Castles of Steel

by Robert K. Massie

  Meanwhile, Beatty’s private relationship with his wife continued unchanged. On September 4, soon after he and Eugenie left Aberdour—he for Scapa Flow, Eugenie for London—he wrote to Ethel, “You must know that I am quite unhappy when you are not with me. I know, dear heart, that I am rather an impossible person, difficult to get on with and moody and peevy at times. I know also that it has cost me some change in your feelings towards me. But you must believe me when I say that I just worship you today as I have ever done from the moment I first saw you.”

  After another short meeting in London in October 1917, Eugenie asked Beatty by letter, “Did anything that happened when you were here make some of your thoughts come true?” He answered, “They all came true [and] the reality was sweeter and more divine than my ‘thoughts.’ My visit to London was a visit to fairy land with a beautiful golden-haired Fairy Queen.” In January, she sent him a collection of erotic fairy stories she had written, set in an imaginary land of the Arabian Nights. Beatty wrote back that he could “administer love potions just as successfully” as her characters. In April, when she wrote saying she wanted to see her “Comrade in Dreamland,” he replied, “It would not be a case of a Comrade in Dreamland for I would never let you sleep—unless you swooned and then I would bring you to with caresses.” The admiral then produced a literary effort of his own:

  Here’s to you and here’s to Blighty,

  I’m in pajamas, you in a nighty,

  If we are feeling extra flighty,

  Why in pajamas and Why the nighty?

  Beginning in April 1918, when the entire Grand Fleet was permanently based in the Firth of Forth, Beatty and Eugenie often met in the afternoon at the North British Hotel in Edinburgh. Eugenie would take a room; Beatty would arrive and go straight up. That summer, she sent him a book about techniques of lovemaking. “What an amazing book!” he wrote to her. “To learn that all the Troubles in Domestic Life are due to the fact that the man is too quick and the lady too slow. What a tragedy! I am sure that the man should do all he could to prolong the thrills, they are so damnably short, but how is it to be done?” In his next letter, he proposed his own solution: to “kiss you from the tips of your toes upwards and take some time about it, Adorata Mia.”

  Despite his affair with Eugenie, David and Ethel continued exchanging gossip and belittling people they didn’t like; it was as if they realized that denigrating common enemies brought them closer together. Beatty wrote that Lloyd George was a “dirty dog” and “a demagogue, pure and simple.” Geddes was another “dirty dog,” “weak as ditch water.” Edwin Montagu, minister of munitions—the man who had taken Venetia Stanley away from Asquith—was “the Jew Montagu.” “Yes,” Beatty wrote to his wife, “he is appalling to look at with that immense conceit and self-confidence common to the Hebrew tribe.” Ethel called Churchill “a dead dog” and “a disappointed blackguard.” When the war ended, Beatty left the Grand Fleet and returned to London with Ethel. He now had two women in the same city. As he and Ethel were expected to present the picture of a happily married hero and his devoted wife, he and his “Golden-Haired Comrade” had to reconsider their relationship. Eugenie took the lead, asking what their future would be. Beatty replied that he was “a selfish beast,” who “ought to say that I must not trouble you more and ought to retire gracefully out of your life”—the implication being that he hoped she would say that he did not have to. He explained his feelings for his wife as those of duty and gratitude, not passion: “I am truly devoted to Tata, so much so that I efface myself in my desire to see her happy. I cannot forget all that she has been to me for the last twenty years, all that she has done for me, all that she has given me.” But once the war began, he said, he had “looked for love and sympathy and did not get them . . . until you came along and gave me both.” Nevertheless, the signature on this letter, written in April 1919 as Beatty was leaving for France with Ethel, told Eugenie much. He had written: “Heaps of love, Ever Yours, David.”

  [In 1920, when Ethel had the first of a series of nervous breakdowns, Beatty, desperate, wrote to Eugenie, asking for help. His wife’s “perpetual black despair,” he said, made his own “present dog’s life not worth living.” In 1924, at Beatty’s request, Eugenie accompanied Ethel on a trip to the Riviera. Ethel became “quite impossible,” telling Eugenie that she hated her, and Eugenie left her in the hands of “an interesting young man available to wait on her”; Beatty, past caring about infidelity, hoped only that Ethel would not come home.]

  In July 1917, Sims accompanied Jellicoe to Scapa Flow and, on returning to London, relayed to Washington the First Sea Lord’s urgent request that the U.S. Navy send its four strongest coal-burning battleships to reinforce the Grand Fleet. The reason for Jellicoe’s appeal was that the Royal Navy was short of manpower; there simply were not enough trained seamen to man the new British light cruisers, destroyers, and submarines about to be commissioned. The Admiralty’s proposed solution was to take five of the Channel Fleet’s predreadnought King Edward–class battleships out of commission and use their crews—each of these old ships carried 1,000 men—to provide officers, gunnery and torpedo ratings, and other personnel for the new warships. The King Edwards, whose task had been to guard the eastern approaches to the Channel, would be replaced by four Superbs, the oldest dreadnoughts in the Grand Fleet. The Superbs in turn—if the Americans agreed—would be replaced in the Grand Fleet by four U.S. Navy dreadnoughts.

  Despite Sims’s endorsement, the Navy Department in Washington at first rejected Jellicoe’s request. One reason was doctrinal: most American admirals were disciples of Alfred Thayer Mahan, the apostle of sea power, who had decreed that a battle fleet must remain concentrated. Already, the American admirals felt that they had compromised their fleet’s integrity by giving up the destroyers needed to screen their battleships; now they were resolved not to dribble away the battleships themselves. Behind this decision also lay the long-range concern that, should the Allies lose the war, the United States alone might have to face the German fleet. In addition, there was the deep American suspicion of Japan and fear of a two-ocean conflict. On top of all this, there was a practical reason for refusing to send the battleships to Europe. The fleet had been providing gun crews to scores of armed American merchant vessels, so the gunnery complement of many warships, including battleships, was sadly depleted. Until new men could be trained, the ships were not ready to fight.

  No officer felt more strongly that American battleships should remain in American waters than the navy’s senior admiral, Chief of Naval Operations William S. Benson. In May, a month after America entered the war, a British government mission including Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour had tried to convince Benson and Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels to postpone the American 1916 dreadnought-building program in favor of building more destroyers for escort work. Their views had not changed. “The future position of the United States must in no way be jeopardized by any disintegration of our main fighting fleet,” Daniels said. Benson concurred: “The U.S. believes that the strategic situation necessitates keeping the battleship force concentrated and cannot therefore consider sending part of it across.” Refusing to give up, Sims replied, “I cannot see that sending a division of ships would be any disintegration of our fleet, but merely an advance force interposed between us and the enemy fleet.”

  At the Navy Department, Mahan’s principles were sacrosanct, but views began to change when America’s two most senior American admirals—Admiral Henry T. Mayo, Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Atlantic Fleet, and then Benson himself—traveled to the British Isles. Mayo arrived in London on August 29, 1917, for discussions at the Admiralty followed by a visit to the Grand Fleet at Scapa Flow. There, Beatty was at his hospitable best, briefly hauling down his own Commander-in-Chief’s flag from Queen Elizabeth and hoisting the four-star flag of his American guest. Beatty’s private description of Mayo was less generous; to Eugenie, he characterized the American admiral as “a dear old cup of tea
who never did anything wrong in his life; an impeccable old gentleman—that’s no use now, is it?” Back in London, Mayo heard Jellicoe ask again for American battleships and, on the basis of what he had seen and heard, responded favorably. Now only Benson blocked the way.

  On November 7, the Chief of Naval Operations arrived in London, where three days of discussions at the Admiralty produced another conversion. On November 10, Benson cabled Secretary Daniels, recommending the sending of four coal-burning American dreadnoughts to the Grand Fleet. Benson went further: if conditions warranted, he was willing in the spring to send the entire U.S. battle fleet to Europe. Benson’s abrupt reversal stemmed from more than a sudden attack of Anglophilia. He could see that the presence of American battleships would give the navy a greater voice in Allied naval strategy and would enhance the prestige and morale of the U.S. fleet. He also recognized that if America’s powerful battleship fleet remained idle throughout the war, it might be difficult to extract money from Congress to build future dreadnoughts. On November 25, Battleship Division 9 of the U.S. Atlantic Fleet—New York, Wyoming, Florida, and Delaware—sailed from Hampton Roads for Scapa Flow.

  Antagonism between the American and German navies went back to June 1898, when an American naval squadron commanded by Commodore George Dewey had a potentially dangerous confrontation with a German force under Vice Admiral Otto von Diederichs in Manila Bay. In the months preceding this episode, the kaiser had announced, “I am determined, when the opportunity arises, to purchase or simply to take the Philippines from Spain.” In May 1898, the German consul in Manila told Berlin that the time had come to choose a German prince to become king of the Philippines. Then war broke out between Spain and America. Dewey caught the Spanish Far Eastern Squadron at anchor, quickly annihilated it, and, lacking troops to land and seize the Philippine capital, established a blockade of Manila. A German flotilla, larger than Dewey’s force, appeared and was responsible for minor infractions of international blockade regulations. When Dewey insisted on stopping German warships crossing his blockade line, Diederichs sent his Flag Lieutenant to the American flagship Olympia to protest. Dewey lost his temper. “Why, I shall stop each vessel whatever may be her colors!” he said. “And if she does not stop, I shall fire at her! And that means war, do you know, Sir? And I tell you, if Germany wants war, all right, we are ready.”

  In the years that followed, Dewey and Diederichs each became the senior officer of his respective navy. Each was convinced that war between the two countries was possible, but German contingency planning was far more thorough. After defeating the U.S. fleet off the east coast of the United States, Norfolk, Hampton Roads, and Newport News were to be occupied, after which the Germans would move up Chesapeake Bay toward Washington and Baltimore. “Unsparing, merciless assaults” would follow against New York City and Boston. Long Island was to be the springboard for attacks on New York, and Great Gull, Gardiner, Fishers, Plum, and Block islands were given special consideration. Brooklyn would be seized and Manhattan bombarded in an operation for which “2 to 3 battalions of infantry and 1 battalion of engineers seem fully sufficient.” There was no thought of penetrating farther inland; these blows to America’s seaboard population centers were considered enough to bring the nation to terms.

  The American war plan against Germany at the turn of the century never imagined the German army being landed on American soil. Instead, American planners expected a German naval assault in the Caribbean aimed at acquiring naval bases in the West Indies and colonies in South America. To meet this threat, the American Atlantic Fleet would concentrate in the Caribbean where the decisive battle would be fought. Given the problems a German fleet would face in crossing the Atlantic and in coaling upon arrival, the Navy Department—and especially Dewey—was confident of an American victory.

  This irrelevant strategy had not been updated since the outbreak of war in Europe, and in April 1917 the U.S. Navy was wholly unprepared for the battles it was about to fight.

  It was afflicted with a serious imbalance in warship types. It possessed fourteen modern dreadnought battleships, but only seventy-four destroyers. These were far too few to screen the dreadnoughts and still look after the navy’s twenty-three predreadnoughts, its ten armored cruisers, and its twenty-five light cruisers. No provision whatever had been made for destroyers doing convoy duty for merchant ships. This discrepancy was not entirely the navy’s fault. For years, the Navy Department had asked Congress for money to build four new destroyers to accompany the construction of each new battleship; every year Congress had appropriated money for only one or two. In 1917, the latest American destroyers were among the best in the world, but only fifty-one of the seventy-four in commission were modern. More new ships were under construction, but the same imbalance persisted: six dreadnoughts, ten light cruisers, and only ten destroyers.

  The American navy’s construction plans, like those of the German navy, had been victimized by the Dreadnought revolution. No president believed more passionately in sea power than Theodore Roosevelt, and during his eight years in office, the United States had laid down thirteen battleships. All became instantly obsolete with the commissioning of Jacky Fisher’s HMS Dreadnought. And when, at the end of his presidency, Roosevelt painted his new predreadnoughts white and sent them around the world to parade American naval power, the Great White Fleet served mainly to advertise its own obsolescence. Immediately, the Americans, like the Germans, responded to the British dreadnought by building their own. By December 1917, when Benson sent the battleships to Scapa Flow, fourteen American dreadnoughts were in commission.

  Even so, the four dreadnoughts sent to Europe were not America’s most modern. They were coal burners rather than oil burners and their selection was due, not to Benson’s reluctance to send his latest ships, but to the Royal Navy’s candid admission that, while it had ample coal, it could not pro-vide fuel oil for America’s new oil-burning battleships. In speed and armament, the four American ships sent were the equivalent of most of Beatty’s ships. Delaware, the oldest, was commissioned in 1910, carried ten 12-inch guns, and was capable of 21 knots. Florida, completed in 1911, and Wyoming, completed in 1912, carried twelve 12-inch. New York, commissioned in 1914, and her sister Texas, which stayed home, were the last coal-burning dreadnoughts in the U.S. Navy. The ten 14-inch guns of New York and Texas had leap-frogged the armament of the British 13.5-inch-gun battleships; they, in turn, had been leap-frogged by the British Queen Elizabeths and Resolutions with their eight 15-inch.

  Off the Newfoundland Grand Banks, the four American battleships bound for Europe encountered a ninety-mile-an-hour Atlantic gale. Gigantic seas battered the ships, crushed lifeboats, and sprang deck hatches. Tons of water poured into New York, putting her down by the bow with eight feet of water in her forward storerooms. When the storm-scarred ships entered Scapa Flow on the morning of December 7, 1917, a young American lieutenant on New York saw “a glorious golden dawn . . . hills blending with clouds, purple and gold. . . . When our anchors plunged into the flow, three mighty cheers went up from Beatty’s Queen Elizabeth.” Beatty himself was watching and raised his hat in salute. A few days later, this same American officer “climbed to the crest of a little island called Flotta to look over the great land-locked harbor. Spread out below me, swinging aimlessly to the whims of the eddying currents, lay the Grand Fleet.” And when his ship first sailed from Scapa Flow, “I came on deck in the morning in blazing sunrise and beheld a sight never to be forgotten. The Grand Fleet stretched before me, belching dense volumes of black smoke.”

  The American battleships were placed under the operational control of the Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Fleet and designated the 6th Battle Squadron. British flag signals, radio codes, tactical maneuvering orders, and fire-control methods were adopted and Royal Navy signalmen were lent to the American battleships to teach British methods. Less could be done to help American gunnery. Target practice in Pentland Firth revealed the difference between the veteran Briti
sh and the novice American ships. The Americans’ rate of fire and their accuracy were “distinctly poor and disappointing,” Beatty told the Admiralty. Nevertheless, he said, they were “desperately keen” and he would try not to hurry them too much.

  The American battleships and their crews, accustomed to the long blue swells of the Pacific, the cobalt waters of the Caribbean, and even the gray storms of the North Atlantic, were unprepared for the character of the North Sea. “It is not that it blows any harder in the North Sea than in many other parts of the world,” Rear Admiral Hugh Rodman, the commander of the American battleship force, wrote to Benson, “but that it seems to be almost continually blowing, shifting rapidly from one point of the compass to another and kicking up a rough cross sea. In addition there is a great deal of snow, hail, sleet and rain, often coupled with fog and mist.” In the Pentland Firth, with a strong tide running against the wind, the strong tidal currents and heavy seas pushed battleships a quarter mile out of position. The upper and main decks even of dreadnoughts were repeatedly smothered. “I have seen the largest battleships apparently sucked under until only the superstructures on the upper deck were visible when they would slowly rise from their submergence and the water pour off their decks as it might from some huge turtle . . . [coming] to the surface.”

  Personal relations between the British and American sailors were excellent. Rodman, a tall, blunt-spoken Kentuckian, noted for his amiability, his earthiness, and his excellent hand at bridge, had graduated sixty-first in a class of sixty-two from Annapolis, served with Admiral Dewey at Manila Bay, and earned a high reputation for seamanship. Beatty did his best to make the Americans feel welcome. When the fleet was in the Firth of Forth, Rodman and his senior captains were frequent guests at Aberdour House. At Scapa Flow, the Americans were allotted space for a baseball diamond. On the Fourth of July, Beatty gave the American battleships two days off and sent them to a separate cove in the Flow to celebrate. The Commander-in-Chief sent greetings on “this greatest of Liberty Days,” and many Grand Fleet admirals boarded New York to help celebrate. In relays, 200 men at a time from each American ship were allowed to go ashore. Most congregated at the Temperance Hotel in Kirkwall. Privately, Americans complained that British ships were “too cold for men brought up in American homes. They are likewise poorly ventilated by our standards. They do not go in for laundries and other labor-saving devices such as motor-driven dough mixers and potato peelers.” But British ships had one convenience American sailors envied: rum for the men and whiskey for the officers, both prohibited on ships of the U.S. Navy.