by Hew Strachan
In September and October the U-boat gave the Germans effective control of the North Sea. The loss of the Hawke and the vulnerability of Scapa Flow persuaded Jellicoe to pull the Grand Fleet back to Lough Swilly. Even here he was not safe. U20 observed the Grand Fleet’s move, and on the night of 22/3 October the Berlin, a German liner re-equipped as a minelayer, having made an extraordinary voyage around the north of Scotland and rendezvoused with U20, laid its mines north-west of Lough Swilly. On 27 October HMS Audacious, a super-Dreadnought battleship, struck one of the Berlins mines; conscious of the submarine danger, the adjacent ships were slow to close and take her in tow; in full view of her sister ships and of the White Star liner SS Olympic, the Audacious went down.
Now Jellicoe’s anxieties were multiplied. The Germans’ superiority in mine numbers had been recognized at the war’s outbreak, but their lack of minelayers and the British superiority in surface vessels had restrained German minelaying activity. Jellicoe anticipated the German use of mines and submarines in conjunction; the Grand Fleet would have to be preceded by minesweepers (of which it had only six), and its speed would therefore be cut to 10 knots, thus rendering its units more vulnerable to U-boat attack. On 30 October he outlined his conclusions to the Admiralty. He should aim to fight the Germans only in the northern part of the North Sea, where the Grand Fleet would be closer to its own bases and the German mines and submarines would be fewer. The Grand Fleet should only operate in conjunction with a destroyer screen. Above all, it should beware of being lured by the High Seas Fleet onto U-boats and mines: if the German fleet turned away Jellicoe would refuse to be drawn. He concluded that the only way to conduct an attack was to move at high speed to the flank, so ensuring that the battle was not fought in waters of the enemy’s choosing, and so also forcing submarines to surface if they wished to follow. The key question was whether the Germans would conform. Jellicoe was prepared to risk losing the chance of battle rather than risk his fleet.87
In reality the U-boat threat to British warships had already peaked. For all their faith in the torpedo, the Germans had begun the war with only 60 per cent of their established stocks,88 and with a weapon whose calibre was 50 centimetres to the British 21 inches. The defensive steps adopted after the sinking of the three cruisers on 22 September were, broadly speaking, sufficient. Moreover, the torpedo was not the danger to warships which the Germans had imagined. Manoeuvring at speed, and particularly confronted ahead or astern, the warship was a difficult target to hit. The Germans themselves never fully appreciated the extent of their success or the longevity of the subsequent British fears. They regarded their U-boat operations in 1914 with disappointment: as scouts, the submarines had failed to identify the major British formations or to keep track of them; as offensive weapons, they would take a long time to reduce the Grand Fleet to numbers equal with those of the High Seas Fleet.
Britain’s ability to regain the initiative in the North Sea was derived in large measure from another unanticipated application of sea-power. Before 1914 the world’s communications relied principally on underwater cables, the majority of them in British hands and lying along the major shipping lanes. From 1898 Britain reckoned, in the event of war, on cutting the underwater cables of its opponents, so isolating them from the rest of the world. Therefore, within hours of Britain’s ultimatum expiring, Germany’s cable communications were effectively restricted to Europe only. Germany had, however, recognized the danger, and in the decade preceding the war had made considerable strides in the development of an alternative global communications network, using wireless. Throughout the war, therefore, Germany’s communications with its ships and its embassies had to be broadcast; consequently they could be intercepted by their enemies, and to offset this danger messages were sent in cipher.89
The German navy used three principal codes in 1914. That for communication between German warships and merchant vessels was captured by an Australian boarding party off Melbourne on 11 August and reached London late in October; the main naval signal book was taken by the Russians from SMS Magdeburg, which went aground in the Baltic, and was passed over to the British on 13 October; the third code, used by flag officers and for diplomatic purposes, was contained in a box brought to the surface in the nets of a trawler off Texel on 30 November. The majority of German signals were encoded and then reciphered, and the cipher itself was changed at frequent intervals. The Royal Navy’s ability to read German messages was, therefore, not instantaneous or absolutely constant, but it was relatively continuous from December 1914 onwards. The changes in cipher perhaps in part explain the remarkably lackadaisical attitude of the Germans to the possibility of a breach in their signals’ security. In May 1915 one of their cruisers, SMS Königsberg, gave a specific warning to that effect. The Germans can hardly have been surprised: as early as November 1914 they knew that the British were in possession of their commercial code, and they were also aware of the possibility that the Magdeburg’s codebooks had not been destroyed. But not until 1916 was the commercial code replaced, and not until May 1917 was the navy given a new code. Even then the British advantage was not lost. The introduction of the new codes overlapped with the use of the old, and thus was their solution facilitated. Moreover, the very sophistication and long range of the German wireless systems encouraged their excessive use, providing plenty of raw material for the cryptographers. Even ships in port spoke to each other through the medium of the wireless. When at sea the High Seas Fleet was free of the operational control of the Admiralty Staff—unlike the Grand Fleet and the Admiralty—but its commander still employed wireless to communicate with his subordinate units. By contrast, the Royal Navy when at sea maintained much stricter radio silence and used visual signals as far as possible. The Germans felt that it was worth sacrificing signals security in order to be able to convey information correctly and speedily.90
Cryptography was not established as an arm of British intelligence in 1914. Rear-Admiral Henry Oliver, the director of the intelligence division, therefore established a new and secret department to decipher the intercepted German signals. From early November the section was dubbed ‘Room 40’, after its location in the Admiralty Old Building. Its head was a Scottish engineer and the director of naval education, Sir Alfred Ewing. Ewing recruited an able team of cryptographers, but their backgrounds were academic and not seagoing: they did not, therefore, enjoy the professional approbation of the other Admiralty departments, and they also—at least initially—lacked the expertise required for the comprehension and evaluation of the intercepts which they were decoding. The initial mistakes which ensued were enough to ensure the continued mistrust of Rear-Admiral Thomas Jackson, the director of the operations department. The appointment of Commander H. W. W. Hope to inject a little naval knowledge into Room 40 remedied the worst defects, and Hope gradually established himself as the de facto head of the department. Thus Ewing’s role diminished, Hope himself looking to Captain W. R. Hall, Oliver’s success as director of the intelligence division, for leadership. ‘Blinker’ Hall—’half Machiavelli and half schoolboy’91 —proved a master of intelligence and covert operations. But although he enjoyed access to Room 40, he was not to gain full control of it until May 1917. Instead, Oliver, who succeeded Sturdee as chief of the naval war staff on 14 October 1914, continued to regard Room 40 as his personal fiefdom. The informal war group—Oliver, Churchill, Fisher, and Sir Arthur Wilson (now recalled as an unpaid assistant)—received the decrypts but lacked the time or powers of delegation to make best use of them. The failure to establish a full naval staff thus prejudiced the proper use of a major resource.
The operational value of Room 40’s labour lay in two principal directions. Every night each German squadron or unit reported its position by radio. Hall established a series of listening-posts along Britain’s east coast, whose configuration aided the taking of cross-bearings to locate vessels using wireless. This vast bulk of routine information enabled the Admiralty to form a full and up-to-date pic
ture of the Germans’ order of battle and deployment. Offensively, herein lay the basis for operational planning: in practice, the lack of a fully fledged war staff and the poor integration of intelligence with operations meant that the opportunity was not exploited, or at least not until 1917–18. Defensively, Room 40’s value was more specific: it gave warning of any likely German attack. From late autumn 1914 it relieved the Grand Fleet of the constant chores of patrolling or of sweeps through the North Sea, and allowed time for training and refits. It enabled fuel economy. But when intelligence of German offensive movements was received, it was both immediate and urgent. Oliver’s reluctance to delegate and his determination not to pass on all Room 40 decrypts as a matter of course meant that Jellicoe and the other operational commanders were told no more than the Admiralty thought they should know. Jellicoe’s request that he be equipped to decode intercepts at sea was refused for reasons of security. The intelligence from Room 40 which reached the Grand Fleet was therefore in danger of being late, partial, or incorrectly interpreted.
Britain established its decisive lead in naval intelligence just in time. The first German responses to the Heligoland Bight battle had been defensive. The action had not enabled the German coastal artillery to engage, and Hipper therefore instructed his cruisers to fall back in any future encounter. Minefields were laid to the west of Heligoland itself. The Kaiser insisted that the High Seas Fleet should not engage without his express permission.92 But the battle also demonstrated the weakness of a German strategy that relied exclusively on the defensive: the British had done what the Germans hoped they would do, attack close in to the German coast. In the process it was the Germans who had lost ships, and it was the British who, by choosing when and where to attack, had achieved surprise and enjoyed a local superiority. Ingenohl therefore argued that the High Seas Fleet be allowed greater freedom to manoeuvre and to attack. The vulnerability of the torpedo boats had been demonstrated in the action of 28 August, and their range was limited to forty-eight hours’ cruising; the toll which both they and the U-boats would take of the Grand Fleet would be minor and slow. Therefore the attrition of the Royal Navy, in preparation for the eventual decisive battle on relatively equal terms, could only be achieved by the full German fleet engaging fractions of the British fleet. Since the British would not oblige by approaching the Heligoland Bight in a weakened state—or perhaps in any state, given the improvements to the Bight’s defences—the Germans should aim to imitate the Royal Navy and sally forth towards the British coast. The shortest distance from the German bases to the nearest points on Britain’s eastern shores was considerably less than the distance from Scapa Flow to those same points. If kept in harbour indefinitely the fleet and its crews would lose their fitness for sea. On the other hand, by choosing when and where to fight the High Seas Fleet would ensure that it was not weakened because units were under repair or in the Baltic, and it would have the benefits of surprise and concentration.93
Ingenohl’s case for committing the High Seas Fleet rested on sound strategic premisses. Britain, and through Britain the Entente as a whole, enjoyed a maritime preponderance which relieved it of the need for offensive action; as Jellicoe’s thinking recognized full well, the Grand Fleet fulfilled its purpose by holding, not by fighting. Germany, on the other hand, was the challenger. If it wished to gain the Atlantic approaches it would have to fight for them: the onus to seek battle lay on the High Seas Fleet. In August 1914 it had forsaken this option, not only for political reasons but also for naval ones. The relative rate of completion in the construction of capital ships meant that the gap between the two competing forces would narrow in three months’ time: for the fleet, if not for the Kaiser or Bethmann Hollweg, the instructions of 30 July and 6 August represented a temporary postponement, not a long-term deferment. Indeed, over the long term the comparative position would worsen again as the Royal Navy’s orders of 1914–15, let alone any subsequent construction, entered service.
But all this assumed that the function of the German fleet was to fight, and even by October 1914 this was still not necessarily self-evident. Indeed, battle seemed to be receding as an option: the first fleet instructions of 30 July had ordered that, even before the fleets were on an equal footing, if ‘favourable opportunities for battle are offered, they must be taken’.94 The subsequent indecisiveness of the situation on land was itself a powerful argument for indecision at sea: a defeat at sea could adversely affect the situation on land when the latter was still in the balance; the navy as a defensive force at least secured Germany’s ‘northern frontier’, its coastal approaches, and so freed the army to fight on its western and eastern boundaries. The need to break the British blockade was not compelling: its economic effects would be long term, and there was as yet no reason to believe that the decision on land would not precede the impact of the blockade. Thus, the short-term arguments for offensive action were not so powerful as to overcome the long-term political benefits of a ‘fleet in being’. On 1 October 1914 Albert Ballin, the German shipowner, confided to Tirpitz, ‘The fleet in my eyes has become nothing other, and will never be anything other, than the irreplaceable resource of a healthy economy’.95 Its existence at the end of the war would be a vital component in settling with Britain, whose European interests would be restricted to ensuring the maintenance of a balance of power. The Kaiser and Bethmann Hollweg took a not dissimilar view.
However, the decision as to the tasks of the High Seas Fleet was not a simple matter of weighing immediate operational aims versus post-war political objectives, or even of the question as to whether the immediate situation might not be so urgent as to outweigh consideration of the latter. Ingenohl’s efforts to have his operational orders revised raised in acute form the question of command authority. In order to exploit any opportunity to commit the whole High Seas Fleet to action against fractions of the Grand Fleet, its commander-in-chief needed the freedom to act with speed and decision, and on his own initiative. Ingenohl was formally asking the Kaiser to delegate authority; informally, he was urging clarification of his status in relation to that of Pohl, Tirpitz, and Müller.
In open debate, Pohl was Ingenohl’s most clear-cut opponent; the pre-war bureaucratic division between the staff and the fleet continued, both, as before, using strategy as a means to express their institutional differences. In 1913 Pohl had been attracted to the use of submarines and mining as the first stage of an attritional campaign to wear down the British superiority in capital ships. The idea had been tested in an Admiralty Staff war game that winter, and the following summer, in May 1914, U-boat commanders claimed that they had achieved hits on every large surface ship within range on the first day.96 Pohl therefore rejected Ingenohl’s interpretation of the strategic position; he argued that the British would come into the Heligoland Bight once more, and that the next time they would suffer heavy losses; as a pre-war Tirpitzian, he assessed naval power in numbers of intact capital ships; the recklessness of the attack by the German light cruisers on 28 August reinforced his inclination towards caution. But the Admiralty Staff did not speak with one voice. Pohl’s need to dance attendance on the Kaiser at general headquarters meant that his deputy, Paul Behncke, had the major influence in Berlin, and Behncke supported Ingenohl.
Tirpitz too backed the commander of the High Seas Fleet, at least in formal terms. By mid-September he was advocating fleet action and complete operational freedom for the fleet commander. Indeed, he had no option, as he recognized that if the fleet remained unblooded in war it would have no budgetary leverage in peace. But at the same time he was intriguing for Ingenohl’s replacement by Pohl so that he himself could become chief of the Admiralty Staff.97 He blamed Ingenohl for not exploiting the very offensive opportunities which Ingenohl himself was now anxious to create. Furthermore, he was still hedging his bets, still reflecting his pre-war assumptions: he wanted the battle sooner rather than later, but—or so he said at first—not until Turkey had entered the war on Germany’s side and the
re had been a decision in the west; and the battle, when it came, should be contrived to be fought within 100 nautical miles of the Bight. By now, however, Tirpitz had lost the ear of the Kaiser. Müller, who had gained it, played an even more devious game than Tirpitz. He managed variously to present himself as the ally of Pohl and Ingenohl. In reality he backed the former, whose operational views were at least in accordance with the Kaiser’s political wishes.
On 3 October Pohl visited Ingenohl at Wilhelmshaven; it was the only time that the chief of the Admiralty Staff and the fleet commander met while Ingenohl held office. Pohl outlined his views but, Ingenohl reported, told him that they were only adopted in deference to the Kaiser. Ingenohl repeated his own position, but did so in such a low key that the others present failed to appreciate the depth of the difference. Ingenohl argued that a battle close to the German coast would by definition be one the British had sought, and therefore would be on their terms; he wanted the High Seas Fleet to be able to seek battle, even against superior forces. Pohl believed that such an encounter would never occur, as the Grand Fleet was based so far from the German coast. Three days later the Kaiser issued revised operational instructions. Their keynotes were ambiguity and confusion. The possibility that the High Seas Fleet might be allowed to operate outside the Bight, say towards Skaggerak, was not totally excluded. But it could only do so when there was no risk of loss, when political and military conditions were right, and when the Kaiser himself decided. The only real flexibility given Ingenohl related to Hipper’s battle cruisers, which could be used to inflict losses on British forces. But this concession revealed how little had been achieved in squaring operational needs with political purposes. It was already axiomatic that Germany’s relative inferiority in numbers of capital ships meant that the battle cruisers should not operate independently of the High Seas Fleet. A similar ambiguity was more directly expressed in relation to torpedo boats: Ingenohl should use these in his war of attrition against the Grand Fleet, but he should remember that (given the German belief in the efficiency of the torpedo) enough should be left over for the decisive battle. In sum, portions of the German fleet could engage in battle provided they did not suffer losses thereby. Ingenohl’s subsequent indecisiveness had clear roots.
