Castles of Steel

by Robert K. Massie

  Nevertheless, German pilots and airship crews did their best. At 7:35 a.m., the first zeppelin most British seamen had ever seen appeared in the sky ten miles south of Tyrwhitt’s force. This was the L-6, which had been cruising above the Bight in search of the British and whose efforts were rewarded when it spotted Tyrwhitt’s ships. Twenty minutes later, British lookouts saw a German seaplane on the horizon in the same direction. Meanwhile, as the ships moved west, Empress developed boiler difficulties and began falling behind. Soon, this circumstance made the converted former packet boat the focal point of the first air-sea battle in history. At 9:00 a.m., two German seaplanes attacked Empress. The first dropped seven 10-pound bombs from 1,600 feet; the bombs burst in the water 200 yards off the starboard bow. The second seaplane dropped two 22-pound bombs more accurately from 1,800 feet; they exploded only twenty and forty feet from the ship. Empress’s captain did his best to throw the Germans off by zigzagging while his crew enthusiastically fired rifles at the German planes. No harm was done on either side.

  Meanwhile, L-6, drawing closer, descended from 5,000 feet to 2,000 and, approaching Empress from astern, attempted to reach a position directly overhead. Despite his own ship’s apparent vulnerability, Captain Frederick Bowhill of Empress soon discovered that the airship above him could not turn quickly. Bowhill took quick advantage: “My method of defence was to watch [the zeppelin] carefully as she manoeuvred into position directly overhead. I then went hard over. [When] I could see her rudders put over to follow me, I put my helm over the other way.” By repeated turns, Empress was able to avoid the three 110-pound bombs dropped by L-6, although two fell only fifty yards away. When her bomb racks were empty, L-6 departed.

  A few minutes before ten, the Harwich Force arrived at the recovery position thirty miles north of Norderney. The sea and the sky were empty. Minutes later, two British seaplanes appeared overhead, landed near Riviera, and were hoisted aboard. Almost simultaneously, ten miles nearer the coast, another seaplane had landed alongside the destroyer Lurcher, from which Keyes was supervising his submarines. The pilot taxied up to the destroyer, shouted that he had only five minutes’ worth of fuel remaining, and asked the direction to the carriers. Realizing that the rendezvous was too far off, Keyes invited the pilot to come on board and took the seaplane in tow. Tyrwhitt, meanwhile, continued to wait for the remaining seaplanes. At 10:30 a.m., his ships were attacked again by two German seaplanes, which dropped seven bombs. All missed. These air attacks convinced Commodore Tyrwhitt that “given ordinary sea room, ships had nothing to fear from either seaplanes or zeppelins.” Later, writing to his sister, Tyrwhitt said, “Zeppelins are not to be thought of as regards ships. Stupid great things, but very beautiful. It seemed a pity to shoot at them.” Once the last attack had died away, Tyrwhitt realized that the four overdue seaplanes were far beyond their fuel endurance and must be considered lost. He signaled, “I wish all ships a Merry Christmas,” and turned his force back to Harwich.

  In fact, three of the four missing planes had landed in the water near Norderney and their crews had been rescued by Keyes’s submarine E-11. At 9:30 a.m., Captain Martin Naismith in E-11 was waiting submerged off Norderney when, through his periscope, he spotted a British seaplane in the air. He ordered his boat to surface. The pilot, seeing the red and white band around E-11’s conning tower, landed nearby, reported that he had only five minutes of fuel remaining, and asked for a tow to the nearest carrier. Naismith agreed. Ten minutes later, as he was getting under way with the seaplane attached, a German airship (it was L-5) was seen approaching from the east. Then, to complicate matters, a submarine appeared on the surface, heading directly toward his little procession. In fact, it was the British submarine D-6, which had seen the seaplanes land and was coming to see whether she could help. Naismith, however, assumed she was a U-boat. A minute later, D-6 dived—she did this because of the approach of the German zeppelin—but Naismith interpreted this maneuver as that of an enemy submarine preparing to attack. Suddenly, to add to Naismith’s concerns, two more of the missing British seaplanes appeared at the end of their fuel endurance and landed near E-11. Naismith now faced the problem of rescuing four additional airmen in the face of what appeared to be imminent attack by an approaching airship and a submerged submarine. Casting off the towline, he maneuvered so close to one of the newly arrived seaplanes that the pilot and observer were able to step directly onto the submarine’s deck; he told the two airmen in the other plane to swim to his boat. By then, the zeppelin was less than a mile away, but Naismith, mindful of orders to destroy British seaplanes that could not be brought home, ordered a machine gun brought up to the conning tower and had a seaman begin firing at the floats of the three empty seaplanes. Before the planes obliged by sinking, the zeppelin was overhead and Naismith was forced to crash-dive. Two bombs from the airship tumbled down; their explosions shook but did not harm the British submarine. Naismith took E-11 down 140 feet to rest on the seabed, decided to remain, and there the submariners and their five guests sat down to a Christmas dinner of turkey and plum pudding. D-6 had a narrower escape. When her captain brought her back to the surface, he looked up and found L-5 fifty feet directly over his head. With machine-gun bullets clanging against his hull, he quickly submerged and headed for home. Six seaplanes were now accounted for; the crew of the seventh was picked up by a Dutch trawler. The fishermen kept the airmen on board for a week and then returned them to Holland where they were returned to Britain as “ship-wrecked mariners.” On Christmas Day in the Cuxhaven Raid, not a man was lost on either side.

  But loss was to follow. Jellicoe, hoping that the seaplane raid would provoke the High Seas Fleet to make an appearance, had spent the day cruising with the Grand Fleet 100 miles north of Heligoland. At dusk, the wind and sea were rising and by 10:00 a.m., on the morning of the twenty-sixth, a gale was raging with mountainous waves. Jellicoe turned north for home. During the passage, three men from destroyers were washed overboard and one was swept off the deck of the light cruiser Caroline. Three badly battered destroyers had to be sent into dry dock.

  There was more. In the black hours before dawn on December 27, the Grand Fleet, pitching and rolling in the huge seas of Pentland Firth, approached Scapa Flow. When the lead battle squadron, showing no lights, turned north from the Firth into Hoxa Sound, the captain of the battleship Monarch suddenly saw a patrol trawler dead ahead. Attempting to turn, Monarch slewed directly into the path of her sister Conqueror, following astern. The two big ships collided, with Conqueror driving her bow into Monarch’s stern; both bow and stern were fractured and partially crushed. By December 29, Monarch had been mended sufficiently to permit her to sail for serious repair at Devonport. But Conqueror could not leave Scapa until a special salvage unit had made a temporary patch to permit her bow to take the punishment of an oncoming sea. When the crippled battleship sailed on January 21, the seas were still too heavy for her tender bow and she had to turn back for more patchwork. She finally reached Cromarty Firth on January 24; there she underwent further repair in the Invergordon floating dry dock before moving on to Liverpool for a complete reconstruction of her bow.

  The loss of two of his most powerful ships was a blow for Jellicoe. Monarch was gone for three and a half weeks and rejoined the Grand Fleet on January 20. Conqueror did not return until March 6. Their absence, added to the permanent loss of their sister Audacious, reduced the 2nd Battle Squadron, the Grand Fleet’s most modern, from eight ships to five. This deficit, plus the programmed absence of other vessels for essential overhaul, brought the Grand Fleet down to its lowest point of numerical superiority over the High Seas Fleet during the war. For several weeks in January 1915, Jellicoe and Beatty each had only a one-ship advantage over their German counterparts: eighteen dreadnought battleships to seventeen; five battle cruisers to four. Here was the numerical parity the German Naval Staff and Admiral von Ingenohl had been seeking; achieved, “not by their exertions,” as Layman puts it, “but by pure luck.” But I
ngenohl, intimidated and cautious, would not have attempted to exploit the opportunity, even had he known it existed.

  The Cuxhaven Raid destroyed no zeppelins or zeppelin sheds, but it had taught the Admiralty and the fleet that the previously dreaded aerial monsters need not be feared by ships at sea. Tyrwhitt wrote to his wife on December 29, “They [Churchill, et al.] are awfully pleased with the raid and most complimentary. Couldn’t be nicer! I was really surprised at everybody’s pleasure and delight. They want more and I expect they will get it before too long.” Materially, the raid cost the British more than it did the Germans. Four British seamen had been swept overboard, four seaplanes had been lost, and two dreadnought battleships and three destroyers had been disabled. The Germans suffered no casualties and lost one seaplane. But, morally, the opposite result had been achieved. Once again, a British force had steamed into the Bight, challenging the Imperial Navy. From airship and submarine reports circulating through the German fleet, everyone soon learned that no British dreadnought had been present to support the raiding force. Four German battle cruisers, a dozen light cruisers, and scores of destroyers had been poised to go to sea, but had been denied permission. The result was shame, frustration, and renewed discussion of the need to find a new Commander-in-Chief for the High Seas Fleet.

  The First Lord of the Admiralty recognized the Christmas Day raid in practical terms as a failure to blunt the new German airship weapon. Zeppelins were no longer to be feared by ships at sea, but Churchill, now responsible for the air defense of the British Isles, remained apprehensive about the damage airships might do when attacking cities. A New Year’s Day 1915 memorandum prepared for the Cabinet declared that Churchill had “information from a trustworthy source . . . that the Germans intend to make an attack on London by airships on a great scale at any early opportunity. . . . There are approximately twenty German airships which can reach London now from the Rhine, each carrying a ton of high explosives. They could traverse the English part of the journey, coming and going, in the dark hours. The weather hazards are considerable, but there is no known means of preventing the airships coming, and not much chance of punishing them on return. The un-avenged destruction of non-combatant life may therefore be very considerable.”

  Fisher shared Churchill’s alarm. Twenty zeppelins, each carrying a ton of bombs, would be coming, Fisher asserted in a letter to Churchill on January 4, 1915. One ton “would completely wreck the Admiralty building”; twenty tons would cause a “terrible massacre.” Fisher had proposed to deter such an attack by warning the Germans in advance that any captured zeppelin personnel would be shot. “As this step has not been taken, I must with great reluctance ask to be relieved of my present official position as First Sea Lord. I have allowed a whole week to elapse much against my judgement before taking this step to avoid embarrassing the government. I cannot delay any longer.” Churchill’s response to this threat was typical of the way he dealt with the old admiral:

  My dear Fisher:

  The question of aerial defense is not one upon which you have any professional experience. The question of killing prisoners in reprisal for an aerial attack is not one for the Admiralty and certainly not for you to decide. The Cabinet alone can settle such a matter. I will bring your views to their notice at our meeting tomorrow. After much reflection, I cannot support it.

  I hope I am not to take the last part of your letter seriously. I have always made up my mind never to dissuade anyone serving in the department over which I preside from resigning if they wish to do so. Business becomes impossible on any other terms.

  But I sympathise with your feelings of exasperation at our powerlessness to resist certain forms of attack; and I presume I may take your letter simply as an expression of those feelings.

  Yours very sincerely,

  Winston S. Churchill

  Fisher withdrew his resignation.

  Soon afterward, on January 19, the zeppelin bombardment of England began. Two German naval airships dropped twenty bombs on Great Yarmouth and on several villages along the Norfolk coast. Four civilians were killed and sixteen wounded; the zeppelins departed untouched. In time, zeppelin night raids over London became a thrilling, popular spectacle as searchlights illuminated the silver, cigar-shaped behemoths gliding majestically overhead. During the war, fifty-seven airship raids were launched against England, the most destructive coming on September 8, 1915, when twenty-two Londoners were killed and eighty-seven injured. By August 1918, when the last zeppelin raids on England took place, the airships were larger, their speed had risen to 80 miles an hour, their lifting capacity had increased to 50 tons, and their ceiling was 18,000 feet. Over four years, airship and airplane attacks killed 1,413 people in Britain and wounded 3,408. For the first two years of the war, the zeppelins were immune to harm in the sky. Then on September 3, 1916, a German airship, SL-11, was “clawed down in flames”—as Churchill had predicted would happen—by a British fighter plane using incendiary bullets. The young pilot, Lieutenant William Leefe Robinson, was immediately awarded the Victoria Cross.

  CHAPTER 21 The Battle of the Dogger Bank: “Kingdom Come or Ten Days’ Leave”

  The New Year began and Franz Hipper was restless. This most offensive-minded of the German admirals disliked keeping his men and ships on alert at a high pitch of readiness while at the same time restricting them to port. This self-contradictory policy was sapping morale. Besides, the German defeat in the Bight, his own frustrated aproach to Yarmouth, and his close escape after Scarborough rankled him. One explanation for his lack of success, Hipper believed, was that the British had known in advance about his plans. How they knew, he was uncertain, but he suspected that some of the neutral fishing vessels working on the fringes of the Bight and on the Dogger Bank were actually British spy ships. The Dogger Bank, with its shallow bottom, was a rich fishing ground and thus a natural concourse for commercial trawlers, British and Dutch; it also lay on the shortest route between Heligoland and the coast of England. A message from a trawler on the Dogger Bank, Hipper postulated, would enable Beatty’s battle cruiser force to intercept—if not on the way over, at least on the way back. Repeatedly, Hipper insisted that ruthless action must be taken against these fishing boats, no matter what their nationality. Already, on his instructions, German destroyers had stopped and boarded these small vessels in or near the Bight. When, as was often the case, the papers of neutral trawlers were not in perfect order, they were brought into Cuxhaven and subjected to rigorous examination. To address this worry, Hipper proposed an operation in which his force would clear the Dogger Bank of British fishing vessels and suspicious neutral craft and would also attack any light British warships patrolling the Bank. The active operation would involve only the German battle cruisers and their escorting light cruisers and destroyers, but their withdrawal would be covered by the High Seas Fleet.

  Hipper’s proposal, because it was limited in scope, managed to elude the kaiser’s ban on High Seas Fleet activity. On January 10, William, resisting pressure for more energetic action, had reaffirmed his decree that the preservation of the fleet was his paramount consideration. “No offensive is to be carried as far as the enemy coast with the object of fighting a decisive action there,” said Pohl, on behalf of the emperor. The freedom of the battle fleet, therefore, remained as restricted as before. But William again granted Ingenohl permission to make cautious sallies with the battle cruisers for the purpose of cutting off separate British formations. After the war, Admiral Reinhard Scheer explained the fleet’s dilemma: “There was never any reluctance on the part of the German navy to fight. The general aim of our fleet was not to seek decisive battle with the entire English fleet but to test its strength against separate divisions. But the policy of those who controlled it was the perfectly sound one that a fleet action should not be risked until, by mine-laying or submarines, an equalization of the opposing forces in the North Sea had been brought about. But, as action of some kind was necessary for the morale of the men, the p
rohibition was relaxed as far as the Scouting Forces were concerned.”

  Meanwhile, the High Seas Fleet was growing stronger. In the five months since the beginning of the war, four new dreadnought battleships had been added—König, Grosser Kurfürst, Markgraf, and Kronprinz Wilhelm—and one new battle cruiser—Derfflinger. The new battleships were 25,000-ton vessels with ten 12-inch guns and better armor protection than any contemporary British battleship; they were incorporated into the 3rd Battle Squadron commanded by Scheer, the most competent of German battle squadron commanders. In mid-January, Scheer asked Ingenohl’s permission to take his new ships through the Kiel Canal into the Baltic for gunnery practice, but, because of violent storms sweeping over the North Sea, Ingenohl told him to wait. For the same reason, Hipper’s battle cruiser operation on the Dogger Bank was postponed. On January 21, Ingenohl gave Scheer permission to proceed through the Kiel Canal, but on reaching the Elbe, the battleship squadron found itself in a snowstorm so thick that the captains were unable to locate the river’s mouth and were forced to anchor. The following morning, January 22, the weather began to clear and Scheer’s dreadnoughts entered the canal, heading away from the North Sea. In Wilhelmshaven later that day, Hipper and Vice Admiral Richard Eckermann, Chief of Staff of the High Seas Fleet, saw a forecast for clear skies and immediately suggested to Ingenohl: “If the weather tomorrow remains as it was this afternoon and evening, a cruiser and destroyer advance to the Dogger Bank would, in my opinion, be very desirable. Special preparations are unnecessary; an order issued tomorrow morning to . . . [Hipper] would be sufficient. Proceeding during the night, arriving in the forenoon, returning in the evening.”