Heligoland

by George Drower

  That letter was mysteriously signed ‘G.F.W.’ It could have been from the tenacious and faithful William George Black. So keen to write to The Times again on the subject of Heligoland he had perhaps sent two letters! The other, which the paper also printed on 23 November, he had written from the Carlton Club, and characteristically expressed concern for the wellbeing of the islanders. He called for the island to be recolonised by Britain on the grounds that: ‘We could not have defended Heligoland had we retained it, but an unfortified Heligoland would have been little use to Germany; therefore, had we kept it there would have been no system of German coastal defence.’ Additionally he called for Sylt to be given back to Denmark.

  Map 6 Regardless of the breached sea walls of its southern harbour, because of the 1919 Versailles peace agreement, during the interwar years Heligoland regained its place as a stylish tourist resort. (Helgoland Regierung)

  Irrespective of all the busy house-proud Heligolanders’ make-and-mend efforts, conditions on the island were not much improved. Germany’s own economic plight became ever more dismal, so that those islanders who had the heart to claim compensation for lost business and damaged property were reminded that people could scarcely buy a loaf of bread, so low had the Reichsmark fallen. This was an important factor in the agitation that swept the island in October 1919 demanding separation from Germany and union with Britain. Having watched the decline in Germany, they saw British rule as a haven in contrast. Understandably frustrated that their views were not being heeded in London they took matters into their own hands and petitioned the Supreme Council at the Versailles peace talks. Begging that the ‘many injustices of the Prussian regime may be examined and abolished’, they stated that ‘under the long and blissful administration of the great British nation, all our rights and customs were always most loyally upheld’. The quaint concluding phrases of the petition bear repetition:

  We Heligolanders, on our little island in the middle of the seas, far from all the world’s commotion, form the very smallest nation which has for centuries maintained its independence and its local customs. We seek neither wealth nor ostentation, but desire and hope to live in our lonely home upon the rocks, in peace and contentment, as our forefathers did before us.

  Were Heligoland to be returned to Britain as part of a postwar agreement, the diplomatic means by which such a move could be facilitated were available at the Versailles peace conference. However, the tide was beginning to turn and there seemed to be too few influential British statesmen willing to endorse those pleas. Winston Churchill, who had returned to government as Secretary of State for Munitions, and at the time of the Armistice was Secretary of State for War and Air, happened to speak on the subject of Heligoland at a well-reported public meeting in Dundee on 4 December 1918, when he was asked whether he was in favour of the island being returned to Britain. He replied: ‘Admiralty experts had come to the conclusion that it was not necessary to demand it. There had always been two views as to whether it would have been of use to us during the war.’ By then he had probably received intelligence reports detailing the newly discovered German defences found on the island: camouflaged emplacements; concrete trenches hidden beneath sand and soil; and an apparently plain dwelling house at the head of the Pottchen stairs, which concealed a strongpoint commanding the Unterland. It all showed that his Heligoland invasion scheme, had he persevered with it, could have been disastrous.

  The Foreign Office’s response to the revanchist urgings was to produce, somewhat half-heartedly, a pamphlet entitled Heligoland and the Kiel Canal, which conspicuously made not the slightest mention of the islanders’ requests. Unfortunately for Heligoland, a leading British representative at Versailles was the Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour, the nephew of the deceased Lord Salisbury, who had already shown himself none too keen to reclaim Heligoland.

  At Versailles almost any future for the island seemed possible. Perhaps it would be ‘internationalised’, as had happened to other key strategic places only scores of miles distant, such as the Kiel Canal and the mighty Elbe. The question of the disposal of Heligoland was discussed on 17 March 1919 in connection with proposals by the Allied naval authorities that the military facilities on the island be dismantled. The US President, Woodrow Wilson, was sceptical. Although acknowledging that the harbours had been constructed solely for warlike purposes, he objected to their destruction, on the grounds that they might be used as a refuge by merchant shipping in bad weather. The Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, recognising that Heligoland was currently a subject of popular interest in Britain and there might be public disappointment there if the island remained German, telegraphed London that afternoon calling for the War Cabinet to convene and formulate an opinion. Meeting urgently in Downing Street the next day they were profoundly influenced by an Admiralty memo which feared that the fall of a British-held Heligoland would be an unnecessary national humiliation. Uniquely, the memo argued the most crucial part of the island was the harbour complex, because it was only through that could Heligoland’s heavy fortifications – if razed – be rebuilt. Winston Churchill endorsed that view, scribbling with red ink in the paper’s margins: ‘I agree that it should be destroyed – let me see.’ Accordingly the delegation were telegraphed on 21 March: ‘From a practical point of view it is most desirable that the island should not be taken possession of by Great Britain: from a sentimental point of view it is desirable that it should not be returned to Germany.’ And thus, the message concluded: ‘It is urged that either: 1. The island be razed to the high water mark, making re-fortification impossible, in which case the harbour might be retained; or 2. That the fortifications and the harbour be destroyed.’ Lloyd George’s delegation accepted the latter option.

  On all such matters the views of the islanders were never taken into account. As a consequence of the Versailles conference even the question of whether or not Schleswig should be returned to Denmark was to be decided by the people of that province in a plebiscite. However, for the Heligolanders there was to be no such choice, and no voting opportunities were to be made available. Not long before, Balfour had issued his famous declaration denying Palestinians rights of consulation on Jewish settlement in their homeland. To add insult to injury, Britain deliberately chose not to renew the 1890 Heligoland–Zanzibar Treaty, even though it was listed as Article 289 at Versailles. This meant that Britain would no longer have any legal status with regard to the Heligolanders’ conditions. There were even some rumours that Britain might agree to cede Gibraltar to the League of Nations. But for the ‘Gibraltar of the North Sea’ there would be no change.

  No one was more scathing of the Foreign Office’s refusal to regain Heligoland for Britain than the gung-ho Lord Fisher, who wrote in his memoirs: ‘Through some extraordinary claim of reasoning, absolutely incomprehensible, the islands of Heligoland, Sylt and Borkum were not claimed or occupied. In view of the prodigious development of aircraft it was imperative that these islands should be in the possession of England.’ Later Fisher claimed: ‘All this to me is absolutely astounding. The British Fleet won the war, and the British Fleet didn’t get a single thing it ought to have, excepting the everlasting stigma amongst our allies of being fools in allowing the German Fleet to be sunk under our noses.’14

  8

  Project Hummerschere

  Thousands of miles away in East Africa the First World War was still going on. Elsewhere on the planet the guns fell silent on Armistice Day, 11 November 1918, but in Tanganyika a defiant German guerrilla force under Colonel Tafel continued fighting. Throughout the war the Allies had been unable to entirely conquer the vast territory known as German East Africa, nor did they succeed in doing so until 25 November 1918. Tanganyika’s borders had been secured as part of the 1890 Heligoland–Zanzibar swap agreement but even Lord Salisbury could not have predicted the extent to which the fates of those three possessions would be linked. In 1915 the German raiding cruiser Königsberg, having destroyed a dozen merchant ships in the India
n Ocean, became trapped in the shallow waters of the sinuous Tanganyikan Rufiji river, where she was discovered by British seaplanes. However, someone at the Admiralty happened to remember the two monitors HMS Mersey and HMS Severn which Churchill had insisted on building in 1914, despite the unremitting protests of the ‘battle-cruiser gang’, as part of the planned invasion of Heligoland. Such was the low draft of those vessels that their designers claimed they could be ‘sailed in the Round Pond at Kensington Gardens’. Sent via the Suez Canal and Aden to Zanzibar, the monitors edged upriver for the kill, and eventually destroyed the Königsberg – at last they had a target worthy of their guns.

  At Versailles, Germany was stripped of all her colonies, but her humiliation was not total. She was allowed to keep her smallest and nearest colonial-style island, Heligoland. What subsequently happened at the peace conference shows how curious was Britain’s attitude to various colonial possessions. The strategically important but tiny island of Heligoland she cast aside, while eagerly taking responsibility for the strategically and economically unimportant Tanganyika – all 373,000 square miles of it – to be run as a League of Nations trusteeship. Effectively it was a new British colony.

  For the Heligolanders any remaining hope that Britain might take their little island back as one of its colonies ought to have come to an end on 28 June 1919 when the Treaty of Versailles was signed. Arthur Balfour had successfully seen to it that the Heligolanders’ pleas for recolonisation fell on deaf ears. But still they did not give up. Even in October 1919 reports were reaching London, and published in The Times, of agitation for separation from Germany and union with the United Kingdom. In November there were further stories of the islanders’ resentment of German injustice. They were still sickened by the way their houses had been vandalised by the German military, and to add insult to injury those who had received compensation payments found the money virtually worthless.

  They now had other anxieties, too. What particularly concerned them was that in the impending demolition of all the German-built fortifications on the island, a few structures that were relevant to their way of life might also be mindlessly destroyed. Attention focused on the plan to destroy the small boat harbour formed by the old marine mole and the northern wall of the New Harbour works. On 15 August 1919 the Heligolanders put together a petition calling for the retention of the small area known as the northeast harbour. When the request reached London on 1 September 1919 it was dealt with by the Admiralty, rather than the Foreign Office, because the island had long since ceased to be a British colony. That their Lordships were sympathetic to the islanders’ plight was evident from a comment an Admiralty official scribbled four days later in the margins of a file hastily put together on this very subject: ‘It is considered the islanders’ views on this matter are deserving of consideration.’ The petition was passed to the Head of the Naval Section at the British Delegation in Paris, who forwarded it on to the Naval Inter-Allied Commission of Control (Heligoland Sub-Committee). It was practically the first issue considered when the latter began work. So favourably disposed were they towards the islanders that on 7 October 1919 the Head of the Naval Section was able to report to the Admiralty that the Commission on Heligoland had decided the small boat harbour should be retained.

  Fortunately for the Heligolanders, although nobody in the Foreign Office seemed to care about them, there were various influential people within the Royal Navy who were concerned. One such was Andrew Cunningham, a talented naval officer destined for flag rank, who in 1919 was appointed commander of the team preparing to dismantle the fortifications on Heligoland. One factor in favour of the retention of the fishing boat harbour was derived from the naval authorities’ view that some redress was due to the British-based commercial fishermen who had campaigned – as unsuccessfully as all the various nongovernmental lobbyists in Britain – for the island to be retroceded. In 1918 the Grimsby News had even produced a special pamphlet urging that the harbour be kept, as it would thus ensure that the island could offer a safe haven to British fishing boats in the event of stormy weather in the Bight. (Many years later it was claimed that the appeal to save the harbour element of the dockland on Heligoland had been secretly inspired by the German Navy.)

  The Versailles Treaty was finally ratified on 10 January 1920 and the task of defortifying Heligoland could formally begin. Cunningham’s Heligoland Sub-Commission, consisting of seventeen Royal Engineers, travelled to the island on HMS Coventry in February 1920, to superintend the business of demolition. Perhaps appropriately, they were to make their headquarters in the Empress of India hotel by the foreshore, which had been named by Governor O’Brien in the 1880s. It was a peculiar experience for them to be in effective military control of this German-owned island, some thirty years after it had ceased to be a British colony. In anticipation of their arrival someone had scribbled on a wall an old Heligoland proverb: Liewar duad es Skloaw (‘Better dead than a slave’). But the crews of the German minesweeping vessels which used the harbour as a base had quite different views and blatantly showed their disapproval of the British presence by assembling outside the Empress of India singing Deutschland über Alles and throwing stones at the building. However, that soon stopped and an apology was tendered by the officer commanding the minesweepers. Interestingly, although the singing took place round the statue of Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben, it took some time for Cunningham’s party to realise the song’s famous lyrics had been written on the island.

  A meeting was arranged with the German Commission to agree a procedure for the dismantling of the fortifications. Bizarrely, the Commission included both the former chief engineer, who had spent some time on the island during the war, and also the man who had constructed the war harbour – and now had to assist in its destruction, surely a unique record. They were dignified, hurt, and not inclined to forgive or forget. They had lived there year by year, had built all those fortifications and designed the intricate machinery – and now had to watch as it was all smashed up and scrapped! They claimed that it was unfair to enforce the dismantlement of Heligoland. Germany, they felt, had not been truly vanquished and now was being miserably treated. The German technicians originally stated that the dismantling would take seven years to complete, but pressure was brought to bear and a few plans altered until that estimate was whittled down to two years. The work of demolition then began, carried out by some 500– 600 German labourers under the supervision of the Sub-Commission. They worked well and gave little trouble. The operation seemed set to be a reverse of the building process.1

  In fact, in the preceding months some minor dismantling had already taken place. Instruments, gun-sights and fittings of all kinds had been taken as souvenirs by the departing naval garrison. Hitherto working at a rather leisurely pace, they had removed light guns, anti-aircraft batteries and searchlights, leaving stores of timber and metal littered about the Oberland. Now the Allied dismantlers were in charge and they concentrated their attention on the main armament. At the north and south groups of twin 12in gun turrets, the workers began their task, laboriously slicing the huge gun barrels of Anna, Bertha, Caesar and Dora into sections with oxy-hydrogen cutters. Similarly cut up were the eight coastal defence 11in howitzers and four single-turret 21cm guns in the centre of the island. Next they turned their attention to the secondary armament: batteries of 15cm and 8.8cm quick-firing guns mounted on the cliff edge overlooking the harbour, and numerous 3.7cm antiaircraft guns. On the main island an ingenious wooden extractor mechanism was devised for pulling out sections of gun mountings, and various impromptu branch lines were added to the existing light railway in order to move the dismembered pieces of weaponry to the diagonal funicular railway tunnel and down to the harbour. With the remains of the guns went trolley-loads of live ammunition. All the cut-up metal was taken to Wilhelmshaven and sold, and the proceeds divided among the Allies. Where concrete emplacements proved resistant to pneumatic drills they were shattered with dynamite demolition charges. A hi
ghly significant discovery – which certainly ought to have been known many years later – was that only 11⁄2lb of explosive was needed to break up a ton of chilled cast-iron around the turret beds. Some of the main tunnels connecting the north group to the howitzer batteries and south group, and the cable and pipe tunnels at a lower level, could not be destroyed even by this means and instead were bricked up.

  While the dismantling was in progress a considerable friendship developed between the islanders and the British officers. To the British, the islanders seemed Scandinavian in appearance, pleasant and courteous in manner, and devoted to their island home. Cunningham’s superior, Admiral Sir Edward Charlton, visited Heligoland and asked the local people he met what they did in winter. The reply was: count the money they had made in the summer! The islanders were particularly impressed that when off duty the officers mingled informally with the local people, even donning traditional fishermen’s attire. The Heligolanders, it seems, were appreciative that although extensive dynamiting work needed to be done the British engineers were always careful to minimise the inconvenience caused. They even put steel netting around the sites being blown up to protect the islanders’ property from flying shards of metal and concrete.