On Germany’s eastern front, only a few divisions had been left to hold off the Russians in East Prussia pending the fall of France. A smashing Russian victory at Gumbinnen was a false dawn; the Russians were outgeneralled by the newly appointed team of Hindenburg (army commander) and Ludendorff (chief of staff), suffering a shattering defeat in East Prussia at Tannenberg and another at the Masurian Lakes. But the Russians fared better on their Austrian front, where the Habsburg armies lost over two million men in a series of inconclusive or bungled battles, despite German reinforcements. By Christmas the war of movement for which the great European powers had prepared was effectively over; but there was stalemate on all fronts as the belligerents, trying to cope with terrible losses, began to train up new armies and dug in for the long haul. The trench line on the Western Front soon stretched from the Channel to the foothills of the Alps and the border of neutral Switzerland. Further to the south-east, the Austrians confronted the Serbians and Russians in the Carpathians and the Balkans; and to the north-east, the Germans faced the Russians in East Prussia and Poland.
At sea in the first three months the Royal Navy and the Imperial Navy confronted each other warily, an approach that led to several skirmishes and incidents but not the great knock-out blow of a second Trafalgar that the admirals on both sides were half-expecting and purportedly wanted (there were private misgivings in both camps). The Kaiser ordered the High Seas Fleet to remain on the defensive for the time being. On the British side, with the whole country looking to its navy for salvation and triumph, Churchill and his more discerning admirals came close to despair as one piece of bad news followed another. Only hindsight would show just how decisive was the Royal Navy’s first strategic move, which happened before war broke out: the order to the Grand Fleet, handily mobilised in full for a royal review, to sail direct to Scapa Flow, its designated main base against Germany, on 29 July without standing down the reservists. The guardian of the nation, manned by 60,000 sailors, formed a grey steel line over 18 miles long as it steamed 800 miles up the east coast of the United Kingdom, taking two days to arrive. The Grand Fleet was the ultimate guarantor of the traditional British naval strategy against a continental European enemy: blockade, now silently directed against Germany, albeit from an unprecedented distance for fear of mines and the unproven but feared submarines. The Grand Fleet in Scottish waters barred the northerly route from Germany to the broad Atlantic; the southerly route via the Channel was blocked by the destroyers of the Harwich Force and the Dover Patrol, supported by submarines and ultimately by the 15 pre-dreadnoughts of the Channel Fleet, stationed along England’s south coast.
On 5 August two Harwich destroyers sank the German minelayer Königin Luise (a converted passenger ship) 50 miles off the Suffolk coast. Unfortunately she had already laid her 180 mines, two of which sank the cruiser HMS Amphion the next day with the loss of 151 men. The Royal Navy soon rounded up several German merchantmen in the Atlantic as the Tenth Cruiser Squadron became the Northern Patrol, covering the area between Scotland and Norway round the Shetland Islands (in November the cruisers were replaced by 18 auxiliary cruisers taken up from the Merchant Navy and armed with old guns). On 9 August the light cruiser Birmingham caught the U15 repairing her engines on the surface in the North Sea, rammed and sank it with the loss of all hands – the first victory of a surface ship against a submarine and a rare event for many a long month.
Despite the pre-war concentration of resources on the Grand Fleet in the North Sea, the Royal Navy still possessed a profusion of ships round the globe, starting with the Mediterranean Fleet, modern enough for its role except for Troubridge’s white-elephant heavy cruisers. And despite the purge of outdated ships and the rapid construction of new ones during Admiral Fisher’s original term as First Sea Lord (1904–10), there were far too many inadequate vessels, such as most of Admiral Cradock’s South American Squadron, so comprehensively beaten by Graf Spee’s cruisers at the Battle of Coronel on 1 November 1914. Many old cruisers in particular remained in service, trying to cover the commitments of a Royal Navy globally overstretched, despite the unprecedented strategic understandings with Japan and France. Naval technology had been advancing so rapidly for decades and over the turn of the century that warships had an extraordinarily brief front-line life of just a few years: steam power, steel armour, turbines, wireless, bigger and bigger breech-loading guns, fire-direction, rangefinders, torpedoes, mines, seaplanes and submarines …
The worst possible demonstration of the vulnerability of older ships came on 22 September 1914, when the primitive, paraffin-powered German submarine U9 (Lieutenant-Commander Otto Weddigen, IGN, the world’s first submarine ‘ace’) sank the 14-year-old cruisers Aboukir, Hogue and Cressy, 12,000 tonnes each, in 95 minutes off the northern Dutch coast. More than 1,450 sailors drowned; fewer than 900 survived. This terrible feat remains unequalled in the short but immensely destructive history of submarine warfare: three large warships sunk by a single boat in an hour and a half. Only four days earlier Churchill, warned of the weakness of this ‘live-bait squadron’ by staff officers during a visit to the Grand Fleet, had ordered First Sea Lord Battenberg to call a halt to such patrols. Even so, on 15 October Weddigen delivered a bleak postscript by sinking the even older cruiser Hawke off north-east Scotland with the loss of 525 sailors; just 21 survived. But two days later four German destroyers on a mine-laying mission were sunk by a light cruiser and her four British destroyers, off the Dutch-Frisian island of Texel.
Off the south Norwegian coast on 20 October the U17 became the first submarine to sink a merchant ship, the British SS Glitra: halted by a shot across her bows, she was boarded and scuttled by the Germans. They let the crew get into their lifeboats and even gave them a tow towards land in a display of chivalry worthy of the legendary Emden, detached by Graf Spee earlier to cause havoc in the Indian Ocean (see below). Such courtesy would not last long. The early U-boat successes, and mounting fear of mines, prompted Jellicoe, Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Fleet, temporarily to evacuate his poorly protected main base at Scapa Flow and move his ships first to Loch Ewe on the west coast of Scotland and then to Lough Swilly on the north coast of Ireland. The Grand Fleet was in effect homeless as it succumbed to the new affliction of ‘periscopitis’, or sighting submarines (and sometimes firing heavily at them) where there was none. Beyond the gun and the ancient naval tactic of ramming there was as yet nothing available to surface warships with which to sink or disable a submarine, and the gun was effective only if the submarine was on the surface. Then on 27 October the modern battleship Audacious hit a German mine 25 miles out to sea from the lough. Despite the best efforts of the passing British liner Olympic, then the largest in the world, to tow her to safety, she sank eight hours later; all but one of the crew were rescued from the first dreadnought ever to succumb to enemy action. The loss was covered up until Olympic passengers gave their photographs to an American newspaper two weeks later. On the last day of October the U27 sank the seaplane-carrier HMS Hermes just eight miles north-west of Calais, a bold stroke indeed in the strongly guarded ‘English’ Channel.
On 13 August, Graf Spee, bound for the Pacific after abandoning his doomed base at Tsingtao, north-west China (under threat from the Japanese fleet), had detached from his squadron the light cruiser Emden (Captain Karl von Müller, IGN) to attack commerce in the eastern Indian Ocean. Entering it on 8 September after a long evasion through the East Indies, the Emden in barely two months sank or captured 22 ships, shelled Madras, raided Penang sinking two small warships – and generated a stream of favourable propaganda for the German cause. The enemy, even Churchill himself, publicly acknowledged Müller’s skill and chivalry towards his civilian and merchant-seamen victims. The failure of more than 70 ships of the Royal Navy and its Japanese, Russian and French naval allies to catch him caused prolonged embarrassment to the Allies. In the end it was an Australian light cruiser, HMAS Sydney, that shelled the graceful Emden to pieces with her heavier guns and forc
ed the blazing wreck aground in the Turks and Caicos Islands on 9 November. It was the first battle in the history of the new Royal Australian Navy.
Another German light cruiser, SMS Königsberg, caused chaos on the western side of the Indian Ocean, sinking several merchant ships and a British cruiser before taking refuge in the Rufiji River in east Africa. A third, the Karlsruhe, and a fourth, the Dresden, briefly cut a swathe through British merchant shipping in the Atlantic before the former mysteriously blew up and the latter rejoined Spee for the battle off Coronel. A handful of auxiliary cruisers (converted liners with strengthened decks and fitted with guns), such as the Kormoran in the Pacific and the Prinz Eitel Friedrich in the Atlantic, caused discomfiture to the world’s mightiest navy in the opening weeks and months of the war at sea.
One brief burst of light in the early gloom came on 28 August, when an overwhelmingly superior British group of destroyers and light cruisers from the Harwich Force, backed by Beatty’s battlecruisers, sank three German light cruisers and a fleet destroyer, damaging others, without loss and only limited damage, in the Battle of the Heligoland Bight; the German battlecruisers set out too late to intervene. But faulty signalling (always Beatty’s Achilles’ heel) and unintelligent use of intelligence marred this morale-boosting but insignificant victory. British submarines too managed, albeit to a lesser degree than their German rivals, to hurt the enemy, notably when three of them stole into the Baltic to operate from Russian bases.
The other enormous advantage gained by the Royal Navy, second only to the well-timed move to Scapa, arrived at the Admiralty on 13 October – in the shape of the entire main signal book of the Imperial German Navy. This most closely guarded secret of the war at sea came courtesy of Britain’s Russian allies, who had found it clasped in the arms of a dead German warrant officer, floating in the Baltic after the Russian Navy had trapped the light cruiser Magdeburg in the Gulf of Finland and driven her aground on 26 August before shelling her. The Russians offered it to the British, who gratefully sent a cruiser to collect it on 10 October. The book was the foundation of an invaluable intelligence operation conducted from Room 40 in the Admiralty’s Old Building for the duration of the war, foreshadowing the better-known assault on German codes and ciphers at Bletchley Park in the Second World War. But such a coup could hardly be made public.
By the end of October 1914, therefore, the Royal Navy apparently had only a few small successes to show against a depressingly long list of setbacks: the escape of the Goeben, the three ‘Cressys’ and other losses to the apparently uncatchable U-boats, the fall of Antwerp, the Emden and other detached German cruisers, the Audacious, the Hermes … The fleet’s greatest success of this period was and is seldom mentioned: the entirely safe transportation of the BEF across the Channel along with its supplies and reinforcements. This continued throughout the war; not one soldier was lost to enemy action on the cross-Channel route, even when U-boats and light craft were operating from the Belgian ports. At the beginning of ‘First Ypres’ a British naval flotilla under Rear-Admiral Hood made a valuable contribution by shelling German targets from offshore with the heavy guns of two cruisers, three monitors (floating gun batteries) and four destroyers. Tethered balloons with observers aboard were used to spot the fall of shot.
While Churchill was frustrated and depressed by the lack of major action at sea and of good news from the navy, the nation was disappointed and the press increasingly critical of the fleet and its political chief. He was accused of interference in operational detail and of not listening to the experts at the Admiralty. Battenberg almost resigned over Churchill’s intervention at Antwerp; the First Lord meanwhile in the last days of October was touting the idea of replacing the excessively Germanic First Sea Lord with the 74-year-old Lord Fisher. King George V did not like or trust Fisher and did not want the mercurial but vastly experienced old sailor to make a comeback at the expense of his royal cousin; Churchill himself was apparently prepared to resign over the issue until Asquith, the Prime Minister, persuaded all parties to accept the change at the head of the Royal Navy on 29 October – just three days before what was in psychological terms the worst naval disaster of them all: the destruction by Graf Spee of Cradock’s squadron.
Unusual vigour was shown by the Admiralty in investigating the Goeben fiasco. Preliminary enquiries began within a week of Souchon’s escape. It has to be remembered that there was no clue to his further intentions at this stage. As far as the Royal Navy was concerned, the Germans in the end had made for the only refuge available to them; an attempt to get home would have been suicidal, and Austria was not yet at war with Britain and France, so was unlikely to intervene to help Souchon (this assessment, as we saw, was entirely correct). The only apparent result was initially seen as positive for the Entente: with the Italians neutral and the Germans locked away in the Sea of Marmara, the only naval enemy left in the Mediterranean was the Austrian fleet in the Adriatic, a real but surely containable threat. It included 2 dreadnoughts (with 2 more on the stocks), 6 pre-dreadnought and 8 more antiquated battleships, 4 modern light cruisers, 6 old armoured cruisers, 21 mostly recent destroyers and a small but high-quality submarine arm of a dozen boats, soon to be reinforced.
None the less, Milne’s lacklustre, not to say inept, performance and Troubridge’s failure to engage the Germans were matters of profound shame in the Royal Navy. The general feeling in the not altogether silent service was that the two German ships could, and should, have been caught and sunk. ‘To think that it is to the Navy to provide the first and only instance of failure. God, it makes me sick’, Vice-Admiral Sir David Beatty, then commanding the battlecruiser force in the Grand Fleet, wrote to his wife on the Goeben affair. Fisher, all his warnings about Milne vindicated, was apoplectic but far from speechless. ‘Sir Berkeley Goeben’ had been due to take over the Nore command on the Thames estuary (a demotion) but the outbreak of war supervened; when he finally laid down his Mediterranean post he never got another. Having handed over to Carden on 17 August 1914, he sailed to Plymouth in the Inflexible. He defended his actions and decisions in a series of letters to the Admiralty. So did Troubridge, also by the end of August. An important difference between the former commander-in-chief and his erstwhile second-in-command concerned the two battlecruisers, Indomitable and Indefatigable, temporarily assigned by Milne to Troubridge on the very eve of war. In effect, the latter said he changed his mind about attacking the Goeben when he belatedly realised they would not be available to him after they had been detached on 3 August; Milne said he had never promised to return them. Milne’s defence at the court of inquiry, convened to determine whether there should be a trial by court martial, was jesuitical and self-serving, while Troubridge’s was emotional and disorganised.
Prince Louis Battenberg, still First Sea Lord at this time (he was hounded out of office two months later), read the two admirals’ exculpations and concluded that while Milne had acted more or less correctly with one or two exceptions, Troubridge was definitely and seriously at fault: ‘He failed to carry out his clear duty … to attack the enemy … Not one of [Troubridge’s] excuses can be accepted for one moment … The escape of the Goeben must ever remain a shameful episode …’ And, Battenberg concluded, the flag officer responsible should never command at sea again. Troubridge, like Milne, never did; he had been elected scapegoat, not only for Milne but also for the appalling inefficiencies at the Admiralty itself. While Milne could hardly be condemned without reference to the Admiralty’s major contributions to the fiasco, Troubridge apparently could. His main defence was that the Goeben, with her long-range, 28-centimetre guns and high speed, was a force superior to his four lumbering armoured cruisers in the prevailing conditions, and he, like Milne, had been under orders not to engage a superior force.
Curiously, the not inconsiderable factor of the German capital ship’s superior armour was never mentioned, whether at the inquiry or at Troubridge’s ensuing court martial: even if his cruisers had been able to get withi
n their own firing range before being knocked out, the shells from their contemporary type of 9.2-inch guns might well have have bounced off Goeben’s main armour, made from Krupp’s finest steel plates. But Troubridge could have deployed his light cruisers and fast destroyers in simultaneous torpedo attacks from several directions at once, while his heavy cruisers, suitably positioned, would have added to a plethora of targets which the Germans could not possibly have disabled, or even engaged, simultaneously. Even in 1939 capital ships proved incapable of coping with more than two targets at once. When Commodore Harwood’s three cruisers took on the German pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee in the south Atlantic that year, she could engage only two of them at a time, enabling the weaker British ships to ‘wing’ her and drive her into Montevideo (she scuttled on emerging from harbour rather than face the enemy again). All this is to miss the point: Troubridge’s real offence was to put discretion before valour, to let his head rule his heart, to adopt the gallant course at first and then change his mind: he failed to try. All he needed to do was to ‘wing’ the Goeben so that the battlecruisers could come up and finish her off.
Accordingly the court of inquiry on 22 September, chaired by Admiral Sir Hedworth Meux, commander-in-chief at Portsmouth, supported by Admiral Sir George Callaghan, immediate past commander-in-chief of the Grand Fleet, concluded that Troubridge did indeed have a case to answer. The Admiralty therefore wrote to the rear-admiral saying he would be tried under the Naval Discipline Act, on a charge that he did ‘from negligence … forbear to pursue the chase of His Imperial German Majesty’s ship Goeben, being an enemy then flying’. Had the word ‘cowardice’ been substituted for ‘negligence’ here, Troubridge would have faced the death penalty. The trial of an admiral for avoiding battle in wartime was an extreme rarity; even so, while it was not held in secret (except when national security was deemed to be involved), no journalist applied to attend. It began at Portland on 5 November 1914, aboard HMS Bulwark, the 15,000-tonne pre-dreadnought battleship which flew the flag of the commander-in-chief, Plymouth, Admiral Sir George Egerton. He presided, assisted by a vice-admiral, three rear-admirals, four captains and the deputy Judge Advocate of the Fleet. The prosecutor was Rear-Admiral Sydney Fremantle, who had the moral courage to resist the pressure from within a vengeful Admiralty to charge Troubridge with the hanging offence of cowardice. Mr Leslie Scott, KC, MP, a prominent advocate, was ‘the Accused’s Friend’, the technical term for the defender at a court martial, and managed to make a strong case for his client.
The Dandarnelles Disaster Page 9