The Making of Modern Britain

by Andrew Marr

  Though it is called the Battle of Jutland, it happened right in the middle of the North Sea, about 100 miles south of Norway, and a little more than that from the Danish (Jutland) coast. Scheer had sent his second-in-command, Admiral Hipper, with forty ships to lure out the British; he followed behind with the main German High Seas Fleet to close the trap. Jellicoe and Beatty had some advance warning. Thanks to a German ship running aground and being taken by Russians, and another being boarded off Australia, the British had access to their enemy’s most secret naval codes, which were collected and interpreted by a secret team of boffins in the Admiralty’s Room 40. Luckily for Scheer and Hipper, the Royal Navy was too contemptuous of the civilian code-breakers and too suspicious of the messages to use their advantage well, but it did allow the British fleets to head out to meet the Germans, knowing that this was indeed the long-awaited breakout. The fleets on both sides were enormous, with the Dreadnought battleships at their core and huge flanks of smaller vessels. This would be a Somme on the high seas. As one naval historian has written: ‘Now, on both sides, the orders were given. Fifty-eight moving castles of grey steel – thirty-seven under one flag, twenty-one under another, the dreadnoughts of the two greatest navies in the world – were about to collide.’81

  The full story of the battle is too complicated to be told here. In essence, the smaller British fleet, led by Beatty with his battle-cruisers, met Hipper coming north, and in a furious engagement came off worse, with two of Britain’s finest ships blown to pieces. The German gunnery was better and the German ships were better protected, and could absorb more punishment: as Beatty put it in the middle of the fight, ‘There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today.’ At this stage, the Germans did not know that Jellicoe, with his far larger force, was heading towards them, and as he sailed back north, much bloodied, Beatty was able to lead not only Hipper but also Scheer, with his main force, straight towards Jellicoe. The full force of the Royal Navy’s Dreadnoughts inflicted such damage on the German navy that they could stand it for only a few minutes. Then Scheer performed a brilliant parade-ground manoeuvre and turned his ships away at such speed the British admirals did not know what was happening. Oddly, Scheer then turned and attacked again, taking further appalling punishment. As he finally decided to flee, he loosed his destroyers with their torpedoes at the British battleships. Jellicoe responded by turning his battleships round so they presented their sterns to the torpedoes, and managed not to lose a single ship. The price was that he had let the badly mauled Germans get away, and he never found them again, since they sliced through a weaker British force by night and made it back to harbour. Jellicoe was endlessly attacked for this un-Nelsonlike behaviour – the navy’s tradition was to attack, attack, attack – but he had always argued that since Britain had command of the seas, he could not risk his main force. By the time the British Grand Fleet returned to Scotland, the centre of the North Sea was covered with oil, corpses, wreckage and acres of dead fish, killed by the explosions.

  Both navies had performed astonishing acts of heroism. Some of the most damaged German cruisers had engaged in a semi-suicidal death charge against the British battleships to help the rest of their fleet escape. Later, tiny British destroyers behaved equally recklessly in attacking German Dreadnoughts, even ramming them – something akin to a soldier trying to knock over a tank. There were bad tactical mistakes on both sides, not helped by great confusion about what was actually happening. The British had seaplanes as spotters, and the Germans their Zeppelins, but the weather allowed neither to operate. Just as on land, the commanders had only a vague notion for much of the time about what was happening in the thick of fighting. By the standards of a day in Flanders, the numbers killed or wounded were small – 6,768 on the British side, and a little over 3,000 on the German. The Royal Navy lost six cruisers of different types, and eight destroyers, fourteen ships sunk to the loss of eleven German ships. Like the Somme or Ypres, there was no breakthrough, rather the appearance of deadlock – but here too, the battle affected the course of the wider war.

  In Germany, when Scheer’s fleet returned home, it was treated as a great national victory, with flags, a national holiday and German newspapers trumpeting the ‘annihilation’ of the British. In Britain, partly because of confusion and censorship, the German verdict was initially accepted and there was deep gloom. Flags were lowered to half mast. Theatres had their lights turned out. The two British admirals, Jellicoe and Beatty, began a long war by proxy about which was more to blame. At Jutland, both Jellicoe and Beatty had made major mistakes, though Jellicoe was treated worse and felt it more – Beatty was a far more astute and apparently dashing manipulator of the media. Yet the Germans had made as many mistakes and, in the end, theirs was the fleet unable to sail again, while the Royal Navy was prepared and waiting for the next confrontation within four days of returning. Jutland was not pointless. Had Britain won, she would have been able to dominate the Baltic as well as the North Sea, supporting Russia, and perhaps the outcome of the 1917 revolution would have been different. Had Germany won the battle, she would probably have won the war.

  Her next move at sea very nearly did win her the war. From the start, naval strategists on both sides knew that mines, torpedoes and submarines were changing war at sea – making it far harder, for instance, for surface ships to sail up and down blockading ports. Fisher had been an early advocate of submarines, though there was much naval hostility to such an ‘under-handed’ way of fighting and one admiral proposed that any submarine crews caught should be hanged as pirates. Germany, meanwhile, had been slow to develop submarines and in the early stages of the war was sceptical about these unhealthy little craft. But when in September 1914 a single small submarine, U-9, sank three British cruisers, killing 1,400 men, there was national jubilation and the reputation of the U-boat was made. The strategy of starving Britain, not only of food but of fuel and raw materials, was a reasonable one for the Germans – and the British blockade was simultaneously trying to do the same to them. But to be effective they must sink not only British ships but any ships sailing into British ports, including famously the liner Lusitania.

  This was one of the great Cunarders, fast enough to have won a Blue Riband for her pre-war darts across the Atlantic, and in May 1915 she was carrying 1,262 passengers from the United States, mostly British but also many Americans. What was not advertised was that in her hold she was also carrying shells, rifle cartridges and high explosives for the war. Caught by U-20 ten miles off the south coast of Ireland, she was torpedoed and sank so fast the lifeboats were mostly useless. Just over 1,200 people died, including ninety-four children, a third of them babies. Also among the dead were 128 American citizens. Photographs of the drowned children helped cause a wave of anger and revulsion, though in Germany the sinking was hailed as a triumph. A fierce propaganda fight about the rights and wrongs of the sinking began. American opinion was outraged and President Woodrow Wilson expressed deep anger, enough to persuade the Kaiser to change the rules for U-boats, in turn angering the German admirals. A medal struck by an obscure German in Munich commemorating the sinking was copied by an American in London, Gordon Selfridge – the owner of the famous Oxford Street shop. He produced 300,000 of them as a memento of German barbarism. To keep the United States out of the war, the Germans moderated their attacks through the rest of 1915. The following year, determined to try to strangle the British supply route for most of their food, the U-boat campaign was stepped up again. Almost inevitably more Americans were drowned. Wilson became more threatening still and again the Kaiser ordered the U-boats to attack cargo ships only in special circumstances. Scheer, newly appointed to command the High Seas Fleet, was so angry he ordered all U-boats back to base.

  Through 1916 relations between the Germans and the Americans improved. Wilson won re-election to the White House on his success in keeping the United States out of the war. There were continued arguments about the high seas, but the U-boats were restri
cted in their work. It was over the winter of 1916–17 that things changed. Germany was by now hard pressed, shorter in manpower than her enemies and with hunger biting hard into the civilian population. The country was short of coal, oil and meat. The potato harvest had failed, meaning that even that staple had to be rationed. Starvation beckoned; the Austrians were warning that hunger and revolution were marching together. It was obvious that not only was the British blockade working, but also that Germany’s enemies were winning because their war-making supplies of food, oil, cotton, iron, wood, horses and ammunition were coming across the Atlantic from America. ‘Unleash the U-boats’ became the cry. The problem, of course, was that doing so with sufficient ferocity to drive Britain out of the war would almost certainly mean dragging America into the war. The gamble depended upon either the United States somehow being deflected or persuaded not to declare war or, more likely, on the submarine campaign being so successful that by the time US armies had been assembled the British would be beaten and the Atlantic controlled by Germany. Rolling such dice may seem wild, but by then Germany was running out of options. The two warlords, the old Junker-general Hindenburg and his second-in-command Ludendorff, who would later help Hitler towards power, were rising in influence. The Kaiser’s oldest adviser, his chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg, who was more cautious, was losing ground.

  In December 1916 the head of the navy, Admiral Henning von Holtzendorff, told Hindenburg and the other warlords that it was only because of ‘the energy and force of England’ that France and Italy were still fighting: ‘If we can break England’s back, the war will be immediately decided in our favour.’82 The backbone was her shipping: 10.75 million tons of shipping, much of it neutral, was needed to keep Britain in business. Holtzendorff reckoned the U-boats could sink 600,000 tons of ships a month and put off another million tons. A properly unrestricted campaign could put Britain out of the war in five months – that is, by the summer of 1917. To do that would mean sinking without warning any ship trying to get to or from Britain, American ones included. The decision to go ahead was taken in a remote Silesian castle, despite Bethmann-Hollweg’s entreaties, and on 31 January 1917 Germany announced that unrestricted attacks by her U-boats would begin the following day. These were now formidable craft, some 140 of them, with sixteen torpedoes apiece, able to stay at sea for up to six weeks and to travel under water for eighty miles at a time. Soon liners and cargo ships were exploding and sinking in large numbers, killing Americans, as well as British, Scandinavians, Dutch and others. Even then, America might have stayed out, confining herself to outraged protests. The Germans, however, did something spectacularly stupid. They intrigued to draw Mexico into a war with the US, promising her Texas, New Mexico and Arizona. The ‘Zimmermann telegram’ – named after the foreign minister who sent it – was sent via Washington, decoded in the Admiralty’s Room 40 and passed to President Wilson, who promptly declared war. Now it was a race to the finish: could the U-boats defeat Britain before American intervention changed everything?

  It was a very close-run thing. Within weeks the Germans’ target for sinkings was being approached and by April it had been easily beaten – not 600,000 tons of shipping sent to the bottom but 860,000 tons. It was a true slaughter of merchant shipping and, before long, Britain was running out of fuel oil, sugar and many foods. A series of desperate remedies was tried. At sea there had been some success with ‘Q-ships’, which had been disguised to look like unarmed merchantmen but which carried guns to ambush the U-boats when they came to the surface. This involved a lethal pantomime in which Royal Navy sailors and officers pretended to be panicking Dutch or Norwegian sailors, with some abandoning ship while others stayed hidden behind, often having to endure shelling from a U-boat to maintain the illusion, until the trap was sprung. But although a dozen U-boats were destroyed in this way, the ruse depended on their captains deciding to save torpedoes and blow up the merchantmen after surfacing, and by the summer of 1917 the U-boat captains had learned their lesson and were sticking to surprise and torpedoes. Another answer was simply to hunt round the world for extra ships – all sorts of ancient rust-buckets and unlikely vessels were bought and sent across the Atlantic to brave the U-boats. Another was to build more ships in Britain, and that happened. A new Shipping Ministry took control of all British merchant ships, another blow to laissez-faire. New weapons, including better underwater listening devices and depth charges, were developed. Destroyers were taken from the main fleets and used to patrol the most dangerous approaches. Yet none of this was enough to stem the rate of losses. By the early summer of 1917, as the short nights gave the U-boats even more opportunity for carnage, it looked as if Britain would have to sue for peace.

  What saved Britain was a simple case of lateral thinking. Admiralty strategy had long been clear: convoys did not work. The merchant ships were too slow and ill captained to hold together in convoy and could not make the necessary joint manoeuvres. Most obvious of all, the convoy, being big, made too easy a target for a U-boat. As the Admiralty itself said in January 1917: ‘It is evident that the larger the number of ships forming the convoy, the greater is the chance of the submarine being enabled to attack successfully.’83 Finally, there were too few destroyers to protect every convoy every mile of the way. Yet there was something odd about this thinking. The navy itself used convoys very successfully. It used them to transport men across the Channel, losing very few ships to U-boats, and it used them when its own fleets of Dreadnoughts set out, surrounded by a protective ring of destroyers. Inside government, the argument for trying convoys began to grow, with Lloyd George and Hankey pitted against the traditionalists. And almost as soon as the convoy system was used, the U-boats’ toll started to fall. For the final piece of the intellectual jigsaw was now clear. Convoys might be larger than individual ships, but in the context of the vast space of the ocean, this was really irrelevant. A U-boat looking for prey was almost as likely to miss a convoy as to miss a ship. But with huge numbers of scattered ships, it was likely to come across one of them. If it missed the convoy, it missed scores. And even if it came upon the convoy, there would be little time to fire more than one or two torpedoes, which in any case became more dangerous because of the destroyers. The answer was simple and effective. The U-boat threat never went away, but never again was it so lethal. American destroyers now joined British ones and Germany’s last best chance of victory disappeared. There would be titanic battles in France to come, including a final German break-out towards Paris; but once the Atlantic lifeline was secure, and once the Americans were in the war, there could be only one outcome. Yet at home, this was little understood.

  The Women’s War

  The attempted strangling of Britain had made one thing plain: women could not be excluded from a modern economy or state. When the war started, the suffragettes were still in full revolt. More than a thousand had been imprisoned and the leaders of the WSPU were mostly either in jail or on the run. Both Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst were taking refuge in France when war was declared. There is a common belief that votes for women were finally won only because of the Land Army girls and the female munitions workers; but this is wrong. Behind the impression of ‘mayhem as usual’, the suffrage case had been winning ground in 1913–14. Labour was likely to insist on all its candidates supporting women’s suffrage at the next election. The Unionists had been talking to the less aggressive suffragists about some kind of electoral promise too; and now even Asquith was beginning to drop hints that he was coming round. As for Lloyd George, he was talking privately to Sylvia Pankhurst, the sister who had left the WSPU and was now leading the socialist wing of the movement. The vote would have been won without the war. Indeed, probably, the war delayed the breakthrough. It also split the Pankhurst family irretrievably and broke the WSPU. But it meant that when women finally won the vote in 1918 there was almost no opposition left standing; by then even Northcliffe and the Daily Mail had become enthusiastic if unlikely suffragists.

 
That is partly due to Emmeline and Christabel, who turned themselves round in remarkably short order from being feminist rebels to patriotic cheerleaders of spectacular stridency. As soon as the government announced a general amnesty for suffragette prisoners and those on the run, they were petitioning hard to do their bit for the war. Emmeline addressed a meeting in London on the German Peril. When the retired Admiral Charles Penrose Fitzgerald organized in Folkestone ‘the Order of the White Feather’, calling on women to present these traditional symbols of unmanliness or cowardice to men in civilian clothes thought to be ‘idling’ or ‘slacking’, WSPU members took this up too. Their newspaper the Suffragette ceased publication briefly, returning with articles fiercely attacking some ministers for being allegedly pro-German, and foaming with aggression. When it was replaced in 1915 with the Britannia, the new paper carried the masthead slogan ‘For King, For Country, For Freedom’ and made a point of viciously attacking left-wing pacifists like Ramsay MacDonald who had staunchly supported the suffrage cause. With government money they organized a march of 30,000 women, insisting on their right to do war work, and later they toured the country haranguing meetings of workers, attacking strikers as pro-German or Bolshevik and helping the Kitchener recruitment campaign.

  Sylvia would have nothing to do with any of this, supporting a negotiated settlement and doing practical work with working-class families in east London – which did not stop her being booed and showered with rotten vegetables when she spoke in public. Later, in 1917, Emmeline travelled on a government mission to Russia to try to rally support for the war there (Ramsay MacDonald was supposed to go as a balancing voice but the ship’s captain refused to take him). She arrived just as the Bolsheviks were about to oust the Provisional Government and did little good, or harm. Sylvia, by then, was ardently supporting the Bolsheviks. The movement, like the family, was splintered beyond repair. The strident nature of their propagandizing, combined with Christabel’s simultaneous ranting about venereal disease, made many soldiers view them as anti-male. In the war poets you can find strands of misogyny which are in part a reaction to all those self-certain women handing out white feathers (including, often, to wounded or serving men back on leave) and lecturing them about syphilis. Meanwhile many members of the WSPU became convinced that Emmeline and Christabel were snaffling the moribund organization’s funds for their trips to America and France. At meetings they were heckled and many walked out.