A Naval History of World War I

by Paul G. Halpern

  7

  THE BALTIC

  GERMAN AND RUSSIAN NAVAL PLANS

  The Baltic differed from other theaters of the war because of its geography and climate, both of which produce certain special features. First of all, it is a closed sea that can only be entered through the narrow passages of the Big and Little Belts through the Danish islands and the Sound between Denmark and Sweden. These confined waters could be blocked easily by mines, and any fleet from the outside trying to operate in the Baltic did not enjoy a secure line of communications unless it had troops on shore to safeguard the channels. The passages were also neutral waters; neither Denmark nor Sweden was ever drawn into the war. Nevertheless the Germans had an immense strategic advantage in the Kaiser Wilhelm Canal—more commonly known as the Kiel Canal—which linked the Baltic with the North Sea. This spared the Germans the necessity of making the passage through the Belts or the Sound and the Kattegat and Skaggerak around the Jutland Peninsula. They could shift naval forces from the North Sea to the Baltic and back again with both security and relative speed. On the other hand, the British and French were cut off from easy access to their Russian ally. Even the passage of submarines, despite their advantage of concealment, proved to be a major undertaking. The Allies were forced to use the northern route around Norway to the north Russian ports. With Norway a benevolent neutral, this was nowhere near as dangerous as it would be in the Second World War, but the north Russian ports were limited in their capacity, and the Russians were even more limited in their ability to move matériel from the ports southward.

  The northern climate added another special feature to naval warfare in the Baltic. At these latitudes the summer nights, particularly in June, were very short, while the winter nights were correspondingly long. Ice was a major problem. Large portions of the northern and eastern Baltic froze for a few months during the year, particularly the Gulfs of Finland, Bothnia, and Riga. The Russian navy was especially affected, as its operations substantially ceased from January to the latter part of April, except for some light craft at the southernmost base at Libau on the Lithuanian coast. This meant large numbers of men crowded together in discomfort and relative idleness, which created a fertile breeding ground for the subversion and politics that eventually paralyzed the fleet.

  There was another peculiar feature of the naval war in the Baltic. The Germans and Russians each acted on the assumption that the other’s fleet was superior. The Russians had embarked on a substantial naval building program in the years before the world war (see chapter 1), but on paper there was still no comparison between the Russian Baltic Fleet and the German High Sea Fleet. The Russians knew this, and their primary objective was defense of the Gulf of Finland and approaches to their capital, St. Petersburg, renamed Petrograd after the outbreak of the war. The Russians also attempted to supplement their admittedly inferior naval forces with extensive minefields and powerful batteries on shore.

  The Germans, however, regarded the North Sea as the main theater of their naval war and concentrated the bulk of their naval forces there. The Baltic was a secondary theater for them, and they allocated only the minimum force to it, frequently obsolescent ships that could not be risked in the North Sea. Therefore, the German navy, despite its great paper strength, usually was inferior to the Russians in the Baltic. This became even more evident in the first year of the war as the new Russian dreadnoughts and large destroyers entered service. Nevertheless, the Germans always had the option of rapidiy shifting forces to the Baltic at the expense of their North Sea defense. The Germans periodically exercised that option after it became obvious as the war went on that the British would not oblige them with a costly offensive against the German North Sea coast. The Russian navy, however great its momentary superiority, always had to reckon on meeting a potentially overwhelming German force with little warning.

  The Russian assumption of inferiority at sea was exaggerated by the belief Sweden would join Germany in a war against Russia with the idea of recovering Finland. They anticipated a Swedish landing on the south coast of Finland with an advance over land in the direction Viborg-St. Petersburg. The mission of the Russian army and naval forces in the Baltic theater would be to delay the expected enemy advance deep into the Gulf of Finland twelve to fourteen days to give time for Russian forces protecting the capital to be mobilized. The defense would be to the east of the meridian of the Gogland Islands in the gulf and on the banks of the River Kyumen on the Finnish shore. Minefields would be laid to the north and south of the Gogland Islands. This implied Helsingfors would have to be abandoned and Sveaborg would serve as the fleet’s advance base, while Kronstadt would be the main base. The distant base at Libau on the Lithuanian coast would, of necessity, be abandoned.1

  These plans envisaged a very restricted role for the fleet, with a relatively close defense of St. Petersburg. They obviously reflected the very difficult position after the severe losses of the Russo-Japanese War. The scope of operations expanded in the years before the outbreak of the war, coinciding with the period when Admiral Nicholas Ottovich Essen commanded the naval forces in the Baltic. Essen had emerged from the Russo-Japanese War with credit, and in 1908, as a rear admiral, was appointed to the Baltic command. Essen was probably the outstanding Russian naval commander of the war and received favorable comment in both Soviet and émigré literature as well as in the reports of contemporary naval observers.2 Essen, according to one officer, “literally regenerated the Fleet,” with particular emphasis on training and navigation of the difficult channels of the Finnish skerries, a skill the commanders of Russian torpedo craft later performed with great élan.3 Essen’s premature death at fifty-four in May of 1915 was a heavy blow to the Baltic Fleet.

  Essen, although still anticipating that Sweden would be an enemy, did not expect the Germans to use their first-line forces in the Baltic. He therefore favored a more active policy of laying minefields along the German coast and in the path of a German force advancing into the Gulf of Finland rather than passively waiting with the fleet at the Gogland position. The Swedes would be deterred from entering the war by a display of force and the possible use of mines off the Swedish naval base of Karlskrona. The Russian naval staff did not agree to Essen’s proposal to lay mines along the German coast, but under his prodding produced in 1910 a new naval plan that envisaged the laying of a second major minefield along the line Nargen-Porkkala-Udd, which was much farther to the west in the Gulf of Finland. Essen might offer his initial resistance here before falling back to the Gogland position.

  In the 1912 plan, the Nargen-Porkkala-Udd line was designated the “Central Position.” The fleet would deploy here behind an extensive minefield, which would be covered by powerful coastal batteries with artillery ranging up to 14 inches. There would also be additional coastal batteries on the northern flank among the skerries on the Finnish coast between Porkkala-Udd and Gange. The main fleet base would be brought forward to Revel on the Estonian coast, although until that was fully equipped, Helsingfors would be used. Moon Sound, the entrance to the Gulf of Finland from the Gulf of Riga, would also be blocked with mines on the outbreak of war. It should be noted that these plans remained essentially defensive. Except for patrols outside of the Gulf of Finland, the Russians had no thought of fighting in the open sea. At the approach of the enemy’s main fleet, the battleships and cruisers of the Baltic Fleet would fall back and fight and maneuver to the east of the “Central Position.” It would be a form of naval trench warfare, with the ships sheltering behind the minefields and coordinating their fire with the powerful coastal batteries. The coastal fortifications of the “Central Position” and flanking positions in the skerries were far from complete when the war broke out, and part of the minefields could not be covered by defensive fire. The Russians also suffered from the lack of docking facilities for big ships at Revel and Helsingfors. Large ships therefore had to proceed to Kronstadt, which might prove difficult to impossible in the winter months when the eastern part of the gu
lf was frozen.4

  The Russians steadily improved these minefields and coastal defenses after the war broke out. The Germans, preoccupied with the British, never attempted to break into the Gulf of Finland with the bulk of their fleet. German submarines did penetrate the gulf, but the only time the Germans tried a major surface operation with a destroyer flotilla, in November 1916, they met with disaster.

  German naval planning in the years just before the war was dominated by the idea that the real decision would come in the North Sea and that the Baltic would be treated as a secondary theater (Nebenkriegsschauplatz). It would be far more important to face the British with an undamaged fleet than to achieve the destruction of the Russian fleet. A decisive German victory at sea in the Baltic would not compel the Russians to seek peace; that could only be done on land. The Germans did not have sufficient naval strength for a two-front war at sea; the Baltic would have to make do with whatever could be spared or not employed in the North Sea. Nevertheless, the slow growth of Russian naval strength in the Baltic would eventually pose problems for the Germans. Admiral von Pohl recognized that too weak a force in the Baltic could lead to a disaster.5

  The ratio of strength between the Russians and the Germans in the Baltic was even more unfavorable to the Germans at the very beginning of the war because many of the older ships allotted to the Baltic were laid up and would take several days to mobilize. The Germans realized they might well lose the use of their eastern ports of Pillau and Danzig and have to content themselves with defending the island of Rügen, the western Baltic, and their major base at Kiel. Such German forces as were available at the outbreak of the war would therefore have to conduct a game of bluff. They would undertake bold sorties against whatever Russian forces and bases they could reach, lay mines, attempt to disturb the Russian mobilization, and in general try to conceal from the Russians the extent of German weakness. The Germans expected the Russians to undertake an essentially defensive strategy at first, with only brief sorties against the German coast, but they expected the Russians to become bolder as they realized the extent of German weakness. The Germans anticipated a Russian mining offensive against their coast. These points were contained in the operational orders issued to the Baltic forces on 31 July.6

  On 30 July, at the very moment war was breaking out, the kaiser altered the original mobilization plans for the Baltic and named his brother Grossadmiral Heinrich, Prince of Prussia, as commander in chief, Baltic naval forces (Oberbefehlshaber der Ostseestreitkräfte, commonly known as the O.d.O.). The appointment raised eyebrows. Admiral von Müller, chief of the kaiser’s naval cabinet, advised against it on the grounds that Prince Heinrich, who had been in the largely ceremonial position of general inspector of the navy, was not really qualified.7 Kaiser Wilhelm apparently agreed, but indicated that he had promised his brother the job, that the Baltic was not essential, and that the prince could be given a competent staff.8 Although Müller wrote that this was done and that the leadership in the Baltic “was satisfactory in the extreme,” the reality might have been somewhat different. Captain Heinrich, the prince’s chief of staff, apparently reported that the prince had completely lost his nerve when he embarked at the beginning of the war and was faced with the prospect of meeting the enemy in battle. Heinrich proposed that the chief of the High Sea Fleet should receive overall command when he was in the Baltic, and the decision to do this was reached on 9 October 1914. The effect would have been to keep Prince Heinrich from commanding any really important naval action.9

  OPENING MOVES

  On the outbreak of war, both the Russians and the Germans quickly acted or were prepared to act in a high-handed manner with the Scandinavian neutrals in order to secure their own interests. The Admiralstab’s operational orders to Prince Heinrich specified he was to secure Kiel Bay against British or Russian naval forces. This meant that while facing the numerically superior Russians, he would have to cover his rear by securing the entrances to the Baltic against possible British incursions. Early on the morning of 5 August, Rear Admiral Mischke, chief of the Baltic coastal-defense division, directed the laying of 243 mines in the Great Belt, part of the minefield extending into Danish territorial waters. At the same time, other German forces mined the Little Belt. Admiral von Müller was horrified: “A pointless measure since we have every reason to respect Danish neutrality.” He favored repudiating the prince and sending a note of apology to the Danish government. The measure did jar the Danes into acting to protect their neutrality; the following day, they announced that to block the passage of large ships they would mine the Danish portion of the Sound and the Great and Little Belts. They would provide pilots to guide merchant vessels through the minefields. The Admiralstab therefore ordered Prince Heinrich on 7 August to avoid Danish territorial waters.10 The Danish navy after the war claimed to have eventually laid twelve hundred mines, which succeeded in preserving Danish neutrality by forestalling the Germans from acting in Danish territorial waters.11 Although Admiral Scheer later complained that the Danish minefields eliminated the Skaggerak as a possible escape route after a raid in the North Sea, the barrier to easy entry into the Baltic was on the whole more advantageous to the Germans than to the British.12 The mines made it extremely difficult if not impossible for British surface forces to assist the Russians in the Baltic and essentially freed Prince Heinrich to concentrate on the Russians.

  Admiral Essen also was prepared to neutralize the potential danger from Sweden. He too began the war with extensive minelaying in the “Central Position” as planned. The Russians promptly laid 2,124 mines, with additional minefields along the Finnish skerries in the next few days.13 It was the beginning of what would develop into a formidable position.

  This left the unsettled question of Sweden, which the Russian naval plans had assumed would enter the war on the side of Germany. Sweden had declared neutrality, but the Swedish fleet was apparently concentrated at Gotland. Essen interpreted this, along with reports of anti-Russian demonstrations in Sweden, as a threat. His chief of staff for operations, Commander (future commander in chief in the Black Sea and White Russian leader) Kolchak, prepared a plan in which Essen and the Russian Baltic Fleet would appear by surprise before the Swedish fleet and deliver what amounted to an ultimatum to the Swedish admiral, inviting him to proceed with his fleet to the Swedish naval base of Karlskrona and remain there for the duration of the war. If the Swedes refused, Essen was apparently prepared to destroy their fleet. Essen, a bold admiral whose actions are reminiscent of Nelson and the Danish fleet during the Napoleonic Wars, was greatly hampered in the first part of the war by the fact that the Baltic Fleet was actually under the orders of the commander of the Russian Sixth Army. Essen sailed with his fleet on 9 August, sending a report of his proposed actions and a copy of the ultimatum by cable to the commander of the Sixth Army and leaving one of his staff at Helsingfors to await a reply. The Russian naval staff recalled the admiral—one is tempted to say in the nick of time—with the message that in the present political situation the supreme command prohibited all offensive operations. The primary mission of the fleet was to protect St. Petersburg, and that necessitated its presence in the Gulf of Finland.14 The tsar’s attitude toward naval affairs is perhaps best summarized in the remark he reportedly made to Admiral Essen when general mobilization was ordered. The tsar closed the audience with the comment: “We do not want a second Tsushima.”15

  Given the attitude of the Russian supreme command, and their apparent intention to keep a close watch on what many may have considered an overly bold admiral, it was the Germans who assumed the initiative in the Baltic, despite the numerical superiority of the Russians. The first shots of the war were fired early on the morning of 2 August. The fast light cruiser Magdeburg—the most modern of the German ships in the Baltic—shelled Libau, while the cruiser Augsburg laid one hundred mines northwest of the harbor. The Germans did not realize that the Russian navy had evacuated the port, sinking five steamers as blockships, and the min
efield, whose exact location was poorly marked, hampered the operations of the Germans for a long time.

  The Germans continued their aggressive sorties; the Magdeburg, for example, shelled the lighthouse at Dagerort on 12 August, and throughout the month German cruisers and destroyers shelled other points along the Russian coast from the entrance to the Gulf of Finland, south to the border with East Prussia. The Germans nearly met serious opposition on the 17th when Rear Admiral Mischke led the Magdeburg, Augsburg, and three destroyers with the auxiliary minelayer Deutschland (a converted Sassnitz-Trelleborg ferry) to the entrance of the Gulf of Finland. They encountered the Russian armored cruisers Admiral Makarov and Gromoboi, and the Germans were forced to lay their mines 45 miles to the west of their planned position. The two Russian armored cruisers armed with 20.3-cm (8-inch) guns actually outgunned the Germans, but the Russian Rear Admiral thought the German force included the much more powerful armored cruisers Roon and Prinz Heinrich and did not engage. He subsequently lost his command.16