The rest happened quickly. The grand vizier, protesting that he not been consulted, threatened to resign, and a majority of the Cabinet wished to disavow the violent act, but Enver prevailed. He had only to point to Goeben, with her German crew—fezzes notwithstanding—and her 11-inch guns, lying off the Golden Horn. On October 30, the British ambassador presented an ultimatum to Turkey, demanding that the German crews be removed within twelve hours. There was no response. The British still hoped to prod the Turks back from the brink by a demonstration of sea power; on November 3, Indomitable and Indefatigable with two French battleships bombarded the forts at the entrance to the Dardanelles. The British ships fired forty-six 12-inch shells at Fort Sedd el Bahr on the tip of the Gallipoli peninsula, blew up a magazine, and raised huge clouds of dust. Still the Turks did not respond. On November 4, Russia declared war on the Ottoman empire, and the following day Britain and France followed suit.
Thereafter, the iron gates of geography closed on Russia. With access barred, first to the Baltic, and now to the Black Sea, the tsar’s empire was left dependent for imports and exports on the White Sea port of Archangel, icebound for many months. Ninety percent of Russia’s grain exports had come out through the Bosporus and the Dardanelles. The closure of that passageway had an even greater choking effect on imports; now cannons, rifles, shells, and other essentials of war had no route by which to travel from Western arsenals to Russian armies. In time, this would contribute to Russia’s collapse. Turkey’s entry into the war also critically affected Britain’s strategy, leading to the bloody failure of the Gallipoli campaign and the diversion of manpower into the campaigns of the Middle East and Mesopotamia. Ultimately, Turkey paid for her choice with the breakup of the Ottoman empire. After the war, Winston Churchill himself wrote a grim epitaph to this historical episode. When Goeben arrived at the Dardanelles, he said, she brought with her “more slaughter, more misery and ruin than has ever before been borne within the compass of a ship.”
At the Admiralty, early satisfaction that the Mediterranean had been “cleansed” quickly soured into mortification that Goeben had been allowed to escape. Admiral Milne was recalled on August 18, came home, and retired. Sensitive to criticism, he argued that he had successfully carried out his primary orders to defend the French troopships. Battenberg backed Milne on this point; indeed, no one could argue that the transports had been attacked. As for Goeben, Milne declared accurately that the Admiralty had given him no hint that Turkey was a possible destination for the German ship. Why should he, a sea officer with his own pressing naval concerns, have been expected to fathom a secret diplomatic arrangement of which the Foreign Office, the Cabinet, and the Admiralty had no knowledge? Milne put the blame for Goeben’s escape equally on the Admiralty’s failure to give him guidance and on Troubridge for his failure to intercept. On August 30, a Court of Inquiry announced that after “careful examination” of Milne’s behavior and decisions, “their Lordships approved the measures taken by him in all respects.”
Troubridge’s career at first seemed unaffected. On September 8, once Admiral de Lapeyrère’s French battleships had taken over responsibility for containing the Austrians in the Adriatic, Troubridge’s force, again buttressed by Indomitable and Indefatigable, was posted at the entrance to the Dardanelles. “Your sole duty,” Churchill told him, “is to sink Goeben and Breslau, under whatever flag, if they come out of the Dardanelles.” But there was much talk in the navy about the failure to fight Goeben, and someone—if not Milne, then someone else—had to be held responsible. Troubridge was chosen. Surprisingly, the most vehement of his critics was the normally mild-mannered First Sea Lord, Prince Louis of Battenberg. Troubridge was guilty of “amazing misconduct,” Battenberg wrote to Milne. Troubridge, Prince Louis continued elsewhere, had “signally failed in carrying out the task assigned to him. . . . Not one of the excuses which Admiral Troubridge gives can be accepted for one moment. . . . The escape of Goeben must forever remain a shameful episode in this war. The flag officer . . . responsible . . . cannot be trusted with any further command afloat and his continuance in such command constitutes a danger to the state.”
Troubridge returned to England to face a Court of Inquiry. The court judged that he had “had a very fair chance of at least delaying Goeben by materially damaging her,” and passed the case up to a court-martial convened on board the battleship Bulwark at Portland on November 5. The Admiralty did not dare charge Troubridge with cowardice; his reputation for physical courage was too high. Rather, the charge was brought that Troubridge “did, from negligence or through other default, forbear to pursue the chase of His Imperial German Majesty’s ship Goeben, being an enemy then flying.” Troubridge based his defense on the instructions from the Admiralty and from Milne not to engage a superior enemy force. Churchill’s July 30 message to Milne, shown to Troubridge at Malta, was exhibited: “Do not be brought to action against superior force.” Troubridge also cited Milne’s signal to him on August 5: “First Cruiser Squadron and Gloucester . . . are not to get seriously engaged with superior force.” The Admiralty prosecutor responded that the term “superior force” in both messages clearly referred to the Austrian fleet; Troubridge argued that under certain conditions the term also applied to Goeben. For a number of years, he told the court, it had been his “fixed and unalterable opinion that the advent of battle cruisers had killed the armored cruiser.” Milne, he contended, was thoroughly familiar with his opinion; in 1913, the Commander-in-Chief had asked him to lecture on the subject to officers of the Mediterranean Fleet. Indeed, according to Troubridge, their most recent discussion had come during the interview between Milne and himself at Malta on August 2:
Troubridge: “You know, sir, that I consider a battle cruiser a superior force to a cruiser squadron, unless they can get within range of her.”
Milne: “That question won’t arise as you will have Indomitable and Indefatigable with you.”
When Troubridge sailed that evening, of course, Indomitable and Indefatigable sailed with him. But on the following day, on Admiralty orders, Milne had stripped away the two battle cruisers and sent them charging toward Gibraltar, leaving Troubridge with only his armored cruisers. The Court of Inquiry had expressed regret that Troubridge had not made it clear to Milne that “he had no intention to engage Goeben in open water in daylight with his squadron unless supported by a battle cruiser.” In fact, Troubridge had done so repeatedly.
Troubridge also claimed that at the same Malta interview, Milne had conceded that the man on the spot must be the final arbiter as to what constituted a “superior enemy” (in court, Milne reluctantly conceded that he had said this). Once the battle cruisers were taken away, Troubridge contended, his squadron was obviously inferior in gun power and speed: his armored cruisers had never registered hits at over 8,000 yards; their best speed in company was 17 knots. These factors left him—as the man on the spot—in no doubt that Goeben constituted a superior force, which he was forbidden to engage. “All I could gain [by engaging],” he said, “would be the reputation of having attempted something which, though predestined to be ineffective, would be indicative of the boldness of our spirit. I felt that more than that was expected of an admiral entrusted by Their Lordships with great responsibilities.”
Milne, who was present throughout the Troubridge proceedings, was consistently hostile to his former subordinate. Addressing the Court of Inquiry, Milne had declared that he had expected Troubridge to fight Goeben and that in such an action it would have been difficult for Goeben to engage four ships at once; in practice, most single ships had all they could do to aim and fire at two enemy ships. For this reason, Milne said, he did not approve of Admiral Troubridge’s abandonment of the chase. Troubridge, regarding Milne, limited himself to expressing his “deep conviction . . . that Goeben had no right to be escaping at all and that if she had been sealed up in the Strait of Messina by the battle cruisers, as I thought she ought to have been, she would never have escaped.”
/> Ultimately, the judgment of the court-martial, like Troubridge’s decision in the early hours of August 7, came down to a calculation of the relative strength of four armored cruisers as against one battle cruiser. Troubridge claimed that his first decision to attack was “a desperate one” made in the face of clear orders by his immediate superior not to engage “a superior force.” “But I made it and for a time I stuck with it,” he said. “Gradually, however, it forced itself more and more upon my mind that though my decision might be natural, might be heroic, it was certainly wrong and certainly in the teeth of my orders. . . . It was at this psychological moment . . . that my Flag Captain came back to me. . . . It was his duty . . . and, as a matter of fact, I did in reality completely agree with [him]. After he left me I thought it over a little further and then I made my decision.”
Many British naval officers simply did not agree with Troubridge that in daylight Goeben constituted a force superior to his four armored cruisers. Battenberg emphatically declared that the twenty-two British 9.2-inch guns and fourteen 7.5-inch guns would have nullified and overpowered Goeben’s ten 11-inch guns. The Admiralty prosecutor argued that Troubridge had “assumed too readily” that all was well with Goeben; that she could steam at full speed and had plenty of coal and no worry about using up her ammunition. Churchill declared after the war that “the limited ammunition of Goeben would have had to have been wonderfully employed to have sunk all four British armored cruisers one after another at this long range.” Churchill also pointed out that at the Battle of the Falkland Islands a few months later, two British battle cruisers were to use up nearly three-quarters of their ammunition sinking only two German armored cruisers.
Captain Fawcett Wray of Defence supported Troubridge, restating the opinion he had expressed to the admiral in his ship’s chart room: “Up to the range of sixteen thousand yards, Goeben must be a superior force to one Defence or four Defences. . . . For four ships to try to attack her is . . . impossible because you could not get . . . [within] sixteen thousand yards unless she wanted you to, but if you did get within sixteen thousand or twenty thousand yards . . . it . . . [would be] suicidal.”
Oddly, the court-martial devoted no time to a consideration of comparative armor. Nor had Troubridge apparently ever asked himself whether his cruisers’ 9.2-inch or 7.5-inch shells would penetrate Goeben’s heavy 11-inch armor. An answer was provided at Jutland, when the German battle cruiser Seydlitz, similar in construction to Goeben, survived twenty-two hits from 12-inch, 13.5-inch, and 15-inch British shells, each with many times the penetrating and destructive power of Troubridge’s 9.2-inch shells. Nor did Troubridge’s defenders mention the vulnerability of his own thinly armored ships to 11-inch shellfire. Jutland made it painfully clear that armored cruisers were spectacularly vulnerable to heavy shells fired by battleships or battle cruisers; that day, four of the ships that had pursued the Goeben—the battle cruiser Indefatigable and the armored cruisers Defence, Black Prince, and Warrior—blew up and sank because heavy German shells penetrated their inadequate armor.
The verdict of the court-martial was handed down on November 9. The court accepted Troubridge’s judgment that, under the circumstances of weather, time, and position at the time the two sides would have met—6:00 a.m. in full daylight on the open sea—Goeben constituted a “superior force.” The court acknowledged that Troubridge’s instructions, passed to him from the Admiralty by Milne and repeated to him again by Milne, ordered him not to engage a “superior force.” Admiral Troubridge, therefore, was “fully and honourably” acquitted.
In the larger sense, however, neither Milne nor Troubridge ever received full acquittal. Troubridge afterward was given various commands on shore, but he never again served at sea. Milne remained on half pay for the rest of the war. Fisher continued to blame the “serpent” Milne for Goeben’s escape. “Personally, I should have shot Sir Berkeley Milne,” Fisher wrote to a friend. He changed the prewar “Sir Berkeley Mean” to “Sir Berkeley Goeben,” adding that “this most disastrous event . . . [a] lamentable blow to British naval prestige, would never have occurred had Sir B. Milne had been off Messina with the three battle cruisers . . . as if international law mattered a damn.” Many historians agreed that Milne’s failure to blockade Messina was the key. When Sir Julian Corbett, the official navy historian, criticized Milne for not guarding both entrances to the Straits of Messina with his battle cruisers, Milne raged at the presumption of “an amateur on shore” daring to criticize a senior naval officer. Arthur Marder, the American naval historian, closed his account of the episode by citing Milne’s remark “They pay me to be an admiral. They don’t pay me to think.”
Within the navy, the court-martial left a basic issue unresolved: when an officer finds himself confronting a possibly superior force, should he ignore the odds, summon raw courage, and attack, or should he retreat and await a better day? Nelson’s dictum “No captain can do very wrong if he places his ship alongside that of an enemy” had become holy writ in the Royal Navy, but Nelson had said it at Trafalgar, when his fleet of sailing ships had physical parity and psychological superiority over the enemy. In the modern era, no British destroyer captain was expected to invoke Nelson and lay his ship alongside—or even singlehandedly attack—a German dreadnought. The navy expected the exercise of judgment along with a display of courage; this was the verdict and lesson of the Troubridge court-martial. And, in fact, the subsequent battles of Coronel, the Falkland Islands, and Jutland strongly supported Troubridge’s belief that bigger ships firing heavier guns could destroy smaller, weaker ships with relative ease, especially when the smaller ships could not—or did not choose to—run away.
Nevertheless, the Troubridge court-martial left a bad taste in the mouths of British sailors for many years. Twenty-five years later in the South Atlantic, a situation arose somewhat similar to the one faced by Troubridge. In December 1939, early in World War II, the German pocket battleship Graf Spee, a formidable ship armed with six 11-inch and eight 5.9-inch guns, encountered three smaller British cruisers, which among them carried six 8-inch and sixteen 6-inch guns. The British commodore Henry Harwood did not hesitate to engage. Graf Spee, concentrating her heavy gunfire on the largest British ship, the heavy cruiser Exeter, put this enemy out of action, but she did not seriously harm or shake off the two light cruisers, Ajax and Achilles, which continued to pepper her with gunfire and threaten her with torpedoes. After an all-day battle, the damaged Graf Spee retreated into the neutral harbor of Montevideo, Uruguay, claiming the legal seventy-two-hour respite to make repairs. During this span, the two small British cruisers waited outside territorial waters while British reinforcements, including a battle cruiser and an aircraft carrier, hurried toward the scene. In the end, Graf Spee emerged, steamed into shallow offshore water, and scuttled herself. Then her captain, Hans Langsdorff, went to a hotel room and shot himself. In the aftermath, Britain’s First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Dudley Pound, wrote to Harwood, “Even if all our ships had been sunk you would have done the right thing. . . . Your action has reversed the finding of the Troubridge court martial and shows how wrong it was.”
CHAPTER 3 Jellicoe
John Rushworth Jellicoe, Winston Churchill once said, was “the only man on either side who could lose the war in an afternoon.” In appearance, the new Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Fleet seemed an implausible bearer of this immense responsibility. A small, quiet man, fifty-five years old when he took command in 1914, Jellicoe had never been known to raise his voice. Those in the navy who knew him said that this was because he never had to; John Jellicoe was obeyed instinctively. From a distance, he looked nondescript. He was only five and a half feet tall.
[This is not as short as it may sound today. Like Jellicoe, King George V was five foot six; Winston Churchill was five foot six and a half, and Jellicoe’s famous colleague Admiral David Beatty was five foot seven.]
His brown eyes were set deep in a wrinkled, weathered face. His prominent nose, jutting fr
om under a small, old-fashioned navy cap, made his profile distinctive, but far from handsome. Then, coming closer, people saw the feature that distinguished John Jellicoe: the light in his eyes, which simultaneously shone with bright intelligence and radiated patience, calm, and kindliness.
Jellicoe commanded the Grand Fleet in August 1914 because Jacky Fisher had insisted that no one else would do. Over many years, Fisher, the irrepressible founder of the modern Royal Navy, rushing through life from one volcanic controversy to the next, had steered this, his most promising protégé, from one assignment to the next, each leading to Fisher’s eventual goal: to have Jellicoe in command of the British fleet when war with Germany began. “Jellicoe to be Admiralissimo on October 21, 1914, when the battle of Armageddon comes along,” Fisher wrote in 1911. A year later, he added, “If war comes before 1914, Jellicoe will be Nelson at the Battle of St. Vincent [where Nelson served brilliantly under Admiral Sir John Jervis]. If it comes in 1914, Jellicoe will be Nelson at Trafalgar.” Now Admiralissimo of the armada Fisher had built, Jellicoe was ready. Twenty-two months of skirmishing would follow and then, on May 31, 1916, he would lead the most powerful British fleet ever sent to sea into the climactic naval battle of the war, the greatest clash of armored ships the world had ever seen.
Jellicoe’s strength was his thorough professionalism, his cool, analytical mind, and his iron self-control. He was neat, polite, and methodical. He believed in naval traditions, procedures, and decorum, among which were loyalty, scrupulous fairness, and genuine concern for the personal affairs of his officers and men. The fleet responded to Jellicoe’s transparent sincerity and obvious selflessness by giving him unreserved affection and trust. He was, said one of his Grand Fleet captains, “our beloved Commander-in-Chief, the finest character that ever was.”
Castles of Steel Page 8