Castles of Steel (28 page)

Thirty-six hours after Jellicoe learned that
Hawke
had been torpedoed, he received a report that a U-boat was
inside
the Grand Fleet base at Scapa Flow. Convinced now that neither the North Sea nor Scapa Flow was safe for the Grand Fleet, the Commander-in-Chief asked permission to withdraw it still farther to the west. Reluctantly, the Admiralty authorized the temporary transfer of two battle squadrons to two new harbors, Loch-na-Keal, on the Isle of Mull on the Scottish west coast, and Lough Swilly, on the east coast of northern Ireland. Both harbors had narrow, easily defended entrances, and Lough Swilly also had a shallow bottom which would make entry difficult for a submerged submarine. Ironically, Jellicoe’s search for security by shifting his battle squadrons led to the Grand Fleet’s first major loss. Having preserved his dreadnought fleet intact for the first three months of the war, he suddenly was stripped of one of his most powerful ships when the new 23,000-ton dreadnought
Audacious,
carrying ten 13.5-inch guns, was sunk—not by gunfire or a torpedo, but by a German mine.

Because a mine cannot distinguish the nationality of a ship that runs into it, the Hague Convention of 1907 had agreed to keep the open seas free of these lethal weapons floating beneath the ocean’s surface. Belligerents were permitted to lay offensive minefields only in hostile territorial waters; that is, within three miles of an enemy’s coast. Nevertheless, because the North Sea is generally shallow and therefore particularly suitable for moored contact mines, the German navy, preparing for war, began accumulating a large stock with the intention of using them aggressively. Beginning on the war’s first day, when the converted steamer
Königin Luise
laid her mines off the Suffolk coast, German ships and submarines placed over 25,000 mines in the North Sea, most of them in defiance of the Hague Convention. Commodore Tyrwhitt was appalled by this “indiscriminate and distinctly barbarian mining.” Expecting a short war, he noted that “it will be months before the North Sea is safe for yachting.”

When war came, the British navy was wholly unprepared for large-scale mining, offensive or defensive. Mines had been effectively used in the Russo-Japanese War; Lord Fisher, always open to new weapons and new tactics, had been impressed. But the navy in general considered the mine, like the submarine, a “cowardly weapon,” “the weapon of the weak,” “a weapon no chivalrous nation should use.” Britain, accordingly, possessed few mines and no offensive mining strategy or equipment. In the first ten days of October, a small defensive minefield was laid in an attempt to seal off the northern approaches to the Channel, but the enterprise failed. British mines, poorly designed and constructed, sometimes blew up under the sterns of the minelayers. And within a few weeks, the anchored mines began to break loose from their moorings and drift down the Channel, making passage dangerous for British cross-Channel traffic. Equipment for dealing with German mines was equally inadequate. Before the war, only fourteen elderly British destroyers had been converted into minesweepers. When Jellicoe took command, the Grand Fleet was assigned a total of six.

Lacking minesweepers, the Admiralty discovered that the most effective method of dealing with German mines was to sink the minelayers. Success in this effort was rare. One notable moment came on October 17, when the light cruiser
Undaunted
and four destroyers of Tyrwhitt’s Harwich Force patrolling off the Dutch coast encountered four old German destroyers steaming west across the southern North Sea. The ships,
S-115, S-117, S-118,
and
S-119,
each carrying twelve mines, had left the Ems at 3:30 a.m. Their mission was to lay their mines at the mouth of the Thames, but when they met
Undaunted
and her squadron at 1:30 p.m., they turned and ran for home. The top speed of the German ships was 20 knots—that of the British, 30; by midafternoon, two Germans had been sunk and the other two, turning back to help, also went to the bottom. Thirty German officers and men from the four ships survived.

Eleven days later, on October 28, the Germans struck back. In mid-October, the fast, 17,000-ton North German Lloyd liner
Berlin,
armed as a cruiser and equipped with a large number of mines, passed through the North Sea into the Atlantic with orders to mine the approaches to Glasgow on the river Clyde. Off the northern Irish coast, however,
Berlin
’s captain decided to alter his plan and lay his mines off Tory Island, northwest of Lough Swilly, then serving as a Grand Fleet anchorage. The German captain was unaware of the Grand Fleet’s presence; he chose the site because it lay across the main trade route from Liverpool to America. On the night of October 22,
Berlin
laid 200 mines across the entrance to the channel used by most shipping in and out of Liverpool.
Berlin
then sailed north to attack trade with Archangel, but was damaged in autumn gales and forced to seek shelter in Trondheim, where she was promptly interned by the government of Norway. Meanwhile, on October 26, the Tory Island minefield claimed its first victim when the British merchantman
Manchester Commerce
struck a mine and sank. For several days, word of this loss reached neither the Admiralty nor Jellicoe aboard
Iron Duke
at Lough Swilly.

Believing that the fleet was safe, Jellicoe ordered Vice Admiral Sir George Warrender to take his battle squadron—the eight newest and most powerful dreadnoughts in the Grand Fleet—to sea for gunnery practice. At 9:00 a.m. on the morning of October 28, the squadron, with
Audacious
steaming third in line, was just turning onto the gunnery range when a violent explosion occurred under the port side aft of
Audacious.
The port and center engine rooms began to flood and the vessel began to settle by the stern. No one knew the cause of the explosion, but as a minefield so far to the west seemed implausible, a torpedo appeared the likely culprit. Following Admiralty orders issued after the sinking of
Cressy
and her sisters, Warrender hurriedly asked Lough Swilly to send help, then gathered up the rest of his squadron and sailed away.

At first, Captain Cecil Dampier of
Audacious
believed that she was sinking so fast he must abandon her. Presently, as the escorting light cruiser
Liverpool
circled the dreadnought at high speed, the settling slowed and Dampier found that the battleship still could make 9 knots on her starboard engine. He decided that if he could make the twenty-five miles to Lough Swilly, he might be able to beach her there before she sank. Jellicoe, meanwhile, ordered every available vessel—destroyer, tug, and trawler—out from Lough Swilly and Loch-na-Keal to assist
Audacious
and to prevent the submarine—if one was present—from attacking again. Until he was certain that no U-boat was present, Jellicoe did not dare send a battleship to attempt a tow, but the old predreadnought
Exmouth
was put on short notice to be ready to go. Meanwhile, Vice Admiral Sir Lewis Bayly, commander of the other battle squadron still at anchor in Lough Swilly, offered to go to
Audacious
by destroyer and take command of the salvage effort. Jellicoe agreed.

For two hours,
Audacious
struggled under her own power, moving fifteen miles nearer Lough Swilly, with the water rising steadily inside her hull. At 10:50 a.m., the remaining engine room was swamped and the vessel came to a halt. Dampier brought her bow around to the sea, and began sending away his crew in boats to the surrounding smaller craft. Because the captain still believed he had a chance to save his ship he and 250 volunteers remained on board as a working party. Nevertheless,
Audacious
continued inexorably to settle. Then, at 1:30 p.m., the 45,000-ton White Star liner
Olympic,
sister of the iceberg-destroyed
Titanic,
on the last day of a voyage from New York to Liverpool, appeared. Responding to distress signals,
Olympic
’s captain, H. J. Haddock, volunteered to help. Dampier asked Haddock to take his ship in tow and Haddock, ignoring the threat of submarines or mines, attempted to comply. Destroyers carried hawsers from
Audacious
to the liner, but although Haddock managed to make a little headway with the battleship in tow, the heavy seas and the weight of the sinking dreadnought quickly made the task impossible;
Audacious,
shearing into the wind, repeatedly snapped the hawsers.

In the early afternoon, a report of the sinking of the
Manchester Commerce
the night before by a mine in the same vicinity reached Jellicoe. At 4:40 p.m., the admiral also learned that a four-masted sailing vessel had struck a mine the previous night in the same area. At 5:00 p.m., Jellicoe, now certain that
Audacious
had been mined, not torpedoed, ordered
Exmouth
to sail from Lough Swilly and attempt to tow in the sinking ship. But by the time
Exmouth
arrived, it was too late. Admiral Bayly, Captain Dampier, and the few officers and men still on board were taken off and the waterlogged ship was abandoned.
Liverpool
was ordered to stand by through the night, but at 9:00 p.m., after a twelve-hour struggle,
Audacious
suddenly capsized and, a few seconds later, blew up. Ironically, this explosion in the empty vessel was responsible for the only casualty in the sinking of the battleship. A piece of debris, flying 800 yards, landed on the deck of
Liverpool,
where it killed a watching petty officer.

Jellicoe, dismayed by this loss of a dreadnought, was desperately anxious that the sinking be kept a secret. That night, when
Olympic
reached Lough Swilly, the admiral prohibited any communication between ship and shore. Then he signaled the Admiralty, urging that the news be suppressed. The Grand Fleet’s margin in numbers over the High Seas Fleet was so slight—Jellicoe reckoned that he now had seventeen serviceable dreadnoughts to Ingenohl’s fifteen—that knowledge of this loss might bring the Germans out at the wrong time. Jellicoe realized that, owing to the presence of
Olympic,
the loss probably could not be concealed for long, but any time he could gain would help. Churchill and his colleagues agreed, but because concealment of naval losses was so contrary to British and Royal Navy tradition, the Admiralty could not issue this order on its own. The decision went up to the Cabinet.

The Cabinet decided to withhold the news, but its decision was based less on the situation in the North Sea than on the situation in the eastern Mediterranean. In Constantinople, by October 28 and 29, the Germans, aided by the presence of
Goeben,
were on the brink of persuading Turkey to enter the war. Most Turks, the British ambassador warned London, now expected the Germans to win, and news of a dramatic German victory in the form of the sinking of a modern dreadnought might tip the scale. Accordingly, the Cabinet granted Jellicoe’s request. This did no good with regard to Turkish neutrality. Two days later, Admiral Souchon took his battle cruiser and other ships into the Black Sea to bombard Russian ports, and Turkey entered the war.

Even so, for several days,
Olympic
was detained at Lough Swilly. A number of American passengers were on board, many of whom had lined the rails, snapping their Brownie cameras while the liner attempted to tow the sinking battleship.

[One of these passengers was Charles M. Schwab, chairman of the Bethlehem Steel Company. Detained on board
Olympic
in Lough Swilly, Schwab got word to Jellicoe that he had crossed the Atlantic to discuss important War Office contracts and wished to proceed to London as soon as possible. Jellicoe immediately had a conversation with Schwab during which he asked the American to call on Lord Fisher, who had just returned to the Admiralty. In London, Schwab saw the new First Sea Lord; he returned to America with a contract to build submarines for the Royal Navy.]

On November 14, the
Philadelphia Public Ledger
published a photograph of
Audacious
sinking. Nevertheless, news of the loss was officially suppressed and the Admiralty announced only that the ship had been damaged. Her crew was instructed to keep the loss a secret and the men were quietly reassigned to other ships. Thereafter until the end of the war,
Audacious
remained on all lists of ships and fleet movements.

[Admiral Scheer, commenting on this episode after the war, said, “We can only approve . . . not revealing a weakness to the enemy.”]

Her sinking was announced on November 13, 1918, two days after the armistice that ended the war. By then, the ship had achieved another distinction: of the forty-one British dreadnought battleships that fought in the Great War,
Audacious
was the only one lost to enemy action.

Four days after the sinking of
Audacious,
Jellicoe traveled to London to confer with Churchill and the new First Sea Lord, Jacky Fisher. In preparation for this meeting, the Commander-in-Chief wrote a letter to the Admiralty, dated October 30, explaining his concerns about the dangers to his fleet from submarines and mines. Prewar estimates as to the capabilities of German U-boats had been found to be too low: the sighting of U-boats as far north as the Orkneys on the fourth day of the war had convinced Jellicoe that his heavy ships were threatened no matter where they were in the North Sea. His reaction was to move his fleet ever farther away. Already, on September 30, he had written to Churchill, “It is suicidal to forgo our advantageous position in the big ships by risking them in waters infested with submarines. The result might quite easily be such a weakening of our battle fleet and battle cruiser strength as seriously to jeopardize the future of the country by giving over to the Germans the command of the open seas.” Until the threat could be dealt with, Jellicoe suggested, he should operate the battle fleet at a latitude of 60 degrees north—above the Orkneys—with a line of cruisers spread 120 miles to the south to continue the blockade. The Admiralty did not approve, and recurring sweeps by the fleet in the northern half of the North Sea continued.