A Naval History of World War I

by Paul G. Halpern

  Helgoland was discussed at the Loch Ewe Conference in Jellicoe’s flagship Iron Duke on 17 September and dismissed. Contrary to Wilson’s assertions, ships would have been no match for the heavy fortifications of Helgoland, where the high velocity and low trajectory of naval guns would be ineffective against the well-concealed and well-placed land guns. Even if they succeeded, the British could not hold the island so close to the German coast, and if the British could take it with fortifications intact, the Germans would surely have an easier time retaking it once the fortifications were demolished. Jellicoe reported: “Naval opinion was unanimous that the reduction of Heligoland would involve far more serious losses in capital ships than would compensate for any advantage gained, and that the difficulties in the way of a successful bombardment would be very great.” Bayly brought up the subject of the Baltic, favoring an attack on Kiel by light cruisers and destroyers. This also was ruled out, largely because of the danger from minefields, although the possibility of a pair of submarines making the attempt was left open. Even Tyrwhitt, the bold and aggressive commander of the Harwich Force, was strongly opposed to the proposals, describing them later as “the equivalent of the death-warrant of a very large number of officers and men, besides being impossible and displaying considerable ignorance of the defences of Germany!”2

  Borkum was probably Churchill’s favorite among the North Sea projects, and with the continuing deadlock on the western front, he began pushing for it at the end of the year. The little island, 4 miles long by 3 miles wide, was located off the entrance to the Ems River, far enough (120 miles) from Wilhelmshaven that it could be seized before heavy reinforcements could arrive. It had figured prominently in the Admiralty prewar studies, and in December 1914 Churchill was convinced, as he wrote Fisher, that it was “the key to all Northern possibilities.” He pointed out to Jellicoe that the possession of an overseas base here would quadruple their submarines by enabling the older B- and C-class boats to operate in German waters and would facilitate an invasion of Schleswig or possibly Oldenburg.3

  Borkum was really the first stage in the policy of taking pressure off Russia by an attack on Germany in the Baltic. The plans have been generally associated with Fisher, who certainly spoke of the Baltic often enough, although there may be some doubt concerning the depth or seriousness of his intentions by this time. The general scheme was to seize Borkum, which could then be used as a base for the invasion of Schleswig-Holstein, which would lead to the occupation of the Kiel Canal. Intensive mining, supported from Borkum, would keep the German fleet out of the North Sea. Denmark would be won over to the Allied side, and the British army might land on Fyn to secure the passage through the Great Belt. The navy could then move through the Danish belts and the Kiel Canal into the Baltic, gain control of that sea, and then use Russian troops for a landing on the Pomeranian coast less than 100 miles from Berlin. May 1915 would be the target date for securing control of the Baltic.4 The Danes apparently had an inkling of these views, and naturally regarded the consequences for Denmark as extremely dangerous. There were reportedly sighs of relief in the Danish government when Fisher and Churchill left office in 1915.5

  Churchill and Fisher managed to persuade Prime Minister Asquith and the War Council on 7 January 1915 to approve in principle the proposed attack on Borkum, with detailed planning to commence for the operation to take place in three months’ time. Lord Kitchener, the secretary of state for war, agreed somewhat surprisingly to spare a division.6

  The Borkum operation never took place, largely because it was overshadowed by the Dardanelles campaign and a wide spectrum of naval opinion was resolutely opposed to it. The reaction to Churchill’s paper by Captain Herbert Richmond, then assistant director of operations, was typical: “It is quite mad. The reasons for capturing it are NIL, the possibilities about the same. I have never read such an idiotic, amateur piece of work as this outline in my life.” Richmond considered it “pure foolery” to risk troops in waters full of submarines. There were also strong technical reasons to recommend against the landing. The prevailing conditions of haze made it extremely difficult to range guns on the flat, featureless island with no marks on which to fix the ship. Navigation of deep-draft ships in the vicinity of the island with its sandbanks and minefields and without navigation marks would be very difficult. The batteries it would be necessary to destroy were not visible from the sea even under the clearest weather conditions—not likely to last very long—and one could not land troops until the area over which the transports would have to pass had been swept for mines, which, in turn, would not be possible until the batteries had been silenced.7

  Churchill later felt that Fisher, although speaking favorably of Borkum in principle, “did not give that strong professional impulsion to the staffs necessary to secure the thorough exploration of the plan” and seemed ready to enter the Baltic without securing Borkum first. When questioned on how he would prevent the German fleet from falling on the British lines of communication in the North Sea or the Danish belts, Fisher spoke in general terms of sowing the North Sea extensively with mines and bottling up the Germans in this fashion. Aside from the fact that the British did not have at this stage the requisite number of mines, nor were the ones they had reliable, there was another obvious problem with this line of reasoning. Sir Julian Corbett, the noted naval historian and friend of Fisher whom the First Sea Lord had charged with preparing a paper arguing in favor of the Baltic operation, pointed it out: If they were to paralyze the movements of the German fleet in the North Sea through the extensive use of mines, what was to prevent the Germans from doing the same thing to the British in the Baltic? Fisher never really replied, and one of his more recent biographers argues that he was by this stage of the war not really serious about a Baltic operation. Certainly Fisher spoke of the Baltic; his vast building program was supposedly shaped by it. The most noted examples were the three “freak” battle cruisers, the Glorious, Courageous, and Furious, with large-caliber armaments, high speed, and drafts deliberately kept below twenty-two to twenty-three feet for Baltic operations.8 The battle cruisers, however, may have owed their characteristics as much to Fisher’s obsession with speed and gun power at the expense of protection as to planned operations in the Baltic. Other portions of Fisher’s program, submarines and destroyers, were as much for the North Sea as the Baltic, and even the large numbers of armored landing craft and monitors could have been used for operations on the Belgian coast. Fisher, whatever the characteristic violence of his language, knew the reality of modern war and was cautious in his actions. He frequently stressed the necessity of maintaining the margin over the German fleet and avoiding useless losses in subsidiary operations. Fisher, contrary to his later assertions before the Dardanelles Commission in 1916, which were shaped by his need to justify opposition to the Dardanelles expedition, may actually have regarded the Baltic project as a useful talking point, which could be used to deflect Churchill’s wilder and more dubious projects.9

  Oliver, chief of the Admiralty war staff, also was skeptical about the Baltic and wondered how Fisher would answer the problem of the British fleet passing the Great Belt in single line ahead with the German battle fleet deployed and “crossing the T” in front of it or how the British would be supplied in the Baltic. Oliver summed it up neatly: “I hated all these projects but had to be careful what I said. The saving clause was that two of the three [Churchill, Fisher, A.K. Wilson] were always violently opposed to the plan of the third under discussion. I was glad when the Dardanelles project came along as it took the old battleships out of the North Sea picture.”10

  The last of the abortive North Sea projects to be discussed before turning to the Dardanelles are the plans concerning the Belgian port of Zeebrugge. Jellicoe and Bayly discussed a plan for blocking the port by sinking ships across the channel, and Jellicoe suggested it to the Admiralty only to be told it was not considered practicable at the time. The potential for a German submarine base at Zeebrugge did alarm the
Admiralty, and in mid-November they took up a suggestion from the commander in chief of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) in France, General Sir John French, for a large-scale flanking operation directed against Zeebrugge. The Admiralty wanted a landing on the coast to take place at the time of the army’s advance. Kitchener, initially favorable, backed away when he realized the amount of guns and ammunition required, and the army tried to turn it into a purely naval operation. Fisher opposed this and did not regard coastal bombardments by themselves as effective. He believed an advance by the army in conjunction with a naval attack was necessary and that ten thousand troops landed at Zeebrugge would turn the German flank. The plan presupposed the British army would occupy the coastal sector—now held by the Belgians—so that it could advance with the support of naval artillery, but General Joffre, the French commander in chief on the western front, refused to shift the BEF. On 28 January the War Council abandoned the idea of an attack.11

  Zeebrugge remained a magnet for the British throughout the war, and its strategic importance increased as the submarine threat developed. The Germans made effective use of both Zeebrugge and Ostend for their Flanders Submarine Flotilla. Both ports were linked by canal with the inland city of Bruges, where the Germans eventually constructed vast bombproof submarine pens. In 1915 Zeebrugge and Ostend became the target of long-range bombardments by monitors screened by an elaborate force of destroyers, paddle minesweepers, and drifters of the Dover Patrol. The Germans transformed the Belgian coast into some of the most heavily fortified real estate in the world, with, for example, the powerful “Tirpitz” battery (four 11-inch guns) in the suburbs of Ostend and the “Kaiser Wilhelm II” battery (four 12-inch guns) at Knocke to the eastward of the Bruges Canal. The bombardments were unsuccessful in knocking out the batteries or destroying the submarine bases.12 In 1916 and 1917 there were different schemes for either landing on the Belgian coast from an enormous pontoon pushed by monitors or blocking Zeebrugge by various means. The plans are generally associated with either Commodore Tyrwhitt of the Harwich Force or Admiral Sir Reginald Bacon, commander in chief Dover Patrol. They were never implemented.13 In the spring of 1918, Zeebrugge and Ostend were the targets of a raid in an attempt to block the entrances of the canal (see chapter 13).

  The schemes for overseas expeditions in the northern theater of the war remained abortive. They had various points in common in that they were generally plans to seize locations close to the German coast that could be used as bases for the implementation of a close blockade. Even if successful, they would also have put the British in positions difficult to hold, usually in range of artillery located on the mainland, and one can generalize that the costs and disadvantages of the operations outweighed the possible advantages. As Admiral Oliver said of Helgoland, “Every time supplies were required would involve a major operation for the Grand Fleet in the minefields.”14 As for the Baltic, any operation, regardless of the maritime hazards, obviously would have depended on major Russian military assistance to have had any chance of success. Would the Russians, reeling from heavy military defeats at the beginning of the war, have been able to play the desired role?

  THE DEFENSE OF EGYPT AND THE SUEZ CANAL

  The entry of Turkey into the war on the side of the Central Powers brought about three of the four major overseas campaigns conducted beyond the western front by the British during the First World War—Egypt and Palestine, the Dardanelles, and Mesopotamia. The three were conducted predominantly by British or British Empire forces, and naval forces at certain moments played important, if not critical, roles. The fourth campaign—Macedonia—was one in which the French tended to have the leading role, and in which naval forces played a minor role, limited to transporting troops and supplies and supporting the flank of the British army with monitors at Stavros. The enmity of Turkey posed a particular threat to the British, for it threatened two areas vital to British security, the Suez Canal in Egypt and the oil supplies in the Persian Gulf. The British and French, and later the Italians to a lesser degree, faced another danger from Turkey. The Turkish sultan in his capacity as caliph, or successor to Mohammed, proclaimed a Jihad, or “holy war,” against the enemies of Turkey. This was potentially a major threat to the British and French, whose empires contained huge numbers of Muslims. Would they remain loyal? The psychological impact of defeat or apparent defeat on their own subjects was never absent from British or French reasoning. Neither was colonial rivalry, and this complicated reaching agreement on what should have been purely naval and military operations.

  The British reacted quickly to Turkish hostility with a bombardment of the Dardanelles, the landing to neutralize the Turkish fort at Sheikh Syed (see chapter 4), the diversion of troops to the Persian Gulf, and the retention in Egypt of Indian troops en route to France. Turkish seapower was negligible and unable to influence events outside of the Black Sea. Turkish military power was not negligible, however, and the Turkish Fourth Army in Syria—approximately sixty thousand men—posed an obvious threat to the Suez Canal. The bulk of this Turkish force was not likely to reach Egypt, because the Sinai Desert, which lay between the canal and the Turkish army, was a formidable natural obstacle, devoid of regular roads and with little water to support a large army. But if only a portion of the Turkish army could reach the canal and hold it just long enough to block it, they could do immense damage to the Anglo-French cause.

  The best defense of the Suez Canal would have been for the British and French to make use of their seapower—as yet unchallenged by submarines in the Mediterranean—to strike at the Turkish army’s lines of communication, paralyzing any advance toward Egypt. Lord Kitchener believed the best place to strike would be Alexandretta, where a branch line of the Constantinople-Baghdad Railway ran down to the Gulf of Iskanderun. The main Constantinople to Baghdad line was not yet complete: there were two major gaps, one of approximately 20 miles in the Taurus mountains and the other of approximately 5 miles in the Amanus mountains. The mountain road through the Amanus gap was not suitable for wheeled traffic until 1916, and it was actually easier and faster to proceed via the branch line to Alexandretta and then by road to rejoin the railway just west of Aleppo. Therefore, to cut the Alexandretta route, particularly in the winter months, would be a devastating blow at Turkish communications.

  Diplomatic considerations overruled sound military ones. The French had a long-standing interest in Syria, and the Foreign Office was afraid British operations at Alexandretta would be misinterpreted by the French and therefore harmful to Allied unity. The French were indeed, and not without reason, suspicious of British designs in this area. The Alexandretta scheme was shelved and the decision taken to defend Egypt along the line of the Suez Canal.15 Nevertheless, plans centering on the region of Alexandretta would continue to appear.

  The naval defense of Egypt was under Vice Admiral R. H. Peirse, commander in chief East Indies. The destruction of the Emden and the immobilization of the Königsberg drastically altered the situation on the East Indies Station, which was now free of any major threat, and Peirse proceeded to Suez where he hoisted his flag in the battleship Swiftsure. The Admiralty authorized him to use his ships to watch the Syrian ports, and the result was the remarkably successful raid by Captain Frank Larken in the cruiser Doris, which cut the railway line between Adana and Alexandretta where it ran close to the coast to the north of Alexandretta. The activity of the Doris, as well as the French cruisers D’Entrecasteaux and Amiral Charner and the Russian cruiser Askold, demonstrated the vulnerability of Turkish communications to naval artillery and undoubtedly contributed to the Turks’ decision to cross the Sinai by the more difficult central route rather than by the traditional path along the coast. The Turkish advance also profited from unusually heavy rains, which permitted a far larger body of troops to be supported on the desert route than the British had anticipated. A prewar study by the War Office in 1906 had concluded that five thousand men would be the most that could be brought across the desert. However,
the Turkish invasion force numbered approximately twenty-five thousand, with nine batteries of field artillery and one of 15-cm howitzers. The Turks also had pontoons of galvanized iron, each capable of holding twenty men, as well as rafts for the canal crossing. Colonel Freiherr Kress von Kressenstein and a staff of six German officers attached to the VIII Turkish Corps played a leading role in organizing the advance. The commander of the Fourth Turkish Army in Syria, Djemal Pasha (who was also minister of marine) hoped the Turkish invasion would set off a nationalist uprising in Egypt to take the British from the rear.16

  The Turks had only a small chance of succeeding. The bulk of the troops defending the western bank of the canal were from the Indian army, and the British left only a few bridgeheads on the east bank. The canal was patrolled by six torpedo boats and a flotilla of armed tugs and launches, provided by the Suez Canal Company and fitted with 12-pounders or 3-pounders, Maxim guns, and with some armor protection for the wheel and boilers. Canal hoppers served as parent ships in each sector of the defense, and they were fitted with searchlights mounted on a platform high enough to clear the canal banks. British and French warships served as mobile floating batteries, with the battleships Swiftsure at Port Said and Ocean at Suez; and the cruisers Minerva and D’Entrecasteaux, the sloop Clio, the armed merchant cruiser Himalaya, and the Hardinge of the Royal Indian Marine scattered along the one-hundred-mile length of the canal. A special berth was dredged for the French coast-defense ship Requin in Lake Temshah, and aiming stakes were set out on land before the Turkish attack. French Nieuport seaplanes based at Port Said provided intelligence of the Turkish advance.17