Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War

by Max Hastings

  By 12.50 it was obvious Mainz was finished, and Roger Keyes ordered Lurcher alongside. He wrote: ‘She had settled considerably by the bows, the after part was crowded with men, many terribly wounded; the battery was a ghastly shambles, amidships she was a smouldering furnace, two of her funnels had collapsed and the wreckage appeared to be red-hot; the heat scorched one’s face as far off as the bridge of the Lurcher, everything was dyed saffron with the fumes of our lyddite shells.’ The destroyer took off 220 survivors. One man, a young German officer who had been directing the removal of the wounded, refused to go. Keyes addressed him personally, saying that he had ‘done splendidly, we must clear out, he must come at once, there was nothing more he could do’. The lean, twinkling-eyed British commodore held out his hand. The German stiffened, saluted, and said, ‘Thank you, no.’ There was a happy postscript to this charmingly soppy episode: a few moments later, when the cruiser rolled over and sank – her starboard propeller narrowly missing Lurcher, going full speed astern – the young man accepted rescue from the water.

  Eight German light cruisers were now closing on the scene, once more threatening the British with superior firepower. Fortunately for the forces of Tyrwhitt, Goodenough and Keyes, their enemies’ movements were uncoordinated. Each German ship in turn attempted sporadic lunges, then dashed away when threatened by heavier metal. Around 12.30 p.m. the battered Arethusa once more became a target for German cruiser fire. Tyrwhitt, on her bridge, said afterwards: ‘I really was beginning to feel a bit blue.’ The British were momentarily alarmed to see the shape of a big ship looming out of the haze to westward. Then, to their boundless relief and noisily-expressed delight, Lion and the rest of the battlecruisers were identified. Thousands of men aboard the British light cruisers and destroyers watched exultantly as Beatty led his column of 30,000-ton monsters at full speed past them, each throwing up a fine bow wave, black funnel-smoke streaming behind, wakes boiling.

  Now it became the battlecruisers’ engagement. Beatty’s crews were keyed to the highest pitch. ‘As we approached,’ wrote Chatfield, at his post with the admiral on Lion’s bridge, ‘everyone was at action stations, the guns loaded, the range-finders manned, the control alert, the signalmen’s binoculars and telescopes scanning the misty horizon … One could scarcely see two miles. Suddenly the report of guns was heard … [and] on our port bow, we saw … the flash … through the mist. Were they friendly or hostile? No shell could be seen falling. Beatty stood by the compass, his glasses scanning the scene. At length we made out the hulk of a cruiser [Mainz] … Her funnel had fallen and her foremast had been shot away, a fire raged on her upper deck … “Leave her to them,” said Beatty. “Don’t fire!”’

  The admiral sought instead to engage the undamaged German light cruisers, and a few moments later his ships’ vast turrets traversed, the guns elevated, and amid successive thundering detonations they began to hurl charges across the Bight. Of the enemy ships in sight, Strassburg made a successful escape, but Köln with her tiny 4-inch guns made pathetic efforts to return fire as 12- and 13.5-inch shells landed with devastating effect. A minute or two of such devastation reduced her upperworks to flame and tangled steel. A few moments later Ariadne suffered the same fate, and still Beatty’s column raced on. But the admiral knew time was running out: the moment the tide permitted, German battleships would be out. After forty minutes in the Bight, with the enemy coastline close at hand, at 1.10 p.m. he made a signal to all British forces: ‘Retire.’ As they swung westwards, Lion fired two more salvos to finish off Köln, which promptly disappeared stern-first beneath the waves. It was two days before the Germans chanced on a lone survivor from the cruiser; in the interval, a junior admiral and more than five hundred men had perished.

  At 2.25 p.m., with the British an hour gone, Ingenohl’s big ships at last arrived on the scene, made a cautious sweep, then returned to port, as did the Grand Fleet, which had cruised two hundred miles north of the engagement. Aboard Lion, a throng of ecstatic sailors clustered beneath the bridge to cheer their adored admiral. Arethusa was towed home at six knots. On 30 August the battlecruisers and light cruisers reached Scapa Flow, to be received with a welcoming roar from men lining the decks and upperworks of every ship of the Grand Fleet.

  Three German light cruisers and a destroyer had been sunk, three more cruisers damaged. On the British side, Arethusa and three destroyers were badly damaged, but all had returned afloat. Only thirty-five men had been killed, an amazingly small ‘butcher’s bill’ alongside the Germans’ 712. Churchill, euphoric, boarded Tyrwhitt’s flagship at Sheerness to distribute laurels; he later called Heligoland Bight ‘a brilliant episode’. The public were thrilled, and Beatty became hero of the hour. The admiral was ‘disgusted’ to receive no message of appreciation from the Admiralty, but wrote to Ethel about the Germans with the condescension of a man of his time: ‘Poor devils, they fought their ships like men and went down with colours flying like seamen against overwhelming odds … Whatever their faults, they are gallant.’

  The action was immensely serviceable to the British government in the midst of the retreat from Mons, a time of acute national tension about events in France. At the Admiralty Norman Macleod wrote: ‘This little battle has had a very cheering effect as showing morale of navy & unlikelihood of invasion.’ Asquith expressed delight that ‘Winston’s little scheme … has come off very well … some set-off to our sad losses on land.’ In the mood of self-congratulation that followed, few of the questions were asked that should have been: about the shambolic British planning and lack of a clear command chain; failures of communication and indifferent gunnery. Not only were shells poorly aimed, but many which achieved hits failed to explode, or to inflict significant damage: fuses were unreliable and often caused premature detonation. British submarines deployed in the Bight achieved nothing. Had not Jellicoe, on his own initiative, dispatched Beatty to support the raid, Tyrwhitt’s and Keyes’s force could have been badly mauled by the enemy’s light cruisers. A moment’s bad luck might have cost a battlecruiser. The Commander-in-Chief believed that the risks of this daring gamble exceeded the rewards.

  Yet there were larger, psychological forces in play which were, and remain, underrated by critics of the Heligoland Bight action. Its impact on the High Seas Fleet went far beyond the trifling material losses. German sailors recognised that they had suffered a humiliation. British ships had steamed and skirmished with impunity within a few miles of the coast of the Fatherland. Hundreds of thousands of civilians ashore had heard the gunfire, and trembled. Admiral Tirpitz raged, not least because his son Wolfgang was a lieutenant in the lost Mainz. He spoke in extravagant terms to Albert Hopman: ‘We disgraced ourselves. I knew that I had to sacrifice my son. But this is dreadful. We came under fire, and in consequence saw the end of our fleet.’ Tirpitz refused to be comforted by Hopman’s reminder that the British had recovered German survivors: his son might be among them. He persuaded himself the young officer must be dead. Yet next day, the British sent word that they indeed held young Tirpitz as a prisoner.

  The Heligoland operation emphasised the Royal Navy’s moral dominance over its enemies, which would persist until 1918. The Kaiser was confirmed in his respect for British seapower, and ordered that thence-forward the High Seas Fleet must operate with the utmost circumspection; its big ships could take the offensive only with his personal consent. This was an important British strategic achievement, which went far to justify the operation. On 9 September, the Grand Fleet attempted another coat-trailing operation off Heligoland – and the Germans absolutely declined to respond. Frustrating as was this passivity to sailors eager for battle, it emphasised British naval mastery.

  Yet the Heligoland fight also displayed the unfitness of the Admiralty to direct a modern war at sea. A Quarterly reviewer in 1860 described the institution as ‘intellectually becalmed in the smoke of Trafalgar’, and in considerable measure this remained true half a century later. It was dominated by old men of small imagination.
Though the First Sea Lord, Prince Louis of Battenberg, enjoyed respect and was unjustly traduced in the press because of his German background, he was unequal to his role. Scornful critics nicknamed him ‘Quite Concur’ because of the frequency with which he scribbled these acquiescent words on correspondence. The naval war staff was more of a research department than a machine for planning and directing operations. Its structure assumed that admirals at sea would make the decisions once the fleet sailed. But it soon became clear that, in the new era of wireless, the temptation for the Admiralty to intervene was irresistible, while both the institution and its personnel were ill-equipped to do so. ‘Brains were at a discount both in the Navy and the Admiralty,’ wrote Beatty’s staff officer Filson Young. He shared his chief’s contempt for the Sea Lords and their staffs: ‘The spirit informing the whole was a narrow and lifeless spirit, expressing itself everywhere in the policy that the means were more important than the end.’

  Fortunately for the allied cause, however, the Admiralty was not exclusively officered by slow seadogs. One department of the highest importance – intelligence – fell into the best possible hands. From November 1914 Room 40 was directed by Captain Reginald ‘Blinker’ Hall – the nickname derived from a habit of constantly blinking his eyes. Hall had been a rising star at sea, most recently commanding a battlecruiser, when poor health caused him to be relegated to a shore job. He had gained some experience of amateur intelligence work in1908 by borrowing a yacht from the Duke of Westminster in which he sailed down the German fleet anchorage at Kiel enumerating and photographing its ships while masquerading as a holidaymaker. Now, turned professional, this physically insignificant figure became a vital force, one of the intelligence wizards that Britain occasionally throws up.

  An eyewitness described his ‘incisive way of talking’, adding that ‘it was his face and eyes that caught one’s attention. A majestic nose over a rather tight-lipped mouth and a firm, cleft chin made one feel instinctively that this was not a man with whom one could take liberties. He looked rather like a peregrine falcon, an impression reinforced by his penetrating eyes, darting around the assembled company.’ Another acquaintance described Hall as ‘half Machiavelli, half schoolboy’. The latter portion of his character was displayed by his response, in a story he liked to tell himself, when a judge gave a convicted German spy a light sentence, on the grounds that the man was only passing on factory locations to Germany. Hall, intensely irritated, allegedly caused German intelligence to be informed that the judge’s home was ‘an important factory site’.

  Room 40’s task was critically assisted by the capture at sea of three German naval codebooks. On 11 August an Australian naval officer seized at pistol point the codebook of the German steamship Hobart, off Melbourne, though as a result of dilatoriness this prize did not reach London until the end of October. The Russians passed on another codebook, captured when the cruiser Magdeburg ran aground off the Estonian coast in the Baltic on 25 August; this got to the Admiralty on 13 October. Finally, on 30 November a British trawler off the Texel retrieved the codebook of a German destroyer sunk there on 17 October. By December 1914, with the aid of a group of brilliant German-speaking academics recruited for the purpose, Hall’s team thus held the secrets of all three principal enemy naval codes – known as VB, HVB and SKM. Later, it would crack others.

  Those were days in which wireless still seemed a miracle to men born before its inception. Aboard Beatty’s flagship Lion at Scapa Flow, one night in its radio room an officer donned headphones and listened entranced to Morse chatter across the airwaves: ‘We heard the Russian commander-in-chief in the Baltic; we heard Madrid; we heard the German Commander-in-Chief, from his fastness across the North Sea; and it amused me to turn the wavelength back and forward between the German and British commanders – the two voices that mean so infinitely much to us all – to contrast their tones, and to imagine what they were saying.’

  Thanks to Room 40, the British high command soon knew many of the answers to the German end of that puzzle. A growing volume of messages intercepted by a chain of Admiralty radio receiving stations along the east coast were decrypted, translated and read within a few hours. The navy grudgingly forgave civilian translators for their ignorance of nautical parlance, which resulted in the Operations Department being passed a decrypt which asserted – for instance – ‘the [German] 2nd Battle Squadron will run out at 2 p.m. and return to harbour athwartwise at 4 p.m.’. Because the High Seas Fleet operated from Wilhelmshaven, where many orders were issued on paper or by telephone, ‘Blinker’ Hall could not be confident of anticipating every German motion. But, because of the technical excellence of their transmitters, Ingenohl’s ships communicated by wireless more than did the Royal Navy. Moreover, one of the first British actions as a belligerent had been to sever Germany’s submarine telegraph cable links with the rest of the world. This obliged Berlin to use wireless for much sensitive international traffic, while naval signals often gave the Grand Fleet several hours’ warning that the enemy was putting to sea.

  In the months following Heligoland Bight, however, the fortunes of the struggle tilted to and fro, in a fashion that frequently embarrassed the Royal Navy. On 22 September U9 was able to sink three old British cruisers performing pointless ‘picket duty’ off the Dutch coast. Hogue, Aboukir and Cressy were idling along on a steady course, their captains oblivious of any submarine threat. When the first ship was hit, and then the second, incredibly each cruiser in succession stopped to rescue survivors; 1,400 men thus perished. Many sailors of the High Seas Fleet expressed envy of U9’s commander, who went home in triumph. Lt. Knobloch of Rostock wrote wistfully in his diary: ‘It must be a heartwarming feeling to re-enter harbour after such an achievement.’ More exalted officers felt the same way. Ernst Weizsäcker wrote proudly of U9’s success, in sharp contrast to the surface fleet’s inertia: ‘One feels happy to be a naval officer today.’

  On 27 October, the new British dreadnought Audacious was lost to a mine off the north coast of Ireland. For months afterwards the Admiralty made itself ridiculous by declining to admit the sinking even in naval orders, though hundreds of American passengers aboard the passing liner Olympic had witnessed it, and German schoolchildren enjoyed a celebratory holiday. Meanwhile commerce raiders, most famously the Emden, achieved some embarrassing successes on the far side of the world, in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. There was a dismaying episode on the evening of 1 November, when Rear-Admiral Sir Christopher Cradock’s antiquated cruiser squadron was destroyed by Admiral von Spee at Coronel, off the coast of Chile.

  ‘Kit’ Cradock had once published a little book entitled Whispers from the Fleet, in which he warned that ‘the headstrong unthinking naval “dasher” is bound to come to grief’. Yet he himself chose to play precisely that role: he led his squadron beyond reach of support from the 12-inch guns of the pre-dreadnought battleship Canopus, which had been placed under his command. Canopus’s captain was informed by his engineering officer that technical problems made it necessary to reduce the ship’s speed to twelve knots. Thirty-six hours later, it was found that the man concerned had suffered a nervous breakdown – there was no real need for the reduction of speed, which had opened a three-hundred-mile gap between the battleship and the rest of the squadron: Canopus could have fought at Coronel.

  But this revelation came too late to save Cradock. Though his old armoured cruisers Good Hope and Monmouth had been mobilised with reservist crews and his only efficient ship was the light cruiser Glasgow, he declined a chance to cut and run in the face of overwhelming odds. A loyal courtier, he had been knighted for ‘personal services’ to the King; like every officer in the navy, he had observed the obloquy heaped upon Admiral Ernest Troubridge in August, for rejecting a chance to fight Goeben and Breslau in the Mediterranean at the outbreak of war. Though his own force was relatively much weaker than that of Troubridge, Cradock engaged the enemy and was promptly dispatched along with 1,600 British sailors and their ships. Asq
uith wrote testily to Venetia Stanley: ‘I am afraid the poor man has gone to the bottom: otherwise he richly deserves to be court-martialled.’

  Coronel, though strategically unimportant, was a blow to British prestige, and rattled an already nervous government. Jellicoe is often criticised as a plodder whose caution later denied the Royal Navy a big victory at Jutland. Yet the commander-in-chief’s prudence, unexciting though it was, contrasted favourably with Cradock’s suicidal gesture, Beatty’s impulsiveness, and the tactical stupidity which caused Hogue and its sister cruisers to be sunk by U9. The problem persisted, however, that in London the government was becoming desperate for some conspicuous British successes. Asquith, with the accustomed flippancy which emphasised his unfitness as a director of war, wrote to Venetia Stanley on 4 November, after Coronel: ‘I told Winston … it is time he bagged something, & broke some crockery.’

  In truth, of course, the First Lord was the last man who needed encouragement to take risks: he had just made one extraordinarily perilous decision. In October Prince Louis of Battenberg was hounded from office, and Churchill sought to remedy the lack of grip at the Admiralty by installing as his successor former First Sea Lord Admiral Lord Fisher. One of the wild, brilliant spirits whom Churchill loved – he described ‘Jacky’ Fisher as ‘a veritable volcano of knowledge and of inspiration’ – the begetter of the Dreadnought was now seventy-three. His admirers justly point out that during his second tenure as First Sea Lord he displayed better judgement and more consistency on operational matters than his intemperate correspondence suggests. But Churchill and Fisher soon fell out, and embarked on a struggle for dominance which contributed to neither the efficiency nor the happiness of the Admiralty.