Castles of Steel (14 page)

REFERENCE MY PERSONAL TELEGRAM LAST NIGHT. AM MORE THAN EVER CONVINCED OF VITAL IMPORTANCE OF MAKING NO CHANGE. PERSONAL FEELINGS ARE ENTIRELY IGNORED IN REACHING THIS CONCLUSION.

Late in the morning, the fog thinned and
Boadicea
left Wick with Jellicoe on board. He arrived at Scapa Flow early in the afternoon and went on board
Iron Duke
to report to Callaghan. Jellicoe found his situation extremely awkward: “When I reported myself to the Commander-in-Chief, the knowledge of the event which was apparently impending made the interview both embarrassing and painful, as I could see that he had no knowledge of the possibility of his leaving the fleet, and obviously I could not tell him.”

While Jellicoe was with Callaghan aboard the flagship, a telegram came in to
Centurion.
The First Lord was tiring of Jellicoe’s protests:

I CAN GIVE YOU 48 HOURS AFTER JOINING. YOU MUST BE READY THEN.

But Jellicoe, just back from his painful interview with Callaghan, was not ready. From
Centurion,
he signaled at 11:30 p.m. on August 2:

PERSONAL TO THE FIRST LORD AND THE FIRST SEA LORD:

YOURS OF SECOND. CAN ONLY REPLY AM CERTAIN STEP CONTEMPLATED IS MOST DANGEROUS. BEG THAT IT MAY NOT BE CARRIED OUT. AM PERFECTLY WILLING TO ACT ON BOARD FLEET FLAGSHIP AS ASSISTANT IF REQUIRED TO BE IN DIRECT COMMUNICATION. HARD TO BELIEVE IT IS REALIZED WHAT GRAVE DIFFICULTIES CHANGE COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF INVOLVES AT THIS MOMENT. DO NOT FORGET LONG EXPERIENCE OF COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF.

Jellicoe slept poorly on Sunday night. On Monday morning, August 3, he tried again to reverse Churchill’s decision:

QUITE IMPOSSIBLE TO BE READY AT SUCH SHORT NOTICE. FEEL IT IS MY DUTY TO WARN YOU EMPHATICALLY THAT YOU COURT DISASTER IF YOU CARRY OUT INTENTION OF CHANGING BEFORE I HAVE THOROUGH GRIP OF FLEET AND SITUATION.

Jellicoe’s telegrams now stood somewhere between insubordination and farce, but he still refused to give up. At 11:30 the same morning, he made his final appeal:

ADD TO LAST MESSAGE. FLEET IS IMBUED WITH FEELINGS OF EXTREME ADMIRATION AND LOYALTY FOR COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF. THIS IS VERY STRONG FACTOR.

Winston Churchill had had enough. He was not only the First Lord of the Admiralty; he was also a member of a Cabinet and government making the ultimate decision for war or peace. Germany, Austria, France, and Russia already were at war and the German government had just presented a twenty-four-hour ultimatum to Belgium. Despite Britain’s treaty obligations to Belgium, four members of the Asquith Cabinet, opposed to British participation in any continental war, had resigned. Others were waver-ing. Churchill’s patience was exhausted and he had no further time for a fidgety admiral, even a prospective Commander-in-Chief. The First Lord’s final message, sent off on the afternoon of the third, allowed for no rebuttal:

I AM TELEGRAPHING COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF [CALLAGHAN] DIRECTING HIM TO TRANSFER COMMAND TO YOU AT EARLIEST MOMENT SUITABLE TO THE INTEREST OF THE SERVICE. I RELY ON YOU AND HIM TO EFFECT THIS CHANGE QUICKLY AND SMOOTHLY, PERSONAL FEELINGS CANNOT COUNT NOW ONLY WHAT IS BEST FOR US ALL. YOU SHOULD CONSULT HIM [CALLAGHAN] FRANKLY.

FIRST LORD

At four a.m. on Tuesday, August 4, Jellicoe received the signal to break the seal on his Admiralty envelope. As he knew it would, the letter inside contained his appointment as Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Fleet. Now obliged to act, he proceeded at once to board
Iron Duke,
where he found Callaghan already in possession of his own Admiralty signal:

THEIR LORDSHIPS HAVE DETERMINED UPON, AND H.M. THE KING HAS APPROVED, THE APPOINTMENT OF SIR JOHN JELLICOE AS COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF. YOU ARE TO STRIKE YOUR FLAG FORTHWITH, EMBARK IN THE
SAPPHO
OR OTHER CRUISER, AND COME ASHORE AT QUEENSFERRY, REPORTING YOURSELF AT THE ADMIRALTY THEREAFTER AT YOUR EARLIEST CONVENIENCE. THESE ORDERS ARE IMPERATIVE.

Callaghan’s emotions were under control. He had known that eventually Jellicoe would be his successor, but not that his own appointment was to be cut short. At the Admiralty conference only a week before, Churchill and Battenberg had given him no intimatio
n that they were contemplating a change. Nevertheless, Callaghan behaved, Jellicoe said later, “as always, as a most gallant officer and gentleman, and his one desire was to make the position easy for me, in entire disregard of his own feelings.” The two admirals agreed that Jellicoe should take command the following day, August 5. Even as they were talking, however, another signal came in from the Admiralty ordering the fleet to sea that very morning. Callaghan decided to give up command immediately. At 8:30 a.m. on August 4, as the Grand Fleet was leaving the harbor, he hauled down his flag and left Scapa Flow.

The fleet watched him go with dismay and indignation. Most officers felt that it was grossly unfair that the man who prepared them for war should be so abruptly dismissed on the eve of battle. Two senior vice admirals commanding Grand Fleet battle squadrons, Warrender and Bayly, signed a joint telegram to the Admiralty asking that the decision be “reconsidered.” Beatty, commanding the battle cruisers, telegraphed extravagantly to Churchill and Battenberg that the change “would cause unprecedented disaster. . . . Moral effect upon the fleet at such a moment would be worse than a defeat at sea. It creates impossible problems for successor.”

[Writing to his wife, Beatty was more judicious: “We received the terrible news that the Commander-in-Chief has been relieved by Jellicoe. I fear he must have been taken ill. It is a terrible handicap to start a war by losing our Commander-in-Chief and it will break his heart. Jellicoe is undoubtedly the better man and in the end it will be for the best, but he hasn’t the fleet at his fingertips at present.”]

The Admiralty replied that their lordships understood these requests, but that they ought not to have been sent. Churchill—who later admitted that what had been done to Callaghan was “cruel”—telegraphed Jellicoe: “Your feelings do you credit and we understand them. But the responsibility rests with us and we have taken our decision. Take up your great task in buoyancy and hope. We are sure that all will be well.”

The fleet’s indignation was short-lived, and Jellicoe, quickly shouldering the burden of wartime command, soon gained universal respect. Nevertheless, two officers—the two most concerned—were slow to recover from the trauma. “I hope I never have to live through such a time as I had from Friday to Tuesday,” Jellicoe wrote on August 7 to Hamilton, his successor as Second Sea Lord. “My position was horrible. I did my best but could not stop what I believe is a grave error. I trust sincerely it won’t prove to be so. Of course, each day I get more into the saddle. But the tragedy of the news to the Commander-in-C was past belief, and it was almost worse for me.” To his mother Jellicoe wrote, “I felt quite ill and could not sleep at all. It was so utterly repugnant to my feelings. But the Admiralty insisted and four hours before the fleet left, I was ordered to transfer my flag as acting Admiral to the flagship and poor Sir George Callaghan left her utterly broken down. It was a cruel and most unwise step.” Fortunately for Jellicoe, his feelings on the matter had been transparent and it soon became clear that Callaghan had understood them. On August 21, the former Commander-in-Chief wrote to his successor:

My dear Jellicoe:

My disappointment has been made much easier to bear by the very kind letters I have been receiving these last few days.

Yours of the 13th which has just reached me is one of them and I am indeed grateful to you for all you say. It was a hard time, but we will forget it as we doubtless will both have many more shocks before it is all over.

The King was most kind and did a great deal to put me right with myself.

Good luck, old Chap

Three and a half years later, when Jellicoe’s only son, George, was born, Cosmo Lang, the Archbishop of Canterbury, came to the Isle of Wight to christen the child. Crossing the Solent on the same boat, Admiral Sir George Callaghan told the archbishop that all the admirals who had served with Jellicoe in the Grand Fleet had subscribed to purchase a gold christening cup, which he would present to Jellicoe. After the dinner following the service, Jellicoe took Callaghan aside and said to him, “Look here, old chap, I have long waited to have a chance of showing you some papers to prove that I did everything I could to avoid that painful episode which neither of us can forget. Here they are.” Instantly, Callaghan replied, “Damn your papers, my dear fellow, I don’t want to see them. I have never had any doubt about it.”

Burdened by the suddenness of his appointment and the pain it had inflicted, Jellicoe took up his immense responsibilities. With the great weapon placed in his hands, he had not only to shield the coasts of Britain from invasion, to guard the exits from the North Sea, and to foil the purposes of the German High Seas Fleet; he had to do more. The nation, the navy, the Admiralty, and the ebullient First Lord expected far more. All believed in Britain’s invincibility at sea and all looked to this small man to bring them victory. And it was not just victory they demanded, but the absolute, annihilating triumph at sea bestowed upon England a century before by another small British admiral: Horatio Nelson.

CHAPTER 4
First Days

Jellicoe would have been happy to give England the glorious victory for which it yearned; the problem was to arrange that victory and persuade the Germans to cooperate. For more than a century after Trafalgar, the British navy possessed no detailed, carefully worked out war plan. Instead, British naval officers universally assumed that when war broke out, the fleet would immediately take the offensive. In 1871, when Vice Admiral Sir Spencer Robinson was asked how the navy would be employed in wartime, he replied, “The only description I could give is that wherever it is known that the enemy is, our ships would go and endeavour to destroy him. If you saw a fleet assembling at a stated port, you would send your fleet to that port to attack it. That is my view of the way in which war should be carried out.” This virile opinion was shared by successive Boards of the Admiralty; they restated it in writing on July 1, 1908, when the Sea Lords instructed the Commander-in-Chief of the Channel Fleet that “the principal object is to bring the main German fleet to decisive action and all other operations are subsidiary to this end.” The theme of the instant, all-out assault was drummed into the British public. Nelson had won at Trafalgar,
The Spectator
declared on October 29, 1910, “because our fleet, inspired by a great tradition and a great man, recognised that to win you must attack—go far, fall upon, fly at the throat of, hammer, pulverise, destroy, annihilate—your enemy.”

But what if the enemy refused to cooperate? Suppose, in this new war, the Germans, despite possessing the second largest navy in the world, held their ships out of reach inside heavily fortified harbors, awaiting their own moment to strike? Until 1912, when Churchill came to the Admiralty, the Royal Navy had planned to deal with this possibility just as Nelson had dealt with Napoleon’s navy before Trafalgar: with a close, inshore blockade, monitoring every action of the enemy fleet and bringing it to battle if and when it came out. This time, a close British blockade of the German North Sea coast would be established with destroyers and other light forces constantly patrolling a few miles offshore, ready to report any German sortie before falling back on the British battleships cruising nearby. Fisher was the first to recognize that the submarine, the torpedo, and the mine had tossed this policy of close blockade on the scrapheap. No British admiral would be allowed to keep a fleet of battleships cruising back and forth in the Heligoland Bight in the close and constant presence of German submarines, destroyers, and minefields. This would mean, the Admiralty explained to the Committee of Imperial Defence in 1913, “a steady and serious wastage of valuable ships.” In addition, there was the problem of fuel. Sailing ships in Nelson’s day required only the wind; steel warships needed coal and oil. Destroyers patrolling the entrance to Heligoland Bight would have to return to port every three or four days to refuel; with a third of the force always absent, a close blockade would require twice as many modern destroyers as the Royal Navy possessed.

By 1913, the British navy had accepted these realities, abandoned close blockade, and adopted a new policy of distant blockade. In essence, this meant that rather than blockading the German coast, the British navy would close off the entire North Sea. Here, geography lent a powerful helping hand. As the naval historian Arthur Marder put it, “In a war with Germany, Britain started with the crucial geographic advantage of stretching like a gigantic breakwater across the approaches to Germany”; Mahan had said the same thing: “Great Britain cannot help commanding the approaches to Germany.” The existence of the British Isles, stretching over 700 miles from Lands End to the northern tip of the Shetlands, left only two maritime exits from the North Sea into the Atlantic. The first was the Straits of Dover, twenty miles wide at their narrowest point. Here, the new technology of undersea weaponry came down in Britain’s favor. “Owing to recent developments in mines, torpedoes, torpedo craft and submarines,” declared a Committee of Imperial Defence paper on December 6, 1912, “the passage of the Straits of Dover and the English Channel by ships of a power at war with Great Britain would be attended with such risks that, for practical purposes, the North Sea may be regarded as having only one exit, the northern one.” This “northern one” was the 200-mile-wide gap at the top of the North Sea, between northern Scotland and the southern coast of Norway. In these stormy waters, the blockade would be enforced by cruiser patrols supported by the dominating presence of the Grand Fleet at Scapa Flow. With these two exits barred, then, in the words of the naval writer Geoffrey Callender, “so long as Admiral Jellicoe and the Dover patrol held firm, the German fleet in all its tremendous strength was literally locked out of the world. The Hohenzollern dread- noughts could not place themselves on a single trade route, could not touch a single overseas dominion, [and] could not interfere with the imports on which the British Isles depended.” Distant blockade did not mean that British ships and sailors would simply sit as watchmen at the ocean gates and surrender the North Sea to the Germans. A new Admiralty war plan defined the Grand Fleet’s new role: “As it is at present impracticable to maintain a perpetual close watch off the enemy’s ports, the maritime domination of the North Sea . . . will be established as far as practicable by occasional driving or sweeping movements carried out by the Grand Fleet . . . in superior force. The movements should be sufficiently frequent and sufficiently advanced to impress upon the enemy that he cannot at any time venture far from his home ports without such serious risk of encountering an overwhelming force that no enterprise is likely to reach its destination.” This was a practical strategy to contain the threat of the German fleet, the best that could be devised with the resources available. Unhappily for British jingoists, in uniform and out, it was not a strategy that guaranteed an immediate, annihilating victory over the High Seas Fleet.