by Hew Strachan
Much ink has been spilt on the so-called ‘spirit of the offensive’. At times the armies’ discussions of the issue are put into the context of a general mood in the Europe of 1914, a melting-pot of social Darwinism and proto-fascism. Consideration of the navies is a powerful corrective to some of the more absurd propositions. The navies had proved less adept than the armies at developing staff organizations; their consideration of operational issues was partial; debates were dominated by issues of personality; these blocks to rational analysis might suggest a predisposition to rash attacks. And yet the broad parameters within which the British and German navies elected to operate in 1914 were defensive. Sea captains were no less anxious to prove their worth in battle than were infantry officers. But the pre-war function of the navies, as manifested by the arms races in both the North Sea and the Mediterranean, was deterrence: war plans were relatively neglected.
Furthermore, if considered on a purely maritime level, deterrence succeeded. The mobilization of the British and German fleets was potentially far more provocative than that of the armies. On 26 July 1914 Battenberg, without cabinet approval, prevented the dispersal of the fleet, assembled for exercises in July, and the Royal Navy was put on a war footing on 29 July. The German navy, although mobilization was not ordered until 1 August, put its ships on alert on 7 July and moved its High Seas Fleet into the North Sea on 31 July. But although the navies therefore anticipated the actions of the armies, neither those steps nor the longer-running arms races themselves generated the war. Tirpitz thought Britain’s naval mobilization on 29 July was a bluff, and the deputy chief of the Admiralty Staff agreed with him. Even on 3 August the sailing orders of German auxiliary cruisers emphasized that they should do nothing to jeopardize the possibility of British neutrality.78 To the very end the German navy persisted in seeing the Anglo-German naval competition in terms short of war. Moreover, deterrence and defence persisted as themes for the next four years. The preservation of what each side had, the security of coasts and of commerce, the importance of ships as bargaining counters not as agents of war, prevailed over the conduct of offensive operations.
THE NORTH SEA, 1914–1915
On the evening of 1 August 1914 Sir John Jellicoe, having accomplished the long train journey to Scotland’s northern extremity, found his progress from Wick to Scapa Flow blocked by fog. At 10 p.m. he took the opportunity to dispatch a telegram to the First Lord of the Admiralty: ‘Am firmly convinced that the step you mentioned to me is fraught with gravest danger.’79
Jellicoe carried with him orders to assume command of the most powerful fleet in the world. He showed no enthusiasm for the job. Sir George Callaghan, whom he was to replace, and who had just completed the task of bringing the Grand Fleet through the Dover straits and up to its battle station at Scapa Flow, was well-respected in the navy. Callaghan was aged 62, eight years older than Jellicoe, and was due to retire in two months’ time. Jellicoe enjoyed the imprimatur of Fisher; and nobody could cavil at his elevation on professional grounds. But Jellicoe’s protests continued. He was no doubt loath to hurt Callaghan; he was conscious of the vulnerability of the fleet while its command was disrupted as he eased himself into his new responsibilities; most important of all, he feared becoming the conductor for the professional disapprobation of Churchill’s interventionism.
Jellicoe’s attitude, however, was also indicative of his temperament. Intelligent and analytical, he lacked the thrust and daredevil approach considered characteristic of British naval commanders: Fisher’s description of him as ‘the future Nelson’ could hardly be more inappropriate.80 He was reluctant to delegate, he was a worrier, and he was a hypochondriac. Like his mentor and like Corbett, he believed in the central importance of the preservation of British naval supremacy, of the fleet in being. This, and not the lust for battle, would determine his actions.
The offensive spirit, therefore, received a powerful corrective with Jellicoe’s appointment. But Jellicoe’s task—in Churchill’s words, ‘to secure the safety of the British Fleet during the long and indefinite period of waiting for a general action’81—was not an easy one to sustain. The First Lord himself, while recognizing the wisdom of the policy, found it temperamentally uncongenial. The public, whose consciousness of British naval supremacy had been heightened by the pre-war arms race and its attendant propaganda, became impatient for battle. Most important, the fleet itself chafed at its enforced inactivity.
Three officers in particular, each holding quasi-independent commands, came to represent a more adventurous style than that of Jellicoe. The best known was Sir David Beatty, still only 43, his uniform worn with a jauntiness that owed much to his tailor’s reinterpretation of the dress regulations, and until 1913 Churchill’s naval secretary. Beatty’s reputation for dash was earned in operations ashore, in the Sudan in 1896 and in the Boxer rebellion, and was confirmed by the appointment he now held, the command of the battle cruiser squadron. Beatty was to make much of Jellicoe’s caution, his determination to centralize, and his fear of independent-minded subordinates. In reality, he himself was in due course to prove as prudent in the exercise of command as his superior. Beatty was subordinate to Jellicoe, but because he was based at Rosyth personal meetings between the two were rare. Distance also played its part in encouraging Jellicoe to forego authority over the second of the three, Commodore Reginald Tyrwhitt, who commanded a flotilla of light cruisers and destroyers at Harwich; Tyrwhitt’s command formed part of the Southern Force under the direct authority of the Admiralty. Associated with Tyrwhitt in the Southern Force was Commodore Roger Keyes, commanding a submarine flotilla. Tyrwhitt and Keyes represented a younger generation of officers, frustrated by the more plodding approach of their seniors, most of whom had never seen active service, and many of whom had been promoted beyond their real abilities by the rapid expansion of the fleet in the 1880s and 1890s; it was to men like them, and to Keyes in particular, that Churchill would turn for ideas with which to goad his admirals.
The opening task of the war for the Southern Force was to blockade the northern approaches of the Channel in order to ensure the safe passage of the BEF. Herein was an opportunity, which Ingenohl recognized, to deal with a fraction of the Royal Navy. But the waters of the Channel were ideal for British submarine attacks, and the limitations of coal supply would curtail the presence of German torpedo boats, especially since the Germans lacked precise intelligence as to the timings of the BEF’s movements. While the Grand Fleet stood by in case the High Seas Fleet did come out, the Southern Force blocked the Channel, and the transports crossed independently and without impediment.
This task completed, Keyes and Tyrwhitt cast around for more positive undertakings. Together they hatched a plan for the Harwich Force to attack the German destroyers in the Heligoland Bight at dawn, when both the day and the night patrols would be out, and then to drive them towards the open sea. Keyes’s submarines were to be poised to deal with any larger German ships that came out. When Keyes took his plan to the War Staff its members were too busy to consider it. However, on 23 August Churchill, stung by a couple of recent German sorties and anxious to cover the operations at Ostend, adopted Keyes’s proposal. It was then referred back to Sturdee: the chief of the naval war staff retimed the raid so that only the German day patrols would be out, and then limited the involvement of the Grand Fleet (despite Jellicoe’s wish to take out his whole force) to Beatty’s battle cruisers and Commander W. E. Good-enough’s 1st light cruiser squadron. By the time the involvement of Beatty and Goodenough was settled Keyes and Tyrwhitt had already sailed, all their ships having been told that Tyrwhitt’s two light cruisers would be the only British vessels bigger than destroyers in the Bight on the morning of 28 August. The other large units expected in the vicinity were two battle cruisers from the Humber, accompanying on the Harwich Force’s starboard quarter, to the west, as it ran south past Heligoland. Beatty himself was only marginally better informed—at 8 a.m. on 27 August he signalled to his squadron:
‘Know very little. Shall hope to learn more as we go along.’82
The German patrols on the morning of the 28th were weak, only four light cruisers were out, and the state of the tide meant that no capital ships would be able to pass the bar until noon. Shortly before Tyrwhitt began his sweep past Heligoland he encountered Goodenough and learnt also of Beatty’s presence. At 8 a.m. his two light cruisers were engaged by two German cruisers, which screened the retreat of the German torpedo boats to the cover of the Heligoland batteries. A single German torpedo boat was isolated, driven out to sea, and sunk. However, HMS Arethusa, the light cruiser in which Tyrwhitt was flying his pennant, suffered engine damage and, more significantly, had her wireless shot away. Thus, when Keyes spotted Goodenough’s light cruisers through the morning mist his signal to Arethusa for clarification received no reply. Keyes concluded that he had four enemy light cruisers in tow, and reckoned he was leading them north-west onto the guns of the Humber-based battle cruisers Invincible and New Zealand. Goodenough, having picked up Keyes’s signal, responded, effectively giving chase to himself, and Tyrwhitt also conformed. At 9.30 a.m. one of Keyes’s submarines attacked HMS Southampton, Goodenough’s flagship, and the latter responded by trying to ram the submarine: fortunately both were unsuccessful. Twenty minutes later Keyes had finally identified the Southampton.
This tale of British confusion and misadventure was in part redeemed by the second half of the action. Within the Jade both Moltke and Von der Tann, two German battle cruisers, were getting up steam to pass the bar at 12 p.m. In addition, a number of German light cruisers had put to sea; their actions were not co-ordinated, their wireless reporting was poor, and they were converging on the Harwich Force oblivious of Beatty’s or Goodenough’s presence. For an hour-and-a-half, between 11 a.m. and 12.30 p.m., Tyrwhitt’s force engaged the German light cruisers, but was faced with odds which were progressively becoming more uneven. At 11.35 Beatty responded to Tyrwhitt’s signals (sufficient repairs now having been done to Arethusa), and changed course to the east, increasing his speed to 27 knots. Shortly after noon Goodenough’s light cruisers came to Tyrwhitt’s support, and then half-an-hour later Beatty’s flag-ship HMS Lion led the battle cruisers into the fray. Admiral Franz von Hipper, commanding the German cruiser squadron, ordered his light cruisers to fall back on Moltke and Von der Tann. But SMS Mainz, which had come up from the Ems to the south-west, was caught between the 1st light cruiser squadron and the Harwich Force; she was hit between 200 and 300 times, and finally sank shortly after 1 p.m. Lions gunnery accounted for another light cruiser, SMS Köln, at 1.35 p.m., and left a third, Ariadne, so damaged that she too also went down. At 2.25 Moltke and Von der Tann came into sight, but Ingenohl had already ordered that they should not engage the British battle cruisers, and Hipper himself was anxious not to risk battle without his full squadron. Beatty in any case was turning away; the dangers to his command were multiplying.
The victory of the Heligoland Bight, three German light cruisers and one torpedo boat sunk with no British loss, was a timely fillip both to the navy and to the Entente. It provided a welcome contrast to the steady retreat of the armies in France. Moreover, it established a moral superiority at sea that remained to the British advantage for the rest of the war. The relative inferiority and vulnerability of the German torpedo boats and light cruisers was a powerful disincentive even to German attritional operations in the North Sea. But the euphoria of victory helped to render less urgent the rectification of the Royal Navy’s faults. Most palpable, and perhaps predictable, were the failures of command and staff-work: the confusion of authority did not deserve the success which was achieved. Jellicoe’s response was to emphasize tighter tactical control, but the difficulties in signalling encountered on 28 August were not addressed. Nor had the British, thanks to the performance of the Lion, detected what the Germans had noticed—that many British shells had failed to explode and that others, although they detonated, did not penetrate. Heligoland Bight was no test of Fisher’s ideas on long-range gunnery. When Beatty’s battle cruisers arrived the contest became entirely one-sided, the Germans having no capital ships with which to reply. Beatty therefore used his speed to close the ranges, not keep his distance, and the German light cruisers were hit at between 3,000 and 6,000 yards.
Beatty’s decision to enter the battle was, of course, the key to the Royal Navy’s victory. The consequent British dominance suggests that his choice was more self-evident than was actually the case. The waters into which he advanced contained not only British submarines which might not know of his presence, but possibly also German submarines which would welcome it if they did. The underwater threat therefore counselled caution, whatever Tyrwhitt’s plight. The long-term significance of the action of the Heligoland Bight, therefore, lies as much in what did not happen as in what did. Both sides had planned on their submarines playing a major role, the British positioning theirs to catch German surface vessels as they came out into the open sea, the Germans hoping to use theirs in attritional actions on the occasions when the Royal Navy ventured too close to their coasts. In the event, neither hope was fulfilled.
Fisher’s pre-war enthusiasm for the submarine seemed to have been endorsed in the 1913 manoeuvres, in which British submarine officers claimed to have accounted for 40 per cent of the surface vessels present.83 What is remarkable is not how few submarines the Entente powers possessed in 1914 but how many—Britain had fifty-five, France seventy-seven, Russia thirty-three. Although the Central Powers had fewer—Austria-Hungary six and Germany twenty-eight—the latter were technically better.84 Initially Tirpitz had opposed submarines, through prejudice certainly, but on grounds of performance too. However, in entering the field late the Germans were able to benefit from the experiments and failures of those who had gone before. In 1910 German allocations for submarine construction doubled over the previous year (and quadrupled compared with 1907); by 1913 they doubled again. They focused on diesel propulsion; the first were completed in 1913, and had a cruising range of 5,000 nautical miles. The fact that by early 1914 Germany, after a late start, was building superior submarines at a faster rate than Britain was a point Fisher did not hesitate to make to Jellicoe.85
The respect accorded the submarine was due less to the vessel itself, whose warlike applications still remained uncertain, than to the torpedo. The torpedo boat had been the main plank in the jeune école’s advocacy of a guerre de course in the 1870s and 1880s. The riposte was long-range gunnery. At Tsushima the torpedo was only effective at the closest ranges and against vessels that were already disabled. But in the intervening decade its range and speed had doubled, to about 11,000 yards and 45 knots. Whereas in the Royal Navy gunnery was the specialist branch which attracted elite status, in the German navy torpedoes had a comparable claim. Müller, Pohl, and Hipper were all torpedo experts. Tirpitz himself had played a major part in the development of the torpedo, and torpedo boats had a high profile in his fleet (they outnumbered the Grand Fleet’s destroyers two to one). The Germans, therefore, reckoned to compensate for their relative lack of firepower by attention to the torpedo: the U-boat was thus primarily a torpedo-firing platform.
Therefore, the criticism to be levelled at the navies of 1914 is not that they failed to respond to a new weapons system, but that they integrated it with existing operational thought rather than recognized that it would create its own operational environment. Fleet action was the dominant concern of naval officers: the submarine threat was assessed in relation to that. What only a few anticipated was that the submarine would operate independently of other warships and would become the principal adjunct of economic warfare. The relative lack of attention to blockade removed the context into which the submarine would subsequently come to fit. Moreover, the state of international law, which assumed that an attacking ship would take over a merchantman as a prize, made the submarine a poor means by which to harass commercial traffic.
The opening months of the war in the North Sea appeared
to confirm the worst fears of Fisher and of the man to whom he had relayed them, Jellicoe. On 6 August ten U-boats set off northwards in a sweep through the North Sea to locate the Grand Fleet and the line of the British blockade. During the course of August the Germans lost two submarines and their sustained cruising exposed defects in the others; in return, they had encountered only fractions of the Grand Fleet and had not established the pattern of the British blockade. But their activity fuelled Jellicoe’s worries, particularly given the lack of submarine defences at Scapa and Rosyth. On 5 September a U-boat sank a cruiser in the Forth. On 22 September three old cruisers, Aboukir, Hogue, and Cressy, were sunk by a single U-boat, U9, with the loss of 1,459 lives, including a large proportion of middle-aged reservists and 15-year-old cadets. The cruisers had been patrolling the ‘Broad Fourteens’ off Holland against the possibility of a German raid into the Channel. Tyrwhitt, Keyes, and ultimately Churchill had all recognized their vulnerability, but the threat seemed to be more from single vessels than submarines, given the expectation that the effectiveness of the U-boat would be in confined waters, not on the open sea. The three cruisers had no destroyer escort (as the weather had been too heavy when they put out), they were not zigzagging, and their speed was only 10 knots. When Aboukir was struck she was first assumed to have hit a mine, and, even when the true danger was identified, Hogue and then Cressy stopped to pick up survivors. The lessons were clear: ships in submarine-infested waters were to steer a zigzag course, to maintain a speed of at least 13 knots, and were to refrain from stopping. Nonetheless, on 15 October another cruiser, HMS Hawke, was sunk off Aberdeen. In the course of 1914 warship losses to U-boats totalled 120,000 tons.86
