Castles of Steel

by Robert K. Massie

  On February 5, Beatty wrote to Ethel, “I am sending old Rodman out on an operation of his own which pleases him and gives them an idea that they are really taking part in the war. I trust they will come to no harm.” The following day, February 6, the 6th Battle Squadron took its first turn at escorting a convoy to Norway. The four American battleships left the “lavender, snow-powdered hills” of Scapa Flow with a squadron of British light cruisers and screening destroyers, all under Rodman’s command. At sea, wrote the young American officer, “the atmosphere was crystal clear, seeming to magnify each star a dozen times.” In the middle of the night, “the north burst into a brilliant arc of light, and moving streamers. A magnificent display of the aurora borealis followed, rolling its curtains of delicate fire across a surface of reflected brilliance. Against this arc, our ships stand out silhouetted sharply black.” Next day, the rising mist revealed “the coast of Norway: against a wall of snow-capped mountains backing up its jagged cliffs.” Having delivered the convoy’s thirty merchant vessels and while waiting to pick up a return convoy, Rodman’s ships were attacked by submarines—or so they believed. Three of the four battleships reported seeing periscopes and torpedo wakes. Wyoming’s captain was unconvinced that submarines had been present, and a British destroyer reported porpoises. Rodman, however, was certain that his ships had been attacked and officially reported two torpedoes fired at Florida and two at Delaware. After the war, German naval records revealed that no U-boat had attacked battleships that day off the Norwegian coast.

  Returning to Scapa Flow, the 6th Battle Squadron was augmented by the arrival of the battleship Texas, New York’s sister. This addition resulted from Rodman’s request for a fifth battleship so that his division could maintain a constant four-ship strength and still allow for repair and refit. Texas, trying her gunnery, proved inferior to the four ships that had spent two months with the Grand Fleet. Although Texas had won an Atlantic Fleet gunnery trophy, Rodman grumbled, “she was not ready to fire under wartime conditions.”

  On March 8, it was again the Americans’ turn to escort the Scandinavian convoy and Rodman put to sea with four battleships, five light cruisers, and twelve destroyers. Again, the convoy was delivered and Rodman waited through the night to pick up the returning convoy. A thick fog at dawn made the rendezvous difficult to manage and several big ships narrowly escaped collision. Three of the four battleships were separated and did not rejoin until morning. Once again, Florida and Delaware reported periscopes. On April 17, the Americans sailed on their last convoy assignment. Again, they had bad luck. Texas reported a periscope, which no one else saw. A gale came up, pushing merchantmen and escorts here and there, and when the wind died, the scattered convoy stretched across the sea for sixty miles.

  Gradually, the gunnery of the American battleships improved. By June, after six months in the North Sea, Rodman reported the firing as “exceptionally fine, much better than we have ever done previously.” Beatty did not agree. Because of the American ships’ poor performance and the permanent absence of one Grand Fleet battleship division off escorting the Scandinavian convoys, he never permitted release of the three Superbs which the American dreadnoughts had been brought over to replace. The Commander-in-Chief, according to one of his staff officers, still considered the American ships “rather as an incubus to the Grand Fleet than otherwise. They have not even yet been assimilated to a sufficient degree to be considered the equivalent to British dreadnoughts, yet for political reasons he [Beatty] does not care that the Grand Fleet should go to sea without them.” At sea the 6th Battle Squadron was always stationed last in line, “where they were least likely to interfere with the movements of the fleet.”

  On July 29, the battleship Arkansas, a sister of Wyoming, arrived to relieve Delaware, which returned to Hampton Roads. In target practice, Arkansas was every bit as poor as the other American battleships had been when they arrived. By November 9, 1918, she was coping with another enemy: she had 259 influenza cases on board, and eleven men died.

  During the summer of 1918, three more American dreadnought battleships arrived in Europe. The Admiralty and the Navy Department feared that the German Naval Staff might send one or more fast battle cruisers into the North Atlantic to attack troop transports crowded with American soldiers. If the 27-knot Derfflinger could place herself in the midst of a troop convoy, thousands of American soldiers would drown. To protect the convoys, the new oil-burning dreadnoughts Nevada and Oklahoma, along with the coal-burning Utah, were ordered to Berehaven, Ireland. The three dreadnoughts at Berehaven were under American, not British, operational control, but they had been assigned no screening destroyers. Meanwhile, thirty-four American destroyers commanded by the British admiral Lewis Bayly were based at Queenstown, 100 miles away. Before the American battleships could go to sea, therefore, their admiral had to borrow American destroyers from Bayly. For tactical, not national, reasons, Bayly was reluctant. He agreed that the battleships must be screened in submarine-infested waters, but he also feared the disruption of his finely tuned convoy assignments. He promised to do his best and managed from time to time to loan destroyers for the battleships to go to sea for gunnery practice. Only once, on October 14 when two troop convoys were entering the danger zone, was a real alert sounded for a surface raider. The three American battleships put to sea escorted by seven American destroyers. No raider appeared.

  During the war, nine American dreadnoughts served in European waters; six with the Grand Fleet, three at Berehaven. Two more, Pennsylvania and Arizona, came over after the armistice.

  [Utah, Oklahoma, and Arizona, along with West Virginia, were sunk at Pearl Harbor, and Pennsylvania, New Mexico, Mississippi, Colorado, and Tennessee were severely damaged. Nevada escaped sinking only because she was able to get under way and her captain ran her aground. All of these ships except Utah, Oklahoma, and Arizona were repaired or raised and rebuilt in time to participate in the ultimate defeat of Japan.]

  None of these American dreadnoughts ever met the High Seas Fleet. But neither, after Jutland, did any British dreadnought.

  Americans from the president on down wanted the war to end quickly, and they were not put off by convention, effort, or expense. One grandiose American proposal was the complete sealing off of the North Sea by a barrier from Scotland to Norway to block the passage of submarines. Some American engineers made the preposterous suggestion that this be achieved by building a massive stone breakwater 230 miles long and 300 to 900 feet deep. On May 10, 1917, the British naval mission in Washington heard another grand-scale proposal involving a vast webbing of mines and nets that would stretch across the same area. Reporting to the Admiralty, the mission said that the “United States is prepared to bear the cost and maintain the barrier with necessary small craft. . . . This scheme involves the violation of Norwegian territorial waters concerning which the Foreign Office could express opinion. A formal protest by Norwegian government is probable but there is strong feeling here that it should be overridden.” The plan’s strongest advocate was Franklin D. Roosevelt, the enthusiastic assistant secretary of the Navy. “It is physically quite possible to construct a thousand miles of nets two hundred feet in depth,” Roosevelt urged. “It is also perfectly possible to construct 500,000 mines. The cost of manufacturing, transporting and installing 1,000 miles of net and 500,000 mines has been variously estimated at from $200,000,000 to $500,000,000. The Allied governments can well afford the expenditure if only in comparison with the value of the merchant tonnage sunk during the first five months of the present year.”

  The Admiralty was appalled. The distance, the depth of the water, the effect of storms and strong currents on mine anchors and tethers, the amount of material required, the impossibility of finding ships to bring these materials from America—all made the gargantuan proposal appear inconceivable. But Roosevelt and the Americans did not give up. In September 1917, during his visit to London, Admiral Mayo raised the idea again. This time, the Admiralty was willing to discuss t
he project, although more in an effort to conciliate the Americans than because of a genuine conversion. Finally, in October, the Admiralty approved what was to be called the Northern Barrage, providing the Americans supplied the mines and most of the mine-layers.

  The American navy went to work. In mid-October, the Navy Department awarded a contract for 100,000 mines. Four months later, on March 3, 1918, the first mines of the Northern Barrage splashed into the North Sea. The minefield, divided into British and American zones, was 230 miles long and 30 miles wide. Over this expanse, 15 rows of mines were laid; the mines were set 100 yards apart at depths of 45, 160, and 240 feet. Through the spring, summer, and fall of 1918, minelaying continued and, although the armistice came before the Northern Barrage was complete, over 70,000 mines were laid—56,571 by the Americans, 13,546 by the British. The cost was $40 million. The problem of Norway was never solved. British and American patrols often saw U-boats using Norwegian coastal waters and Wemyss advised the War Cabinet that “U.S. naval authorities realise that the results of their exertions in production and laying a vast quantity of mines are largely reduced by the inertia of Norway.” Norway, nevertheless, remained unwilling to prevent U-boats from using her territorial waters, either by mining them herself or by allowing the Allies to do so.

  The Northern Barrage did not close the North Sea to U-boat passage; submarines traveled back and forth at a rate of thirty or forty a month. The toll taken by the Barrage is uncertain. Only four submarines are known to have been destroyed. One was U-156, a large Deutschland-class minelayer returning from the U.S. East Coast, where one of her mines had sunk the American cruiser San Diego; her fate was assumed from the fact that her captain signaled his base that he was approaching the Barrage and would signal again once he was through; he and his boat were never heard from again. Sims believed that at least four more submarines had been sunk and six seriously damaged crossing the Barrage; German naval records do not support this belief.

  In the summer of 1918, seven large Deutschland-class U-boats appeared off the Eastern Seaboard of North America, assigned to mine convoy assembly points and attack unescorted shipping. Mines were laid from Newfoundland to Cape Hatteras, with particular attention paid to the entrance to Chesapeake Bay. The campaign sank 110,000 tons of merchant shipping and the obsolete American armored cruiser San Diego. An eleven-year-old, 14,000-ton ship with a crew of 1,250, San Diego had been escorting troop convoys across the Atlantic. Her value in this line of work is difficult to imagine; against a submerged U-boat, she could do nothing; had she been asked to confront Derfflinger or any other German battle cruiser sent into the North Atlantic, her lot would have been martyrdom. Even so, on the morning of July 19, 1918, San Diego was steaming down the Long Island coast bound for New York to pick up a convoy. Off Fire Island, the ship struck a mine laid by U-156, sank rapidly, and left more than a thousand men bobbing in the water. Because the coast was nearby, many rescue vessels arrived quickly and only six lives were lost. San Diego was the only large American warship lost during the war.

  The U.S. Navy played a major role in transporting over 2 million American soldiers to Europe. By June 1918, American troops were pouring into France at the rate of 300,000 a month. The safety of their troop convoys lay in a combination of speed and heavy escort: troopships never moved at less than 12 knots; many reached 15; and the big ocean-liner greyhounds reached 22 and more—all far beyond the speed of a submerged submarine. In addition, a convoy of four or five large troopships would be surrounded by as many as ten or twelve destroyers. Under these conditions, the U-boats were as ineffective as they had been against Grand Fleet dreadnoughts in the North Sea.

  More than half of the vessels carrying the soldiers were British or—ironically—German. Before the war, Americans going abroad were ac-customed to traveling on European ocean liners and few large American passenger ships had been built. The great British liners—Aquitania, Mauretania, and Olympic—became troop transports. And within hours of the declaration of war, the U.S. Coast Guard seized all North German Lloyd and Hamburg-America vessels interned in American harbors. Among these were several prewar luxury liners, including the world’s largest, the giant 52,000-ton Vaterland, which, renamed Leviathan, became a U.S. Navy troop transport. By “hot bunking”—assigning one bunk to two men, each man having ownership for twelve hours—the ship’s capacity was doubled and Leviathan carried 8,000 or 9,000 soldiers to Europe on every voyage. Other German ships were given new names and pressed into service: Cincinnati became Covington, Kronprinzessin Cecilie became Mount Vernon, Kaiser Wilhelm II became Agamemnon. The German liner President Lincoln kept its original name.

  The U-boats’ mission was to sink these British and former German ships filled with seasick young Americans. Only one was sunk carrying soldiers to France. This was the transport Tuscania, torpedoed on February 5, 1918, off the coast of Ireland with 2,179 American soldiers on board, mostly National Guardsmen from Michigan and Wisconsin. One hundred sixty-six soldiers drowned, along with forty-four members of the British crew. The toll of troopships returning to North America was heavier. President Lincoln was torpedoed, westbound from France to the United States, with 715 men on board including sick and wounded soldiers, two of them completely paralyzed. All were evacuated into lifeboats and picked up fifteen hours later by two American destroyers, which had raced 275 miles at 25 knots. Twenty-seven crewmen died; all of the soldiers were saved. The troopship Covington, returning home from Brest, went down with a loss of seven men. Antilles went down with sixty-seven men, Moldavia with fifty-six, and Ticonderoga with 215. Mount Vernon, the former Kronprinzessin Cecilie, was attacked when she was homeward bound and carrying 350 sick and wounded soldiers, 150 of whom were unable to move. Thirty-five sailors were killed by a torpedo explosion and the ship settled ten feet deeper in the water. But she did not sink. One troop transport struck back. On the night of May 12, 1918, the giant White Star liner Olympic, sister of Titanic, crammed with American soldiers, sighted U-103 on the surface. Making 24 knots, Olympic rammed the submarine and cut her in half.

  In every war, there is a last man killed in action; in naval war, a last ship sunk in battle. In the Great War, the last sinking on each side involved a submarine, first as victim, then as assailant. On October 25, 1918, two weeks before the armistice was signed, UB-116 sailed from Heligoland carrying eleven torpedoes; Captain Hans-Joachim Emsmann’s intention was to enter Scapa Flow and torpedo as many moored battleships as he could. Unfortunately, Emsmann was badly advised on two counts. Six months earlier, the Grand Fleet had moved south to the Firth of Forth. In addition, Hoxa Sound, which he had been told was unguarded, was defended by hydrophones, which picked up the sound of approaching ships; by seabed cables, which caused a galvanometer needle to flick when an electric current was induced by the magnetic field of a crossing vessel; and by mines, which could be detonated electrically from the shore. This combination of defenses was too much for Emsmann to overcome and UB-116 was efficiently and suddenly destroyed.

  The last British warship sunk was Britannia, a predreadnought battleship of the 16,500-ton King Edward VII class. Bound for Gibraltar on the morning of November 9, 1918—two days before the armistice was signed—the ship saw and managed to avoid two torpedoes before being struck by a third. She went down slowly and her crew was taken off by escorting destroyers. Three hours later, the battleship sank. From her resting place on the ocean floor, the nearest point of land is Cape Trafalgar.

  CHAPTER 38 Finis Germaniae

  The German gamble to win the war with an unrestricted U-boat offensive had failed. Britain did not starve and sue for peace, America joined the Allies, the blockade continued to reap its grim toll, and Germany was on the brink of physical and psychological exhaustion. Then, unexpectedly, the German Supreme Command was given one last chance. After the fall of the tsar, the provisional government had kept Russia in the war for another eight months, but the success of the Bolshevik coup d’état in November 1917 led to Russia’
s surrender. A million German and Austrian troops including fifty divisions of veteran infantry were released from the Eastern Front, and Ludendorff was offered another opportunity. Through the winter, trains carrying hundreds of thousands of German soldiers and 3,000 guns rumbled west across Germany. In the spring, for the first time since August 1914, the German army would have approximate numerical parity with the Allies on the Western Front. But this equivalence would be only temporary. Once the masses of American infantry now assembling in their training camps at home were transported across the Atlantic, the advantage Germany had gained by the defeat of Russia would be eliminated. It was clear to Ludendorff that he must strike before the Americans arrived.

  In January 1918, on the eve of this last great German offensive, 6.5 million men faced one another on the Western Front. Allied soldiers numbered 3.9 million: 2.6 million French, 1.2 million British and empire troops, and 100,000 Belgians. Facing them were 2.5 million Germans, but by March 1918, with the addition of the million soldiers brought from the Russian front, Ludendorff would have 3.5 million men. The date set for the attack was March 21 and the kaiser assumed a victory. “If an English delegation came to sue for peace,” he told his entourage, “it must first kneel before the German imperial standard, for this is a victory of monarchy over democracy.”