Heligoland
Page 14
Significantly, also present at the regatta was the American cruiser USS Chicago, commanded by the versatile Captain Alfred Mahan, who was much better known as the author of the thought-provoking work The Influence of Sea Power upon History. Over many months the Kaiser had read the book thoroughly from cover to cover, scribbling many annotations in its margins. It became his guide for an awesome expansion of the Germany Navy. The process was prepared for him by Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, who took office in June 1897. His first memorandum was explicitly anti-British. It set down that the most dangerous naval enemy was England; that a shortage of German coaling stations outside Europe meant Germany should avoid a global war with England; and that Germany must build as many battleships as possible. Lastly, he insisted that: ‘Our fleet must be so constructed that it can unfold its greatest military potential between Helgoland and the Thames’. These recommendations were destined to be put into effect in 1898 when the Reichstag approved Tirpitz’s plan for a massive warship-building programme. It won the support of expansionists such as von Bülow, who famously remarked in the Reichstag that December: ‘We don’t want to put anyone in the shade, but we too demand our place in the sun.’
On 3 May 1897 the Kaiser ordered the High Command of the Navy to prepare an operational study for war against England. Ludwig Schröder, the Admiralty staff officer entrusted with the work, went so far as to advise the Kaiser that Germany should ‘out-Copenhagen’ the British by seizing neutral Antwerp and the mouth of the Schelde in a sudden coup de main before war had been declared, and mounting an invasion of England from the Belgian coast. This plan of Schröder’s was dismissed as ‘insane’ by Tirpitz, who favoured the concentration of a powerful fleet of battleships in the North Sea, which might opportunistically wrong-foot a Royal Navy debilitated by its world-wide commitments.6
Wilhelm later revealed in his autobiography My Memoirs (1922) that in February 1900, while he was with the German fleet on manoeuvres at Heligoland, he had received an astonishing telegram from Berlin. Russia and France had approached Germany with a proposal to make a joint attack on Britain now that she was involved elsewhere (the Boer War was in progress), and to cripple her sea traffic. Wilhelm objected and ordered that the proposal should be declined. Assuming that both Paris and St Petersburg would present the matter in London in such a way as to make it appear that the proposal had originated in Berlin, Wilhelm immediately telegraphed from Heligoland to Queen Victoria and the Prince of Wales, explaining the facts of the Russo-French proposal and his repudiation of it. Victoria answered, expressing her hearty thanks, while the Prince of Wales replied with an expression of astonishment. Later Victoria told Wilhelm confidentially that the false version of the story had indeed been told in London, just as he anticipated, and that thanks to his despatch she had been able to expose the intrigue to her government. Somewhat implausibly, Wilhelm also remembered, ‘she added that she would not forget the service I had done England in troubled times’! And yet, only three years earlier, the Schröder plan had been devised on his orders.
Erskine Childers was busy writing his adventure novel The Riddle of the Sands at that time. It was the fictional tale of a patriotic English yachtsman, Arthur Davies, and his Foreign Office accomplice, Carruthers. While sailing the converted lifeboat Dulcibella around the Frisian Islands they discover a secret German plot to use the islands’ remoteness to conceal an armada of barges for transporting troops to invade the east coast of England. Carruthers spies on the Kaiser’s late-night inspection of the secret fleet, which proves the scheme is being formulated with the approval of the highest authority. Romantic interest is provided by Clara, the daughter of the scheme’s fictional mastermind, Dollmann. The Dulcibella is safely towed through the Kiel Canal by a trading schooner, but not before Davies’s heroic little yacht is nearly lured to destruction by Dollmann. The villain of the piece hoves to at the Elbe Outer Lightship, not far from Heligoland, and maliciously urges the Dulcibella to take a short cut to Cuxhaven (and thence on to Brunsbüttel) initially, via the dangerous, semi-submerged maze of shoals between the Scharhorn sands and the shifting Knechtsands.
By coincidence the plot uncovered by the plucky yachtsman was remarkably similar to the audacious 1897 Schröder plan, and there has always been speculation as to where Childers obtained the elements for his ‘fictitious’ yarn. Heligoland now seems to provide the answer. His main invasion warning appears in the epilogue to The Riddle of the Sands, where Carruthers argues that the likely landing place for an invasion would be on the flats of the Essex coast, just north of the Thames estuary, ‘between Foulness and Brightlingsea’. Such a shore, he hypothesised, ‘would form an excellent roadstead for the covering squadron, whose guns would command the shore within easy range’. However, Carruthers insisted, the expedition would be doomed ‘if by any mischance the British discovered what was afoot in good time and could send a swarm of light-draft boats, which could get amongst the flotillas while they were still in process of leaving the siels [shallows]’. Surprisingly, what has hitherto never been detected is that this was precisely the argument made by the anti-Heligoland cession campaigner Robert Heron-Fermor in a speech on 9 July 1890. That evening he had asked:
What would be the consequence to England of the incorporation of Holland with the German Empire? Why, in the event of war, our whole East coast would be open to invasion. Because from the Thames to the Humber we have no harbours nor roadsteads where vessels could lie under the protection of guns. On the other hand the creeks and inlets of Holland swarm with places of refuge where fortifications could be thrown up, and an invading flotilla could lie concealed under their shelter in perfect safety.
As a clerk at Westminster, Childers would have had access to the House of Lords library, and it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that he came across Heron-Fermor’s 1890 pamphlet there, and with it a full transcript of the speech. Perhaps it was HeronFermor’s forewarnings of the folly of swapping Heligoland that supplied the strategic substance of The Riddle of the Sands.
The novel was published in London in May 1903 and rapidly became an enormous success, eventually selling some two million copies. It established Childers as a pioneering practical yachtsman, one of the few willing to venture so far in a small, makeshift, cruising yacht. Vixen’s cruise to the Frisian Islands and the Baltic did, however, have a precedent. In 1889 Edward Knight had published The Falcon on the Baltic, an obscure account of a cruising yacht’s voyage from Hammersmith to Copenhagen. In it, Knight referred to the ‘old enemy, the north-west wind’.
But it was Childers’s book that caught the public imagination, with its thrilling combination of high adventure and nautical yarn. The sailing sequences in The Riddle of the Sands were some of the most beautiful ever written in the English language. Unfortunately for Heligoland, despite Childers’s affection for the Frisian Islands, he set the novel’s most memorable episodes among low-lying islands, either at night or in dull weather, in order to maximise the dramatic effect. This immensely popular novel certainly romanticised the Frisian Islands – and by association Heligoland – and brought them to public attention, but in the process unwittingly gave the lasting impression that such dismal conditions were usual there.
A shock naval defeat on the far side of the world just a year after the publication of Childers’s novel utterly transformed Heligoland’s strategic importance. As tensions mounted between Russia and Japan, on the night of 8 February 1904 Admiral Togo’s battle squadron suddenly appeared at the outer harbour of Port Arthur and pounded Russia’s powerful Pacific Squadron into smoking hulks. Caught entirely by surprise the Russian ships scarcely fired a shot.7 This attack echoed Germany’s ‘Copenhagen 1807’-type nightmare, especially because the shelling had occurred before war had been declared. That October the furious reaction of British public opinion to the Dogger Bank incident – when Russian warships fired on Hull fishing boats in the North Sea just 230 miles from Heligoland – frightened the Germans quite as much as the Russians. I
n fact German suspicions that influential decision-makers within the British naval establishment were calling for a coup de main against Germany’s rapidly growing navy were partly justified. In early 1904 Sir John Fisher, the pugnacious First Sea Lord, had in fact suggested to King Edward VII that it would make sound sense to ‘Copenhagen’ the German fleet before it got too strong. The king replied: ‘My God, Fisher, you must be mad!’ The belief that ‘Fisher was coming’ actually caused a panic at Kiel at the beginning of 1907.8
The collapse of Russian military power in the Far East and the first stirrings of revolution at home threatened to remove the Russian Empire from the ranks of the great powers. As a result, Germany had much less to fear from the northern power on her eastern boundary. This meant that German naval planners came to regard the North Sea and not the Baltic as the principal German naval area. However, as Büchsel noted in a lengthy memorandum to Tirpitz in early 1906, the defences around the Elbe estuary would be totally inadequate in the event of a surprise British attack, hence there was a pressing need to turn Cuxhaven into a first-class fortress now that the High Seas Fleet was to be based on the Elbe. He suggested the development of a triangular system of fortresses to protect the mouth of the Elbe, using Heligoland and two other islands several miles offshore: Borkum, off Emden, and Sylt, just by the Schleswig-Holstein coast. All three islands would require fortifications, underwater defences, docks and communication systems.9
These strategic constructions seemingly justified the warnings in The Riddle of the Sands. Childers became ever more insistent that Whitehall should heed his advice and develop a North Sea base for major British warships, in the Firth of Forth or at Harwich. In early 1906 he sent a memorandum to the Cabinet’s Committee of Imperial Defence entitled Remarks on the German North Sea Coast in its Relation to War between Great Britain and Germany, in which he advocated that officers should be sent to ‘explore’ the coast in order to gain practical personal knowledge for future operations and landings. Some yachtsmen volunteered to go as freelance agents; one such was Brigadier Gordon Shephard, who got himself arrested at Emden. In 1910 two characters were invited by Naval Intelligence to make a ‘walking tour’ of the newly fortified Frisian Islands. Marine Captain Barney Trench and Lieutenant Vivian Brandon spent three weeks that spring on their tour, visiting Heligoland, then Sylt, Cuxhaven, and each of the islands in the Frisian chain until they reached Borkum. In the course of their fact-finding tour they took photographs of secret installations and filled notebooks with technical observations. At Borkum they were arrested as spies before being transferred to Leipzig. At their celebrated show trial – well reported in British newspapers – they were sentenced to four years’ imprisonment.
Tirpitz was more inclined to invest in effective warships than in fortresses, and was uneasy about allocating substantial capital resources for the fortification of Heligoland. He was not alone. Various other leading figures in Berlin thought so too; indeed, it was in connection with such work that – as Kaiser Wilhelm recalled in his memoirs – ‘the Empire and Prussia fought like cat and dog’.10 Tirpitz believed that if money was to be allocated for the fortification of the Frisian Islands, it ought to be spent on defending Heligoland which could then assist in offensive sorties by the battle fleet.
That fateful decision having been taken, Heligoland became the subject of a huge new phase of military building intended to develop it into a formidable offshore base for torpedo-craft, gunboats and light cruisers. To the south-west, jutting out from the corner of the island where the high red cliffs of the Oberland joined the Unterland, a concrete mole was constructed, a protective arm projecting some 1,950ft out to sea. Another mole, 1,300ft long, was built to the east, and the area between the moles was ambitiously reclaimed from the sea by means of infilling with millions of tons of sand brought from the Elbe estuary. To this vast new diamond-shaped apron, known as the Südhafen (South Harbour), was attached an electric railway and jetties forming various specialist harbours. All the while the main island itself was coming to resemble a huge unsinkable battleship. Mounted high on the cliff-tops at the north and south ends of the island, the main armament consisted of groups of long-range guns with 12in-diameter barrels. The very contours of the Oberland, most of which had traditionally been used by the islanders as potato fields, were harshly altered when the north group of guns were installed on a miniature mountain, fashioned out of the material blasted out of the ground during the construction of the maze of subterranean stores and shelters. Indeed, many of the works were underground.
The guns were housed in four massive, heavily armoured steel turrets, which could be swivelled for all-round fire. These turrets, which the German Navy lightheartedly named ‘Anna’, ‘Bertha’, ‘Caesar’ and ‘Dora’, were so streamlined that they were almost flush with the ground and thus would have been especially difficult targets for British warships at sea. All maritime facilities on the island were upgraded to the very highest standard. By 1913 even the lighthouse had been specially modernised with the latest searchlight mirrors and arc lamps. Boasting 38 million candle-power, it became, or so it was claimed at the time, one of the most powerful lighthouses in the world. The present lighthouse keeper there now doubts the truth of that claim.
Less and less information about the islanders was reaching Britain each year. Spy-fever and the construction of the heavy-duty fortifications meant that the German authorities were in no mood for it to be otherwise. No doubt wishing to keep the island from the prying eyes of visiting British yachtsmen, in 1908 the Kaiser himself decreed that henceforth the Dover–Heligoland race was to be held every three years. Rather more worryingly, the German authorities banned British vessels from entering the island’s waters at any time. This was in flagrant contravention of the 1890 Treaty of Cession’s Article 7 – which had prominently guaranteed access for British fishing boats to Heligoland’s anchorages in all weathers. The Foreign Office scarcely bothered to complain. Indeed, the only discernible voice in support of the British link with the island was that of William George Black, who twenty years earlier had been denigrated by the Foreign Office in its internal departmental memos.
Entirely at his own expense and on his own initiative, Black visited the island in June 1911. In the absence of any British consular representation there, he was the best (if not the only) person to report on the islanders’ living conditions. Mindful of the spy-fever that had not so long before claimed Shephard, Trench and Brandon, and sensing he was being watched, he was most careful to avoid taking photographs or notes. He found that some five hundred Italian and East Prussian labourers had been toiling for three years in the construction of subterranean passages, chambers and galleries designed to allow the artillery secure and easy access to every part of the island. Apart from the barracks Germany had created for her own soldiers no provision had been made to house the greatly increased population. The foreign workmen were obliged to find lodgings with the Heligolanders, where they became more or less members of the family. Hitherto there had been little crime among the island’s population of two thousand, and no door needed to be locked at night. The lodgers paid good rates for their accommodation, but their presence disturbed the islanders’ close-knit way of life and the morale of their ancient nation was further eroded. Had the Heligolanders been able to continue with their proper occupation as fishermen they could have compelled the government to provide accommodation for the labourers, but the fishing industry, according to Black, had been wrecked, the nets torn apart by submarines and other vessels.
On returning to England in 1911 Black’s observations were published in an article entitled ‘From Heligoland to Helgoland’ in the National Review. By chance the journal was edited by Leopold Maxse, the son-in-law of Lord Salisbury and the nephew of the island’s most distinguished former governor, Ernest Maxse. Black’s article described the military changes he had noticed. There was construction activity across the roads on Dune (formerly Sandy Island), although the outline of that depe
ndency had been greatly diminished by recent storms. What used to be the healthy open Oberland was almost entirely occupied by buildings and fortifications. Peering through the barbed-wire fence overlooking the new dockland complex he had seen one of the specialist harbours being prepared for submarines. German warships were almost constantly employed in gun practice in the neighbourhood of Heligoland, sometimes by day, often by night, and the Heligolanders told him they could hit the mark at a distance of 7 miles.11
At about that stage in the maritime arms race Admiral von Tirpitz and Germany’s naval planners anticipated that the threat of a pre-emptive attack by the Royal Navy would be removed by 1914 when the Heligoland fortifications were completed and the Kiel Canal widened. In contrast, on the other side of the North Sea, Lord Fisher, who was always looking ahead, believed that the threat of war would increase at that time. In a conversation with the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Maurice Hankey, he predicted that when the German programme of ship-building was completed, and their fleet able to match the Royal Navy, Germany would declare war. He expected that this would happen in September or October 1914, basing his forecast on a consideration of the date by which the alterations to the Kiel Canal would be finished and the German harvest safely gathered in.
7
Churchill Prepares to Invade
In early August 1914 a large German ship anchored off Heligoland. It had come to abruptly move the 3,427 inhabitants. They were given just six hours to pack, and could take with them no more than they could carry by hand. Strict orders were issued by the island’s Commandant that all keys to houses, rooms and cupboards were to be left in their locks, and the islanders were told that their household effects, bedding and furniture would all remain unattended until the war was won – in a few weeks. Several years earlier the Heligolanders had been warned that when the construction of the island’s fortifications was complete many of them might need to be rehoused on the mainland, in a village on the Elbe, but nothing had happened. Even so, the cold abruptness of the deportation now was more unnerving than the fact of leaving. Some Heligolanders had lived on the island all their lives and had never set foot on mainland soil. Now many were sent to Altona, others to Blankenese, a suburb on the Elbe a few miles from the centre of Hamburg. There they were treated as semi-English. The only two British subjects resident on the island, one of them a sailor with twenty-three years’ service in the Royal Navy, were arrested and flung into prison. And Britain had not yet declared war on Germany!1