by Peter Hart
Admiral Sir John Jellicoe, HMS Iron Duke, Grand Fleet
He also outlined the cautious tactical approach he would take in any battle. Jellicoe was not willing to risk casting away the British global naval advantage for the sake of personal glory in combat.
If, for instance, the enemy battle fleet were to turn away from an advancing fleet, I should assume that the intention was to lead us over mines and submarines, and should decline to be so drawn. I desire particularly to draw the attention of Their Lordships to this point, since it may be deemed a refusal of battle, and, indeed, might possibly result in failure to bring the enemy to action as soon as is expected and hoped. Such a result would be absolutely repugnant to the feelings of all British naval officers and men, but with new and untried methods of warfare new tactics must be devised to meet them. I feel that such tactics, if not understood, may bring odium upon me, but so long as I have the confidence of their Lordships I intend to pursue what is, in my considered opinion, the proper course to defeat and annihilate the enemy’s battle fleet, without regard to uninstructed opinion or criticism. The situation is a difficult one. It is quite within the bounds of possibility that half our battle fleet might be disabled by underwater attack before the guns opened fire at all, if a false move is made, and I feel that I must constantly bear in mind the great probability of such attack and be prepared tactically to prevent its success.12
Admiral Sir John Jellicoe, HMS Iron Duke, Grand Fleet
This cautious approach was fully endorsed by the Admiralty on 7 November 1914. Jellicoe’s caution reveals that Tirpitz was entirely right in his frustration at the inactivity of the High Seas Fleet: the British did indeed fear the consequences of a pitched battle unless it was fought to their advantage within strictly and controlled circumstances. Meanwhile, the British utilised a potent combination of minefields, destroyers and the pre-dreadnoughts of the Channel Fleet based in the Medway, which effectively blocked off the English Channel. The German High Seas Fleet would be confined to the North Sea; that in consequence would be an area of contested waters, with neither side truly holding sway. But the rest of the oceans of the world would be relatively secure for British commerce and military expeditions – save only for the depredations of any German commerce-raiders. In view of this, many British officers were surprised by what they saw as the passive approach of the German Navy.
When your adversary is very quiet one is always inclined to think they are up to some very deep laid scheme and it is the same with us now. One never imagined that the German Battle Fleet would come out until they had endeavoured to reduce some of our superiority but we did imagine they would drive home attacks with destroyers, submarines and mines with all their might and that they would make a very determined attack on our commerce during the first few days of the war, but their attempts in all directions seem to have been very poor ones. For instance, one would have thought that they would have sent their battlecruisers out into the Atlantic because until we had discovered it they could have created a pretty kettle of fish as none of the cruisers we have on trade protection could either fight them or run from them. Even after they had been discovered it would have taken some time for our battlecruisers to have hunted them down.13
Commander Dudley Pound, HMS St Vincent, Grand Fleet
Although they did briefly consider such an operation, the Germans were not willing to sacrifice their battlecruisers and their crews on such a speculative venture. They would bide their time and hope the British would do something stupid.
In the absence of any great fleet actions, and with a constant drip of losses, the mood in the Royal Navy was somewhat despondent at this stage of the war. This was exacerbated by the difficulties encountered in dealing with the German commerce-raiders, the light cruisers Dresden, Karlsruhe and Leipzig, and the threatening German East Asiatic Squadron, commanded by the resourceful Vice Admiral Maximilian von Spee, consisting of the two armoured cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau accompanied by the light cruisers Nürnberg, Emden, Leipzig and Dresden. Assisted by a collection of colliers and supply ships, these ships would create havoc across the whole of the Pacific Ocean for several months, preying on the sea lanes and even threatening the troop convoys despatched from Australia and New Zealand. The detached exploits of the Emden, in particular, became the stuff of legend before she was sunk by the Sydney at the Cocos Islands on 9 November 1914. But von Spee’s greatest triumph came when he engaged the British South American Squadron (the armoured cruisers Good Hope and Monmouth, the light cruiser Glasgow and the auxiliary cruiser Otranto), commanded by Rear Admiral Sir Christopher Cradock, at the Battle of Coronel, off Chile, on 1 November 1914. Cradock had been pushed by Admiralty signals into a series of rash decisions, seeking action with a German squadron which was clearly stronger and able, once contact had been made, to use its superior speed and armament. The encounter was to prove short-lived. Cradock impotently tried to close the range to allow his out-gunned ships some chance to inflict damage, but to no avail as Lieutenant Knoop observed from the Scharnhorst.
In most cases hits by high explosive shells were immediately followed by outbreaks of fire. Twice I observed what I believed to be an explosion of ammunition. The flames shot up immediately after hits by high explosive shells and were distinguishable from the other fires by their dimensions and outline. Some hits, probably on the decks, sent up showers of sparks over a wide area. When armour was hit thick black clouds with sharp outlines were observed. Hits were so frequent that it was impossible to note them in chronological order. The Good Hope received serious hits in the fore part of the ship, on the upper bridge, on the mast about 30 feet above the deck, on the after side of the foretop, also hit repeatedly amidships, most of these causing fires. The after battery was hit several times and fires broke out. The flames in the interior of the ship could be seen through the portholes. Two shells struck the ship near the after turret. The Monmouth was hit on her fore 6-inch turret. The high explosive shell blew off the roof. A terrific explosion of charges must then have blown the whole turret off the forecastle for it disappeared completely. I observed that many shells struck the ship amidships. A huge column of fire, almost as high as the mast and 60 to 90 feet across, suddenly shot up on the starboard side. Between thirty and forty hits were counted in all. At times three or four fires were burning simultaneously.14
Lieutenant Ernst Knoop, SMS Scharnhorst, East Asiatic Squadron
It was a cruel battle in which both the Good Hope and the Monmouth were sunk with the loss of all hands. The Otranto had early on been told to make a run for it, while the Glasgow bore a charmed life, escaping with only minor damage. The Battle of Coronel demonstrated the brutal consequences of a one-sided naval battle. Yet von Spee was doomed, too. Knowing that he had little chance of ever getting back to Germany, he saw it as his duty to maximise the damage he could inflict before the inevitable British retaliation burst upon him. It would not take long.
At the Admiralty the First Sea Lord Prince Louis of Battenberg had been under increasing populist press attack over his German ancestry and had been replaced by Sir John Fisher, the fiery old controversialist and progenitor of the Dreadnought. He would prove a disastrous choice – a muddled mixture of irrationality, rashness and an increasing inability, at the age of seventy-three, to maintain a coherent line of thought that meant he was unable to resist the misguided enthusiasms of his combative First Lord Sir Winston Churchill. Ultimately both would fall together, mired in the disaster of the Gallipoli campaigns of 1915. But Fisher was seen to his best advantage in this early crisis: action was his watchword as he over-ruled Jellicoe’s protests and despatched not one, not two, but three battlecruisers to hunt down von Spee. The Princess Royal was sent from the Grand Fleet to guard the West Indies, while the Invincible and Inflexible were sent from the Mediterranean to the South Atlantic under the command of Vice Admiral Doveton Sturdee. Here, in company with a further three armoured cruisers (Carnarvon, Cornwall and Kent) and two light cruisers (Glas
gow and Bristol), they made their way to join the old pre-dreadnought Canopus at Port Stanley on the Falkland Islands which they reached early on the morning of 8 December 1914. And there they were busy coaling when von Spee arrived intent on destroying the harbour installations and any ships within it. For a moment, there may have been the theoretical opportunity for the Scharnhorst and the Gneisenau to rake the near-helpless British ships in harbour, but the beached Canopus fired a long-range salvo of 12-inch shells which, not unnaturally, panicked the Germans who could already see the distinctive tripod masts of the battlecruisers. Once they had sorted themselves out the British ships emerged to begin a long stern chase. The disparity of speed was such that it was only a matter of time before the Germans were reeled in one by one and destroyed.
This was a very bitter pill to swallow. We choked a little at the neck, the throat contracted and stiffened, for that meant a life and death grapple, or rather a fight ending in honourable death. The old law of naval warfare, which ordains that the less powerful and the less swift ships should be vanquished in free waters and in fine weather, was again to be exemplified in our case. It would have been vain to harbour the slightest illusion in this respect, for the sky remained clear; there was not the slightest cloud presaging bad weather to be seen, nor any wisp of fog to throw over us its friendly mantle and hide us from the enemy’s sight.15
Commander Hans Pochhammer, SMS Gneisenau, East Asiatic Squadron
During the battle that followed, von Spee played his poor hand as best he could. He freed his faster light cruisers to try and escape independently. Meanwhile, like Craddock before him, he struggled to close the range to enable his 8.2-inch guns to damage the mighty battlecruisers. But it was all for nothing and both his ships were steadily smashed to pieces.
As we passed the Scharnhorst we noticed that she lay deeper than usual heeled slightly to the larboard. There was a large hole in the fore end and a similar one in the quarter deck. Smoke was rising from the ship and flames were visible in the interior through shell holes and portholes. But her gun thundered incessantly; the starboard batteries now came into action and brought fresh force into the fray. But it looked as if her fate was sealed. She moved more slowly in the water and suffered considerably under the hail of enemy shells. The Admiral must have felt that his ship was nearing her end. Just as he had previously sacrificed his armoured cruisers to save his light cruisers, so he proposed to sacrifice the Scharnhorst to save the Gneisenau. Determined to get the last ounce out of his resources and to fight as long as he could float, and in this way facilitate the escape of our ship, he swung round to the enemy on the starboard in the hope of damaging him by firing torpedoes! The water had now risen to the fore upper deck. Fires were raging fore and aft, but the Admiral’s flag floated proudly from the foremast, as also did the battle flags from the after mast and the gaff. The Scharnhorst gradually heeled over to larboard, and her bows became more and more submerged. Her fore turret was about six and a half feet above the water when it fired its last shot, then – the screws revolved in the air and the ship swiftly slid head first into the abyss.16
Commander Hans Pochhammer, SMS Gneisenau, East Asiatic Squadron
The Scharnhorst went down with the gallant admiral and all hands. Then it was the turn of the Gneisenau.
I felt the ship giving way under me. I heard the roaring and surging of the water come nearer and nearer, and was filled with the idea that I should be very cold. When the upper deck was submerged the speed at which the ship was capsizing somewhat diminished, owing to the resistance set up, and then the ship continued to turn on her axis. The sea invaded a corner of the bridge, caught me and those who were with me and tossed us away, a movement which I involuntarily accelerated by a vigorous push off. I was caught up by a whirlpool and dragged into an abyss. The water eddied and murmured around me and droned in my ears. But even before suffering from loss of breath I felt as if I were being drawn upwards by invisible hands. I opened my eyes and noticed it was brighter, ‘Keep cool!’ I thought to myself and then began to strike out. I came to the surface. The sea was heaving. The swell was due partly to the wind, which must have sprung up in the late afternoon, and partly to the displacement of water produced by the capsizing of our ship. The latter I saw a hundred or so yards away, her keel in the air. The red paint on her bottom glistened in the sunset.17
Commander Hans Pochhammer, SMS Gneisenau, East Asiatic Squadron
In the end Pochhammer and some 200 of his men were saved from the Gneisenau. The light cruisers Nürnberg and Leipzig were also overhauled and sank, although the Dresden escaped, to be eventually sunk by the vengeful Glasgow on 14 March 1915. The Battle of the Falklands was of little significance other than in restoring the damage to its reputation suffered by the Royal Navy at the Battle of Coronel a month earlier. In a sense, Admiral von Spee and his men were already doomed from the moment they commenced their mission: far from home, with finite resources, sailing the seas with their enemies all around them. Their conduct was a tribute to the spirit that had been engendered within the German Navy.
MEANWHILE, VON INGENOHL was tempted by the evident absence of British battlecruisers in the hunt for von Spee to launch a series of raids on the east coast of Britain. These raids were intended to provoke an unconsidered response from the British that might allow the chance of isolating and destroying elements of the Grand Fleet. Since October, Beatty’s 1st Battlecruiser Squadron had been based at Cromarty in northern Scotland and so was the most promising candidate for a German ambush. Yet the British did have one huge theoretical advantage in this game of cat and mouse. Unknown to the Germans, their secret naval ciphers had been passed to the Admiralty by the Russians after they had been recovered from the wreck of the Magdeburg on 26 August 1914. A special department was set up to decode the German signals and to follow the constant permutations and changes of codes adopted by the Germans over the years that followed. Known as Room 40, it was augmented by the use of wireless directional stations dotted along the east coast that could identify the location of German units by taking cross-bearings on any wireless traffic.
The first German tip and run raid on Yarmouth, made on 3 November, came too early for Room 40. For the next raid, on 16 December, von Ingenohl planned a bombardment of British east coast towns by the battlecruisers of the 1st Scouting Force commanded by Admiral Franz von Hipper, with the further intention of trying to draw Jellicoe into a freshly laid minefield. Two days before it happened, the Admiralty were notified by Room 40 of the imminent raid, but the intelligence proved more of a hazard than a boon to Jellicoe. The Admiralty did not realise that Hipper would be supported by the whole of the High Seas Fleet and interfered in Jellicoe’s dispositions to insist that he deploy just Beatty’s four battlecruisers and the six dreadnoughts of the 2nd Battle Squadron with accompanying light forces. Both sides were attempting to trap the other, but in the circumstances of bad weather and poor visibility the operations were inconclusive – except for the people of Scarborough, Hartlepool and Whitby, who found the German shells crashing down on them. In the end von Ingenohl lacked the nerve to close the trap. At the first reports of fighting between the respective destroyer screens he reversed his course towards Germany, thereby abandoning Hipper to his fate. However, Beatty missed any chance to come to grips with Hipper’s battlecruisers, in circumstances of deep confusion exacerbated by unclear signals from Beatty aboard his flagship Lion that allowed Hipper to escape unscathed. It had been a mutually unsatisfying non-event and yet both Hipper and Beatty had come close to disaster. How close was not necessarily appreciated at the time.
The immediate consequence was an outcry in the British popular press over the Navy’s apparent inability to prevent these raids on British coastal towns. Although, in truth, there was little the Admiralty could do. The North Sea was not controlled by the Royal Navy – this was the penalty for the distant blockade – and so all that could be done was to move Beatty to a new base at Rosyth in the Firth of Forth to all
ow a slightly quicker response should Room 40 give warning of another raid.
He did not have long to wait. On 23 January 1915, Room 40 divined that Hipper and the 1st Scouting Group (Seydlitz, Moltke, Derfflinger and Blücher) would be emerging at 17.45 that very day. The intercepted signals did not make it clear what the Germans were about to do, so it was assumed that they were intent on another coastal raid. In fact Hipper was planning to entrap and destroy the British light forces operating in the Dogger Bank region but, as prior intelligence goes, it was still pure gold. Once again the Admiralty acted with an unwarranted degree of over-confidence. Beatty and Tyrwhitt’s Harwich Force was despatched to intercept Hipper, but without the close support of Jellicoe’s fleet. Thus Beatty sailed with the 1st Battlecruiser Squadron (the Lion, Tiger, Princess Royal), the 2nd Battlecruiser Squadron (the older New Zealand and Indomitable), the dubious support of the pre-dreadnoughts of the 3rd Battle Squadron, the 1st Light Cruiser Squadron and the usual screening destroyers. He intended to rendezvous with the Harwich Force near Dogger Bank at 07.00 on 24 January. Soon after, the light screens of both forces clashed and Hipper, astutely recognising what was happening, bolted for home. Beatty and his battlecruisers began a grim stern chase, seeking to overhaul and destroy their adversaries. Gradually the faster Lion, Tiger and Princess Royal began to get within range, until the Lion opened fire, at about 20,000 yards, concentrating initially on the rear ship, the hybrid battlecruiser Blücher, which was slightly lagging behind. From this promising position everything began to go wrong for Beatty. Insufficiently clear signals from his flagship led to confusion in the distribution of the fire from his battlecruisers. This was further exacerbated by appalling standards of gunnery which to some extent meant that the British superiority in numbers was discounted.