by Max Hastings
Three surfaced British submarines were to provide bait to tempt the Germans to pursuit. Behind them, some fifty small warships would approach within a few miles of the Kaiser’s principal naval base. If the raid went wrong and the High Seas Fleet’s dreadnoughts became involved, a fiasco could follow: no unarmoured ship could survive the fire of one which mounted heavy guns. The only insurance designed into the original plan was that two British battlecruisers should lurk forty miles north-westwards. The operation was designed to resurrect sixteenth-century memories of Drake at Cadiz and ‘singeing the King of Spain’s beard’. But such was the Admiralty’s hamfistedness that it was launched without Jellicoe being consulted or informed until 26 August, the day it began.
Keyes’s submarines were first to sail, accompanied by their commodore in the destroyer Lurcher. Lt. Oswald Frewen of the destroyer Lookout, also earmarked to participate, noted that he disliked having two days’ notice of a battle: ‘I would have preferred it to come upon us suddenly. I am imaginative, & also constitutionally pessimistic, & I do not in the least require 2 days to think things over!’ Next day Frewen’s ship put to sea with Tyrwhitt’s flotillas, thirty-two destroyers in all. The commodore flew his flag in the brand-new light cruiser Arethusa, which proved a mistake, because the vessel was unready to fight.
Jellicoe – cautious, sensible, instinctively controlling – now voiced alarm about the whole business. Committed to concentration of force, he proposed to take the Grand Fleet to sea, and cruise where he could intervene if opportunity beckoned or disaster threatened. The Admiralty dismissed this idea, but grudgingly authorised him to commit the rest of the battlecruiser squadron. Beatty thus sailed for Heligoland early on 27 August – the day after Le Cateau – with six light cruisers in support. Jellicoe then took his own decision to defy the Admiralty and lead his major units south, though only in a distant supporting role. This was an operation conceived on impulse and fumbled into execution, which nonetheless became a significant marker buoy in the history of the war at sea: the first occasion on which the Royal Navy sallied in strength, with a prospect of battle. Column upon column of lean grey ships steamed forth across the North Sea from their several anchorages. Some captains were bent upon doing something great for England; others sought merely to avert a disaster.
The age of the dreadnought had created a new hierarchy of twentieth-century seamen: officers of the big ships, almost all deemed ‘gentlemen’ save the engineers, enjoyed considerable comforts and kept some state, in port at least. Three nights a week the ship’s band played outside Beatty’s cabin as he and his guests dined in mess undress uniform; on other evenings, the musicians performed outside the wardroom. Among humbler personnel, working conditions varied. Engine-room staffs laboured deep in the hulls, amid heat, noise and filth resembling that of a steelworks. ‘The least informed could always tell when we were going to sea,’ wrote an officer, ‘by the songs that used to rise from the messdecks as soon as the orders to the engine-room department to raise steam had been given; the whole ship began to murmur with strange music, like a hive.’ Not everyone approved of the choristers: a stoker petty officer requested Lion’s senior engineering officer: ‘Please to make an order that the men at the furnaces were not to sing in action, as he found it impossible to make himself heard in D boiler room.’
In oil-fired ships working conditions were tolerable, save in very hot weather, but feeding coal to the furnaces of older vessels was a gruelling routine, and bunker replenishment was every crew’s dirtiest and most detested duty. Stokers and trimmers below the waterline were among the least likely men to survive a sinking, and well they knew it. Through every moment at sea, they were vulnerable to an inrushing torrent if the ship struck a mine or was torpedoed. Elsewhere, seamen and heavy guns’ crews of large vessels enjoyed the privileges of effective heating and ventilation, and most were protected from the elements. There was plenty to eat – far more than working-class civilians enjoyed in peace or war. Aboard a British battlecruiser, some 2,000 eggs were cooked each morning, a further 1,000 at night; a seaman would think nothing of eating six eggs for breakfast.
Those who served aboard light cruisers, destroyers and smaller vessels, however, endured in heavy weather conditions almost as harsh as those of Nelson’s era. On watch or manning turretless guns in action, on decks and even bridges only a few feet above the sea, they were forever drenched, numbed and shivering, whipped by half-frozen spray, with no prospect when their watches ended of drying bodies or clothing in the dankness of the mess decks. Yet the men who manned small, fast surface ships and submarines prided themselves that they were members of an elite. U-boat officer Johannes Spies exulted in his lifestyle, despite its chronic stench and discomfort: ‘In the clear seawater, when the sun is shining the silvery air bubbles sparkle all over the boat’s hull and rise as in an aquarium. At times when the boat was lying still on the sea bottom we could observe fish swimming by the ports of our conning tower, attracted by the electric light shining through.’ Destroyer crews likewise revelled in the thrill of rushing across the sea at speeds exceeding 30 mph. As one such ‘ocean greyhound’ left its anchorage, a fanciful listener likened the whisper of its racing hull through the water to the tearing of silk. There was human hardship aboard, but also romance.
The battlecruisers’ commander, Vice-Admiral Sir David Beatty, who would play a significant role in Heligoland Bight, was already acclaimed as the most dashing sailor of his time, a star alike of the bridge and the chaise-longue. He was blessed with some ability, intense pugnacity and boundless self-esteem. His favourite journalist, Filson Young, described Beatty as ‘young, distinguished-looking indeed, but more with the distinction of Pall Mall than of Plymouth Hoe’. Beatty first sprang to public notice commanding a Nile gunboat in Kitchener’s 1898 Khartoum campaign, and achieved financial security by marrying Ethel, daughter of Chicago department-store tycoon Marshall Field. Critics considered the admiral a cad of the first water, citing his dalliances with junior officers’ wives and penchant for shooting sitting gamebirds.
He was nonetheless a man after Winston Churchill’s heart: before the war the First Lord had rescued Beatty’s career from the breaker’s yard when he was placed on half-pay following a contemptuous and almost unprecedented rejection of the post of second-in-command of the Atlantic Fleet. Churchill gave him instead the service’s juiciest plum, the battlecruiser squadron. In 1914 Beatty was forty-three, an age at which the average naval officer aspired to a mere captaincy. Lion, in which he flew his flag, became the most publicised ship of the 1914–18 war. Most of Beatty’s officers adored him, but before the war was done his promotion of unworthy favourites and neglect of technical issues, especially communications, would expose dangerous shortcomings; Beatty possessed less of Nelson’s genius – and luck – than he and the British public supposed.
In the early morning of 28 August, however, such revelations lay in the future, as British forces converged on Heligoland Bight. Most were blithely unaware of each other’s presence, thanks to the operation’s slapdash preparation as a ‘come-as-you-are’ party. Beatty signalled his squadron as it sailed: ‘Know very little, shall hope to learn more as we go along.’ The Royal Navy suffered not merely from a confused chain of command, but also from inadequate communications. Its wirelesses were less powerful than those of the Germans. An Admiralty telegram informing Keyes and Tyrwhitt that Beatty would be joining the operation failed to reach them before they sailed: the destroyer commodore discovered that the battlecruisers were coming only when he met Commodore William Goodenough’s light cruisers at sea. Exchanges in action relied chiefly on Nelson’s technology – flag signals. Over short distances these were more reliable than wireless, but they became unreadable in poor weather, and their eighteenth-century efficacy was impaired in the twentieth by increased warship speeds and funnel smoke. Beatty’s flag-lieutenant was an epic bungler, whose shortcomings adversely influenced British operations in the North Sea through the ensuing two years.
At first light, the three submarines acting as bait surfaced as planned and advanced close to the island of Heligoland, where they were duly spotted by the Germans. Action was brought on by one of Hipper’s destroyers, which at 7 a.m. sighted Tyrwhitt’s flotillas and warned the admiral. Low tide prevented German heavy units from putting to sea, as Keyes and Tyrwhitt had anticipated, but Hipper ordered eight light cruisers to sail as fast as they could raise steam, which took some ships three hours. A confused, desultory series of destroyer actions meanwhile began, as if several fox hunts were simultaneously pursuing quarry across the same country. The British ships exposed themselves within range of shore batteries, but were spared their attentions because visibility fell to 5,000 yards, mist blinding the gunners.
At 8 a.m., Tyrwhitt’s skirmishing activities were interrupted by the appearance of the first two of Hipper’s light cruisers, Frauenlob and Stettin. In accordance with doctrine, the British turned and fell back on their own cruisers, Arethusa and Fearless, which joined a fierce exchange of fire. Now, however, the British flagship revealed its unreadiness: all but one of its guns jammed and fell silent. The Germans hit the 3,500-ton Arethusa again and again, the accuracy of their fire displaying an embarrassing superiority over that of Goodenough’s ships. Back in August 1913, the British naval attaché in Berlin, Capt. Hugh Watson, wrote in a valedictory dispatch: ‘I see no reason to think the German naval officers … are inferior to their British comrades … From what I know … I think that in the day of trial [they] will be proved more capable than the officers of navies with which we are politically more closely allied.’ He meant the French and Russians, and he was right, as was revealed on 28 August. The German navy was a young service, devoid of any heritage comparable with that of its foe, but in Heligoland Bight its seamen showed courage and skill.
Arethusa was saved because her one remaining 6-inch gun achieved a lucky hit, exploding on Frauenlob’s bridge, which was reduced to a tangle of twisted steel. Thirty-seven of the crew were killed or wounded, including the captain. The German ship was obliged to turn and limp away, leaving Arethusa in desperate straits, having lost speed and begun to take in water. Almost immediately, Tyrwhitt’s ships met a new group of their German counterparts, homebound from patrol; five destroyers escaped, but one was trapped and sunk in a hail of fire, her colours flying and guns blazing to the last.
The British had just started to rescue survivors when the cruiser Stettin raced back into action, after a brief withdrawal to bring its boilers to full power. Tyrwhitt’s destroyers turned away as shells bracketed them, abandoning two of their boats full of German prisoners and ten British sailors. These orphans were pondering their fate on a temporarily empty sea when Keyes’s submarine E-4 surfaced alongside, took aboard Tyrwhitt’s sailors and three German officers ‘as a sample’, then submerged again. Everybody was determined to be seen to behave honourably: E-4’s captain left the enemy with water, biscuits, a compass and course for Heligoland, fourteen miles away.
The time was still not much after 8 a.m., but an eventful day was unfolding in the Bight. During the next hour, there were some minutes of farce after Roger Keyes spotted four-funnel cruisers. Having no notion that any such British ships were at sea, he reported them by radio to the distant battlecruiser Invincible as enemies, and hastily fled in little Lurcher. When this confusion was sorted out, Keyes expressed alarm lest his submarines, still unaware that the big ships were in fact British, tried to sink them. One such attempt mercifully failed, as did Southampton’s effort to ram the offending British E-boat.
At 10.17, Tyrwhitt exploited a lull in the battle to heave to – taking a huge risk in waters where U-boats might naturally be expected. He called Fearless alongside his crippled Arethusa; for twenty minutes, the two ships lay dead in the water while their crews laboured frantically to clear jammed guns and restore power. By the time this was achieved, the British had been in Heligoland Bight some four hours, and it was obvious enemy reinforcements must be on the way. The tide remained too low for big ships to move, but three more of Hipper’s light cruisers appeared just as Arethusa restarted her engines, and commenced firing on the British raiding force.
This development was scarcely unexpected, but caused Tyrwhitt to signal Beatty, still almost two hours’ steaming away: ‘Am attacked by large cruiser … Respectfully request that I may be supported. Am hard pressed.’ The commodore gained a respite when the German light cruisers turned away in the face of a massed British destroyer torpedo attack. But Beatty recognised that a hornets’ nest was stirring in Heligoland Bight. He did not know what enemy forces, and especially submarines, might face him there, but felt personally challenged by Tyrwhitt’s signal. High on the bridge of Lion, he turned to Ernle Chatfield, his flag captain: ‘What do you think we should do? I ought to go forward and support Tyrwhitt, but if I lose one of these valuable ships, the country will not forgive me.’ Chatfield responded, with the easy enthusiasm of the man not in charge, ‘surely we should go’. At 11.35 Beatty swung his mighty column – Lion, Queen Mary, Princess Royal, Invincible and New Zealand – at twenty-seven knots towards the Bight.
In sailors’ eyes, each giant had its own defined character: Queen Mary and New Zealand were deemed crack ships; Princess Royal was the jolliest socially; Lion seemed a trifle gloomy, perhaps because of the weighty presence of the admiral and his staff. Now, all these embodiments of British naval prestige were steaming hard towards the Kaiser’s front door. Beatty’s decision to intervene was brave and probably inevitable, given that he had been sent with orders to provide support for Tyrwhitt, but nonetheless highly dangerous. In Nelson’s time, it was an extraordinary occurrence for a line-of-battle ship to fall victim to any save a vessel of comparable size. In 1914, by contrast, while dreadnoughts remained impregnable to smaller ships’ guns, they were highly vulnerable to mines and torpedoes, the latter enabling small warships to wield immense destructive power, in a fashion that seemed monstrously unfair to the schoolboy minds of some sailors.
Geoffrey Harper wrote: ‘I always had a feeling against submarines and nothing would induce me to go in for them because I always thought they were not exactly the Navy, and now I have become quite certain … It is rotten and underhand and like stabbing a man in the back … I am not the only one who is against submarine warfare, I come across people everywhere whose general opinion is: It’s not fair, I don’t like it. Of course our submarines are as much to blame as the enemy’s. Anyone, of any nationality, who serves in a submarine is not playing the game.’ Such nonsenses aside, at midday on 28 August Beatty’s squadron was taking a considerable chance by advancing towards the unknown perils of the Bight, for the honour of the Royal Navy more than for any more substantial prize.
Ahead of the battlecruisers, the action was drifting westwards: the 4,350-ton Mainz joined the fray, firing hard at British destroyers, of which eleven launched torpedoes at the light cruiser without effect. Tyrwhitt’s ships felt the heat of Mainz’s superbly accurate fire: its first salvo hit Laurel, detonating shells in her ready racks, blowing away the after funnel and severely wounding the captain; Liberty’s mast disappeared overboard, her bridge was hit and her captain killed; Laertes received a full salvo which temporarily stopped her dead in the water. Disaster again threatened the British, until Mainz astonished them by turning away at full speed. German lookouts had spotted three of Commodore Goodenough’s cruisers closing fast. Their ship, however, retired too late: within seconds, British 6-inch shells were hitting Mainz hard. Tyrwhitt’s destroyers launched another flurry of torpedoes, at the cost of themselves taking a succession of gunfire hits from the doughty German. Almost all the torpedoes missed, but just one struck Mainz, inflicting grievous damage upon her propulsion system. Slowing in the water, she became an easy mark for the British cruisers, which now steamed past in succession, pounding her from end to end.
‘Every salvo they fired brought a perfect tornado of hits,’ said Mainz’s first lieutenant later. ‘I counted eve
ry salvo by the flash: one, two, three, four, five, then the shells would reach us, scattering death and destruction. Every broadside that struck us shook the whole ship.’ On Southampton, Stephen King-Hall wrote:
A most extraordinary feeling of exultation filled the mind. One longed for more yellow flashes; one wanted to hurt her, to torture her; and one said to oneself, ‘Ha! There’s another! Give her hell!’, as if by speaking one could make the guns hit her. Though she was being hit, she was not being hit enough, as at the range of 10,000 yards in that mist it was nearly impossible to see the splashes of the shells and thus control the fire. Also she still had the legs of us. To our dismay, the mist came down, and for five minutes we drove on without sight of her.
Down below, in complete ignorance of what had been happening, the stokers forced the boilers until our turbines could take no more, and the safety valves lifting, the steam roared up the exhaust pipes at the side of the funnels with a deafening roar. Suddenly – everything happens suddenly in a naval action with ships moving at 30 miles an hour – we came on top of the Mainz only 7,000 yards away, and the range decreasing every moment. Something had happened to her whilst she was in the mist, for she was lying nearly stopped … We closed down on her, hitting with every salvo. At irregular intervals one of her after guns fired a solitary shot, which passed miles overhead. In ten minutes she was silenced and lay a smoking, battered wreck, her foremost anchor flush with the water. Ant-like figures could be seen jumping into the water as we approached. The sun dispersed the mist, and we steamed slowly to within 300 yards of her, flying as we did so the signal ‘DO YOU SURRENDER?’, in international code. As we stopped, the mainmast slowly leant forward and, like a great tree, quite gradually lay down along the deck.