Castles of Steel (101 page)

The daily work of the blockade was entrusted by the Admiralty to twelve obsolete cruisers, all unfit to fight modern warships. Four of these ships went to the western end of the Channel where, working with a French squadron, they patrolled the entrance from the Atlantic. Eight old cruisers of the
Edgar
class established watch over the other, wider North Sea exit, the 200-mile gap between the Shetlands and Norway. Rarely were all eight cruisers on patrol together; periodically, each vessel had to go into the Shetlands to coal. Thus, during the first four months of war, the North Sea blockade of the German empire was routinely performed by six rusty old warships, steaming ten, twenty, or thirty miles apart.

In practice, blockade duty meant an always wearying, sometimes dangerous routine. When a cargo ship was halted, a naval boarding party including two officers went across to the neutral vessel. The visitors’ first task was to look at the ship’s papers and establish her identity using a copy of the Lloyds registry. A more difficult task for naval officers, most of whom knew no language other than English, was to discover whether crew members and passengers calling themselves Norwegians, Swedes, Finns, Danes, or other, were, in fact, Germans. Occasionally, people were closely questioned. This examination, says A. C. Bell, the official British historian of the blockade, “was conducted with the assistance of a printed list of unusual words in every European language and with the aid of drawings of familiar objects.” A German or Austrian citizen attempting to deceive the examiners “might have an exceptional knowledge of the language he professed to speak as a native, [but] it was not likely that he would, in rapid succession, [be able to] give the right word for . . . a bicycle pedal, an instep, a cheekbone, a nasturtium, or a frying pan.” Halting or erroneous answers led to close inspection of the person’s luggage. As for the cargo, the boarding officers would read the manifest, then descend into the hold to look about. Discovery of anything suggesting contraband, absolute or conditional, sent the vessel into port—usually Kirkwall, in the Orkneys—for a rigorous examination. There, even when the ship and its cargo were entirely cleared, several weeks might go by before the vessel was released; the natural result was neutral frustration and bitterness.

The hardships suffered by neutral seamen and shipowners were small, however, compared to those endured by the men of the blockading squadron. In normal weather in these waters, the crews, wrapped in yellow duffel suits, looked out at gray skies and rolling gray waves. When autumn gales brought winds down from the Arctic, piling the sea into short, steep ridges of water, the men on the old cruisers continued the work of the blockade. In tumultuous seas, the engines stopped, a boat was lowered, and a boarding party went down the ladder. Putting off from the tall steel side of their own vessel, the men rowed to the waiting neutral, where another ordeal awaited them. One unexpected flick of the churning sea could hurl their wooden boat against the hull, turning the craft into splinters and the boarders into floundering, drowning men.

Still, the ships gave out before the men.
Hawke,
one of the eight old cruisers, was sunk by a German torpedo on October 14. By the end of that month,
Theseus
reported bilgewater leaking into her feed tanks,
Endymion
declared urgent need for engine repairs, and
Crescent,
the flagship, developed a leaky condenser. At first, patchwork sufficed. Then, November 11 brought down on the squadron a full gale with monster waves.
Edgar,
with engine trouble, was ordered into harbor. Two ships had to heave to.
Crescent
was so battered that her admiral, Dudley de Chair, said later, “We rather feared she would go down.” Once the storm had passed, half the squadron went into the Clyde for repairs. There, inspectors reported so unfavorably on the condition of the ships that, on November 20, the Admiralty ordered all of the seven remaining
Edgar
s withdrawn from service.

Replacements were available, some of them already at work. These were civilian passenger liners, of which Britain possessed more than a hundred before the war. Weighing up to 20,000 tons, with speeds from 15 to 25 knots, they had been converted into armed merchant cruisers. They were, of course, unarmored, but this was irrelevant as they were not to face enemy war-ships. Equipped with 6-inch and 4.7-inch guns to intimidate enemy or neutral merchant vessels, they were manned in part by the crews of the seven retired
Edgar
s. In December, Admiral de Chair gave up his 7,000-ton flagship
Crescent
for the 18,000-ton liner
Alsatian,
capable of 23 knots in pursuit, or, if maintained at a patrol speed of 13½ knots, of remaining at sea for forty-two days. By the end of December 1914, eighteen liners patrolled the blockade lines; eventually, there were to be twenty-four.

Germany had counted on a short war in which a blockade of its coasts would not be a factor. In Count Alfred von Schlieffen’s mind when he drafted his great flanking movement for invading France through Belgium was fear of the dangers of a long war. “A campaign protracts itself,” he said. “Such wars are, however, impossible when a nation’s existence depends upon an unbroken movement of trade and industry.” Underlying this need for haste was the basic economic structure of a powerful young empire that had existed for only forty-three years. In 1914, the German Reich was still divided into two distinct economic units. The industrial cities and manufacturing towns of the west had always been supplied with food and raw materials from overseas, imported through Rotterdam and Antwerp and thence brought up the Rhine, while the eastern agricultural areas of Germany were accustomed to sending their surplus farm products into industrial Bohemia or on to Russia. The German railway system, therefore, had never carried the food surpluses of the empire’s eastern provinces to the west and now, largely diverted to military purposes, was unable to do so. Unless the flow of imports through neutral Dutch ports could be maintained, the food-consuming populations of the west were bound to suffer. It was because of this that Admiral von Tirpitz, fearing that the war would be longer than Schlieffen expected, and reviewing the potential impact of a British blockade, declared that neutrals must be used to bring supplies into Germany. Even so, German experts believed that the empire’s powers of resistance would depend on early and decisive military success; overall, the conclusion was that Germany could maintain itself on its own resources for nine or ten months but no more.

Because the German government had invested so much in the Schlieffen Plan and believed so strongly in the power of the German army to deliver a quick victory, the Germany navy had been held back. The navy’s war plan, in any case, had been a defensive one, which called for awaiting an expected British offensive. German planners had been aware of Admiral Wilson’s earlier intention to attack Heligoland and seize islands on the German coast; anticipating this offensive, the Germans intended to turn it to their own use. The battle, the Germans hoped, would be fought in the inner Bight in the presence of their own minefields, where they could sink or cripple a significant portion of the attacking fleet. Somehow, through a failure of intelligence, the German Naval Staff remained unaware when in 1912 the Royal Navy abandoned its aggressive plan. There were suspicions that the Admiralty might adopt the strategic defensive by sealing off the North Sea at the Dover Strait and from the Orkneys to the Norwegian coast; shortly before the war, a German intelligence summary had hedged: “There is nothing certain about how Britain will wage war. A series of fleet maneuvers in previous years suggested a close blockade of our coasts; later maneuvers . . . suggest that a distant blockade had been chosen as the starting point of the British war plan.” But even had they been told that the British plan had changed, most German naval officers probably would not have abandoned their belief that the full might of the Grand Fleet would come charging into the Bight in the first weeks of war. When the expected onslaught failed to materialize, the premise on which German naval strategy had been based was overturned.

Even so, the German Naval Staff still believed that the British would keep light forces within striking distance of the German bases and that these forces would be supported by heavy battle squadrons that from time to time would sweep into the Bight to flaunt their superiority. On these assumptions, the German navy continued to base its naval war plan. Because the kaiser refused to permit an early fleet action, the British fleet was to be reduced by attrition achieved by minelaying, by attack with minor vessels, including submarines, and by offensive sweeps by battle cruisers. When sufficiently large losses had been inflicted and the two battle fleets were approximately equal in strength, then the High Seas Fleet would steam out and force a major battle.

This campaign of attrition began on the war’s first day when the converted steamer
Königin Luise
laid a long line of mines, one of which sank the light cruiser
Amphion.
Britain reacted quickly. The laying of mines in the open sea, beyond an enemy’s three-mile coastal limit, was in violation of the Second Hague Convention. (Germany, anticipating the potential of mine warfare, had refused to accept this portion of the convention.) On August 10, the British Foreign Office sent a note to neutral powers accusing the Germans of scattering mines illegally and indiscriminately around the North Sea, endangering merchant ships of all nations. This peril, the Admiralty warned, would increase because Britain reserved the right to lay mines of its own in self-defense. Further, the note declared, the Admiralty would begin to turn back ships of all neutral flags trading with North Sea ports before they entered areas of exceptional danger. The Dutch, believing these positions a pretext for diverting the Rotterdam trade, were furious; in any case, for the moment, most neutral vessels ignored the warning.

On the night of August 25, two more German minefields were laid, off the Humber and off the Tyne. Although British minesweeping officers were convinced that the minefields had been laid by fully equipped German navy minelayers, the Admiralty concluded that the work had been done by fishing trawlers disguised as neutrals. Immediately, all east coast ports were closed to neutral fishing craft, and neutral governments were warned again about indiscriminate German mining. Near the end of October, the German Naval Staff decided to mine the approaches to a great commercial harbor; deciding on Glasgow, they dispatched the
Berlin
to the Firth of Clyde on the approaches to that city. Her captain instead mined the approaches to Tory Island where, on October 27, one of his mines sank the dreadnought
Audacious.
This shocked the British Admiralty and provided an excuse for a dramatic escalation of the war at sea. On November 2, during Jellicoe’s visit to London to confer with Jacky Fisher, who had just become the First Sea Lord, the British government issued a harsh proclamation:

During the last week, the Germans have scattered mines indiscriminately in the open sea on the main trade route from America to Liverpool via the north of Ireland. . . . These mines cannot have been laid by any German ship of war. They have been laid by some merchant vessel flying a neutral flag . . . [which is an] ordinary feature of German naval warfare. [Therefore, the Admiralty] give[s] notice that the whole of the North Sea must be considered a military area . . . [where] merchant shipping of all kinds, traders of all countries, fishing craft and all other vessels will be exposed to the gravest dangers. . . . Ships of all countries wishing to trade to and from Norway, the Baltic, Denmark, and Holland, are advised to come, if inward bound, by the English Channel and the Straits of Dover. There they will be given sailing directions which will pass them safely . . . up the east coast of England. . . . Any straying, even by a few miles from the course indicated, may be followed by fatal consequences.

This declaration, in effect saying that the whole of the North Sea was out of bounds to world shipping without the express permission of the Royal Navy, brought a storm of anger and protest. Neutral governments read the announcement as a declaration that the British government meant to sever communication between Scandinavia and America. In Germany, the decree was interpreted as an illegal declaration of economic war. Admiral Scheer, who already considered the British “lords of hypocrisy” for not having ratified the Declaration of London, was bitterly indignant. “She [Great Britain] did not consider herself bound by any international laws which would have made it possible to get food and other non-contraband articles through neutral countries into blockaded Germany,” he wrote. “Thus, when the distinction between absolute and relative contraband was done away with, all German import trade by both land and sea was strangled, in particular the importation of food. . . . [Further,] neutral states were forced by England to forbid almost all export of goods to Germany in order to obtain any overseas imports for themselves. . . . Free trading of neutral merchant vessels on the North Sea was made impossible . . . because . . . all shipping was forced to pass through English waters and to submit to English control.” The blockade, intended to starve Germany, Scheer said, “required time to attain its full effect. . . . Success would be achieved gradually and silently, which meant the ruin of Germany as surely as the approach of winter meant the fall of the leaves from the trees.”

Breaking the blockade imposed by British sea power was, properly, a mission for the German navy. In the war’s early months, however, the kaiser’s navy had shown itself glaringly—embarrassingly—ineffective. Offensive minelaying and submarine operations against British warships had produced paltry results. The
Berlin
’s expedition had resulted in the sinking of the
Audacious,
but the Naval Staff remained convinced that the British fleet could not be significantly reduced by this means, and minelaying was discounted as a major factor in the naval war. Expectations from a U-boat campaign against the British fleet were scarcely greater. It was true that the U-boats had inflicted losses—
Pathfinder,
the
Bacchante
s,
Hawke,
and
Formidable
—but the German Naval Staff did not rate these successes highly; the torpedoed ships were old and of little combat significance. More important, submarines had proved ineffective against modern, fast-moving, escorted heavy warships. They had failed to interrupt movement across the Channel and had not sunk a single troop transport. By December 1914, most German naval officers did not believe that submarines could play a serious role in the war of attrition against the Royal Navy. Increasingly, the Naval Staff and officers in the fleet demanded a new plan, new tactics, new leadership. How could the German fleet, the second most powerful in the world, contest the command of the sea? Mine warfare and submarine attacks on warships had failed, and the emperor had forbidden his navy to force an action between the battle fleets at sea. What other possibilities existed? It was in this state of embarrassment and frustration that the German navy and government considered proposals for a submarine campaign against merchant shipping.