1918

by Matthias Strohn

  The Black Sea

  In the Black Sea the situation was very similar to that in the Baltic. Here, the revolutionary movement had also hampered naval operations, but contrary to the Baltic, the commander of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, Vice Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak, was at least able to conduct convoy operations between the Crimea and the Caucasus front in the first four months of 1917. Revolutionary soviets, however, forced him to resign in June. His successor, Rear Admiral Aleksandr Nemits, left port again for a mining operation against the Bosphorus. Discovered by the light cruiser Medilli, the former SMS Breslau, the ensuing short exchange of fire was in fact the last clash of the Turkish and Russian fleets in three years of war in the Black Sea. Later Russian attempts to attack Turkish positions were thwarted by protests from the soviets whose influence had increased enormously in the meantime.

  The Bolshevik revolution and the peace treaties dictated by Germany to Russia and Romania in 1918 opened the Black Sea for the Germans and their allies, the Ottomans. Though Sevastopol, formerly the main Russian naval base, now belonged to the Ukraine, which had emerged from the ruins of the Tsarist Empire, the Germans were keen to get their hands on the rest of the Russian Fleet. The German High Command, as well as leading admirals, even dreamed of using these ships together with the Yavuz Sultan Selim, the former SMS Goeben, for a sudden attack on Allied forces in the Mediterranean and a junction with the Austrians to mop up Allied forces in the region. The effect upon the Allied positions in the Middle East and in the Balkans might – in theory – have been disastrous.7 In the event, these plans – or better dreams – came to nothing, although they had also occupied the Allies for some time. While all modern Russian ships managed to escape, those left were not only old pre-dreadnoughts, but also proved difficult to repair and man for the Germans. Political disputes between the Germans and the Ottomans, who also wanted their share of this precious booty, caused further delays. As a result, the Black Sea remained quiet apart from the increasing unrest between revolutionary and counter-revolutionary troops in the area. The Germans viewed these with increasing suspicion, concerned that these developments might hamper their own expansionist plans in the East. In order to emphasize Germany’s claim Ludendorff ordered the transportation of a German submarine to the Caspian Sea in mid-September 1918, deeply convinced that the imperial ensign would strengthen Germany’s position there and help pave the way to even farther Asian countries such as India.

  The Mediterranean

  Apart from both German and Austrian submarine attacks on Allied shipping, the eastern Mediterranean had seen no action for a long time. The only exception was a sortie of the Turkish battle-cruiser Yavuz Sultan Selim and the light cruiser Medilli into the Aegean Sea on 20 January 1918. This surprise attack on Allied ships guarding the entrance into the Dardanelles proved successful. Two British monitors were sunk off the Greek island of Mudros. On the way back, however, the Medilli ran into a minefield and sank. To make things worse, the Yavuz Sultan Selim also hit a mine, when it tried to tow the listing Medilli back into the Dardanelles. With great luck it limped back into the Dardanelles, where it ran onto a sandbank. Towed back to Constantinople, it proved so badly damaged that it could not be repaired there. The only dry-dock in this area was in Russian Sevastopol, which had been taken over by the Germans in mid-March. There the Yavuz Sultan Selim was repaired in the following months. When it returned to Constantinople at the end of October the Ottoman Empire was on the verge of collapse. The German naval mission, which had run the ship, accordingly left only a few days later, thus ending the war in the Middle East even before the Armistice in the West.

  As in the North Sea, only German and Austrian submarines proved successful. The introduction of the convoy system had caused problems for the U-boats in this part of the world as well, and so had the increased numbers of US, Australian, and eventually even Brazilian destroyers employed both to protect convoys and to hunt submarines. Yet, the U-boats were still able to inflict losses upon the Allies. These losses, however, steadily decreased from 103,738 tons in January to 28,007 tons in October. Apart from Allied countermeasures, maintenance problems and the fact that the bigger U-boats, which had achieved remarkable successes in the years before, were not replaced were also responsible for this development. Eventually only less effective small U-boats were available to wage the tonnage war in the Mediterranean.

  The Adriatic

  In the Adriatic the situation had been very similar to the one in the North Sea right from the beginning of the war. Only occasional sorties from either side against major or minor targets or in the support of operations on land from the sea had broken the stalemate that had existed since Italy’s entry into the war in 1915. Successes had always been very limited, though both sides had suffered losses. From the Austrian point of view, however, the situation began to change dramatically in 1918 with the arrival of more Allied destroyers in the Adriatic to support the defence of the Otranto Barrage and thus prevent German as well as Austrian submarines from entering the Mediterranean. To make things worse for the Austrians, the navy was severely hampered by unrest in the early months of 1918. This unrest coincided with a wave of workers’ strikes in Austria as well as in Germany. Political discontent, war-weariness, and hunger were the main motives of those who went onto the streets or mutinied as at Cattaro. For the first time, red flags were hoisted indicating the impact of the Russian Revolution on soldiers, sailors, and the people on the home fronts. Eventually the Austrian Navy managed to solve the problem. Some of the ringleaders were executed, hundreds imprisoned. In contrast to the German naval mutiny in 1917, however, the Austrian Navy, tried to solve some of its problems by relieving incompetent officers from their command. Nevertheless, the Cattaro mutiny remained a warning that the situation was on the verge of getting out of control and that the war had to come to an end – the sooner the better. In early June 1918, the new and more-energetic commander-in-chief of the Austro-Hungarian Navy, Rear Admiral Niklas Horthy, planned a new sortie to destroy the Otranto Barrage and open it for the submarines of the Austrian and German navies as in the year before. His formidable task force, which consisted not only of light cruisers and destroyers but also of seven battleships, returned after the dreadnought Szent István had been sunk by an Italian motorboat which had found it by chance and torpedoed it. Whether this attack on the Otranto Barrage would have changed anything if it had been successful is a matter of speculation. It did, however, prove that the change from the strategy of a fleet-in-being to a more offensive fleet was a disaster. It was the last time that the Austrian Navy went out to sea. Following this unexpected success, the Allies increased their pressure upon the Austrian Navy by attacking Austrian ports as well as sending submarines to patrol off Austrian naval bases, though with no success. When two Italian officers secretly entered the Austrian naval base at Pola on 1 November 1918 and succeeded in putting charges to the battleship Viribus Unitis and the steamer Wien – which exploded, although they had been detected already – the Dual Monarchy was, like its allies, on the verge of collapse.

  The end of the Great War

  Though fighting against the Bolsheviks continued in the East until 1919 and though the Middle East remained an area of unrest until 1923 for the Allies, the Great War came to an end in late 1918. The end of this war at sea is, strangely enough, closely connected not only with the ‘Hundred Days’ campaign of the Allies in the West as well as the collapse of Germany’s allies in the East and in the South-east, but also with the plans for a final sortie of the High Seas Fleet. Somehow an irony of history, Scheer’s decision to launch a final and suicidal offensive against the Grand Fleet into the Hoofden in October 1918, when the war was virtually over and when the new and more democratic German government had already begun to negotiate the terms of an armistice with the Allies, was the spark to the powder-keg that blew up the whole Empire. Scheer’s idea that a final battle was necessary to save the honour of the naval officer corps and help to justify the requiremen
t for a huge navy after the war was a clear sign that the navy’s leadership had still not understood the signs of the times. Unwilling to die for their officers who had mistreated them in many ways throughout the war, unwilling to defend a political order which they had experienced as unjust and undemocratic, and simply wanting to go home as soon as possible, the sailors put out the fires in the big ships and mutinied. Now the naval leadership had to pay the price for its mishandling of the unrest on many ships in the year before. Instead of introducing reforms and improving the situation on board, they had reacted with harsh punishments. Within days this mutiny spread all over Germany with Red sailors often marching at the front of the demonstrations against the old authorities. On 9 November 1918 Germany became a republic, and on 11 November representatives of the new government signed the Armistice at Compiègne in France.

  The stipulations of the Armistice were harsh, but the great majority of Germans were simply glad that the war was over. The High Seas Fleet had to disarm under the supervision of Allied officers and to sail into internment in Britain. All preparations finished, 21 November 1918 was eventually ‘Der Tag’ – the day of victory many officers of the Royal Navy had allegedly longed for for almost a decade. A long line of German ships, led by the light cruiser HMS Cardiff, steamed through the North Sea towards Britain. This time, however, the High Seas Fleet had not left Schillig Roads to attack its most dangerous enemy, as Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, the father of the German battle-fleet, had called Britain 20 years before, but to surrender. Some 40 miles east of the Firth of Forth, which was one of Britain’s major naval bases, the German vessels were met by the combined British, American, and French fleets. In two columns with the German ships between them, the commander-in-chief of the Grand Fleet, Admiral Sir David Beatty, led the beaten enemy to the place of his internment, Britain’s naval base at distant Scapa Flow in the Orkneys. Before he left his flagship, the battleship Queen Elizabeth, Admiral Beatty gave the signal: ‘The German flag will be hauled down at sunset today, Thursday, and will not be hoisted again without permission.’8 Finally the naval war was over. Somehow, it was an irony of history that the Germans were nevertheless able to retaliate and triumph. When Rear Admiral Ludwig von Reuter, commander of the German ships lying at anchor in Scapa Flow, was informed that the German ships would not be allowed to return home after the signing of the peace treaty, as many officers had hoped, but be distributed among the victors, he ordered the scuttling of the ships under his command. Within a few hours, most ships disappeared in the water; only a few could be saved at the last moment by British guards. For many Germans the scuttling of the once-proud fleet was a symbol of justified defiance. To some extent it foreshadowed the eventual outcome that most naval officers would be unwilling to learn their lessons from what had happened before, but instead look for the right moment to take revenge.

  Aftermath

  Due to the restrictions imposed by the Treaty of Versailles, the German Navy would pose no threat in the future. Nevertheless, the Allies soon tried to take measures to prevent a renewal of the naval race which had contributed so much to the deterioration of international relations before the war. This time it was the US naval programme of 1916, which had demanded the build-up of a fleet second to none, that was the trigger to come to some kind of international agreement. In 1921–22 delegates from the United States, Great Britain, Italy, France, and Japan assembled in Washington DC to negotiate an agreement. Though a naval race between Britain and the United States was politically very unlikely, such an agreement was also a good opportunity in particular to curb Japanese ambitions in the Far East. Apart from Japan, which only grudgingly entered into these negotiations, all powers had a great interest in an agreement because their financial resources had been depleted by the war. Moreover, political and social unrest were a warning that governments had to meet the wishes of the people, instead of wasting money on new armament programmes. In all countries people also wanted nothing but peace for the future after the horrors of the war they had experienced. After long discussions the delegates signed an agreement limiting the strengths of navies for a ten-year period. In capital ships the agreement stipulated a quota of 525,000 tons for the United States and Britain, of 315,000 tons for Japan, and of 175,000 tons for both France and Italy. Separate provisions along the same lines included tonnage limits for aircraft carriers. The tonnage of cruisers was also limited to 10,000 tons, but their numbers were not. Submarines, the new deadly weapon of the war, were completely left out. In the public these results were welcomed almost enthusiastically as a first step to worldwide disarmament and peace. In the navies the view was more ambiguous, though most admirals had realized that they simply could not afford more ships than they already possessed. Rather, they had to scrap many, which also eased their financial burden. Whether this system of arms control would work was, however, a question of the future. In 1930, at the London naval conference, it did, despite a severe quarrel between the United States and Great Britain about the inclusion of cruisers into the agreement; six years later it collapsed because Japan proved unwilling to renounce its ambitious aims.

  Conclusion

  As Arthur J. Marder has rightly claimed in his magnificent account on the role of the Royal Navy in World War I, French Maréchal Foch was never able to understand the role of sea power in this seminal struggle, whatever arguments were put forward by politicians and admirals alike. He always asked: ‘What have the Navy done? Have they done any fighting?’ These questions were typical for army officers in all nations, but not for them alone, because most of the fighting took place on land and the great majority of soldiers of all nations had lost their lives in the trenches and not on the rough seas. And it is true. The navies, especially the Royal Navy, the former mistress of the sea, displayed deficiencies during the war. The great challenges of the revolution of naval warfare during the war were sometimes difficult to overcome for officers who had been trained in the era of the last sailing ships. Nevertheless without sea power the Allies would not have been able to secure their life-lines all over the world. In this respect, the Great War was indeed a proof of the teachings of the naval prophet, Alfred T. Mahan, who believed that the great power status of a nation was inextricably associated with the sea, with its commercial use in peace and its control in war. Vice versa this meant that the Germans eventually had no chance of winning the war, unless they were powerful enough to improve their strategic position by either occupying the doors into the open Atlantic – Brest and Bergen – or (following one of Mahan’s critics, Halford J. Mackinder) by enlarging their continental basis. A generation later, they tried to achieve both aims. They failed again, not least because of the importance of sea power in this even-greater struggle for world dominance.

  CHAPTER 9

  THE AIR CAMPAIGN OF 1918

  Dr James S. Corum

  Breaking the stalemate

  From 1914 to 1917 the Germans and the Western Allies were stalemated by their inability to make a decisive break in the array of trenches and fortifications that ran the length of the Western Front. Since early 1915 the combatant powers had mounted repeated major offensives at places like Verdun, the Somme, Champagne, and Flanders; these were an attempt to make a decisive breakthrough, but instead resulted in massive casualties for minor gains. Although the defence had an advantage in this style of warfare, the casualties in these campaigns were almost as high for the defenders as for the attackers. Yet, by early 1918 both sides had developed some revolutionary tactics that would again enable offensive warfare and manoeuvre without incurring high losses for the attacker – and airpower had a central role in this revolution.

  This chapter on the air war in 1918 focuses on two issues that determined the conduct of the campaign: how the small air services of 1914 had become large air forces involved in all aspects of operations; and the role played by aviation in the tactical revolution that broke the trench deadlock and enabled offensive warfare.

  The tactical revoluti
on

  The most lethal weapon of the war, and the key to success on the battlefield, was artillery. Over 80 per cent of all casualties of World War I were inflicted by artillery. Troops in deep entrenchments were relatively safe from artillery, but when forces massed for the attack and counter-attack and moved out of the trenches, artillery inflicted massive casualties. However, in late 1917, in a series of parallel developments, the French, German, and British armies came to a highly effective solution to overcome the firepower of the defenders and enable the infantry forces to advance through the enemy trenches without excessive casualties.

  Indeed, airpower was linked to the artillery from the start of the war and it was the air arm that made the artillery so effective. The primary role of the air services was reconnaissance and observation and almost half of the German, British, and French air services was composed of squadrons assigned to reconnaissance and artillery spotting. The rapid evolution of aircraft and observation techniques, as well as radios and aerial photography, allowed the combatants a clear picture of enemy defences and forces from the front lines to deep in the rear areas. Reconnaissance aircraft mapped not only the enemy front lines, but reserve positions, artillery batteries, and support units far to the rear. By the mid-point of the war the air services had large intelligence branches capable of processing thousands of aerial photos every week. Major operational plans were based primarily on aerial intelligence, which provided the targets for the artillery. The artillery relied heavily on two-seater observation aircraft equipped with radios and specially trained to work with the gun batteries. Radio sets of World War I were bulky affairs, but by 1916 both sides made radio transmitters small enough to fit in an aeroplane and able to transmit messages in Morse code directly to radios located with the artillery. The basic procedures were highly effective. Artillery fliers would spot a target such as a troop concentration or an enemy artillery battery. They used a simple code key in which grid references were letter and number coded, with typical targets assigned Morse code letters, and the aircraft observer could tap out a brief message directly to the artillery units.1 This enabled the artillery to fire immediately and the observing aircraft could adjust the artillery’s fire, again with messages of just a few letters. Thanks to aircraft, artillery could be used with an accuracy unimaginable before World War I.