Castles of Steel (24 page)

Nevertheless, for the German navy there were bright spots. German gunnery had been rapid and accurate. Had the two sides been evenly matched, then, in the conditions of haze, in which ships appeared and suddenly vanished, the Germans should have prevailed. The English admired the way in which the German salvos were bunched even when they did not hit. German ships displayed physical proof of Tirpitz’s long-prescribed adage that a warship’s primary responsibility is to remain afloat; the destroyer
V-187
and the three light cruisers absorbed enormous damage before they finally sank. Most of all, the Germans could take pride in the courage of their captains, officers, and men. In reporting the defeat to the kaiser, Ingenohl slathered his officers and men with praise. He spoke of “the long-suppressed battle ardor and the indomitable will of your Majesty’s ships to get at the enemy.” “However heavy the losses,” he said, “this first collision with the enemy gave proof of the eagerness to do battle.” The men’s “confidence in their own ability,” he assured William, “has not been shaken but has grown.” No Briton would argue; after the Battle of the Bight, no British sailor ever belittled German bravery.

Despite these bright spots, depression afflicted the German fleet. Officers and men were humiliated at having allowed more than fifty British warships, including five capital ships, to penetrate so close to the shore of the fatherland. Hipper, particularly, felt the defeat; he privately placed the blame on the division of command in the High Seas Fleet. Hipper had always wanted to keep at least one battle cruiser on patrol in the Bight, but the Commander-in-Chief had refused to expose the battle cruisers in this defensive role. In Hipper’s view, therefore, Ingenohl was ultimately responsible for leaving the German destroyer patrols vulnerable to attack whenever the tide over the Jade bar was low. At Hipper’s request, a change in the defensive arrangements for the Bight was made, and beginning in September extensive defensive minefields were laid. With the end of the need for destroyer and light cruiser patrols, “the larger part of the light surface forces became available for other tasks.” In addition, an important change in tactical doctrine was made: there would be no more piecemeal arrivals by German warships. If the British came back, full squadrons would respond, or nobody would.

In the long run, the most significant result of the battle was its effect on the kaiser. Exhilarated by news of the German army’s constant success on the Western Front, William suddenly was forced to confront the fact that the British fleet had stormed into German home waters and sunk a number of his “darlings.” This bold stroke was confirmation that the near adulation that William had always felt for the Royal Navy was not misplaced; the spirit of Nelson, one of William’s heroes, was still alive. The German fleet, for which Britain’s friendship had been squandered, seemed now at risk from the bold actions of Nelson’s heirs. To preserve his ships, the kaiser determined that the fleet must “hold itself back and avoid actions which can lead to greater losses.” The main body of the High Seas Fleet was ordered not to fight outside the Bight, and not even inside the Bight against superior forces. Admiral Pohl, Chief of the German Naval Staff, wired Ingenohl that “in his anxiety to preserve the fleet [William] . . . wished you to wire for his consent before entering a decisive action.”

Tirpitz was appalled by the kaiser’s decision. It was the beginning of a struggle between the Grand Admiral and the monarch. Tirpitz insisted that the High Seas Fleet should be used for what it was: a weapon of war. Restricting it to a defensive role, he believed, was madness. “August 28 [was] a day fateful both in after-effects and in incidental results for the work of our navy,” Tirpitz wrote after the war. What Tirpitz wanted was that

on the approach of the English, the order . . . [be] instantly given “the whole fleet to sea with every vessel we have.” If there were larger elements of the British fleet in the Bight, there could be nothing better than to come to battle so near to our own ports. . . . But the reverse course was followed. The Emperor did not wish for losses of this sort. . . . Orders [were] issued by the Emperor . . . after an audience with Pohl, to which I as usual was not summoned, to restrict the initiative of the Commander-in-Chief of the North Sea Fleet. The loss of ships was to be avoided; fleet sallies and any greater undertakings must be approved by His Majesty in advance. I took the first opportunity to explain to the Emperor the fundamental error of such a muzzling policy. This step had no success, but on the contrary there sprang up from that day forth an estrangement between the Emperor and myself which steadily increased.

The kaiser prevailed and the High Seas Fleet was tethered. The British, on the other hand, were eager to try again. On September 9, a well-planned repetition of the Bight operation—coordinated by Jellicoe this time—was carried out in the hope of drawing out the German fleet. Beatty with six battle cruisers (
Inflexible
had joined him from the Mediterranean) supported the light forces, and the whole Grand Fleet lay over the horizon 100 miles north of Heligoland. The Harwich flotillas penetrated to within twelve miles of Heligoland, but saw no German ships. Beatty told Ethel, “They knew we were coming and not a soul was in sight. I fear the rascals will never come out, but will only send out minelayers and submarines. They seem . . . wanting in initiative and dash with their battle cruisers. . . . It looks as if we should go through the war without ever coming to grips with them. Such a thought is more than I can bear.” On September 28, Keyes and Tyrwhitt tried to arrange still another penetration, but reports of vast new German minefields led to cancellation. [We] could not go messing about there any more,” said Tyrwhitt, adding dejectedly, “We, the Navy, are not doing much, but if the Germans won’t come out, what can we do?”

After the war, Churchill gilded this victory, plucked from near catastrophe, with the glow of Destiny: “The Germans knew nothing of our defective staff work and of the risks we had run,” he wrote.

All they saw was that the British did not hesitate to hazard their greatest vessels as well as their light craft in the most daring offensive action and had escaped apparently unscathed. They felt as we should have felt had German destroyers broken into the Solent and their battle cruisers penetrated as far as the Nab. The results of this action were far-reaching. Henceforward, the weight of British naval prestige lay heavy across all German sea enterprise. . . . The German Navy was indeed “muzzled.” Except for furtive movements by individual submarines and minelayers, not a dog stirred from August till November.

CHAPTER 7
Submarines and Mines: “Fisher’s Toys”

Jacky Fisher’s British navy was built to carry massive guns firing heavy shells with enormous penetrating power over long range. To this purpose, the dreadnought battle fleet had been equipped, first with 12-inch, then with 13.5-inch, and ultimately with 15-inch guns. But even as the size and destructive power of naval guns increased, other weapons, less visible and often more dangerous, were being developed to destroy ships. These were torpedoes and mines, designed to explode below the waterline against the hull of an enemy ship. The advantage, as John Keegan has succinctly put it, is that “water conducts shock far more efficiently than air.”

Submarines, torpedoes, and mines all predated the Great War. Mines had been used in the American Civil War, where they were called torpedoes (“Damn the torpedoes,” said Rear Admiral David Farragut as he led his Union squadron over a Confederate minefield in Mobile Bay). But after the Battle of Tsushima in 1905, where the Russian navy was annihilated by Japanese heavy naval guns, it was the big gun, not the torpedo or mine, that was believed to be the decisive weapon. The submarine, however, possessed a unique advantage over the massive, armored ship equipped with great guns: it could make itself invisible. Approaching underwater, it could attack without revealing its presence except for the few chosen moments when it pushed its periscope above the surface. In the 1890s, the world’s most advanced submarines were being built in America by John Philip Holland, an Irish nationalist who, after immigrating to the United States, devoted himself to designing and building weapons that could sink British warships. On the surface, a 160-horsepower gasoline engine gave Holland’s boat a speed of 7½ knots; beneath the surface, it made 6½ knots on power from an electric battery. Holland’s employer, the Electric Boat Company in New London, Connecticut, was a private enterprise and the navies of the world soon beat a path to its door. The Royal Navy purchased a single Holland submarine in 1900 and, impressed by its potential, then built five undersea craft under license. The French navy began with experiments of its own but later came around to Holland’s designs. By the summer of 1914, 400 submarines, most of them evolutionary progressions from Holland’s original design, existed in sixteen navies.

Fisher had been one of the first to see the potential of the submarine. In 1903, he announced their power to revolutionize war at sea: “Death near—momentarily—sudden—awful—invisible—unavoidable! Nothing conceivably more demoralizing!” In 1904, before the
Dreadnought
was designed, he wrote, “I don’t think it is even faintly realized—the immense impending revolution which the submarine will effect as offensive weapons of war.” The submarine, he repeated constantly, was “the battleship of the future,” and the torpedo the naval weapon of the future. The problem was how to deliver the torpedo to the target. In 1903, the effective range of torpedoes was 1,000 yards. By equipping battleships with quick-firing guns and screening them with anti-torpedo-boat vessels (Fisher named them destroyers), navies could make it hazardous for an enemy surface vessel to come close enough to launch its torpedoes. But a submarine, Fisher realized, was an ideal means of bringing torpedo-launching tubes within range of major enemy warships in daylight.

When Fisher first became interested, submarines were far from the deadly weapons they were to become in two world wars. Slow, limited in radius of action and in time submerged, afflicted with restricted vision in daylight and total blindness at night, they seemed relatively harmless—to some, even ridiculous. Admiral Lord Charles Beresford dismissed them as “playthings” and “Fisher’s toys.” Then, as the potential of the undersea craft became more apparent, scorn was mingled with indignation and fear. Submarines, British admirals grumbled, were unethical and “un-English . . . the weapon of cowards who refused to fight like men on the surface.” Admiral Sir Arthur Wilson, Commander-in-Chief of the Channel Fleet, so despised this “underhanded method of attack” that he wanted the Admiralty to announce publicly that all submarine crews captured in wartime would be hanged as pirates. Fisher thought differently. His objective was to send enemy warships to the bottom of the sea. He did not care whether the weapons that sent them there were cowardly, underhanded, or un-English; he only cared that they worked. If submarines could torpedo and sink enemy warships, Britain should have submarines, and the more the better. To overcome opposition, Fisher looked for allies. He guided King Edward VII through the submarine
A-1
when she was in dry dock and took the Prince of Wales (later King George V) with him in the same submarine when she submerged off Portsmouth. (The Princess of Wales, watching from an observation ship, was heard to say quietly, “I shall be very disappointed if George doesn’t come up.”)

As First Sea Lord, Fisher worked with Captain Reginald Bacon, whom he described as “the cleverest officer in the navy” and later appointed as the first captain of the revolutionary battleship
Dreadnought.
In 1904, Bacon commanded the navy’s entire submarine force, consisting of six small boats. His officers and crews considered themselves an elite corps and, in fleet maneuvers in March 1904, they made a name for themselves. Their enemy was the Home Fleet and they hit Sir Arthur Wilson’s battleships so many times with unarmed torpedoes that umpires reluctantly ruled two of the battleships “sunk.” Unfortunately, the submarine
A-1
was rammed and actually sunk by a passing merchant vessel, which had not been warned that an undersea craft might be passing beneath its bow. The real lesson of the maneuvers, Bacon reported, was that the presence of submarines “exercised an extraordinary influence on the operations” of a battle fleet: for safety, battleships now must always be accompanied by a large screen of destroyers. A decade later, Jellicoe was putting this lesson into practice in the North Sea.

By the time Roger Keyes was appointed Inspecting Captain of Submarines in 1910, the British submarine force had climbed to sixty-one boats: twelve ancient
A
’s, eleven elderly
B
’s, thirty-seven
C
’s, the new
D-1,
and eight more
D
’s under construction. When war broke out four years later, Britain had seventy-four submarines, more than any other naval power in the world, but this number was grossly misleading. Most of the boats were old coastal vessels of the
A, B,
and
C
classes whose average underwater speed (about 8 knots) and endurance (about twelve hours) were too limited to allow them to accompany a friendly surface fleet or to seek and attack an enemy fleet. They rarely remained at sea for more than a few days and never ventured any great distance from the British coast. In 1907, Britain first began to develop the
D
class, oceangoing vessels of 500 tons, diesel powered, with a surface speed close to 15 knots. The
E
-class boats that followed grew to a length of 178 feet and a displacement of 660 tons; they could achieve a surface speed of 15½ knots and an underwater speed of 9½ knots, and they could dive safely to 200 feet (the depth at which pressure from the sea would crush the boat was around 350 feet). These submarines were equipped with torpedoes with an extreme range of 11,000 yards and that had gyroscopes enabling the torpedoes to maintain an accurate course.

The appointment of Keyes in 1910 was a surprise. Keyes was a destroyer captain with no experience as a submariner, and his new assignment was not only to command and train the existing force but also to oversee all submarine construction. Keyes made enemies by looking abroad for experimental vessels and periscopes better than those produced at home.