A Naval History of World War I

by Paul G. Halpern

  There was still submarine activity by the Germans. UB.42 was ordered to the eastern Black Sea in early October, where she landed five Georgians with gold and munitions to support a Georgian independence movement. The submarine then operated against shipping, sinking two small sailing craft and a steamer and shelling Tuapse.

  The Russians kept up the pressure on the Turkish coal traffic with whatever destroyers they could put to sea until the fall of the provisional government. The German official history concedes that the Russian intelligence service was still excellent, and on 31 October the destroyers Pylki and Bystry successfully broke up a Turkish minesweeping force at Igneada north of the Bosphorus. The small torpedo boat Hamidabad and three minesweeping boats had been clearing the coastal route from Constanza when attacked; the Hamidabad, loaded with gasoline for the minesweeping boats, exploded and sank and two Turkish steamers in port were damaged. The three minesweeping boats beached themselves to escape destruction.

  The Germans realized, once again, that the remaining Turkish torpedo craft could not protect either transports or minesweepers from the large Russian destroyers and were suitable only for securing against submarines the entry and exit of the Goeben and Breslau from the Bosphorus. The Breslau was ordered out the following day, 1 November, to sweep from Igneada to Midia in search of enemy warships. But the Russians detected the move, and the Russian commander in chief since August, Rear Admiral Nemits, sailed with the Svobodnaya Rossiya, two large destroyers, and the old battleships of the Second Squadron (Evstafi, Ioann Zlatoust, and Boretz Za Svobodu) with a destroyer. They were joined the following day by the new dreadnought Volya on her first operation, accompanied by the seaplane carrier Rumyniya and a destroyer. It was the swan song of the Black Sea Fleet. The crew of the Svobodnaya Rossiya refused to continue the war and forced Nemits to return to Sebastopol. The Second Squadron remained off the Romanian coast for a few days, and the Volya’s group cruised off the Bosphorus. None of the Russian ships encountered the Breslau, which had slipped back into the Bosphorus on the evening of the 1st.71

  The Russian navy still controlled the sea and the Turkish and German ships could only make fleeting raids outside of the Bosphorus when the Bolshevik Revolution occurred, and the commander in chief was ordered to obey only the orders of the Central Committee. Operations at sea were broken off, and the Bolsheviks quickly proceeded to arrange an armistice with the Central Powers. The Armistice came just in time for the Turks, for shortly before it was concluded on the night of 15–16 December the bread ration in Constantinople had been cut in half and shortly after the armistice, on 20 December, Ludendorff informed Enver Pasha that the situation in Germany and the anticipated resumption of traffic in the Black Sea meant the Germans would restrict their export of coal to Turkey.72

  Vice Admiral Souchon was not on hand to witness the final collapse of his Russian opponents in the Black Sea, for the commander of the Mittelmeerdivision had returned to Germany at the beginning of September to assume command of the Fourth Squadron in the High Sea Fleet. His successor was Vice Admiral Rebeur-Paschwitz, who nearly gambled away Turkey’s major naval assets through an ill-advised sortie from the Dardanelles. Rebeur-Paschwitz decided that he might provide at least indirect support for the hard-pressed Turkish forces in Palestine by some operation to draw Allied ships from the Palestine coast to the Dardanelles. He also hoped to bolster Turkish morale after the recent fall of Jerusalem, and, perhaps most important of all, demonstrate to the Turks that warships were meant to be used. He was disastrously overconfident about the Allied minefields off the Dardanelles, assuming he knew their location through aerial reconnaissance and that their effectiveness had been diminished by time and tide.

  The Goeben and Breslau came out of the Dardanelles early on the morning of 20 January 1918. They were accompanied by Turkish torpedo boats, which did not venture far from the Strait. The Germans had chosen their moment well and achieved tactical surprise. The British commander, Rear Admiral Hayes-Sadler, who had been guarding the Strait with the semidreadnoughts Lord Nelson and Agamemnon and an old French battleship at Lemnos, had foolishly divided his force by taking the Lord Nelson with him to Salonika at a time when the French battleship was in dock. The Goeben and Breslau surprised and sank the monitors Lord Raglan (14-inch guns) and M.28 (6-inch guns) at Kusu Bay, Imbros. They then proceeded toward Mudros, where the Lord Nelson was raising steam to meet them. The Lord Nelson’s captain was none too confident of the results of an encounter with the more modern German ship. It never occurred because the Breslau ran into a minefield and subsequently sank; the Goeben, in attempting to take her consort under tow, was also mined and broke off the operation. The Goeben hit other mines getting back into the Strait, and the damaged battle cruiser then ran aground near Nagara Point as the result of a navigational error.

  The Goeben was in a very precarious position, but if the Germans had botched the operation so far, it was now the turn of the British to bungle. The British attacked the battle cruiser with aircraft, and although they scored hits, the airplanes could not carry bombs heavy enough to inflict serious damage. The only British submarine on the scene had a fractured propeller shaft and was not employed. The British had to wait a few days for a replacement, E.14, to arrive. In the interval the Turks and Germans managed to tow the Goeben off the sandbank the day before E.14 was sent through the Strait, where the defenses were now far stronger than they had been in 1915. The submarine was lost. Shortly afterward Hayes-Sadler was sacked. The Germans and Turks had little cause to celebrate. They had lost their best light cruiser and the Goeben was immobilized for the foreseeable future at Constantinople, where complete repair was not possible and where improvised bulkheads had to be set in place and cofferdams once again erected around her damaged hull. The old Mittelmeerdivision had ceased to exist as an effective fighting unit.73

  The armistice with Russia gave the Mittelmeerdivision a new lease on life and eventually opened dazzling prospects. According to the terms, all Russian warships in the Black Sea were to be gathered in Russian ports and disarmed or detained until the conclusion of a general peace. However, on 9 February 1918, the Central Powers also concluded a treaty recognizing the independence of the Ukraine. The new state was to include Odessa and part of the Black Sea coast. There was some question as to whether or not the Ukrainians might have a claim to all or a portion of the Black Sea Fleet. The fate of the fleet became worrisome to the Allies after the armistice, and the situation turned critical when German and Austrian troops marched into the Ukraine to secure the wheat fields. With Russia prostrate, the question was when and where would the Germans stop? On 13 March the Germans occupied Odessa, and by 17 March they had reached Nikolaiev and its dockyards holding an unfinished dreadnought, three light cruisers, and four destroyers on the stocks. The completion of these ships, given the disorganization in the Russian yards and the scarcity of labor and matériel, was not likely in the foreseeable future.

  The Germans continued to the east and then turned southward to the Crimea. They were in front of Sebastopol by 1 May. What would happen to the Black Sea Fleet? The commander in chief was now Vice Admiral N. P. Sablin, but his authority was extremely tenuous and no one could be certain what the sailors would do. The Bolshevik government, now in Moscow, ordered Sablin to sail to Novorossisk on the eastern shores of the Black Sea. Sablin managed to get fourteen destroyers and torpedo boats to sail on the 13th, but the two dreadnoughts and four destroyers remained behind. They finally sailed on the night of the 14th, just as German patrols entered the city. German artillery opened fire on the ships, and the large destroyer Gnevny ran aground while an older destroyer was sabotaged in the dockyard. The Germans seized the now thoroughly worn out and decrepit predreadnoughts, the three cruisers, and a substantial number of smaller ships and submarines. They were aided by the fact that demolition parties failed to carry out their orders, but few of the ships at Sebastopol were ready for sea.

  The best and most modern core of the Black Sea
Fleet, the two dreadnoughts and most of the modern destroyers, were now fugitives at Novorossisk where the situation was very confused. Russia was falling into civil war and a White volunteer army hovered outside of the city, where there was a theoretical Soviet Republic. The Red Army at Novorossisk was reported to be mutinous, and within the fleet there was a wide variety of opinion, and even Sablin’s leadership was subject to approval through election.

  Ludendorff had plans for the Russian ships. He wanted them to be seized as war booty, and at least some of them put in service to police the Black Sea. The Turks had their own claims, including a substitute for the Breslau. The Bulgarians, and possibly the Ukrainians, also had claims, and there was the legal technicality of whether ships seized after the conclusion of the Peace of Brest-Litovsk could be seized as war booty. The Central Powers established the Nautisch-Technische Kommission für Schwarze Meere, commonly known as NATEKO. Vice Admiral Hopman was appointed its head with orders to coordinate the employment of all naval personnel in the Ukraine and in the Crimea in agreement with the local German army authorities and to secure all prizes useful to the navy at Sebastopol and ready them for sea. The Goeben proceeded to take advantage of the Sebastopol dry dock for badly needed repairs, and the Turks recovered the cruiser Medjidieh, which had been lost to the Russians in 1915. The Germans, however, were very evasive about Turkish claims for other Russian warships, for they doubted their capacity to man them or maintain them.

  Ludendorff, who was much more persistent than the navy in coveting the Russian ships, set a deadline for the Russian ships at Novorossisk to return to Sebastopol. If they did not, the German army would resume its advance. Captain Tichmenew, the interim Russian naval commander at Novorossisk in the absence of Sablin, was apparently ready to comply and negotiated an agreement with Admiral Hopman for the Germans to pay, subject to future reimbursement from the Russian government, the Russian officers and men who would remain in the ships after they returned to Sebastopol. All was not as it seemed, however, for apparently the government in Moscow sent secret orders to Novorossisk that the ships were to be scuttled if an order was ever received from Moscow to turn the ships over to the Germans. The state of discipline in what remained of the Black Sea Fleet partially frustrated this order. There was an intense debate in the fleet over what course of action to follow, and a vote was taken. Approximately 450 voted to scuttle the ships, 900 voted to return to Sebastopol to be interned, and 1,000 abstained. On 18 June Tichmenew in the dreadnought Volya with three large destroyers, two torpedo boats, and an armed merchant cruiser sailed for Sebastopol. These were all the ships the Germans got their hands on. The other dreadnought, the Svobodnaya Rossiya, was torpedoed and sunk by a destroyer off the port. The destroyer then proceeded to Tuapse where she scuttled herself the next day. The remaining destroyers and torpedo boats, including five of the highly desirable large modern destroyers, were scuttled at Novorossisk.74

  The Entente had only an imperfect idea of what was going on in the Black Sea, but there was a very real fear that the Germans and their Allies would acquire the former Russian Black Sea Fleet and use the warships to break out of the Dardanelles and upset the naval balance in the eastern portion of the Mediterranean. The Allies need not have worried. The Germans, despite the grandiose plans Ludendorff clung to until the very end, were hard put to find the men to man the handful of ships they planned to restore to service (the dreadnought Volya, perhaps four or five destroyers, and a few submarines and other craft). With the difficulties the Germans had in getting sufficient men from Germany, and the necessity to use Russian yards and labor, by the end of July 1918, they were likely to have in service only one of the large destroyers, two small old destroyers, a submarine, and a number of minor craft, particularly shallow-draft vessels for use in the Sea of Azov.

  The Germans concluded a supplementary treaty with the Russians on 27 August, which included an article dealing with Russian warships and Russian stores seized by the Germans after ratification of the peace treaty. The Germans recognized Russian ownership of the warships but specified they would remain “under German care until the conclusion of a general peace.” A secret letter from the German foreign secretary supplementing the treaty stipulated that the Germans should be given the use of the warships for “peaceful aims,” especially for minesweeping and harbor and police service. In case of war necessity, the warships might be used for military aims, but the Germans promised the Russians full indemnity for loss and damage incurred in that service. This precluded, at least technically, the Germans transferring any of the ships to their allies, but the Germans planned to evade the full effect by placing Turkish personnel in some of the ships “for training.” They planned to have a nucleus crew bring the best of the Russian predreadnoughts, the Evstafi and Zlatoust, to Constantinople, where the ships, with largely Turkish crews bolstered by Germans, would be used for the defense of the Dardanelles. They had to abandon this idea; there would not be enough men after the Volya was placed in service.

  The Germans made secret preparations to quickly seize the ships to preclude sabotage by the Russians remaining aboard once the news-of the agreement with the Russian government was made public. On 1 October the Germans seized the Volya, four large destroyers, two small old destroyers, and the seaplane carrier Imperator Trajan. Only the Volya actually entered service under the German naval ensign on 15 October, and the German crew had great difficulty making her battle ready and working the unfamiliar equipment. They had only a fortnight to enjoy their prize, for the Ottoman Empire was tottering, and on 30 October the Turks signed an armistice with the British on the island of Moudros. There was now every prospect the navies of the Entente would be able to appear in the Black Sea in overwhelming strength. Ironically, the Goeben really did become a Turkish ship when the Germans formally turned her over to the Ottoman navy on 2 November, to the objections of the Turkish minister of finance, who was not anxious to assume responsibility for a large, costly ship under the drastically altered circumstances. The Germans were equally anxious to return the Russian warships to whatever Russian authorities they could get to accept them, for under the secret supplementary treaty with the Russians, they would have been liable if the Allies had seized them while they were in German hands. The first Allied warships reached Sebastopol in mid-November, but the Russian civil war meant that hostilities would continue in the Black Sea for another two years. Most of the old battleships had their machinery wrecked in 1919 to prevent their falling into the hands of the Bolsheviks; others were scuttled. The Bolsheviks inherited little of the Black Sea Fleet that was usable. With the final victory of the Bolsheviks in 1920, the Volya and a small remnant of the former Black Sea Fleet, including the cruiser Kagul, the seaplane carrier Almaz, seven destroyers, three small old destroyers, and four submarines, steamed to Bizerte where they were interned by the French. They were eventually broken up, although the French retained the 305-mm guns of the Volya, which later were captured by the Germans during the Second World War and used for the defense of Guernsey. The most formidable opponent of the Black Sea Fleet, the Goeben, survived as the Turkish Yavuz until the beginning of the 1970s.75

  9

  THE DANUBE

  THE SERBIAN CAMFAIGN

  World War I naval operations on the Danube have been largely overlooked in the English-speaking world, although this great river, originating in Germany and flowing through central and eastern Europe all the way to the Black Sea, is navigable for more than 1,700 miles. Oceangoing vessels could proceed up what was known as the “maritime Danube” as far as Galatz in Romania. The importance of this vital waterway to Germany and Austria increased once they were cut off from access to the high seas. It was the German and Austrian equivalent of the North Atlantic seaway used by the British and French, although obviously the volume and importance of the Danube traffic could not compare to what had passed through Hamburg, Bremen, or Trieste before the war. The Danube also was of great strategic importance during the Dardanelles campa
ign, because it was a potential route for munitions to Turkey. For the first year of the war, it was also a tenuous but viable means for at least small quantities of supplies to reach Russia. The British might have been drawn into a regular campaign on the Danube had the Dardanelles campaign been successful. With these considerations in mind, it is hardly surprising that the first naval shots of the war—indeed the first shots of the World War itself—were fired on the Danube and that naval forces were still in action during the final days of the war.

  The most significant naval force on the Danube was the k.u.k. Donauflottille. The flotilla was commanded for most of the war (October 1914-December 1917) by Linienschiffskapitän Karl Lucich. The Austrians had six monitors in service at the beginning of hostilities, and put four more in service during the war. Two monitors were lost to mines during the war, although both were salved after considerable effort. Preliminary work had begun on another pair of monitors when the war ended. The primary armament of the monitors generally consisted of two 12-cm guns mounted in one or two turrets. The secondary armament varied, but usually included a pair of 7-cm, quick-firing cannon, as well as 12-cm howitzers and machine guns. The armor protection was limited by the necessity to maintain light draft and varied from 44–50 mm for the belt, 75–50 mm for the turrets to 19–25 mm for the deck.

  The k.u.k. Donauflottille also began the war with six small patrol boats armed with machine guns in lightly armored turrets. The six additional patrol boats entering service during the war grew larger, more powerful, and more extensively protected. The last four in 1916 were 129-ton, 44-meter craft armed with four 7-cm guns and four machine guns. The Austrians also armed and adapted various river craft, ranging from paddle steamers to tugs and barges, for service as command and accommodation ships, minesweepers, and hospital ships. The Austro-Hungarian army had its own craft on the Danube too. The Pioneer Corps employed two armored motorboats that were subsequently transferred to the navy and moved to the Adriatic for work in the lagoons along the Italian front. The common feature for all navies engaged in riverine warfare, whether on the Danube, the Tigris, or the Dvina, appeared to be ingenuity.1