Castles of Steel (4 page)

Meanwhile, on July 27, the High Seas Fleet returned to Kiel. On July 31, the German dreadnoughts were moving again, this time west through the Kiel Canal to the naval bases on the North Sea. The Naval Staff, concerned about England, had decided that the oldest German battleships and armored cruisers would be sufficient to deal with the Russians, who had lost most of their navy ten years before in the Russo-Japanese War. On August 1, Germany ordered general naval mobilization, but the kaiser and the chancellor still were certain that Britain would remain neutral.

For many years, summer maneuvers in the waters around the British Isles had been a regular feature of the Royal Navy’s annual routine. In the summer of 1914, however, these maneuvers were canceled and replaced by a test mobilization of the British reserve fleet. This decision had nothing to do with the developing European crisis and stemmed from a conversation in October 1913 between Winston Churchill, the First Lord of the Admiralty, and Prince Louis of Battenberg, the First Sea Lord, in which the two men were discussing the need to save money. Churchill was under constant pressure from David Lloyd George, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and other colleagues in the Liberal Cabinet to pare the enormous sums being spent on building dreadnoughts. The amount allotted to the navy in 1914, over £50 million, would be the largest disbursement of this kind in British history. One economizing measure—only a gesture, admittedly—would be to substitute a test mobilization of the Third Fleet, the reserve fleet, for the annual summer maneuvers. Cancellation of the maneuvers would save only a pittance—£100,000 worth of coal and oil burned—but at least the Admiralty would have made the gesture toward the Exchequer.

In March 1914, therefore, when Churchill presented the House of Commons with the yearly Naval Estimates (the Admiralty’s annual budget request), he announced the change. The plan was to call back from civilian life twenty thousand men of the fleet reserve, man the Third Fleet’s two squadrons of the navy’s oldest predreadnought battleships, and place every vessel in the Royal Navy on a war footing. Once this was done, King George V would review the entire British fleet at Spithead; afterward, the ships would carry out brief exercises at sea and then disperse.

The fleets and ships involved varied greatly in power and readiness. The First Fleet, the core of British naval power, was built around three battle squadrons of modern dreadnoughts manned by regular navy crews and always ready for action. The Second Fleet, two battle squadrons of relatively recent predreadnought battleships with attendant smaller craft, needed only to collect its regular navy personnel from various naval training schools ashore. The Third Fleet’s old ships, whose capabilities and readiness the mobilization was designed to test, were more or less permanently moored in quiet harbors and tended by skeleton maintenance crews. To make them ready for sea and turn them into fighting machines, thousands of naval reservists were now to be called up and brought aboard.

It was coincidence that the Royal Navy’s test mobilization, determined as a matter of budgetary economy, occurred at a time of crisis in the Balkans. On July 10, as the Austrian Foreign Ministry was drafting its ultimatum to Serbia, thousands of British naval reservists began arriving at manning depots, where they were issued uniforms and boarded their assigned ships. By July 16, the Second and Third Fleets had sailed from their home ports to join the First Fleet for the royal review at Spithead, between Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight. On July 17, King George arrived and the First Lord, bursting with pride, presented the monarch with a fleet that Churchill declared to be “incomparably the greatest assemblage of naval power ever witnessed in the history of the world.”

On Monday morning, July 20, the armada put to sea for exercises. Every ship was decked with flags, with bands playing and sailors and marines lining the rails. The fleet took six hours to pass the royal yacht, even steaming at fifteen knots. The next three days were spent in tactical exercises in the Channel. On July 23, the three fleets parted company. The ships of the Third Fleet began returning to their home ports to discharge their crews and lapse again into tranquillity. The First and Second Fleets moved to Portland harbor, where they were to remain until Monday morning, July 27. By noon that day, however, the harbor would be empty, the separate battle squadrons dispersed, some to begin gunnery exercises, others to release their crews on midsummer leave. The Second Fleet would return to its home ports to send its crews back to gunnery schools, torpedo schools, and other training establishments ashore. By Friday, some of the ships would be in dry dock for overhaul, others tied to quays for lesser repairs.

There seemed no reason not to return the fleet to peacetime status. Despite the tragedy at Sarajevo, Europe appeared calm. The kaiser had departed on his annual summer cruise in the Norwegian fjords. The president of France had departed on July 13 to visit St. Petersburg, the capital of France’s principal ally, Russia. Accordingly, on July 23, at the conclusion of the naval exercises, Admiral Sir George Callaghan, Commander-in-Chief of the First Fleet, informed the Admiralty that he was ready to break up the fleet. The Admiralty replied: “First Fleet squadrons all disperse on Monday July 27 in accordance with your approved program.”

But on Thursday, July 23, 1914, Austria handed her ultimatum to Serbia. Early on Friday, July 24, the British foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, received the text at the Foreign Office; he described it as “the most formidable document ever addressed from one state to another.” Along with demands that would practically strip Serbia of its national sovereignty, it contained a forty-eight-hour time limit for Serbian acceptance. That afternoon, when Grey informed the British Cabinet, members listened dutifully but to most the crisis seemed far away. “Happily,” Prime Minister H. H. Asquith wrote the king that evening, “there seems to be no reason why we should be anything more than spectators.” Churchill decided to let the Royal Navy continue to stand down from its war footing and return the older ships to peacetime status.

Nevertheless, Admiral Callaghan was worried. When no steps had been taken on Saturday the twenty-fifth to halt the demobilization process, he reminded the Admiralty that if nothing was done, his fleet would be broken up on Monday. That Saturday morning, however, the crisis appeared to have eased, perhaps even passed, for word reached London that Serbia had accepted most of the Austrian terms. Asquith and members of the Cabinet promptly left the capital for the weekend. Churchill had rented a small holiday house, Pear Tree Cottage, at Cromer on the Norfolk coast for his wife and young children, who were already there. Leaving the First Sea Lord to keep watch at the Admiralty, Churchill reached his family on the one o’clock train. Prince Louis did not approve of the general exodus, complaining that “ministers with their weekend holidays are incorrigible.” The next morning, Sunday the twenty-sixth, Churchill said, “I went down to the beach and played with the children. We dammed the little rivulets which trickled down to the sea as the tide went out. It was a very beautiful day. The North Sea shone and sparkled on the horizon.” Twice that morning, at nine o’clock and again at noon, Churchill left the beach to walk to the house of a neighbor who owned a telephone. He called Prince Louis and learned in the first call that there were rumors that Austria might not accept Serbia’s submission; at noon the First Sea Lord told him that Vienna had declared the Serbian response unsatisfactory, had severed diplomatic relations, and had ordered mobilization of the Austrian army. Emperor William was reported to be returning to Berlin, and the High Seas Fleet to be concentrating off the Norwegian coast. In this context, dispersing and demobilizing squadrons of the British navy seemed a grandly wrongheaded decision. Within hours, the naval reservists would have scattered; to mobilize them again would take time. But to arrest their discharge would be politically provocative. Churchill decided to return to London immediately. In the meantime he told Prince Louis that, as the man on the spot, he should “do whatever was necessary.” By the time Churchill appeared at the Admiralty that evening, Prince Louis, on his own initiative, had signaled Callaghan: “No ships of the First Fleet or flotillas are to leave Portland until further orders.” Ships of the Second Fleet were to remain at their home ports, in proximity to the men in their crews who were in schools. Churchill immediately approved everything the First Sea Lord had done.

For Admiral Callaghan, the order came at the eleventh hour. The core of his fleet, the dreadnought battle squadrons, was to disperse the following morning. Already, the dreadnought
Bellerophon
of the 4th Battle Squadron had been detached and was on her way to Gibraltar to refit in the dry dock there. Six of his cruisers, most of his destroyers, and all of his minesweepers were at their home ports with half their crews away on leave. Still, he was able to halt the dispersal before it went any further, and he began immediately to reassemble his fleet. From London, Captain Wilhelm Widenmann, the German naval attaché, who was closely monitoring these activities, telegraphed a report to Berlin:

The British fleet is preparing for all eventualities. First Fleet is assembled at Portland. The ships of the Second Fleet are fully manned. The schools on shore have not reopened. Ships of the Second and Third Fleets have coaled, completed with ammunition and supplies. In consequence of the training of reservists, just completed, the latter can be manned more quickly than usual. The destroyer and patrol flotillas and the submarines are either at or en route to their stations. No leave is being granted; officers and men already on leave have been recalled. In the naval bases and dockyards, great activity reigns. Special measures of precaution have been adopted: all dockyards, magazines, oil tanks, etc., being put under guard. Repairs of ships in dockyard hands are being speeded up. A great deal of night work is being done. Outwardly, complete calm is preserved in order not to cause anxiety by alarming reports about the fleet. Movements of ships, which are generally published daily by the Admiralty, have been withheld since yesterday.

[Widenmann’s extensive information came from a network of minor spies, mostly British in German pay, operating in and around British naval bases. Their existence had been discovered three years earlier but, in a classic counterintelligence procedure, they were allowed to continue because, as Churchill realistically put it, “others of whom we might not have known would have taken their place. Left at large,” Churchill continued, “we read their communications which we [then] regularly forwarded to their paymasters in Berlin. Up to this point, we had no objection to the German government knowing that exceptional precautions were being taken by the navy. But the moment had now come to draw down the curtain. . . . On a word from me, the Home Secretary laid by the heels all these petty traitors who for a few pounds a month were seeking to sell their country.”]

Churchill and the navy were preparing for war, but most members of the British Cabinet still saw no great urgency. Tuesday, July 28, brought the danger closer. Austria categorically rejected the Serbian note, refused to negotiate, and declared war. In St. Petersburg, the Russian General Staff urged the tsar to mobilize the entire Russian army, but Nicholas II agreed to mobilize only the military districts on the border with Austria-Hungary. Churchill decided not to wait. The First Fleet must be moved to a place of safety; the Admiralty had only a vague idea of the whereabouts of the High Seas Fleet and worried about the vulnerability of the mass of ships in Portland harbor to surprise torpedo attack by German destroyers. Churchill’s larger purpose was to ensure that the First Fleet (soon to be designated the Grand Fleet) should sail and be at its war station before Germany could know whether Britain would become an enemy “and therefore if possible before we had decided ourselves. . . . At 10 o’clock on Tuesday morning, I proposed this step to the First Sea Lord and Chief of Staff and found them whole-heartedly in favour of it. We decided that the fleet should leave Portland at such an hour on the morning of the 29th as to pass the Straits of Dover during the hours of darkness . . . at high speed, and without lights . . . and proceed to Scapa Flow.” At 5:00 that evening, the order flashed from the radio masts atop the Admiralty to the signal mast of
Iron Duke:
“Tomorrow, Wednesday [July 29], the First Fleet is to leave Portland for Scapa Flow. Destination is to be kept secret except to flag and commanding officers.” Callaghan was to send the fleet north under his second in command, Vice Admiral Sir George War-render, so that he could travel himself to London in order to consult at the Admiralty. Even as Sir George Callaghan boarded a train for London, his dreadnoughts were moving out of Portland harbor, not to return for more than four years. No one has written a better description of this scene than Churchill himself:

We may now picture this great fleet with its flotillas of cruisers steaming slowly out of Portland harbor, squadron by squadron, scores of gigantic castles of steel wending their way across the misty, shining sea, like giants bowed in anxious thought. We may picture them again as darkness fell, eighteen miles of warships running at high speed and in absolute darkness through the narrow Straits, bearing with them into the broad waters of the North the safeguard of considerable affairs. The strategic concentration of the fleet had been accomplished with its transfer to Scottish waters. We were now in a position, whatever happened, to control events and it was not easy to see how this advantage could be taken from us. A surprise torpedo attack, before or simultaneous with a declaration of war, was at any rate one nightmare gone forever. If war should come, no one would know where to look for the British fleet. Somewhere in that enormous waste of waters to the north of our islands, cruising now this way, now that, shrouded in storms and mists, dwelt this mighty organization. Yet from the Admiralty building we could speak to them at any moment if need arose. The king’s ships were at sea.