Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War (67 page)

In sailors’ eyes, each giant had its own defined character:
Queen Mary
and
New Zealand
were deemed crack ships;
Princess Royal
was the jolliest socially;
Lion
seemed a trifle gloomy, perhaps because of the weighty presence of the admiral and his staff. Now, all these embodiments of British naval prestige were steaming hard towards the Kaiser’s front door. Beatty’s decision to intervene was brave and probably inevitable, given that he had been sent with orders to provide support for Tyrwhitt, but nonetheless highly dangerous. In Nelson’s time, it was an extraordinary occurrence for a line-of-battle ship to fall victim to any save a vessel of comparable size. In 1914, by contrast, while dreadnoughts remained impregnable to smaller ships’ guns, they were highly vulnerable to mines and torpedoes, the latter enabling small warships to wield immense destructive power, in a fashion that seemed monstrously unfair to the schoolboy minds of some sailors.

Geoffrey Harper wrote: ‘I always had a feeling against submarines and nothing would induce me to go in for them because I always thought they were not exactly the Navy, and now I have become quite certain … It is rotten and underhand and like stabbing a man in the back … I am not the only one who is against submarine warfare, I come across people
everywhere whose general opinion is: It’s not fair, I don’t like it. Of course our submarines are as much to blame as the enemy’s. Anyone, of any nationality, who serves in a submarine is not playing the game.’ Such nonsenses aside, at midday on 28 August Beatty’s squadron was taking a considerable chance by advancing towards the unknown perils of the Bight, for the honour of the Royal Navy more than for any more substantial prize.

Ahead of the battlecruisers, the action was drifting westwards: the 4,350-ton
Mainz
joined the fray, firing hard at British destroyers, of which eleven launched torpedoes at the light cruiser without effect. Tyrwhitt’s ships felt the heat of
Mainz
’s superbly accurate fire: its first salvo hit
Laurel
, detonating shells in her ready racks, blowing away the after funnel and severely wounding the captain;
Liberty
’s mast disappeared overboard, her bridge was hit and her captain killed;
Laertes
received a full salvo which temporarily stopped her dead in the water. Disaster again threatened the British, until
Mainz
astonished them by turning away at full speed. German lookouts had spotted three of Commodore Goodenough’s cruisers closing fast. Their ship, however, retired too late: within seconds, British 6-inch shells were hitting
Mainz
hard. Tyrwhitt’s destroyers launched another flurry of torpedoes, at the cost of themselves taking a succession of gunfire hits from the doughty German. Almost all the torpedoes missed, but just one struck
Mainz
, inflicting grievous damage upon her propulsion system. Slowing in the water, she became an easy mark for the British cruisers, which now steamed past in succession, pounding her from end to end.

‘Every salvo they fired brought a perfect tornado of hits,’ said
Mainz
’s first lieutenant later. ‘I counted every salvo by the flash: one, two, three, four, five, then the shells would reach us, scattering death and destruction. Every broadside that struck us shook the whole ship.’ On
Southampton
, Stephen King-Hall wrote:

A most extraordinary feeling of exultation filled the mind. One longed for more yellow flashes; one wanted to hurt her, to torture her; and one said to oneself, ‘Ha! There’s another! Give her hell!’, as if by speaking one could make the guns hit her. Though she was being hit, she was not being hit enough, as at the range of 10,000 yards in that mist it was nearly impossible to see the splashes of the shells and thus control the fire. Also she still had the legs of us. To our dismay, the mist came down, and for five minutes we drove on without sight of her.

Down below, in complete ignorance of what had been happening, the stokers forced the boilers until our turbines could take no more, and the safety valves lifting, the steam roared up the exhaust pipes at the side of the funnels with a deafening roar. Suddenly – everything happens suddenly in a naval action with ships moving at 30 miles an hour – we came on top of the
Mainz
only 7,000 yards away, and the range decreasing every moment. Something had happened to her whilst she was in the mist, for she was lying nearly stopped … We closed down on her, hitting with every salvo. At irregular intervals one of her after guns fired a solitary shot, which passed miles overhead. In ten minutes she was silenced and lay a smoking, battered wreck, her foremost anchor flush with the water. Ant-like figures could be seen jumping into the water as we approached. The sun dispersed the mist, and we steamed slowly to within 300 yards of her, flying as we did so the signal ‘DO YOU SURRENDER?’, in international code. As we stopped, the mainmast slowly leant forward and, like a great tree, quite gradually lay down along the deck.

By 12.50 it was obvious
Mainz
was finished, and Roger Keyes ordered
Lurcher
alongside. He wrote: ‘She had settled considerably by the bows, the after part was crowded with men, many terribly wounded; the battery was a ghastly shambles, amidships she was a smouldering furnace, two of her funnels had collapsed and the wreckage appeared to be red-hot; the heat scorched one’s face as far off as the bridge of the
Lurcher
, everything was dyed saffron with the fumes of our lyddite shells.’ The destroyer took off 220 survivors. One man, a young German officer who had been directing the removal of the wounded, refused to go. Keyes addressed him personally, saying that he had ‘done splendidly, we must clear out, he must come at once, there was nothing more he could do’. The lean, twinkling-eyed British commodore held out his hand. The German stiffened, saluted, and said, ‘Thank you, no.’ There was a happy postscript to this charmingly soppy episode: a few moments later, when the cruiser rolled over and sank – her starboard propeller narrowly missing
Lurcher
, going full speed astern – the young man accepted rescue from the water.

Eight German light cruisers were now closing on the scene, once more threatening the British with superior firepower. Fortunately for the forces of Tyrwhitt, Goodenough and Keyes, their enemies’ movements were uncoordinated. Each German ship in turn attempted sporadic lunges, then dashed away when threatened by heavier metal. Around 12.30 p.m. the battered
Arethusa
once more became a target for German cruiser fire.
Tyrwhitt, on her bridge, said afterwards: ‘I really was beginning to feel a bit blue.’ The British were momentarily alarmed to see the shape of a big ship looming out of the haze to westward. Then, to their boundless relief and noisily-expressed delight,
Lion
and the rest of the battlecruisers were identified. Thousands of men aboard the British light cruisers and destroyers watched exultantly as Beatty led his column of 30,000-ton monsters at full speed past them, each throwing up a fine bow wave, black funnel-smoke streaming behind, wakes boiling.

Now it became the battlecruisers’ engagement. Beatty’s crews were keyed to the highest pitch. ‘As we approached,’ wrote Chatfield, at his post with the admiral on
Lion
’s bridge, ‘everyone was at action stations, the guns loaded, the range-finders manned, the control alert, the signalmen’s binoculars and telescopes scanning the misty horizon … One could scarcely see two miles. Suddenly the report of guns was heard … [and] on our port bow, we saw … the flash … through the mist. Were they friendly or hostile? No shell could be seen falling. Beatty stood by the compass, his glasses scanning the scene. At length we made out the hulk of a cruiser [
Mainz
] … Her funnel had fallen and her foremast had been shot away, a fire raged on her upper deck … “Leave her to them,” said Beatty. “Don’t fire!”’

The admiral sought instead to engage the undamaged German light cruisers, and a few moments later his ships’ vast turrets traversed, the guns elevated, and amid successive thundering detonations they began to hurl charges across the Bight. Of the enemy ships in sight,
Strassburg
made a successful escape, but
Köln
with her tiny 4-inch guns made pathetic efforts to return fire as 12- and 13.5-inch shells landed with devastating effect. A minute or two of such devastation reduced her upperworks to flame and tangled steel. A few moments later
Ariadne
suffered the same fate, and still Beatty’s column raced on. But the admiral knew time was running out: the moment the tide permitted, German battleships would be out. After forty minutes in the Bight, with the enemy coastline close at hand, at 1.10 p.m. he made a signal to all British forces: ‘Retire.’ As they swung westwards,
Lion
fired two more salvos to finish off
Köln
, which promptly disappeared stern-first beneath the waves. It was two days before the Germans chanced on a lone survivor from the cruiser; in the interval, a junior admiral and more than five hundred men had perished.

At 2.25 p.m., with the British an hour gone, Ingenohl’s big ships at last arrived on the scene, made a cautious sweep, then returned to port, as did the Grand Fleet, which had cruised two hundred miles north of the
engagement. Aboard
Lion
, a throng of ecstatic sailors clustered beneath the bridge to cheer their adored admiral.
Arethusa
was towed home at six knots. On 30 August the battlecruisers and light cruisers reached Scapa Flow, to be received with a welcoming roar from men lining the decks and upperworks of every ship of the Grand Fleet.

Three German light cruisers and a destroyer had been sunk, three more cruisers damaged. On the British side,
Arethusa
and three destroyers were badly damaged, but all had returned afloat. Only thirty-five men had been killed, an amazingly small ‘butcher’s bill’ alongside the Germans’ 712. Churchill, euphoric, boarded Tyrwhitt’s flagship at Sheerness to distribute laurels; he later called Heligoland Bight ‘a brilliant episode’. The public were thrilled, and Beatty became hero of the hour. The admiral was ‘disgusted’ to receive no message of appreciation from the Admiralty, but wrote to Ethel about the Germans with the condescension of a man of his time: ‘Poor devils, they fought their ships like men and went down with colours flying like seamen against overwhelming odds … Whatever their faults, they are gallant.’

The action was immensely serviceable to the British government in the midst of the retreat from Mons, a time of acute national tension about events in France. At the Admiralty Norman Macleod wrote: ‘This little battle has had a very cheering effect as showing morale of navy & unlikelihood of invasion.’ Asquith expressed delight that ‘Winston’s little scheme … has come off very well … some set-off to our sad losses on land.’ In the mood of self-congratulation that followed, few of the questions were asked that should have been: about the shambolic British planning and lack of a clear command chain; failures of communication and indifferent gunnery. Not only were shells poorly aimed, but many which achieved hits failed to explode, or to inflict significant damage: fuses were unreliable and often caused premature detonation. British submarines deployed in the Bight achieved nothing. Had not Jellicoe, on his own initiative, dispatched Beatty to support the raid, Tyrwhitt’s and Keyes’s force could have been badly mauled by the enemy’s light cruisers. A moment’s bad luck might have cost a battlecruiser. The Commander-in-Chief believed that the risks of this daring gamble exceeded the rewards.

Yet there were larger, psychological forces in play which were, and remain, underrated by critics of the Heligoland Bight action. Its impact on the High Seas Fleet went far beyond the trifling material losses. German sailors recognised that they had suffered a humiliation. British ships had steamed and skirmished with impunity within a few miles of the coast of
the Fatherland. Hundreds of thousands of civilians ashore had heard the gunfire, and trembled. Admiral Tirpitz raged, not least because his son Wolfgang was a lieutenant in the lost
Mainz
. He spoke in extravagant terms to Albert Hopman: ‘We disgraced ourselves. I knew that I had to sacrifice my son. But this is dreadful. We came under fire, and in consequence saw the end of our fleet.’ Tirpitz refused to be comforted by Hopman’s reminder that the British had recovered German survivors: his son might be among them. He persuaded himself the young officer must be dead. Yet next day, the British sent word that they indeed held young Tirpitz as a prisoner.

The Heligoland operation emphasised the Royal Navy’s moral dominance over its enemies, which would persist until 1918. The Kaiser was confirmed in his respect for British seapower, and ordered that thence-forward the High Seas Fleet must operate with the utmost circumspection; its big ships could take the offensive only with his personal consent. This was an important British strategic achievement, which went far to justify the operation. On 9 September, the Grand Fleet attempted another coat-trailing operation off Heligoland – and the Germans absolutely declined to respond. Frustrating as was this passivity to sailors eager for battle, it emphasised British naval mastery.

Yet the Heligoland fight also displayed the unfitness of the Admiralty to direct a modern war at sea. A
Quarterly
reviewer in 1860 described the institution as ‘intellectually becalmed in the smoke of Trafalgar’, and in considerable measure this remained true half a century later. It was dominated by old men of small imagination. Though the First Sea Lord, Prince Louis of Battenberg, enjoyed respect and was unjustly traduced in the press because of his German background, he was unequal to his role. Scornful critics nicknamed him ‘Quite Concur’ because of the frequency with which he scribbled these acquiescent words on correspondence. The naval war staff was more of a research department than a machine for planning and directing operations. Its structure assumed that admirals at sea would make the decisions once the fleet sailed. But it soon became clear that, in the new era of wireless, the temptation for the Admiralty to intervene was irresistible, while both the institution and its personnel were ill-equipped to do so. ‘Brains were at a discount both in the Navy and the Admiralty,’ wrote Beatty’s staff officer Filson Young. He shared his chief’s contempt for the Sea Lords and their staffs: ‘The spirit informing the whole was a narrow and lifeless spirit, expressing itself everywhere in the policy that the means were more important than the end.’