Smoke and Mirrors
Page 23
Pargust, though, was to make history. The action, cool, well-disciplined, successful, deserved more than a hatful of lesser decorations. The Victoria Cross was the only appropriate award for such a display of determined gallantry. In the thirty-six minutes that Pargust waited after the torpedo strike, any one man could have betrayed her true purpose. One injudicious movement would send UC 29 diving to safety.
King George V personally settled the matter of who should receive the nation’s highest award for valour. He activated Clause 13 of the Statutes of the Victoria Cross. This allowed an officer or rating to be selected by a secret vote by his comrades. It was rarely used; this was the first time it was authorised for a ship’s crew.
Pargust was to ballot two awards, one for an officer, one for a rating. Campbell’s officers initially suggested that he should again receive the decoration. Campbell felt that this was not the purpose of the election and declined, explaining later ‘that the Victoria Cross I wore was on behalf of my crew and through no special act of my own’.
The vote proved decisive. Lieutenant Ronald Neil Stuart, who already held the DSO, was chosen to receive the Victoria Cross. The other went to William Williams, DSM, who held the starboard gun port in place for half an hour. Without his action, Pargust might not have survived. Both men won their previous decorations for the fight with U 83.
Only one other U-boat went down in June 1917. Oberleutnant zur See Herbert Pustkuchen and UC 66 failed to return to Zeebrugge. British records suggest that she was the victim of the armed trawler Sea King. Pustkuchen was the man who sank Sussex to incur American displeasure. Sea King was under the command of a certain Commander Godfrey Herbert who once captained Baralong. The world of hunter and hunted was not large.
Whether Pustkuchen believed that the trawler was an easy kill or he simply did not see it before he surfaced only a mile away is a matter only for idle debate. UC 66 dived as Sea King hurried towards her. The trawler dropped a depth charge. It sank and exploded. Six heavy detonations followed, probably on-board mines. Later intelligence confirmed that a boat of the Flanders Flotilla was missing. With an apparently valid claim, Sea King and her crew duly collected their bounty.
Some doubt exists about the claim’s validity. The encounter happened off the Lizard, virtually in the U-boat’s assigned patrol area, three weeks after she sailed. This gives her an extraordinarily long period at sea for her class.
Whether she sank by accident or design matters little. Only two U-boats were destroyed in June 1917, while in the same period 631,895 tons of shipping went to the bottom.
That month, the Kaiserliche Marine ordered more U-boats. Sinkings averaged over 600,000 tons per month but the English were peculiarly stubborn. Five out of the six months that the Naval Staff believed would bring a cowering enemy to the conference table had slipped by. Great Britain continued to fight on, apparently undeterred by the U-boats’ depredations. To ratchet up the campaign a few more notches, orders went out for a further ninety-five boats. Of these, thirty-seven were the coastal UB II Class, thirty-nine were UC II minelayers, eight were deep-water boats and ten were monsters of 2,000 tons each, with the ability to stay on patrol for three months at a time.
The chief of the U-boat arm, Hermann Bauer, handed over his job to Käpitan zur See Andreas Michelsen. He took over a fleet of 132 boats. Sixty-one of them were on patrol, forty in the seas around the United Kingdom.
In Britain, officialdom realised that the U-boat campaign was succeeding only too well. In April, the month when losses soared, the chance of an ocean-going merchantman leaving the United Kingdom and returning safely was one in four. Jellicoe, pessimistic as ever, told a War Cabinet Policy Committee meeting on 20 June that shipping losses made it impossible to continue the war into 1918.
This miserable prophecy enraged Lloyd George. It was also a naval sideswipe at the Army. Haig and the BEF should have captured Zeebrugge and Ostend. This would end the activities of the Flanders Flotilla. Eventually, the desire to stamp out that particular wasps’ nest led to the abortive raids on the two ports in April and May 1918. Full of heroism, they became legendary. Properly planned, they would have succeeded with fewer casualties. Glorious failure redeemed by outstanding gallantry attracts more publicity and plaudits than a successful operation, meticulously organised, that avoids unnecessary sacrifice. The former is rewarded by medals, the latter by a footnote in history books.
More immediately, Jellicoe’s gloom-laden opinion gave Haig the chance to proceed with the Third Battle of Ypres, soon emotionally known as Passchendaele. It would not only break the German army in France. It would liberate the Belgian North Sea ports from the German Imperial Navy. The almost mythical status of the two harbours as U-boat lairs had grown steadily since the start of the war. In November 1916, when Asquith was still Prime Minister, the War Committee made it clear that there was ‘no operation of war to which the War Committee would attach greater importance than the successful occupation, or at least the deprivation to the enemy, of Ostend, and especially Zeebrugge’. For neither the first nor last time in history, intelligence got it wrong. The blue-water boats were the ones that mainly threatened British trade. They came from Kiel, from Emden, from Heligoland, not from occupied Belgium.
Lloyd George was not pleased. Already convinced that most generals and admirals were dullards, he planned to push Jellicoe out of office. Criticism already appeared in the press, particularly in Lord Northcliffe’s papers, The Times and Daily Mail. ‘You kill him,’ allegedly remarked the Prime Minister to the newspaper peer, ‘and I’ll bury him.’ But even he could not deny that the apparent need to neutralise the Flanders Flotilla outweighed any other matter.
Although the convoy system gradually gained ground, the lack of escorts hampered its growth. The Admiralty, still wedded to hunting patrols as well as a belief that the Grand Fleet needed two destroyers to every capital ship, emphasised its lack of escorts. Not only British admirals believed that this was still the better way to fight the U-boat. Admiral William Sims, temporarily in command at Queenstown while Sir Lewis Bayly took much-needed leave, pressed the US Ambassador in London, Walter Page, to lobby Woodrow Wilson to send more anti-submarine vessels across the Atlantic. The United States had been in the war for three months. Of sixty destroyers available, though, only twenty-eight operated in European waters.
The need for numbers received no help from the Convoy Committee, who believed the average convoy of twenty ships needed six destroyers as escorts. That meant fourteen flotillas, eighty-four ships in all, as well as fifty-two cruisers to supply the escorts across the ocean where the U-boats did not venture. It proved to be an overgenerous allowance.
Two facts stared every knowledgeable observer in the face. Germany sank merchant ships faster than the world’s shipyards built them. German dockyards built U-boats faster than the Allies sank them. Given time, Germany would win the war. All Germany had to do was to keep going.
In July 1917, U-boats sank 492,320 tons of shipping. Seven boats failed to return. UC 61 ran aground near Boulogne. UB 20 fell foul of a mine while on a diving trial off Zeebrugge. Two boats, UC 1 and U 69, simply disappeared. U 99 was claimed by the British submarine J2, while UB 27 is linked to a dubious claim by HMS Halcyon. Oberleutnant zur See Hans Niemer, captain of the seventh boat, UB 23, took his badly damaged boat to Spain rather than try to reach Zeebrugge through the Dover Straits. Depth-charged by the Royal Navy’s PC 60 on 26 July 1917, Niemer reached Corunna three days later.
Seven boats down from a variety of causes. The Kaiserliche Marine commissioned eleven new boats to take their places.
In Wilhelm’s Second Reich, discontent on the home front marred this rosy prospect. Three years of war, marked by the British blockade, caused great privations. If the successes on the Eastern Front had turned into real benefits, there would be a different tale. For all her efficiency, though, for all her reputation, Germany could not seemingly bring grain, food, comforts from the conquered lands to home.
Germany’s allies showed the strain. Austro-Hungary neared total collapse. Despair, civil unrest, came from hunger, enormous casualties, and a growing belief that the war was lost.
The complaints echoed in Germany. Many no longer believed the Navy’s claims of tonnage sunk and U-boat successes. Even Ludendorff apparently considered the Kaiserliche Marine’s claims overblown. The First Quartermaster-General concentrated on planning a new offensive to win the war.
In the Reichstag, more deputies demanded an end to the war. Gustav Hoch, a member of the newly formed Independent Socialist Party, summed up their mood: ‘U-boat warfare was to have been the solution, but it has failed. The Government is constantly urging us to hold out. Can we do that? We have exhausted our strength. We are in the midst of revolution. Working men already think of revolution. Trust in the Government has gone. Hope has ended and it cannot be restored.’
On 19 July 1917, the first crack appeared in the smooth façade of the Imperial Navy. The crew of a battleship, Prinzregent Luitpold complained about their rations. To make the point, they refused duty. Discontent swiftly surged through the Kaiser’s pride and joy, the Hochseeflotte. The next day, many of the crew of the light cruiser Pillau walked off the ship. On 1 August, fifty of the more-disgruntled from Prinzregent Luitpold joined them. By 4 August, the men of Kaiserin and Friedrich der Grosse refused orders. A few days later, the men of Westfalen and Rheinland joined in. If not mutiny, it was close to it.
Matters were resolved, although an investigation revealed a startling truth. The protest originated from links between some ratings and discontented deputies in the Reichstag, deputies who wanted a negotiated peace. The politicians judged that Germany had reached the end. They sensed that revolution was close.
The war had become a race against time. Both for Britain and Germany.
THIRTEEN
GLORY IN DARK WATERS
On 4 August 1917, three years to the day since Great Britain entered the war against Germany, Captain Gordon Campbell, VC, DSO, left Devonport with his new command, HMS Dunraven. Just over 3,000 tons, built in 1910 at Newcastle upon Tyne, she was slightly larger than either of Campbell’s previous decoys. She carried the essential 4in gun, together with four 12-pounders. She also had two 14in torpedo tubes and two depth charges.
Conspicuously displayed on her aft deck was a genuine defensive gun, a 2½-pounder, the sort carried by many armed merchant steamers. Campbell took meticulous care to make his decoy look like any ordinary tramp. Among his happier ideas were four carefully made railway trucks to act as deck cargo, produced entirely from wood and canvas.
As with Farnborough, as with Pargust, a masterly system of wires and hinges collapsed railings, hatches, cabins and derricks on command. When Campbell heard that an errant shell splinter killed an old friend on the bridge of his Q-ship, he installed armour plate behind the wooden sides of Dunraven’s bridge. A perforated steam-pipe was another refinement to confuse an attacker. Liberally punched with holes, it snaked round the decoy’s upper works. A valve on the bridge allowed steam to enter the pipe on demand. When it did, an impressive cloud of vapour escaped amidships to simulate a hit on the engine room.
Most of Pargust’s crew joined the new ship. Stuart, the previous Number One, left to command his own ship. Anecdotal evidence suggests that he felt unhappy with Campbell’s methods of command.
Whether or not this was true, his place was taken by the previous Number Two, Lieutenant Charles George Bonner, the former Conway cadet, in Antwerp the week German troops marched across the border. Bonner left his ship, Incemore, on 17 August, one day before it sneaked from harbour and returned to Britain. Determined to join the war, Bonner enlisted in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve in London on 8 September 1914. The enlistment papers show his trade as Second Officer in the Merchant Service and noted that he held a Master’s Certificate. Bonner duly reported to London’s Crystal Palace for basic training. One of his early instructors, Arthur Egerton Watts, later wrote that Bonner enlisted as an ordinary seaman because he thought the Admiralty would not employ him to run a ship during the war. Indeed, his entry into the RNVR nearly turned him into an infantry soldier. Most of the eager enthusiasts were earmarked for the Royal Naval Division, which proudly kept naval ranks and terminology but trained its recruits as infantry soldiers. For those volunteers, their future sea experience would be confined to sitting on troop transports taking them to fight overseas. Arthur Watts himself later served with the RND at Gallipoli. He wrote of Bonner that the authorities discovered ‘he was a fully-qualified man and took him away. Bonner was a nice chap. I liked him.’
The Admiralty had realised that it needed officers of experience after all. The war was going to be bigger and more exhausting than anybody initially realised. Bonner was accordingly commissioned into the Royal Naval Reserve in December 1914. He eventually joined the Trawler Section at Larne in Northern Ireland to work on drifters. These one-time fishing vessels towed special types of nets which would, it was devoutly hoped, entangle any evil-intentioned U-boat.
In due course, he met Campbell and boarded Pargust as her Second Officer. Bonner subsequently collected a Distinguished Service Cross for the fight with UC29.
Campbell originally intended to sail Dunraven to Queenstown. A stream of reports from the Biscay area persuaded him to detour. He sailed eastward for three days, the dummy railway wagons clearly visible. Dunraven impersonated a Blue Funnel Line steamer on her way to Salonika or elsewhere in the Middle East.
No U-boat snapped at the tempting bait. On the night of 7 August 1917, Campbell turned back. The railway trucks became flat piles of timber and canvas. Dunraven took on the guise of a Blighty-bound tramp.
At 1050 on 8 August 1917, Dunraven was almost clear of the Bay of Biscay. She followed a zigzag course, like any prudent merchantman, at a steady 8 knots, 150 miles west of the Brittany coast. Eight minutes later, she sighted a U-boat on the horizon, ahead on her starboard beam.
On board UC 71, Oberleutnant zur See Reinhold Saltzwedel studied the juicy target. A steamer, roughly 3,000 tons, would add nicely to his tally. Saltzwedel was a leading light of the Flanders Flotilla. If his hand occasionally strayed to his neck in anticipation of the ‘Kaiser’s Necktie’, the Orden Pour le Mérite, it was hardly surprising. In the two years since he left U-boat school, he had despatched more than 100 vessels to destroy 100,000 tons of Allied shipping. Saltzwedel thoroughly knew his business. Dunraven continued on her course.
At 1117, Saltzwedel gave the order.
‘Tauchen!’
UC 71 dived.
Dunraven ploughed on.
Twenty-six minutes later, UC 71 surfaced behind Dunraven, 5,000m distant. It was a standard ploy. Surface ships rarely had guns that fired backwards, over the stern.
UC 71’s gun crew moved to the 8.8cm deck gun. Their target was at almost maximum range but they did not hurry. If the stranger proved to be a U-Boot-Falle, it would stay in range. If it were not, a few shots would cripple it before it escaped. The Oberleutnant had already met a trapship and knew their behaviour. In June, they had a run-in with a French decoy, SS Normandie. Saltzwedel was well aware that appearances could be deceptive.
On board Dunraven, the Red Ensign fluttered in the breeze. Campbell reduced speed by 1 knot but ordered the engine room to make smoke. This, he trusted, would give the impression that his ship was trying to get away. The decoy was heading into wind which was not ideal for the U-boat. In real life, a genuine tramp steamer could have given UC 71 a run for her money.
The 2½-pounder returned fire. Its shells were in the general direction of the U-boat. They fell to the left, then to the right. Always, they were too short. Its crew, Leading Seaman Edward Cooper, Se
aman William Williams, VC, and Wireless Operator William Statham gave a fine display of incompetence.
To impress the U-boat with her innocence, Dunraven transmitted panic-stricken wireless calls. ‘Submarine chasing and shelling me. Help, come quickly.’ ‘SOS. Submarine overtaking me.’ She wirelessed her position.
Dunraven escaped damage from UC 71’s deck gun. Most of the rounds splashed into the sea a little way ahead of the decoy’s bow. From the U-boat, Saltzwedel believed he was regularly hitting his quarry.
Shortly after noon, Saltzwedel ordered full speed ahead. UC 71 surged through the water to overhaul Dunraven. Unimpressed by his quarry’s efforts at gunnery, the Oberleutnant decided to go for the kill. The choppy sea made accurate shooting difficult. Saltzwedel concentrated on catching up with the steamer.
At 1225, broadside on, slightly to Dunraven’s port quarter and 1,000yd distant, UC 71 opened fire once more. Campbell warned his panic party to stand by. With the range reduced, Saltzwedel’s gunners splashed their shells nearer and nearer. When one landed a few feet short, close to the engine room, Campbell opened the valve on his steam pipe, stopped engines and swung the helm to fully expose his port side to the watchers on the U-boat’s deck. Dunraven lost way, wreathed in escaping steam.
‘Abandon ship! Abandon ship!’
The panic party rushed into action. As a final touch, Dunraven wirelessed the news to a listening world: ‘Am abandoning ship!’
Saltzwedel moved in for the death. His forward gun fired three times. The first shell crashed onto the poop deck where the 4in gun hid. Campbell heard a fierce explosion. He at once thought that the magazine had blown up, that the disguised gun was visible to his attacker. Hidden guns on freighters meant only one thing: a decoy. He ordered a distress call to any British naval ships within range. A reply came immediately. HMS Implacable, on her way home from the Mediterranean with a destroyer escort, detached one of her guardians, HMS Attack to help. Smoke and steam cleared from the poop. The deck was intact. The gun stayed concealed.