The First World War

by John Keegan

  The clash of battlefleets at Jutland took place on 31 May 1916 and the following night. There had been two earlier engagements, near Heligoland and the Dogger Bank in August 1914 and January 1915, but neither had engaged the main battlefleets against each other. The battle of the Heligoland Bight, at the entrance to Germany’s North Sea naval bases, came about through the determination of the commanders of the destroyers and submarines at Harwich, the British port nearest the German bases, to intercept the enemy’s offshore patrols and inflict damage. Tyrwhitt, commanding what came to be called Harwich Force, and Keyes, commanding the Eighth Submarine Flotilla, were aggressive officers whose thirst for action won the support of Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, and, through him, the promise of intervention by three of Admiral Sir David Beatty’s battlecruisers if opportunity for success offered. In a confused daylight encounter on 28 August, a misty day in the Heligoland Bight, the British at first succeeded in sinking only one destroyer. When German reinforcements appeared, however, Beatty’s battlecruisers came forward and sank three enemy cruisers before safely disengaging.6

  This small victory greatly heartened the British but, while prompting the Germans to thicken the defences of the Heligoland Bight with minefields and standing patrols of heavy and light vessels, including submarines, it did not deter them from further action. In an effort to treat the British as they had been treated themselves, they sent fast ships to bombard the North Sea port of Yarmouth on 3 November and, on 16 December, Scarborough, Whitby and Hartlepool, on this second occasion with most of the High Seas Fleet’s Dreadnoughts following. The Grand Fleet sent a squadron to intercept but failure of intelligence prevented its making contact, fortunately, for it would have been outnumbered. In the second of the early naval encounters of the war, at the Dogger Bank, intelligence served the Royal Navy better. Its interception and cryptologic services, the latter accommodated in the Admiralty Old Building (Room 40 or 40 OB), was far superior to the German and those who worked there had benefited at the war’s outset from three extraordinary pieces of luck. In August the German light cruiser Magdeburg grounded in Russian waters and its signal books, with the current key, were recovered and sent to England. In October, the merchantman code, seized from a German steamer interned in Australia, also reached London. Later the same month a third code-book, used by German admirals at sea and jettisoned by the senior officer of a group of German destroyers recently sunk in a small action off the Dutch coast, was dredged up accidentally in the nets of a British fishing boat and brought to the Admiralty.7 These three documents opened the secrets of most German naval signalling to the officers of 40 OB, allowing them to read enemy transmissions often in “real time,” that is, as quickly as they were decoded by the intended recipients. In an uncanny foreshadowing of the cryptological history of the Second World War, the German naval staff swiftly recognised that the movements of their ships were becoming known to the enemy but ascribed that intelligence success not to signal insecurity but to espionage. Their suspicions fixed on the Dutch fishing boats trawling the shallow waters of the Dogger Bank, in the central North Sea, which they decided were British-manned, flying false flags and wirelessing their observations to the Admiralty.

  Believing that they could turn such reports to their advantage while revenging themselves for the Heligoland defeat, the German naval staff decided to sail the battlecruisers of the High Seas Fleet to the Dogger Bank and lay a trap for their opposite numbers. On 23 January, the First and Second Scouting Groups sortied, only to encounter heavy opposition as they approached the Dogger Bank at dawn next morning. Beatty’s battlecruiser squadrons, alerted by 40 OB, were in position and, as the weaker and less numerous German formations emerged into visibility, they found themselves assailed by armourpiercing salvoes. The semi-battlecruiser Blücher was overwhelmed and capsized, the Seydlitz almost suffered a fatal internal explosion, averted only by flooding the magazines, and the two scouting groups, turning tail, escaped by the skin of their teeth. Examination of the damage caused to Seydlitz after she limped home revealed that far too much high-explosive, in the form of bags of propellant for the main armament, had been taken out of its flash-proof cases in the ammunition-handling chambers under the turret than was safe or necessary. Damage to the turret had ignited the charges there and the flash, travelling down the turret-trunk, detonated the loose charges below and started a fire next to the magazine. Warned in time of the dangers of bad practice, the German navy instituted much stricter procedures for the handling of its propellant, which was in any case more stable than the British equivalent. Beatty’s Battle Cruiser Fleet, as it became known immediately after the Dogger Bank, continued to keep loose propellant ready in quantity between magazine and turret, with results that would prove disastrous at Jutland.8

  After January 1915, the High Seas Fleet kept close to its home bases for most of the next eighteen months and pondered its strategy. The Fleet’s submarine operations could bring returns, and so could minelaying, by U-boat or surface ship. The sinking of HMS Audacious, a brand-new Dreadnought, by a mine laid by an armed merchant cruiser in October 1914, caused the British Admiralty even greater anguish than the torpedoing of the ancient cruisers Aboukir, Hogue and Cressy by U-9 in the “Broad Fourteens” off Holland in September. Submarine warfare, however, by the rules of commerce-raiding, which stipulated that an attacker must give a merchant ship warning before sinking and make provision for the escape of the crew and passengers, could cause little interruption to trade, while exposing U-boats to rapid retaliation; “unrestricted” submarine warfare, on the other hand, when U-boats torpedoed without surfacing, could all too easily lead to diplomatic incidents, through the sinking of wrongly identified neutrals, or to diplomatic disaster, as it did in May 1915, when U-20 sank the Lusitania. The loss of this huge British liner, and that of the lives of 1,201 passengers, of whom 128 were American, almost caused the United States to break off relations with Germany. Negotiations smoothed over the repercussions of the atrocity but the German naval staff imposed strict limitation on the operations of its submarines in the aftermath. The British merchant fleet continued to lose between fifty and a hundred ships a month to submarine attack during 1915 but could maintain supply to the home country nonetheless.9 Meanwhile, the Grand Fleet and its subordinate squadrons and flotillas of cruisers, destroyers and submarines sustained a blockade of Germany that denied it all trade with the world beyond Europe and which was extended, by British, French and Italian naval dominance in the Mediterranean, against Austria and Turkey. The “central position” of the Central Powers, a strategic posture ordained by military theorists to be one of great strength, had been reduced to one of infirmity, perhaps disabling weakness, by the constriction of an all-encircling blockade. Germany’s sailors, during 1915, racked their brains to think of a way out.

  They had brought their predicament upon themselves, aided and abetted by political and dynastic leaders who should have known better. The geography of the German-speaking lands, however configured into states, denies the Germans maritime power. The geography of the German empire of 1914 narrowed its access to the high seas to the short North Sea coastline between Denmark and Holland. From it, the way to the nearest ocean, the Atlantic, lay through waters easily choked by an enemy. Westward, the English Channel, only nineteen miles across at the narrows, had long lain under threat of closure by the Royal Navy; in more recent years the threat of closure by mine-barriers, though the British did not densely mine the Channel narrows until 1916, promised to render the western route impermeable. Northward, from the estuaries of the Ems, Jade, Weser and Elbe, the High Seas Fleet had a clear run into the North Sea from ports easily protected against a close British blockade. Once at sea, however, it faced a passage of 600 miles up the North Sea, between Great Britain and Norway, before it could break out into the ocean, and then only through a series of gaps, between the Faroes, Iceland and Greenland, easily kept under surveillance by light cruiser squadrons. The likelihood of the High Seas
Fleet clearing the North Sea undetected or unassailed diminished, moreover, with every mile it steamed, because early in the century it had become the Royal Navy’s war plan to transfer its capital units on mobilisation from its English to the Scottish ports, Rosyth near Edinburgh and Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands, leaving its light units of cruisers, destroyers and submarines to maintain an intermediate blockade off the Heligoland Bight, which would give early warning of a German sortie. On that warning the Grand Fleet would sail south at speed, making it an operational probability that a major fleet action would be joined long before the enemy had neared the waters from which it could stage an oceanic break-out. Admiral Fisher summed up the German predicament in an exultant epitome of the critical maritime geography to King George V: “with the great harbour of Scapa Flow in the North and the narrow straits of Dover in the south, there is no doubt, Sir, that we are God’s chosen people.”10

  The Germans had never blinded themselves to the intrinsic geographical weakness of their position or the strengths of the British. They had toyed unrealistically with means of widening their access to the North Sea, by persuading or forcing their Dutch, Danish and Norwegian neighbours to grant them bases, and continued to consider means of doing so even after the war had begun; during 1915, Commander Wolfgang Wegoner of the German naval staff wrote a series of papers advocating the occupation of Denmark, the establishment of a protectorate over Norway and, at some future date, the acquisition of ports in France and Portugal.11 Perception of the value of the submarine, as a carrier either of mines or torpedoes, was also amplified after the war’s outbreak, by the success of the very small U-boat force against both warships and merchantmen. In the main, however, the German Admiralty, having early taken a view of the nature of the fleet it should build and operate best to serve its maritime purpose, persisted with its long-laid strategic policy. That is simply stated. Germany, within the fiscal limits imposed by the maintenance of a very large army, could not outbuild Britain in capital ships. It should, therefore, confine itself to confronting the Royal Navy with “risk”—the risk that its traditional determination to command the seas might lead to a wearing down of its preponderant strength through small actions, and by mine and submarine, which would heighten the danger that, in unforeseeable conditions, the Grand Fleet might find itself at a disadvantage to the High Seas Fleet during one of its offensive sorties. After much debate about “risk” strategy, the Kaiser issued a final war directive to the German navy on 3 December 1912, which stipulated that its “chief war task” should be “to damage the blockading forces of the enemy as far as possible through numerous and repeated attacks day and night, and under favourable circumstances to give battle with all the forces at your disposal.”12

  German naval operations in home waters during 1914 and 1915 had adhered strictly to the 1912 directive, and achieved some of its purposes. Heligoland and the Dogger Bank had been defeats but had indeed damaged the blockading force, since Tiger and Lion were hit at the Dogger Bank, Lion hard enough to have to be towed back to harbour. The sinking of Audacious had been achieved at the cost of a single mine. The potentiality of the U-boat in fleet warfare had also been demonstrated by the sinking of the pre-Dreadnought Formidable in the Channel on 1 January 1915 by U-24. In early 1915 Sir John Jellicoe, commanding the Grand Fleet, was seriously concerned that German Kleinkrieg (small war) successes, combined with the need to disperse units of the Grand Fleet to secondary theatres, was whittling away its superiority. In November the ratio of British to German Dreadnoughts had fallen to 17:15 (it had been 20:13 in August) and of battlecruisers to 5:4.13 Germany was continuing to launch capital ships, moreover, and though Britain was doing likewise, it had calls on its resources, particularly in the Mediterranean, that Germany did not have to meet.

  By the spring of 1916, the balance had swung back in Britain’s favour. The situation in distant waters, thanks to the destruction of the German raiding cruisers, the termination of the Gallipoli campaign and the addition of the Italian to the Franco-British fleet in the Mediterranean, no longer exerted a drain on the forces at home. New classes of Dreadnoughts had come into service, particularly the fast Queen Elizabeths and, while Germany had also added to the High Seas Fleet, the Grand Fleet had recovered a clear superiority. In April 1916 it comprised thirty-one Dreadnoughts and ten battlecruisers, the High Seas Fleet only eighteen Dreadnoughts and five battlecruisers. British superiority in light cruisers and destroyers was also large (113:72) and, while the Grand Fleet’s lack of effective heavy cruisers persisted, it was unencumbered with any of the pre-Dreadnoughts which, for want of weight in the battle line, the Germans continued to count as part of their capital strength.14

  On paper, therefore, the risk in an active implementation of Germany’s “risk” strategy was too large to be accepted; prudence counselled passivity and a reversion to traditional “fleet in being” policy, by which a navy justified its existence simply by causing an opponent to watch its harbours. German naval pride forbade such inactivity. The navy was in Germany the junior, not, as in Britain, the senior service, and many of its officers felt it had to fight whatever the odds, if it were to keep the esteem of the German people, particularly at a time when the German army was pouring out its blood for the nation. A new and aggressive admiral, Reinhard Scheer, had taken command of the High Seas Fleet in January 1916 and a memorandum written to him by one of his captains, Adolf von Trotha, epitomises the attitude of the offensive school to which both belonged: there can be, he wrote, “no faith in a fleet which has been brought through the war intact … we are at present fighting for our existence … In this life and death struggle, I cannot understand how anyone can think of allowing any weapon which could be used against the enemy to rust in its sheath.”15

  Scheer quickly resumed the policy of taking the fleet to sea in the search for action. He made two sorties in February and March 1916 and four in April and May; in the April sortie he succeeded in reaching the English east coast and, in a repetition of the raids of 1914, bombarding Lowestoft. The demonstration, timed to coincide with the Irish nationalist Easter Rising, of which Germany had foreknowledge, caused dismay in Britain but emphasised once again that, while the Grand Fleet at Scapa Flow closed the exit from the North Sea, High Seas Fleet operations must be limited to tip-and-run against targets close enough to home for it to beat a retreat before the Royal Navy’s heavy units could steam south and intervene. Even the Battle Cruiser Fleet, which was now located at Rosyth, one of the ports of Edinburgh, was anchored too far north to catch German raiders without considerable forewarning.

  At the end of May, however, such forewarning it and Jellicoe’s battleship squadrons got. Scheer had been preparing another sortie for some time, on a scale elaborate enough to surprise Beatty’s battlecruisers if they came sufficiently far south. An encounter with the British Dreadnoughts he did not plan. Room 40’s decryption of his signals, however, gave Jellicoe word of his movements, so that, by the time Scheer had cleared the Heligoland Bight, not only were Beatty’s battlecruisers at sea and heading south from Rosyth, so too were the Scapa Flow battleships. On the morning of 31 May, over 250 British and German warships were steaming on convergent courses to a rendezvous, unanticipated by the Germans, off the Jutland coast of Denmark. Among the host of light cruisers, destroyers and submarines which made up the bulk of each side’s forces, it was the presence of the big ships which promised decision. They included, on the British side, twenty-eight Dreadnoughts and nine battlecruisers, on the German sixteen Dreadnoughts and five battlecruisers. Jellicoe’s arrangement of his fleet attached his four newest battleships, of the fast Queen Elizabeth class, to the six battlecruisers of Beatty’s Battle Cruiser Fleet, deployed ahead of the Grand Fleet’s Dreadnoughts as an advance guard, with orders to bring the Germans to action. Scheer’s fleet, advancing fifty miles behind the First Scouting Group of five battlecruisers, included six Deutschland-class pre-Dreadnoughts, which he appears to have brought with him for sentimental rather
than military reasons.16 Their lack of speed, five knots less than that of his Kaiser-class battleships, made them a liability in a contest of rapid closing and opening of the range at which main armament took effect.