to play havoc with British commerce on the coasts of South America: nitrates, copper, and other vital minerals, beef, lamb, and grain.

  The distribution and orders to the numerous Allied scattered forces in the Pacific were rearranged accordingly. In the War Room at the Admiralty Churchill studied the charts covering the vast area of the Pacific, the South Atlantic, and the Caribbean; just as, two months earlier, he had studied the long map of the Mediterranean and with nods of concurrence from Batten berg and Sturdee, drafted telegrams and rearranged dispositions. Nothing gave him a greater sense of power and satisfaction than this tactical masterminding from a distance of thousands of miles. The fact that he was far exceeding his responsibilities no more entered his reckoning than that the Goeben had slipped through Milne’s fingers partly as a result of these excesses.

  In early October 1914 the British squadron most likely to intercept Spee was that of the commander of the South American Station. Rear-Admiral Sir Christopher Cradock, fifty-two years old, was a fine seaman and leader of men who in his native Yorkshire hunted with exceptional dash and was loved and admired by all. ‘Kit’ Cradock had several times been heard to declare that he hoped when his time came it would be at sea in action or by breaking his neck on the hunting field.

  Cradock’s responsibility was to ‘cover’ the Magellan Straits; the River Plate with its important meat and grain trade on the Atlantic side, and the Chilean coastline on the west. He had been told in an Admiralty telegram that, ‘There is a strong probability of the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau arriving in the Magellan Straits or on the West Coast of America… Concentrate a squadron strong enough to meet Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, making Falkland Islands your coaling base.’ Cradock was then assured that reinforcements were on their way, the battleship Canopus, and armoured cruiser Defence from the Mediterranean. ‘As soon as you have superior force’, continued the telegram, ‘search the Magellan Straits with squadron, being ready to return and cover the River Plate, or, according to information search north as far as Valparaiso, break up the German trade and destroy the German cruisers.’

  Cradock carried out the first part of his orders in late September and early October under the most stormy and testing conditions, discovering only that a German light cruiser had recently anchored among the inhospitable islands of Tierra del Fuego, and had no doubt subsequently joined forces with Spee in the Pacific.

  By early October the operations off South America and the pursuit of the German squadron began to assume a similarity with those in the Mediterranean three months earlier. But the shape of events had a grotesque and fateful quality in this distant southern hemisphere, the pace more laboured, the outcome incomparably more tragic in human terms.

  The success of Cradock’s operations depended entirely on his reinforcements in order to give him the ‘superior strength’, a definition the Admiralty might now have learned was as dangerous as it was woolly. His Falkland Islands Squadron consisted of two armoured cruisers dating back to 1902-3, the Good Hope (flag) and Monmouth, armed mainly with 6-inch guns, most of which were disposed on the main deck in casements so close to the waterline that they could not be worked in any sort of a sea. The flagship also mounted two 9.2-inch guns. The total weight of their broadside, in smooth seas, was some 2,400 pounds, about half that of the German armoured cruisers. These ships were manned almost exclusively by reservists, recently called up, who had worked together for only a few weeks and had undergone almost no gunnery practice.

  Cradock’s only modern ship was the light cruiser Glasgow, with a regular crew, an exceptional commander in Captain John Luce, and a good turn of speed. This heterogeneous squadron was completed by a converted liner the Otranto or ‘the sardine tin’, armed with a few old 4.7s and intended only for hunting down converted ships of her own kind.

  With the Defence as a reinforcement, Cradock would be greatly strengthened. But she was the equal of only one of Spee’s armoured cruisers, and the other could – on paper at least – have sent the rest of the British squadron to the bottom in short order.

  Then there was the Canopus. A battleship with 12-inch guns, however old, could surely provide the balancing factor. And this was how Churchill saw her, a man o’war that might not be able to outpace Spee, but one that the German Admiral would never dare challenge. In Churchill’s judgement, Cradock would always be safe with those big guns to protect him like the fists of a pugilist warding off a hostile crowd. In fact, although Spee could not know it, the usefulness of the Canopus was very limited. Her big guns were of an early mark and could not outrange Spee’s guns of smaller calibre. The reservist gun crews were led by reservist lieutenants who had never been in a turret before the war, and had not yet had the opportunity of firing them in practice shoots.

  The Canopus, even though a battleship, was no better protected than the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, and had been ‘C and M’ (under a care and maintenance party only) at Milford Haven for the past two years prior to her scheduled scrapping in 1915. Her reciprocating engines could push her 13,000-ton bulk through the water at some 16 knots; but, as we shall see, things were not as they should have been in her engine-rooms.

  So much for the Canopus, whose qualities were rated so highly by Churchill that he decided that the Defence after all should go to reinforce the cruiser squadron operating farther north in the Atlantic, thus depriving Cradock of the one ship with the speed and power to engage the German squadron.

  The key date in the hunt for Admiral von Spee in the South Pacific was 13 October 19
14, as 6 August had been in the pursuit of Admiral Souchon in the Mediterranean. On that day Spee sailed from Easter for an even more remote island, Mas-a-Fuera, halfway to the Chilean coast, to rendezvous with his colliers. He had been sheltering at Easter for a week, resting his men, replenishing his supplies and preparing for offensive action. He now had three light cruisers in addition to his two big armoured ships.

  Cradock’s light cruiser Glasgow, under Admiralty instructions, had searched for German shipping and any sign of Spee, and on this same day was proceeding south from Valparaiso down the Chilean coast to rendezvous with C.-in-C. at the little port of Coronel. Spee had heard of British movements by W/T from German agents in Valparaiso, and had high hopes of meeting a force inferior to his squadron.

  Also on 13 October Cradock at Port Stanley received a signal from the Canopus indicating that she would be a week late and that she could not make anything near 15 knots. Cradock passed on this news to the Admiralty, through Montevideo: ‘I fear that strategically the speed of my squadron cannot exceed 12 knots owing to Canopus, but shall trust circumstances will enable me to force an action.’ He did not explain how his 12-knot squadron could force an over-20-knot squadron to fight, nor speculate on the likely outcome against the crack German gunnery squadron of the German Navy.