Strange Intelligence: Memoirs of Naval Secret Service

by Hector C. Bywater

  The fuse has been aptly described as the ‘soul’ of the shell. To design a delay-action fuse that will function perfectly in an AP projectile is in itself a most difficult problem. It must occupy the minimum of weight and space. The minute elements of which it is composed must be proof against the sudden shock of discharge, for the premature detonation of a shell within the bore would wreck the gun, kill the turret crew, and, by probably igniting the ready cartridges inside the turret, gravely imperil the ship.

  It is further essential that those elements should withstand the tremendous concussion that results when the shell impinges on the armoured target. This is the instant at which the fuse becomes active and, in due course, causes the charge to explode.

  Thanks to an unwearying devotion to duty [adds our informant] which rose superior to the innumerable disappointments that were met with, we succeeded at length in devising a delay-action fuse that was unaffected by any shock, allowed the intact projectile to penetrate well into the vitals of a hostile ship and then caused it to detonate. In this way, therefore, was put into the hands of the German Navy an armour-piercing shell as perfect as human skill could make it – a weapon superior to anything that our opponents possessed.

  After due allowance has been made for the patriotic exuberance of Commander Kinzel, it must be acknowledged that the German projectiles were more effective than our own. But as soon as one begins to inquire into the cause of this deficiency on our part, many contradictory statements are encountered.

  It is asserted, for example, that the admiralty insisted on using, or trying to use, lyddite as a filling for armour-piercing shells, and that, as this compound was found to be too sensitive for the purpose, black powder had to be substituted. Other, and more technical reasons, have been advanced to account for the comparative failure of our projectiles against German armour.

  From naval officers, however, a simpler explanation has been forthcoming, which tends to confirm the observations already made as to the principles that governed the admiralty’s ordnance policy down to the date of Jutland. One of these officers has been quoted as saying:

  We knew long before Jutland that our AP shell was bad. Efforts were made to improve it, but the answer always came that high-explosives were ‘the stuff to give them’; that the smashing, racking, and wrenching effects of high-explosive shell would tear the strongest-armoured ship to pieces before she had a single clean perforation of her belt. This, I believe, was the substance of reports from our people in Japan during the war with Russia, and we assumed that the German dreadnoughts would prove no less vulnerable to high-explosive attack then Rojestvensky’s ships had done. As a result, the powers that be did not persevere with the attempt to produce a thoroughly effective armour-piercing shell. That we could have done so had we persisted is evident from the fact that an almost perfect projectile was being produced not many months after Jutland.

  Apart from the ammunition question, the test of war revealed further shortcomings in British naval equipment. Our rangefinders and other optical instruments necessary for fire-control purposes were inferior to those used in the German fleet, as has been officially admitted. Why they were inferior has still to be explained. In the early part of the Jutland action, at any rate, the German fire was more accurate than our own. The rapidity with which the enemy’s ships found the range and began hitting was a painful surprise to Admiral Jellicoe himself. It was the more astonishing because, at the date of Jutland, the Germans had not installed a director-control system, such as most of our capital ships already possessed, that was supposed to increase very considerably the accuracy of gunfire.

  The effects of the German shooting were enhanced by their method of ‘bunching’ salvoes. Their guns were so calibrated that all the shots from a broadside pitched in a very small area. If, therefore, the aim were accurate, the target was liable to be struck by several shells at once. This happened to the Queen Mary and other ships we lost, and serves to explain the appalling suddenness with which they were obliterated.

  On the other hand, unless the aim were absolutely correct, ‘bunched’ salvoes missed the target clean.

  British guns were not so closely calibrated, and by comparison with the German broadsides ours appeared to be ‘ragged’, some shots pitching short of, and others over, the target. This method of firing was deliberate, the idea being to increase the chances of hitting by giving each salvo a fairly wide spread, a single hit being rightly adjudged better than none at all.

  Each system had its merits and disadvantages so well balanced that there was little to choose between the two methods. The Germans, however, might well claim to have profited by Lord Fisher’s metaphor: if you are insulted at the dinner-table, don’t throw the decanter stopper at the offender: throw the decanter. They certainly threw with deadly effect in the battlecruiser action at Jutland.

  Irrespective of calibre, there were notable differences between the British and German big guns. The former, built on the wire-wound system, were exceedingly heavy for their bore, our 15-inch weighing nearly 100 tonnes unmounted. The German guns were of the all-steel pattern, and very much lighter, their 15-inch weighing little more than 70 tonnes; yet in accuracy they were by no means inferior to our weapons, and were much longer lived.

  On the outbreak of war the ships of both navies had inadequate protection against the risk of shell-flash reaching the magazines. Luckily for the Germans, they discovered this grave danger sixteen months before Jutland, and were able to take the necessary precautions in time. In the Dogger Bank action of January 1915, the two after-turrets of the battlecruiser Seydlitz were converted into raging furnaces by a single British shell that fractured the base of the aftermost turret and sent white-hot splinters into the ammunition hoist, igniting several cartridges.

  Nitro-cellulose powder burns with intense fury. The flames shot up and down the hoist, found their way through a communicating trap to the second turret, and started a similar blaze there. One hundred and sixty men perished in this holocaust, and only the heroic action of a petty officer, who closed a hatch in the nick of time, prevented the fire from reaching the magazines. Following this experience, anti-flash doors were fitted to all important ships, and other measures taken went far towards eliminating the danger.

  Another safety factor on the German side was represented by the brass cartridge cases in which the main powder charges for the big guns were contained, only the secondary charges being packed in silk bags. Thus, when shell flashes entered a turret or an ammunition hoist, the main charges, being sheathed in brass, rarely caught fire. In the British Navy, all powder charges were enclosed in silk, and were therefore much more liable to be touched off by a flash.

  The poor quality of our pre-war mines has been mentioned in a previous chapter. Although the characteristics of the German mine were well known to the admiralty, no attempt was made to produce an equally efficient weapon, and so, for the first half of the war, our elaborate minelaying operations were to a great extent wasted energy.

  The point we wish to drive home is this: it was not for want of advance information as to the details of German naval equipment that we neglected to provide ourselves with material equally good. The secret service agent’s job was done when he had gathered this information and, after verifying it as far as possible, forwarded it to the proper quarter. If it were not made use of, the blame did not rest with him.

  Whatever the explanation may be – absence of a proper naval staff or excessive conservatism in high administrative circles – there remains the inexorable fact that our pre-war Navy, despite its splendid ships and incomparable personnel, was lacking in certain material elements that were absolutely vital to complete fighting efficiency. The absence of these was responsible for more than one tragedy of lost endeavour.

  CHAPTER 8

  SOME NOTABLE ‘SCOOPS’

  MODERN NAVAL WARFARE is so complicated a business that it can be waged only by specialists. That, of course, is a truism, but we are writing here
with reference to the actual weapons employed, not to strategy or leadership. Each weapon has its ardent devotees. The torpedo specialist likes to think of his beloved ‘tin fish’ as the most potent engines of destruction afloat, and, incidentally, his conviction – or obsession – on this point is largely responsible for the extreme complexity of the modern large warship. There are even naval officers, mainly of junior rank, who think that aircraft will eventually dominate the surface of the sea.

  But the navy as a whole prefers the gun to all other weapons, and with reason. It was the arm that decided every important action of the Great War – Heligoland Bight, Dogger Bank, Coronel, the Falklands, and Jutland.

  The battleship is essentially a floating platform for big guns, and when we increase her tonnage, her speed, and her armour protection, we do so only in order to enlarge her capacity for carrying big guns, to give the platform greater mobility, and to render it less vulnerable to counter-attack. In a word, the ship exists for the gun, not the gun for the ship.

  Hence the supreme importance that is almost universally attached to gunnery.

  Some account has been given in the previous chapter of the extraordinary pains that the Germans took to develop an efficient shell for their heavy guns, and of the spectacular results it produced at Jutland. But unless accurately aimed, the best projectile is wasted. We shall now disclose the methods by which the German Navy attained its high standard of gunnery, and how, in due course, these jealously guarded secrets were penetrated by the British secret service.

  Long after the high-powered naval breech-loading gun had been introduced, target practice in every navy was still conducted at comparatively short range. Although the gun itself could throw its projectile with accuracy up to a very considerable distance, its powers in this respect were not exploited – for the sufficient reason that no system of controlling fire at long range had been evolved.

  But in the nineties of last century certain progressive naval officers in this country and elsewhere began to demonstrate the possibility of long-range gunfire, having first devised, quite independently of one another, the requisite instruments. The four men chiefly responsible for initial progress in this direction were Admiral Sir Percy Scott, Admirals Fiske and Simms in the United States, and Admiral Thomsen in Germany.

  In each case the telescopic sight was the prime element in the new system. Using this in conjunction with the ‘dotter’, ‘deflection teacher’, and other devices invented by himself, Scott obtained astonishing results with the guns of successive ships he commanded. He also revived the old method of broadside ‘parallel firing’, by which the axes of all guns bearing on the broadside are so adjusted as to give the weapons a common point of aim. This was the genesis of salvo firing, as distinct from independent shooting.

  Finally he invented the director system that bears his name. This enables one man to aim and fire all the guns in the ship. If his aim be accurate – and it depends not merely on his own skill, but on that of the colleague who is ‘spotting’ the fall of shot from a masthead position, and also on abstruse mathematical calculations that are being made in the ‘transmitting station’ deep in the bowels of the ship – the target may be hit by a full broadside, just as the smallest miscalculation or error of judgement will cause all the shots to miss the mark.

  Under the inspiration of Admiral Thomsen, the German Navy began experimental practice at long ranges in 1895. In the following year a concentration shoot by battle squadrons was carried out near Swinemünde, in the presence of the Kaiser, who was so impressed by the results that he exerted his personal influence to secure the steady development of long-distance gunnery in the fleet.

  A new navy is apt to be less conservative than one of older standing, and thus it was that, in Germany, every innovation that promised to increase the fighting efficiency of the fleet was assured beforehand of official encouragement. In England, unfortunately, it was too often the other way about, inventors and would-be reformers having an uphill fight to gain official recognition.

  The Germans, having proved long-range firing to be practicable, at once proceeded to give their naval guns an extremely high angle of elevation. The importance of this needs a word of explanation. Within certain limits, the higher the angle at which a gun is fired, the further the shot will travel. A 12-inch gun firing at 15 degrees will throw its shot 16,000 yards, but if the muzzle is raised to 30 degrees the extreme range will be increased to 24,000 yards.

  As the Germans, as far back as 1900, were giving their turret guns an elevation of 30 degrees, while the guns of contemporary British ships were limited to 13 and a half, it follows that the German vessels outranged ours by a very substantial margin. Had war broken out at that period, the German fleet would have enjoyed an immense, perhaps a decisive, advantage by its two-fold superiority in range and accuracy of fire.

  Although we soon got wind of the German high-angle mountings, their significance appears to have been minimised, probably because we knew little or nothing about the quality of the German fleet’s gunnery. Our ignorance on this subject persisted until a very few years before the outbreak of war, but from time to time scraps of information percolated through which, when pieced together, made it clear that our prospective enemies were leaving nothing undone to improve their naval marksmanship. An intelligence agent in 1909 drew attention to the high rate of fire of which the German guns seemed to be capable, the 11-inch discharging three, and the 9.4-inch four, rounds a minute. This rapidity could not be equalled by the main armament of British battleships.

  When Germany designed her first dreadnoughts she took occasion to overhaul her gunnery system. Numerous and costly experiments were made with new methods of fire control, the best elements of each being subsequently incorporated in a standard system with which all the newer ships were equipped. This, the ‘Richtungsweiser’, or direction pointer, had certain features in common with those of the Scott director, though in other respects the rival systems were dissimilar.

  Of director control, as understood in the British Navy, the German fleet had none until a year after the Battle of Jutland, yet the brilliance of its gunnery in that action was attested by the results.

  They were the natural fruits of twenty years of intensive work, carried on with characteristic German perseverance and thoroughness. For every hundred pounds we spent on gunnery research and experiment during this period, Germany spent a thousand. To give but one example: secret service agents in 1910 disclosed that the ammunition allowance for practice purposes was on a far more generous scale than that of the British fleet, the number of rounds per heavy gun being 80 per cent higher. Practice with ‘live’ shell against armoured targets was quite a common occurrence, though it was rarely, if ever, indulged in by the British Navy.

  These facts are adduced to show that there was nothing miraculous in the accuracy of German naval gunfire. The guns themselves and their projectiles were of first-class quality, it is true, but the almost uniformly high standard of shooting was the perfection that is only born of unremitting practice.

  From the secret service point of view, gunnery data were valued more highly than almost any other class of information, and for fairly obvious reasons they were very difficult to obtain. There were several ways of securing details of a new ship, a new gun, or a new torpedo. For example, by accepting certain risks the agent might procure what he wanted by personally visiting a dockyard or an ordnance factory. But while such visits were, in fact, not infrequently made, it was a very different matter to go on board a foreign warship and watch her carry out firing exercises.

  Oddly enough, the only secret agent who is supposed to have performed this feat was working on behalf of the United States. According to letters exchanged between two American naval officers – and, apparently with their permission, published in the American press in 1925 – an American contrived to be on board a British battleship when she was engaged in long-range practice, and noted that the anti-torpedo bulges on one side were flooded to g
ive her a list, thus increasing the elevation of her guns. Neither the dale nor any other details of the incident were given, and it is quite possibly apocryphal.

  Be that as it may, no British agent in Germany ever claimed to have effected as dramatic a coup. Nevertheless, by employing less direct methods we were able to get more than one glimpse of German naval gunnery, which ought to have left us in no doubt as to its quality.

  The introduction of high-angle mountings in the German fleet has already been mentioned. Actual photographs were obtained, depicting pre-dreadnoughts of the Deutschland and Braunschweig class with their turret guns cocked up at acute angles.

  We knew, too, that several of these ships had carried out ‘bombardment’ shoots at ranges up to 14,000 yards, the targets being stationary and the ranges plotted to advance.

  This item of news was valuable as confirmation of the long range of German guns, but it had no other significance, for in those days (1907), and for several years afterwards, the High Seas Fleet never exceeded a range of 10,000 yards when firing at moving targets. In Germany, as in this country, shooting at any greater distance was regarded as a waste of powder and shot.

  When the first German dreadnoughts were laid down it was naturally inferred that their guns would have an angle of elevation at least as high as that in the earlier ships. In fact, our original intelligence reports on the Nassau and Helgoland class credited their big guns with 30 degrees of elevation. The truth was not discovered until the ships had been in commission for some time. It was then found that their mountings permitted an elevation of only 16 degrees.