Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War (69 page)

Hipper was initially unenthusiastic about undertaking the bombardment of British towns, which he considered both strategically irrelevant and at odds with the gentlemanly code of his profession. He wrote in his diary on 29 November that if Germany was to risk her precious big ships, she should do so against the Royal Navy. Shore bombardment represented a footling gesture, not a serious operation of war. He was also apprehensive about the peril posed by British minefields. ‘To founder without battle and honour would be a sorry end of my career,’ he reflected, with a self-pity worthy of Beatty.

At 8.05 on the misty morning of 16 December, at the Yorkshire seaside resort of Scarborough, coastguard officer Arthur Dean looked out to sea and saw two battlecruisers. Six hundred yards from the town’s castle they began firing steadily towards the shore as they steamed across South Bay, before reversing course and repeating the exercise. Elderly widows, with whom the town was well-endowed, were reading their letters over genteel breakfast tables in the Grand Hotel when it received a series of direct hits, devastating the interior. The gable end of the town hall was wrecked, along with shopfronts and boarding-house bedrooms on St Nicholas Cliff, and a row of cottages in Stalby Road. A magistrate named John Hall was dressing when a shell obliterated his bedroom and himself. Twenty miles away at Whitby, similar murderous scenes were played out by two other German cruisers: one shell demolished the west bay of the ancient abbey, another reduced to rubble the little houses of Esk Terrace. At nearby Hartlepool, during thirty minutes of firing German warships wrecked Lloyds bank
and caused a gasworks to explode. Then Hipper’s ships turned away for home.

Meanwhile at Dogger Bank, at intervals through the night and into the day, the rival fleets’ destroyers glimpsed each other and exchanged fire as best they could in the heavy seas. As at Heligoland Bight, German gunnery proved superior: British destroyers were hit several times, while Ingenohl’s ships remained unscathed. Beatty and Warrender strove to divine the significance of enemy movements, until a vital signal came, reporting that Scarborough was under bombardment. It was now up to the admirals at sea to select appropriate interception courses. Warrender signalled Jellicoe, copied to the battlecruisers: ‘Scarborough being shelled; I am proceeding towards Hull.’ Beatty, ever the dashing cavalier, messaged back: ‘Are you? I am going to Scarborough.’ But even as the British big ships ploughed westwards, late in the morning visibility deteriorated dramatically. British and German vessels of all shapes and sizes were reduced to groping and firing intermittently in thick mist, befuddled about their adversaries’ movements.

And where, meanwhile, were Ingenohl and the might of the High Seas Fleet? At 5.45 that morning, hearing that his destroyers had clashed with the British, the German admiral convinced himself that the entire Grand Fleet must be at hand. Surprise was gone. Ingenohl was at sea solely to support Hipper’s raid, and had no mandate from the Kaiser to fight a big battle. He promptly turned for home, oblivious that he thus missed Beatty and Warrender and threw away the German navy’s finest strategic opportunity of the war.

Through the late morning and early afternoon, rival light forces played tip and run in the fog, spasmodically glimpsing each other and exchanging fire, while the British big ships remained mystified about the whereabouts of Hipper. In his later report, Warrender expressed exasperation: ‘they came out of one rainstorm and disappeared into another’. Beatty made a sudden decision to turn east, hoping to better his chances of cutting off Hipper from home. This was a misjudgement. Had he maintained his westerly track, within the hour he would have met the German battlecruisers, though it is far from assured that he would have welcomed the outcome of such an encounter. Beatty might have prevailed, but – given the subsequent fate of his squadron at Jutland, where it lost two ships and suffered heavy damage to two more – he might also have suffered a disaster. As it was, on 16 December he missed Hipper, who scuttled back to Wilhelmshaven unscathed. Both fleets reached their home ports without
absolute loss of a ship, though two British destroyers were dockyard cases. To the chagrin of the Royal Navy, the last chance of a great sea battle in 1914 was gone.

Midshipman Charles Daniel of HMS
Orion
noted that morning that if the fleet let the Germans get away, its reputation would ‘probably be as mud in the eyes of the British public’. Five days later, when the worst had indeed happened, the young man added ruefully: ‘The missing of those German cruisers will not be forgotten by us, and the disappointment becomes worse when one thinks what a splendid show it would have been to have sunk [them].’ The British had not identified Hipper’s exact target, but they knew he was coming, and made no attempt to head him off from the coast, sacrificing the lives of 107 men, women and children in Scarborough, Whitby and Hartlepool, while more than five hundred other civilians were wounded. The Royal Navy thereafter failed to intercept an enemy whose intentions Room 40 had disclosed, even after making contact with some of his squadrons. It was an inglorious day, if characteristic of war at sea in the pre-radar era.

The gravest weakness of the Royal Navy, brilliantly analysed by Andrew Gordon, was its officers’ rigidity of thought and subservience to higher authority: captains waited upon the orders of their admiral, and if these were lacking or confused – as Beatty’s often were – subordinates never dared to think or act for themselves. On twentieth-century warships, the atmosphere of oppressive masculinity suggested a floating boarding school, and in the Royal Navy even prefects – ships’ captains – were fearful of adopting any course of action without their headmaster’s consent. On two occasions during the Scarborough raid, chances were missed because captains waited in vain for a lead from their superiors; on one occasion, when a destroyer flotilla leader swung into a wild turn away because the ship’s rudder had been jammed by a German shell, his entire command followed suit.

But what had the Germans supposed they were doing, in bombarding the coastal towns? Here was an exercise in terrorism with no military purpose, designed to demoralise the British people by demonstrating their vulnerability to German ‘frightfulness’. Instead, however, it served to fuel popular hatred of the enemy and strengthen the nation’s will to fight. If on 4 August British people had felt no great animus towards the Kaiser’s subjects, by the year’s end German deeds and allied propaganda had stirred real passion in many breasts. Twenty-two-year-old James Colvill, an officer on
Lancaster
, wrote after Hipper’s ships had done their worst on 18
December: ‘May we have a chance of paying them back in their own coin to the last pfennig, but not by slaughtering non-combatants, when we get into Germany. I would like to see a dozen German towns – beginning with Essen & finishing with Berlin – burned to the ground & utterly sacked, in one word – “Louvained”.’

The Royal Navy suffered criticism for the Scarborough raid, which would have been much fiercer had the public known that Britain’s coastline was wittingly exposed. Naval officers urged that even if Scapa Flow remained the only plausible anchorage for the Grand Fleet, the battlecruisers, at least, should be moved further south, where they could intervene quickly against another German sortie. Beatty’s ships were eventually redeployed in the Firth of Forth.

But it was widely recognised that the conduct of the High Seas Fleet, its futile ravaging of seaside resorts, represented weakness, not strength. It was because Ingenohl and Hipper dared not go head to head with the Grand Fleet that they were reduced instead to bombarding boarding-houses. In part also, the Scarborough raid reflected the fact that the war was growing nastier. Many people on both sides were shedding inhibitions and chivalrous anxieties with which they had taken up arms five months earlier. Naval officer Walter Freiherr von Keyserlinck, commanding SMS
Lothringen
, wrote to his uncle on 29 December, demanding an unrestricted U-boat campaign against British commerce: ‘Unless war is made something real for the Englishman in his own country, this robber and murderer will not recognise what it means for other people. Since the times of [Dutch admiral] de Ruyter [in the seventeenth century] nobody has exploded a single bomb on [England’s] doorstep.’

Even before the Scarborough raid, most naval officers on both sides acknowledged that they might have a long wait before the rival fleets met. Staff officer Ernst Weizsäcker decided that Germany should have concentrated her naval building programme on cruisers and small craft, rather than vastly expensive dreadnoughts Reinhold Knobloch agreed: ‘Our inactivity causes us to question the usefulness of surface warships. Many [German sailors now] believe that only submarines, aircraft and mines count.’ Walther Zaeschmar, a gunnery officer on
Helgoland
, wrote in his diary in October: ‘Apparently there is no war being waged at all.’ A month later, he had become even gloomier: ‘In the North Sea nothing happens any more. Only the U-boats are operating on a permanent war footing.’ The High Seas Fleet adopted a routine which became gloomily familiar: ships served two days on forward picket duty in the outer Jade Roads; then
four more closer inshore; followed by eight in harbour. Every officer afloat lamented the crushing monotony of such a rotation, but it would characterise the experience of the German fleet for four years, with only the briefest interludes of action.

‘From the point of view of the ordinary naval officer,’ wrote Filson Young across the North Sea, ‘the real trouble about the war, the thing that robbed it of joy and excitement, was the continued absence of the enemy. Hardly anyone in the Fleet had seen a German since war had been declared, and only a few a German ship … The enemy began to grow unreal, chimerical … Once he appeared as four tiny wedges of smoke, like hurrying hedgehogs visible on the far horizon of a cold grey sea – wedges of which there were presently visible only three. This meant that a great ship, with the population of a large village, after being seared and poured into a shambles, had quenched itself, a white-hot hell of agony, in the pale winter sea.’

Roger Keyes wrote to his wife in October: ‘I would give anything to be a soldier until the fleet comes out.’ His view strengthened the following month: ‘I am very sick of inaction! I think next time I come into the world I shall be a soldier – it was stupid of me not to have thought of it before making up one’s mind to go into the Navy. History is plain enough on the subject. Soldiers fight almost every day of a war. Sailors about once a year at the most if they are lucky. The worst of it is one has to make up one’s mind for the Navy so young, one probably doesn’t know enough about history, and those six volumes of James’ naval history … which I lived on about that time were misleading, they are crowded with fights big and small but spread over 30 or 40 years.’

By the war’s end the Royal Navy had grown to a strength of 437,000 officers and men, while 32,287 of its sailors had perished. Such casualties were far from negligible, but represented a much slighter proportion of loss than combatants of the army and the RAF – as the RFC became – experienced. This helps to explain the zeal for the fray that persisted in British naval bosoms long after it had vanished from those of most soldiers: if the sailors’ war was not without risks and hardships, it could not be compared with the horrors of service on the Western Front. In the years that followed the Scarborough raid, at long intervals there were further North Sea surface clashes, most importantly at Jutland in May 1916. The Grand Fleet, which became Beatty’s command after Jellicoe’s transfer to the Admiralty in November 1917, was denied the epic triumph in battle for which the sailors yearned.

But whatever the Royal Navy’s limitations and failures, it made a critical contribution to allied victory in the First World War. At the end of 1914 Churchill noted with just satisfaction that since August, 809,000 men, 203,000 horses and 250,000 tons of stores had been transported to France without loss. Through the years that followed the navy preserved its battlefleet in being; secured free movement around the world for British commerce and British forces; defeated – albeit belatedly and after some shocking bungling which placed Britain at greater risk of starvation than ever in World War II – the 1917 U-boat campaign; and sustained a blockade of Germany that became formidably effective after April 1917.

Critics of the pre-war ‘naval race’ between Britain and Germany have often argued that British dreadnought-building helped to precipitate war, yet ultimately proved irrelevant to its outcome. Neither proposition seems true. There is no reason to suppose that any of the continental powers would have behaved differently in 1914 had the Royal Navy been only half its size. And while the Grand Fleet was unable to make a direct contribution towards victory, in the absence of superiority at sea Britain would have been acutely vulnerable. Commander the Hon. Reginald Plunkett, one of Beatty’s battlecruiser officers, wrote in the service magazine
Naval Review
towards the end of 1914: ‘the British navy has achieved, practically without fighting, all that a Navy has ever been expected to perform’. Though there was vainglory in this statement, almost every German seaman agreed.

12

Three Armies in Poland

In the first months of the war, even as the Austrians suffered humiliation in Serbia, far worse things befell them in Galicia, the region that straddled south-western Poland and the north-eastern province of Austria-Hungary. There, Conrad Hötzendorf presided over a disaster that rent the threadbare fabric of the Hapsburg Empire. To be sure, Russian commanders competed with his incompetence; but by the year’s end, Conrad had shown himself the campaign’s supreme bungler, having contrived the deaths of 150,000 of Franz Joseph’s subjects for no advantage whatsoever.

Both before and after hostilities began, the Austrian chief of staff failed to coordinate plans with Moltke: recriminations between the two nations were the order of the day. In Vienna in the second week of August, Count Berchtold, begetter of the war, wailed to Alexander Pallavicini – father of the officer of the same name who served in Serbia: ‘everything is the Germans’ fault’. Pallavicini observed that few of his fellow countrymen could for long suppress their lingering bitterness about defeat at Prussian hands in 1866: ‘Despite our great danger, and especially in the highest circles, the old hostility persists, and in Berlin they know that very well.’