Castles of Steel (74 page)

The First Lord of the Admiralty recognized the Christmas Day raid in practical terms as a failure to blunt the new German airship weapon. Zeppelins were no longer to be feared by ships at sea, but Churchill, now responsible for the air defense of the British Isles, remained apprehensive about the damage airships might do when attacking cities. A New Year’s Day 1915 memorandum prepared for the Cabinet declared that Churchill had “information from a trustworthy source . . . that the Germans intend to make an attack on London by airships on a great scale at any early opportunity. . . . There are approximately twenty German airships which can reach London now from the Rhine, each carrying a ton of high explosives. They could traverse the English part of the journey, coming and going, in the dark hours. The weather hazards are considerable, but there is no known means of preventing the airships coming, and not much chance of punishing them on return. The un-avenged destruction of non-combatant life may therefore be very considerable.”

Fisher shared Churchill’s alarm. Twenty zeppelins, each carrying a ton of bombs, would be coming, Fisher asserted in a letter to Churchill on January 4, 1915. One ton “would completely wreck the Admiralty building”; twenty tons would cause a “terrible massacre.” Fisher had proposed to deter such an attack by warning the Germans in advance that any captured zeppelin personnel would be shot. “As this step has not been taken, I must with great reluctance ask to be relieved of my present official position as First Sea Lord. I have allowed a whole week to elapse much against my judgement before taking this step to avoid embarrassing the government. I cannot delay any longer.” Churchill’s response to this threat was typical of the way he dealt with the old admiral:

My dear Fisher:

The question of aerial defense is not one upon which you have any professional experience. The question of killing prisoners in reprisal for an aerial attack is not one for the Admiralty and certainly not for you to decide. The Cabinet alone can settle such a matter. I will bring your views to their notice at our meeting tomorrow. After much reflection, I cannot support it.

I hope I am not to take the last part of your letter seriously. I have always made up my mind never to dissuade anyone serving in the department over which I preside from resigning if they wish to do so. Business becomes impossible on any other terms.

But I sympathise with your feelings of exasperation at our powerlessness to resist certain forms of attack; and I presume I may take your letter simply as an expression of those feelings.

Yours very sincerely,

Winston S. Churchill

Fisher withdrew his resignation.

Soon afterward, on January 19, the zeppelin bombardment of England began. Two German naval airships dropped twenty bombs on Great Yarmouth and on several villages along the Norfolk coast. Four civilians were killed and sixteen wounded; the zeppelins departed untouched. In time, zeppelin night raids over London became a thrilling, popular spectacle as searchlights illuminated the silver, cigar-shaped behemoths gliding majestically overhead. During the war, fifty-seven airship raids were launched against England, the most destructive coming on September 8, 1915, when twenty-two Londoners were killed and eighty-seven injured. By August 1918, when the last zeppelin raids on England took place, the airships were larger, their speed had risen to 80 miles an hour, their lifting capacity had increased to 50 tons, and their ceiling was 18,000 feet. Over four years, airship and airplane attacks killed 1,413 people in Britain and wounded 3,408. For the first two years of the war, the zeppelins were immune to harm in the sky. Then on September 3, 1916, a German airship,
SL-11,
was “clawed down in flames”—as Churchill had predicted would happen—by a British fighter plane using incendiary bullets. The young pilot, Lieutenant William Leefe Robinson, was immediately awarded the Victoria Cross.

CHAPTER 21
The Battle of the Dogger Bank: “Kingdom Come or Ten Days’ Leave”

The New Year began and Franz Hipper was restless. This most offensive-minded of the German admirals disliked keeping his men and ships on alert at a high pitch of readiness while at the same time restricting them to port. This self-contradictory policy was sapping morale. Besides, the German defeat in the Bight, his own frustrated aproach to Yarmouth, and his close escape after Scarborough rankled him. One explanation for his lack of success, Hipper believed, was that the British had known in advance about his plans. How they knew, he was uncertain, but he suspected that some of the neutral fishing vessels working on the fringes of the Bight and on the Dogger Bank were actually British spy ships. The Dogger Bank, with its shallow bottom, was a rich fishing ground and thus a natural concourse for commercial trawlers, British and Dutch; it also lay on the shortest route between Heligoland and the coast of England. A message from a trawler on the Dogger Bank, Hipper postulated, would enable Beatty’s battle cruiser force to intercept—if not on the way over, at least on the way back. Repeatedly, Hipper insisted that ruthless action must be taken against these fishing boats, no matter what their nationality. Already, on his instructions, German destroyers had stopped and boarded these small vessels in or near the Bight. When, as was often the case, the papers of neutral trawlers were not in perfect order, they were brought into Cuxhaven and subjected to rigorous examination. To address this worry, Hipper proposed an operation in which his force would clear the Dogger Bank of British fishing vessels and suspicious neutral craft and would also attack any light British warships patrolling the Bank. The active operation would involve only the German battle cruisers and their escorting light cruisers and destroyers, but their withdrawal would be covered by the High Seas Fleet.

Hipper’s proposal, because it was limited in scope, managed to elude the kaiser’s ban on High Seas Fleet activity. On January 10, William, resisting pressure for more energetic action, had reaffirmed his decree that the preservation of the fleet was his paramount consideration. “No offensive is to be carried as far as the enemy coast with the object of fighting a decisive action there,” said Pohl, on behalf of the emperor. The freedom of the battle fleet, therefore, remained as restricted as before. But William again granted Ingenohl permission to make cautious sallies with the battle cruisers for the purpose of cutting off separate British formations. After the war, Admiral Reinhard Scheer explained the fleet’s dilemma: “There was never any reluctance on the part of the German navy to fight. The general aim of our fleet was not to seek decisive battle with the entire English fleet but to test its strength against separate divisions. But the policy of those who controlled it was the perfectly sound one that a fleet action should not be risked until, by mine-laying or submarines, an equalization of the opposing forces in the North Sea had been brought about. But, as action of some kind was necessary for the morale of the men, the prohibition was relaxed as far as the Scouting Forces were concerned.”

Meanwhile, the High Seas Fleet was growing stronger. In the five months since the beginning of the war, four new dreadnought battleships had been added—
König, Grosser Kurfürst, Markgraf,
and
Kronprinz Wilhelm
—and one new battle cruiser—
Derfflinger.
The new battleships were 25,000-ton vessels with ten 12-inch guns and better armor protection than any contemporary British battleship; they were incorporated into the 3rd Battle Squadron commanded by Scheer, the most competent of German battle squadron commanders. In mid-January, Scheer asked Ingenohl’s permission to take his new ships through the Kiel Canal into the Baltic for gunnery practice, but, because of violent storms sweeping over the North Sea, Ingenohl told him to wait. For the same reason, Hipper’s battle cruiser operation on the Dogger Bank was postponed. On January 21, Ingenohl gave Scheer permission to proceed through the Kiel Canal, but on reaching the Elbe, the battleship squadron found itself in a snowstorm so thick that the captains were unable to locate the river’s mouth and were forced to anchor. The following morning, January 22, the weather began to clear and Scheer’s dreadnoughts entered the canal, heading away from the North Sea. In Wilhelmshaven later that day, Hipper and Vice Admiral Richard Eckermann, Chief of Staff of the High Seas Fleet, saw a forecast for clear skies and immediately suggested to Ingenohl: “If the weather tomorrow remains as it was this afternoon and evening, a cruiser and destroyer advance to the Dogger Bank would, in my opinion, be very desirable. Special preparations are unnecessary; an order issued tomorrow morning to . . . [Hipper] would be sufficient. Proceeding during the night, arriving in the forenoon, returning in the evening.”

Ingenohl hesitated. With Scheer’s new dreadnoughts in the Baltic, the dreadnought battleship force of the High Seas Fleet was understrength. Hipper’s Scouting Groups were also depleted. During the bad weather, Ingenohl had sent the battle cruiser
Von der Tann
into dry dock for a routine twelve-day overhaul; when Hipper and Eckermann urged that the Dogger Bank operation immediately be launched, it was too late for
Von der Tann
to be refloated. Several light cruisers were also unavailable, and a number of destroyers, damaged by the winter storms, were under repair. Nevertheless, because the operation was to have a limited scope, the Commander-in-Chief gave his consent. At 10:25 the following morning, January 23, he sent a coded wireless signal to Hipper: “Scouting Forces are to reconnoiter Dogger Bank. Leave tonight at twilight; return tomorrow evening at darkness.” During the day, Hipper was summoned on board
Friedrich der Grosse
to meet and discuss the operation with Ingenohl. Hipper asked that the High Seas Fleet come out to support him, but the Commander-in-Chief, with the kaiser’s latest command fresh in his mind, refused. Because the main fleet would not be out, Hipper promised that if there was the slightest chance of his being cut off from the Bight by a stronger British force, he would turn quickly and run for home. Returning to
Seydlitz,
Hipper summoned his captains and explained the plan: they were to set out in darkness that evening, reconnoiter the Dogger Bank at daybreak, destroy any enemy light forces discovered there, and be back the following evening. On the way out, no fishing boats would be stopped because Hipper did not want to slow the advance or detach any destroyers for this purpose. On the homeward run, however, all fishing trawlers encountered would be stopped and rigorously examined.

At 5:45 p.m. on January 23, Hipper sailed from the Jade with the battle cruisers
Seydlitz, Moltke,
and
Derfflinger,
the large armored cruiser
Blücher,
the light cruisers
Rostock, Stralsund, Kolberg,
and
Graudenz,
and two destroyer flotillas comprising nineteen ships. The mood in the Scouting Groups was confident. Even without
Von der Tann,
Hipper commanded a powerful force, although the inclusion of the armored cruiser
Blücher
diminished rather than enhanced its effective strength.
Blücher
had been designed and built in a period of technological change so rapid that she was obsolete even before she was commissioned. She had been laid down at a time (1907) when Fisher’s revolutionary battle cruiser project was not fully known and understood in Germany. As a result, Tirpitz went ahead and built her at 15,500 tons, with twelve 8.2-inch guns—almost a battle cruiser, but not quite.
Blücher
would have been successful in dealing with British armored cruisers, but she could not stand up to—or keep up with—real battle cruisers. Speed was essential in Hipper’s Scouting Groups; his battle cruisers, light cruisers, and destroyers could all make between 25 and 30 knots.
Blücher
’s maximum design speed was 24 knots. Ultimately, her presence was to frustrate Hipper’s plan to make a lightning thrust and a high-speed withdrawal. And it would doom
Blücher.

The greatest threat to Hipper’s success was the fact that, before his ships left harbor, the British knew he was coming. For days, Room 40 had been decoding German messages. The Admiralty knew about the dry-docking of
Von der Tann.
It was aware of the dispatch of Scheer’s dreadnoughts to the Baltic. It had read Ingenohl’s coded wireless message, ordering the Dogger Bank raid, listing the squadrons involved, and giving the time the operation would be launched. The result was that as Hipper’s ships departed the Jade, British warships were weighing anchor and heading for the Dogger Bank.

On Saturday, January 23, the Admiralty’s day began quietly. Fisher was in bed with a heavy cold in his apartment at Archway House, adjoining the Admiralty Building. Because the First Sea Lord was too ill to move, Churchill went over to see him and the two men talked for two hours. It was noon when the First Lord returned to his room in the Admiralty. He had just sat down when the door opened and Sir Arthur Wilson walked in. “He looked at me intently and there was a glow in his eye,” Churchill recalled. “Behind him came Oliver with charts and compasses.

“ ‘First Lord, those fellows are coming out again.’

“ ‘When?’

“ ‘Tonight. We have just got time to get Beatty there.’ ”

Wilson explained what he had learned from the intercepted German message. The German battle cruisers were putting to sea that evening, he said, and, although the German signal stated only that there would be a reconnaissance in force as far as the Dogger Bank, another raid on the English coast was possible. Wilson and Oliver immediately began to calculate a rendezvous point for the British squadrons to be deployed. The two admirals drew a line on the chart, which afterward proved to be almost the exact line of the German advance. The charts and the clock showed that there was just enough time for Beatty, coming from the Forth, and Tyrwhitt, coming from Harwich, to join forces at daylight near the Dogger Bank and intercept Hipper, this time
before
he could strike. The British rendezvous was set for 7:00 the following morning, January 24, at a position 180 miles west of Heligoland and thirty miles north of the Dogger Bank.