Castles of Steel (62 page)

Once out of danger,
Halcyon
repaired her radio and began broadcasting a general warning.
Leopard
also was signaling: “Two battle cruisers and two armored cruisers open fire on
Lively
and myself.” Local British forces began to move. The destroyer
Success
joined
Lively
and
Leopard
in following Hipper eastward out to sea. The three “off-duty” destroyers of the Yarmouth patrol began raising steam. The submarines
E-10, D-5,
and
D-3,
lying in Yarmouth harbor, put to sea. Coming out on the surface,
D-5
struck a mine—whether one of
Stralsund
’s or a drifting British mine, no one ever knew—and in less than a minute the submarine went down. Two officers and two men in the conning tower were saved; the rest of the crew was drowned. None of the other submarines saw anything of Hipper’s squadron.

Through all this, the Admiralty was silent. Normally, shells falling on an English beach would have triggered an instant signal: “Send the navy!” Nevertheless, since 7:00 a.m., the Admiralty had been monitoring wireless signals but doing nothing; no warnings went out, no orders flashed that ships and squadrons were to get under way. In fact, the Admiralty and the British navy were in temporary disarray. It was a difficult time: the new First Sea Lord, Jacky Fisher, had been in office only three days and, at 3:10 that morning, the first word had come of the disaster in the South Pacific at Coronel. In addition, for the first time in the war, the Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Fleet was absent from his fleet. Jellicoe had been summoned to London for an Admiralty conference on November 2, and on November 3 he was returning by train to Scotland.

At 8:30,
Halcyon
reached Yarmouth and was able to send a more accurate report: the enemy force had included four battle cruisers and four light cruisers and was last seen twelve miles off Lowestoft. Owing to the time necessary for decoding, there was further delay before the Admiralty received this information. Then, for another ninety minutes, the Admiralty remained silent, intercepting and recording signals but taking no action. By 9:55 a.m., when the Admiralty, coming to life, ordered Beatty south with his battle cruisers and summoned Jellicoe’s battle squadrons—without Jellicoe, who was still in transit—from their Irish anchorages, Hipper had left the coast of England fifty miles behind.

Later, Winston Churchill made the case for delay:

Early in the morning of November 3 . . . heavy shells were reported to be bursting in the water and on the beach near Yarmouth. The First Sea Lord and I reached the War Room from our bedrooms in a few minutes. The question was What did it mean? It seemed quite certain that German battle cruisers would not be sent only to throw a few shells at an open town like Yarmouth. Obviously, this was a demonstration to divert the British Fleet from something else which was going to happen—was perhaps already happening. . . . We had no means of judging. The last thing it seemed possible to believe was that first-class units of the German fleet would have been sent across the North Sea simply in order to disturb the fisher-folk of Yarmouth. If the German demonstration off Yarmouth was the prelude or concomitant to a serious attempt to break into the Channel, the very greatest naval events would follow. Meanwhile, nothing to be done but put everyone on guard. . . . Several hours of tension passed; and then gradually it became clear that the German battle cruisers were returning home at full speed and that nothing else was apparently happening; and the incredible conclusion forced itself upon us that the German Admiralty had had no other purpose than this silly demonstration off Yarmouth beach.

Before the affair was concluded, however, the German navy suffered a serious loss. On the night of November 3, the returning fleet found the river mouths covered by dense fog, and Ingenohl ordered all ships to anchor overnight in Schillig roads. At dawn the next day, although the fog was still so thick that it was impossible for one ship to see another, the 9,350-ton armored cruiser
Yorck
received permission to proceed into Wilhelmshaven for repairs to her fresh-water tanks. To do this, the ship had to pass through a small gap in the double row of mines that guarded the southern side of Schillig roads. In the murk,
Yorck
lost her way. A change of current carried her to the wrong side of the moored mine-warfare vessel marking the entrance to the swept channel. Turning hard to correct her error, the cruiser was carried south by the current and struck broadside against a mine. A minute later, she hit another mine, capsized, and sank. Many in the crew saved themselves by clinging to the keel, now protruding above the shallow water. Others, numbing in the icy sea, attempted to swim to safety. Two hundred and thirty-five men drowned.

The Imperial Navy’s first major surface offensive into the North Sea had been an embarrassment. Weak British forces in the Yarmouth area had been surprised, but largely undamaged. The shore bombardment had churned only sand and water. The one success the Germans could claim was that their newly laid minefield had destroyed one British submarine and three fishing trawlers. The German Naval Staff was disappointed and Hipper, in a temporary fit of depression, refused to pin on the Iron Cross the kaiser had awarded him after the raid. “I won’t wear it,” he declared, “until I’ve done something.” And, as it happened, most German officers were eager to try again. Ingenohl continued to be averse to risk, but, as he admitted after the war, “It appeared that the risk [in such a raid] was not as [great as] it seemed. If the battle cruisers suddenly appeared on the spot at daybreak, remained there for an hour or an hour and a half, and then retreated at high speed, it would be a very unfortunate coincidence indeed if, just at this time of the year, when the days were so short, superior enemy forces were met before dark. For so much time would have elapsed before the enemy forces could get up steam and put to sea . . . that our ships would already have a considerable lead.”

In this hopeful forecast, Ingenohl left out two factors, one of which he ought to have considered, the other about which he could not have known. The first was bluntly spelled out later in a critical paragraph of the official German naval history: “One could not assume so great a factor of safety in the superior speed of our battle cruisers as it might appear here [in Ingenohl’s argument]. A single casualty by mine or submarine or any other accident—for example a machinery failure or an unlucky hit by enemy guns on a single ship—could suddenly decrease the speed of the battle cruiser squadron so that the assistance of the [High Seas] fleet, all too far astern, would come too late.” As it happened, Hipper’s raids continued, and eventually just such a scenario became a reality.

The other danger to German ships engaged in raids on the British coast—a danger that Ingenohl did not know or even imagine—was that soon the British would know in advance when his ships were putting to sea and where they were going.

Wireless telegraphy was used by all warships and many merchantmen in 1914 and already, through the foresight of Rear Admiral Henry Oliver, the prewar Director of Naval Intelligence, the British navy had constructed radio directional stations along the east and southeast coasts of Britain. By taking cross bearings, these stations enabled listeners to establish the position—and from successive positions, the course—of any enemy ship sending wireless signals. But once hostilities began and British wireless stations began picking up German messages, establishing only the positions and courses of ships seemed insufficient. The intercepted German wireless signals were in code, and the Admiralty wanted to know what the coded messages contained. While the messages, forwarded to the Admiralty, piled up on his desk, Oliver moved to create an organization that could discover exactly what the Germans were saying to one another—an organization, that is, which could break the German codes. To tackle this job, Oliver turned to a friend, the former Director of Naval Education, Sir Alfred Ewing. Described by his son as a “short, thick-set man with keen blue eyes overshadowed by ill-kept, shaggy eyebrows,” Ewing invariably wore a gray suit, “a mauve shirt, a white butterfly collar, and a dark blue bow tie with white spots.” He had been a professor of engineering in Tokyo, had held chairs at Dundee and Cambridge Universities, where he had done pioneering studies of Japanese earthquakes, and was married to an American whose great-great-uncle was George Washington. Ewing agreed to Oliver’s request and immediately went off to the library of the British Museum to study its collection of old codebooks. Then, gathering around him a small group of German scholars and university dons, he established a secret Admiralty department, which began working in his own cramped office. In their first weeks, they sorted and filed intercepts and learned to identify call stations and to distinguish naval messages from military ones, but they made no progress in deciphering German naval messages. And then—twice from German captains’ shipboard safes and once from the bottom of the sea—the Admiralty was handed the solutions to these mysteries. The German navy began the war with three principal codes. Within four months, the British navy was in possession of all three.

The first German naval codebook fell into Allied hands in the first week of the war when, on August 11, the German steamship
Hobart
was seized off Melbourne by a boarding party of Australians. The German captain attempted to destroy his confidential documents; he was seen in the act and the papers were confiscated. They included a copy of the “Handelsverkehrsbuch” (HVB), a codebook originally intended for communication between German warships and merchantmen, but expanded for use by naval shore commands, coastal stations, and, eventually, U-boats and zeppelins. Its importance was not realized in Melbourne until September 9, when the Naval Board there belatedly informed the British Admiralty of its prize. A copy was dispatched by steamer to England, but it was not until October that the HVB code finally reached London. By then, the Admiralty had acquired a second and even more secret German code contained in the “Signalbuch der Kaiserlichen Marine” (SKM).

The book, six inches thick, fifteen inches long, twelve inches wide, and bound in blue leather, was a gift from the Russians. This is what happened: just after midnight August 26, the German light cruisers
Augsburg
and
Magdeburg
and three destroyers were moving through dense fog along the Russian Estonian coast in the upper Baltic. Unable to see the other ships,
Magdeburg
became separated and went aground 400 yards off the northwestern tip of Odensholm, a small, sandy island with a lighthouse and a signal station, at the entrance to the Gulf of Finland.
Magdeburg
’s captain tried desperately to free his ship, running the engines forward and backward at full speed, throwing overboard anchors, anchor chains, coal, ammunition, minelaying rails, bulkhead doors, and most of the vessel’s fresh drinking water.
Magdeburg
refused to move. At 8:30 a.m., the fog lifted and the German destroyer
V-26
arrived. Her effort to tow
Magdeburg
into deeper water failed. Soon,
Magdeburg
’s radio room was reporting signals from approaching Russian ships. Captain Richard Habenicht, realizing that his situation was hopeless, decided that his duty was to blow up his ship. Explosive charges were placed, and
V-26
came alongside to take off the crew. Suddenly, there came a shout: “The fuses are lit.” This was premature; the crew was not ready and now the vessel would blow up in four and a half minutes.

Besides wishing to save his crew, Habenicht was urgently concerned that the cruiser’s secret documents not fall into Russian hands. On board were four copies of the principal German navy codebook, the SKM, one on the bridge, one in the chart house, one in the radio room, and one hidden in a locker in the captain’s cabin. The radio officer had already taken one of the copies to the engine room and burned it. In the confusion following the cry that the fuses had been lit, he directed his men to carry the codebooks from the bridge and the radio room to the
V-26.
At this moment, the ship’s First Officer, unable to find the captain, ordered “Abandon Ship!” Hearing this, the signalman carrying the bridge copy of the codebook threw it over the side and then jumped overboard himself. When the explosive charge detonated, pieces of the ship splashed down on the men in the water. The radioman carrying the codebook from the radio room disappeared, along with the codebook he was carrying.
V-26
picked up some of the men, struggling to swim, but for fear of being destroyed by a second explosion, the destroyer backed away and left the stricken ship. Soon afterward, the Russian light cruisers
Palladia
and
Bogatyr
appeared and sent a boarding party to
Magdeburg,
which, being aground, could not sink. Searching the wreck, a Russian naval lieutenant broke open the locker in Habenicht’s cabin. Inside, he found the fourth copy of the SKM, forgotten in the excitement. Later, Russian divers inspecting the seabed around the stranded vessel found two more codebooks; the bridge copy that had been thrown overboard and the other lost by the vanished radioman.

The Russians now were in possession of one of the deepest secrets of the German navy. Recognizing its value, they notified their ally and set aside for the British the undamaged SKM, the one found in Habenicht’s locker, which bore the serial number 151. They kept the waterlogged codebooks for themselves. As Churchill told the story later, “[When] the German light cruiser
Magdeburg
was wrecked in the Baltic, the body of a drowned German under-officer was picked up by the Russians a few hours later, and clasped in his bosom by arms rigid with death, were the cypher and signal books of the German Navy. . . . On September 6, the Russian Naval Attaché came to see me. He had received a message from Petrograd that . . . the Russians felt that, as the leading naval Power, the British Admiralty ought to have these books and charts. If we would send a vessel . . . the Russian officers in charge of the books would bring them to England. We lost no time in sending a ship and, late on an October afternoon, Prince Louis and I received from the hands of our loyal allies these sea-stained, priceless documents.”