Romania had effectively dropped out of the war, and this, coupled with the Peace of Brest-Litovsk, in which the Bolsheviks had taken Russia out of the struggle, meant that the Danube route to the Black Sea was open for the Germans and Austrians. The Austrians and Germans had considerable work clearing the numerous mines at the mouth of the Danube and in the Black Sea. They also discovered a curiosity at Reni, a small submarine the Russians had developed for use in the lower Danube but apparently had never had the opportunity to employ.61 Austrian and German troops had also penetrated far into the Ukraine and southern Russia, and the Austrians found it expedient to form at the beginning of April 1918 the Flottenabteilung Wulff, consisting of the four monitors Bosna, Bodrog, Körös, and Szamos, patrol boats Barsch and Wels, and the tug Odessa, towing lighters with coal and naphtha. The detachment was named after its commander, Korvettenkapitän Olav Wulff, who had commanded a monitor division for most of the war, and was ordered to support the activities of the Austrian army in Southern Russia in enforcing the peace with Russia and protecting transport of the Russian crop as far up the Bug and Dnieper as they could navigate. The monitors and patrol boats, after certain preparations such as the installation of compasses, were able to cross the open sea to Odessa, and for the next few months were active at Odessa, Cherson, and Nikolaev and in the navigable reaches of the south Russian rivers. The Austrians also manned and employed a number of Russian and Romanian craft. AOK ordered Wulff’s detachment back to Romanian waters at the end of August 1918, and by 12 September they were safely anchored at Braila.62
The Germans and Austrians on the Danube were in some ways a victim of their own success, for the collapse of the Bulgarian front found them far from home with a hopelessly long front to defend—from the Hungarian border all the way to the Black Sea. The Bulgarians concluded an armistice with the British and French on 29 September which called for the evacuation of all Bulgarian territory by German and Austrian troops within thirty days. There were also signs that the Romanians might reenter the war. On 16 October the 1st Monitor Division was ordered to proceed from Braila to Lom-Palanka to cover the passage of the retreating German army. Mackensen insisted until the 19th that the monitor Sava and patrol boat Barsch remain at Sulina to keep open the route from the Black Sea. It was almost too late, for the 227th Infantry Regiment of the 76th French Infantry Division, moving rapidly northward through Bulgaria, reached the Danube at Lom-Palanka on the 19th and the Danube Flotilla was in danger of being cut off.63 The same day French troops fired on the Wels’s motorboat when it refused a command to surrender after approaching the landing stage to reconnoiter at Lom-Palanka. The Austrians and Germans had assumed that under the Bulgarian armistice they would have until the 26th to leave Bulgaria, but the French obviously had no intention of permitting enemy traffic proceeding up and down the Danube under their noses, particularly as in their opinion it would have meant passively watching the Austrians and Germans cart off “their booty” from Romania. As a French officer bluntly told an Austrian parlementaire on the 21st, the French had concluded an armistice with the Bulgarians, not the Austrians or Germans. French artillery had also opened fire the afternoon of the 19th on the steamer Croatia towing seven lighters and a pontoon. The steamer cut the tow, and the lighters anchored by the sandbank off Lorn. The Croatia grounded on the Romanian shore after suffering damage and casualties. The French then used a Bulgarian launch to tow three of the lighters into Lom-Palanka. The following afternoon the Enns, supported by the Temes and Vim, succeeded in bringing off three of the lighters under heavy French fire, but the remainder as well as the steamer had to be abandoned.
The situation continued to deteriorate for the Danube Flotilla, however, as the French and the Serbians were also approaching the Danube in Serbia, both upstream and downstream from the Iron Gates. The flotilla exchanged fire with irregular Serbian bands as it continued the long retreat. The Austrians had been reluctant to reply to the French artillery out of deference to Bulgarian neutrality, but considered themselves freed from this consideration by the actions of the French. Therefore, the last of the flotilla—the Sava, Barsch, and the armed steamer Una—were authorized to inflict as much damage as possible. The Austrians mined the entrances to the Belene Canal before evacuating, and when French artillery fired on them at Lom-Palanka, they opened fire on the harbor, lighters, and other craft present with their smaller guns while they engaged the French batteries with their main armament. The Sava’s group ran the gauntlet at night with only minor damage. The flotilla had more scrapes with the Serbians as it continued its retreat in the following days, and on the night of the 31st the monitor Bodrog grounded near Visnica and had to be abandoned. By this time the Dual Monarchy was in dissolution. On 29 October Kaiser Karl had authorized all personnel who were not South Slavs to return home. The South Slavs left the flotilla at Vukovar with what is reported to have been, considering the circumstances, a fairly cordial farewell. The Germans, Hungarians, and Czechs who remained arrived with the flotilla at Budapest on 6 November. The situation at Vukovar was less cordial in regard to the large number of steamers and lighters that had assembled there and were detained by the South Slavs.
The last shots on the Danube were fired by the German boats of the Donauwachtflottille, who had no hope of getting home again. The Weichsel exchanged fire with French batteries off Rustschuk on 28 October. The French crossed the Danube near Rustschuk on 10 November using the former Russian/Bulgarian Varna along with Bulgarian steam launches to tow lighters and barges. The Weichsel’s 7.5-cm howitzer fired steadily in futile opposition, and the German commander finally gave orders to scuttle all German craft. The Weichsel was scuttled off Oltenita the afternoon of the 11 th, the day the armistice on the western front went into effect. The Germans scuttled a total of twenty-four boats; six were left afloat at Braila, contrary to orders.64
Naval operations on the Danube had lasted from the first to last day of the war. The great sweeping marches and river crossings of the Romanian campaign are as different from the usual First World War memory of trenches and barbed wire on the western front as the plodding monitors or armed paddle steamers on the Danube were different from the great dreadnoughts and battle cruisers that dashed through the North Sea. The monitors were not a decisive superweapon in themselves, contrary to some overenthusiastic accounts. They were able to bring close artillery support at critical moments to troops in exposed positions, but they were vulnerable, a moving but highly visible target out on the river, and often had difficulty spotting fall of shells or locating well-concealed batteries that took them under fire. The riverine forces could not decide a campaign by themselves, but they were certainly a great source of assistance when geography permitted and military commanders faced river barriers or made use of rivers as a line of supply. Riverine operations were another facet of naval power, and the operations on the Danube deserve to be better known.
10
FROM DREADNOUGHTS TO SUBMARINES: 1915–1916
THE GERMANS SEARCH FOR A STRATEGY
Kaiser Wilhelm and Admiral Hugo von Pohl, who had replaced Ingenohl as commander of the High Sea Fleet after the Dogger Bank action (see chapter 2), did not deviate from the cautious strategy of not risking the fleet in a major action close to the British coast and in waters that were not of its own choosing. Those waters were considered to be not farther than the distance the High Sea Fleet could steam in a night or a day and where the Germans could bring their maximum strength to bear. They were much closer to German than British bases, and damaged German ships had a much better chance of reaching home safely than their British opponents. Von Pohl, however, considered that there was a fundamental difference between his policy and that of his predecessor. Ingenohl, he claimed, had always sent out only weak forces against the enemy, whereas he, von Pohl, always took out the whole fleet. This might lead to success, but might also lead to heavy losses.1
Von Pohl made two sorties in February and March 1915 and four in April and May. They were
generally in a westerly or northwesterly direction from Helgoland and extended between 100 and 120 nautical miles.2 They produced no encounter with the Grand Fleet; nor were they likely to, for the British were no more willing to fight under these terms than they had been at the beginning of the war and were content to maintain the distant blockade that cut off Germany from access to food and raw materials from the rest of the world. The British did not have to fight or risk the Grand Fleet to maintain that blockade. The Germans would have to come to them if they wanted to break it.
It was apparent by the end of 1914 that Kleinkrieg was not going to wear down the British fleet to the point where the Germans could challenge it with every chance of success. The German submarines had done much better than many might have expected, and certainly they had shown their ability to operate at greater distances than anticipated. They had achieved a few spectacular successes and had for a time made the Grand Fleet a refugee on the west coast of Scotland or Ireland until suitable defenses at Scapa Flow had been prepared. They increased the strain on men and machinery enormously during that period. But it is also true that the warships they sank were for the most part old, and often foolishly handled. They did not succeed, and would not in the course of the war succeed, in hitting a dreadnought-class ship, the accepted standard of naval strength. The only dreadnought lost by the Grand Fleet, the Audacious, succumbed to mines laid by the surface minelayer Berlin.3 It was therefore clear that Kleinkrieg would not produce the desired results, and in 1915 there was considerable debate in the German navy on the proper course to follow.
Vice Admiral Gustav Bachmann, von Pohl’s somewhat reluctant successor as chief of the Admiralstab, hoped in the absence of a decisive naval battle to achieve at least a partial success by drawing portions of the British fleet within striking distance of the High Sea Fleet by means of advances and fleet movements within the Helgoland Bight. Von Pohl, though, never forgot that when he made a sortie with the objective of securing a partial result, he might become involved in a fleet action. He put the matter quite clearly to Bachmann on 7 April 1915:
No one can desire our fleet to achieve such partial results more than I do. But I know of no method by which they can be obtained without at the same time risking the whole Fleet. An advance to the enemy’s coast involves the great danger of being forced to fight off the enemy’s coast. To assume that the enemy would send inferior portions of his Battle Fleet right into the German Bight, is to credit him with quite exceptional stupidity. In war such underestimation of the enemy always has its revenge.4
The inactivity of the fleet was very distasteful to many of the officers, often fervid partisans of Tirpitz. They included Captain Magnus von Levetzow, then commanding the battle cruiser Moltke, and Captain Adolf von Trotha of the dreadnought Kaiser. Both were destined to hold important positions under von Pohl’s successor Scheer. These men regarded the inactivity of the fleet as dishonorable at a time when their comrades in the army were suffering heavy losses. Trotha wrote Tirpitz:
It is my personal and unqualified conviction that a fleet which has helped to secure peace by fighting for it, will rise again even after the heaviest of losses. Such fighting will only serve to make the Navy an intimate part of Germany. I have on the other hand no faith in a fleet which has been brought through the war intact.
. . . It is always a surprise to me that there are people who regulate their actions by what will be required after peace has been made. We are at present fighting for our existence and the only question is, can the employment of the Navy, the Fleet, be of assistance to us. In this life and death struggle, I cannot understand how anyone can think of allowing any weapon which could be used against the enemy to rust in its sheath. To strike at every opening is the only way to victory.5
There was at least some support for the Ingenohl and von Pohl policy within the fleet. Vice Admiral von Lans, commander of the First Squadron—the Nassau- and Helgoland-class dreadnoughts—believed a battle in the open North Sea was an “absurdity” (Unding) for the Germans, leading to the annihilation of their fleet. Lans believed that it was only in the Bight that they could fight with any prospect of success. The destruction of the German fleet would also threaten the neutrality of Denmark and permit the British to force their way into the Baltic.6
Lans left the First Squadron in February 1915, shortly after he countersigned a memorandum by his admiralty staff officer, Korvettenkapitän Wolfgang Wegener. Lans therefore received the credit—or blame—for “Reflections on Our Maritime Situation,” generally known in the fleet as the “First Squadron Memorandum.” Wegener is now considered by many the most lucid of the German strategic thinkers of the war, who argued that the political and military point of main effort (Schwerpunkt) for the German fleet was in maintaining sea supremacy in the Baltic rather than in the North Sea. The best ships should therefore be shifted to the Baltic, with the older Deutschland- and Wittlesbach- class ships of the Third and Fourth Squadrons left for simple coast defense in the North Sea. Wegener asserted that sorties in the North Sea were purposeless, for they were undertaken only to “do something” and exposed the German fleet to annihilation without giving it the opportunity to attain a decent goal. Tirpitz termed the memorandum “poison for the fleet.”7
Between February and August 1915, Wegener wrote his famous trilogy of memoranda: “Thoughts About Our Maritime Situation” (June 1915), “Can We Improve Our Situation?” (12 July 1915), and “Naval Bases Policy and Fleet” (August 1915). He continued to stress the importance of the Baltic, and in the second of the memoranda pointed out that from a geographical point of view the Helgoland Bight was a dead end, because the German bases there were too far from the major trade routes. He argued that it was to Germany’s advantage to secure the opening of the Danish Belts. Wegener, in fact, advocated the military occupation of Denmark, so that coaling stations in Danish bays could be established to facilitate employment of the short-ranged German torpedo craft to give the German navy control of the Kattegat and Skaggerak. Wegener was, in fact, fairly brutal in his plans for Denmark, whose neutrality benefitted the British. He wrote: “It must be stated that in the struggle for survival among large nations, a small state simply cannot be accorded the right to neutralize the power of a fleet, schooled over years of hard work, in favor of the [other] side, or to force that fleet to undertake detrimental operations—like an offensive with insufficient means, emanating from the Helgoland Bight.”8
Wegener looked beyond the Jutland Peninsula and Skaggerak. He wanted to outflank Britain’s commanding geographical position by acquiring the Faeroe Islands (possibly by purchase or territorial concessions in Schleswig after the war); foresaw the German fleet might anchor in Norwegian fjords “as protector of Norway”; and looked to the French coast, Cherbourg or possibly even Brest, along with the Portuguese Atlantic islands (Azores and Cape Verdes) as future German bases.9 Moreover, he did not believe submarines had made battle fleets superfluous in the struggle for global sea control. They might wage war against England with submarines, but a future struggle in the Atlantic with the United States for global sea control would require capital ships.10 Wegener was certainly bold and visionary, even if the most ambitious portions of his plans were beyond Germany’s grasp. Wegener’s arguments, which were widely read in the fleet, were needless to say not popular with Tirpitz and his supporters, and the controversy continued after the war.11
Tirpitz displayed a somewhat inconsistent attitude on the question of a fleet action, and on the question of Grosskrieg versus Kleinkrieg he has been described by a noted historian as attempting “to keep a foot in either camp until events forced him to choose between the two.”12 In September 1914 he wrote von Pohl that from the beginning of the war he held the view that guerrilla war would not bring about an equalization of forces. He declared: “Our whole military and administrative activities for the last 20 years have had the fighting of an action as their object. Consequently our best chance of success lies in an action.” Because of
their numerical inferiority, the action would have to be fought not more than 100 miles away from Helgoland, but he was confident the fleet would inflict more damage than it suffered at the hands of the British. Moreover, he claimed, in the history of the world it was nearly always a smaller fleet that defeated the larger one, and he failed to see the use of keeping the fleet intact until peace was concluded.13
Tirpitz changed his tune after the Dogger Bank action, and in a memorandum to the chief of the Admiralstab on 26 January, he wrote: “After the manner in which our naval war has been handled so far, partial successes do not appear to be very probable in the future.” Tirpitz now advocated aircraft attacks against London, a submarine blockade, submarine and destroyer mining operations from the Flanders coast directed against the Thames, and the immediate commencement of cruiser warfare in the Atlantic. He promised: “The interruption of food imports to the west coast of England and of her other commerce would be such a vital danger to her, that I should expect great things from cruiser warfare.” Tirpitz thought any losses entailed in this cruiser warfare would be counterbalanced by the derangement of British commerce.14 Six weeks later, however, the state secretary wrote:
Although I am personally convinced of the necessity of making the enemy, that is Great Britain, feel the pressure of our Navy, I no longer believe that the Fleet will do it. The former Commander-in-Chief . . . and his master (the Kaiser) are of opinion that the fleet can do nothing and the former Chief of the Naval Staff (Admiral von Pohl) always held the same view, whereas I have always considered that it is possible to obtain partial results. I must admit that it is now more difficult to do so, but not as yet impossible.15
A Naval History of World War I Page 50