Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War (65 page)

But at least the Grand Fleet was free to plough the North Sea when it chose. Its enemies were not, and the men of the High Seas Fleet languished in their inglorious predicament. When crews returned to Wilhelmshaven to coal after brief sorties, they ventured ashore apprehensively: Germany expected them to fight, and they were not fighting. ‘Boredom feeds depression,’ wrote Seaman Richard Stumpf. ‘Everywhere people express disgruntlement at our inactivity.’ In the forward turret of Stumpf’s ship
Helgoland
, a map of the Western Front was marked daily with the latest German advances. It became a focus of attention for a rotating crowd of gloomy sailors, who contrasted the army’s triumphs with their own inertia. They complained that the ship’s officers intensified kit inspections merely to
alleviate the mind-numbing tedium of awakening each morning to an unchanging view of Schillig Roads.

The British economic blockade of Germany was in the early war years largely ineffectual, because of divisions of responsibility and uncertainty of purpose in Whitehall: the Foreign Office was preoccupied with avoiding a diplomatic showdown with neutrals, above all the United States. The Board of Trade strove to sustain British commerce. Not only did a steady flow of vital commodities reach Germany via Scandinavia and Rotterdam, but so too did large quantities of British exports, including Welsh coal and Cadbury’s chocolate. Extraordinary as it may seem, the City of London continued to finance and insure many cargoes destined for Germany, and some of these were carried in British ships. The navy was denied authorisation to take the critical step towards implementing a blockade, laying minefields across the North Sea. There were chronic doubts and disputes about the legality of a tight blockade, which the United States – among others – saw as breaching both the 1856 Declaration of Paris and the 1909 Declaration of London. The Germans missed an important diplomatic trick by failing to mobilise neutral opinion against British blockading operations, while themselves incurring intense odium when they later launched unrestricted U-boat warfare. The British failure until 1917 to create a convincing blockade of Germany was an extraordinary manifestation of the government’s failure to grip the imperatives of total war.

During August, Jellicoe’s light forces busied themselves patrolling the North Sea, sinking enemy fishing vessels and warning British and neutral ships of the outbreak of war. In those days before radio receivers became universal, many vessels remained oblivious of Europe’s turmoil until they entered a port. On 9 August, a German cruiser captured a Belgian schooner whose crew had no notion they had become enemies. An ignorantly friendly German trawler’s crew cheered lustily as the British cruiser
Southampton
closed in to seize her. One of
Southampton
’s officers, Lt. Stephen King-Hall, observed wryly that his own wardroom’s noticeboard still bore a five-week-old postcard from officers of the battleship
Schleswig-Holstein
who had visited them during Kiel regatta. ‘We all hope to see you again,’ the Kaiser’s men had written.

Southampton
was party to several minor skirmishes around Britain’s coasts: one occurred early on Monday, 10 August, just north of Kinnaird Head, when jangling alarm bells summoned sailors from their hammocks to action stations. They stumbled sleepily onto the upper decks in the dawn, to find their sister ship
Birmingham
firing her guns at a target
invisible to them in the haze. Suddenly the conning tower of a German submarine broke the surface of the sea, water cascading off its plates, midway between the two warships.
Birmingham
swung her helm and rammed. Moments later, only a black pool of oil marked the grave of U15, first of its tribe sunk by the Royal Navy. There were similar excitements across the North Sea: on 21 August off Borkum, lookouts on SMS
Rostock
sighted a British submarine and narrowly evaded two of its torpedoes. One of the cruiser’s officers, Lt. Reinhold Knobloch, noted: ‘This … was a salutary lesson for us. We saw that the enemy was indeed something real.’

Despite such brief scurries, a sense of anti-climax suffused British and German mess decks alike. Few sailors were rich in imagination, and most responded with shameless immaturity to the catastrophe of European war. Lt. Rudolph Firle, commanding a German torpedo-boat flotilla, wrote as early as 6 August: ‘It becomes deeply boring. One imagined the war as if there was a “Hurrah” immediately after the declaration, followed by an attack and outcome … Enemy not here to be seen, so it’s hard to maintain morale.’ Reinhold Knobloch felt the same: ‘Morale slides because we thought the war would be something different … Nothing is going on … A tremendous carelessness and boredom prevails on board. The men of the army are envied.’

Filson Young wrote: ‘The naval mind was in the position of a swimmer who has trained and practised for a contest, brought himself to the pink of condition, and stands, stripped and ready, on the edge of the diving-board waiting for the word to go – and is expected to continue holding himself in that attitude of expectation for three or four years. Nothing more trying to the spirit could possibly be devised.’ For years the British government had lavished a quarter of its entire tax revenue on the country’s beloved navy. Politicians as well as the public now expected a return on their money. While the army was too small to exercise much immediate influence on the land war, surely the Royal Navy could strike out, humbling the Kaiser’s pretensions in Britain’s natural element?

Churchill was eager to land an army on the German coast. As First Lord of the Admiralty, since his appointment in 1911 he had treated the Royal Navy with proprietorial enthusiasm. He sought to indulge a personal enthusiasm by christening one of the Grand Fleet’s new battleships
Oliver Cromwell
, a proposal not unreasonably vetoed by King George V. Now, Churchill’s dearest wish was to see ‘his’ fleet fight. He behaved more like its commander-in-chief than a mere political overseer, and intervened constantly in operational matters, to the fury of the admirals. He was also
accused of surrounding himself with indifferent officers whose only merit was a willingness to do his bidding. But voices of reason were successful in opposing the First Lord’s amphibious fantasies, fortunately for those who would have had to sacrifice their lives to realise them.

If there was to be no landing on German shores, how then could the navy make its strength felt? The British were confronted with the difficulty of fighting a great land power. The High Seas Fleet commanded by Admiral Friedrich von Ingenohl had no intention of challenging the British in the North Sea, unless or until it could do so on favourable terms. Its big ships put to sea only on rare occasions, when there seemed a chance of catching a detachment of the Grand Fleet unsupported by its main strength.

Thus the first weeks of war passed at sea in bathos and disappointment; in place of a great action, there was only a series of incidents – colourful enough, to be sure, but bereft of grandeur. Every naval officer yearned to fight his war like a gentleman. Reinhold Knobloch felt embarrassed when his ship was employed to destroy some British trawlers, after their crews had been taken off: ‘It does not make us feel good to sink unarmed steamers.’ Captain Karl von Müller of the light cruiser
Emden
, raiding British commerce in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, was one of the few German naval officers who inspired the admiration of his foes. Lt. William Parry noted: ‘She [the
Emden
] is undoubtedly doing jolly well, and moreover is behaving in a gentlemanly way.’

To romantics, Britain’s First Lord foremost among them, it all seemed deeply disappointing. Here was the Grand Fleet, gowned and bejewelled like some noble heiress for a naval ball in the midst of the North Sea, and no guests would come. The sailors should have anticipated such a situation, but for years before the outbreak of war, both sides’ admiralties were vague about what would follow mobilisation and implementation of defensive measures. ‘The Navy are very bad at war,’ wrote Churchill impatiently in 1912. ‘Their one idea is to fight bull-headed.’ This was not entirely fair, given the amount of energy senior sailors devoted to planning blockades, but it was true that fleet action was their chief preoccupation. Meawhile on the other side, intelligent German officers understood that the Kaiser’s naval enthusiasm had sufficed to expend many millions of marks to create a substantial navy – but not one strong enough to meet Jellicoe’s squadrons with a realistic prospect of victory.

At Coblenz on 18 August Falkenhayn demanded of Tirpitz why the High Seas Fleet had not struck out at the allies. The grand-admiral
answered: because such a course would be suicidal – comparable to marching a single army corps against St Petersburg. Falkenhayn said contemptuously, ‘in that case the fleet is useless. It would be better to bring its sailors ashore.’ Tirpitz pressed his argument: the duty of the High Seas Fleet was to protect Germany’s interests afloat, and these would scarcely be advanced by hurling it headlong against the superior might of the allies. The admiral later confided to his staff that he feared the navy would become a scapegoat for the nation’s disappointments in the war, and he was not far wrong. The incoherence of the pre-war vision of Germany’s most famous sailor was laid bare. Tirpitz, far from being the architect of his nation’s naval greatness, proved merely to have persuaded his master, the Kaiser, to waste prodigious resources on an enormous armed yacht squadron.

Jellicoe, meanwhile, recognised that his most important duty was to preserve Britain’s superiority at sea, by eschewing recklessness and even boldness. ‘It was quite clear that the Commander-in-Chief’s principal concern was to protect his Fleet from danger,’ wrote one of Beatty’s officers of the battlecruiser squadron. ‘His strategy was not a little puzzling to that part of the Fleet which was operating in the North Sea itself, and hoped for nothing better than to come to immediate grips with the enemy.’ During Fleet exercises, when ‘enemy’ destroyers launched torpedo attacks Jellicoe invariably turned away, causing a battlecruiser officer to assert caustically, ‘If he does that when the Germans attack he can’t be defeated, but he can’t win.’

Yet though the Royal Navy fumbled some early skirmishes at sea, it nonetheless played a significant role in denying victory to Germany in 1914. The BEF was convoyed to France without losing a man to enemy action, an operation masterminded by Sir Edmund Slade. Despite minor German interference with trade routes, and some sinkings of merchantmen, allied commerce continued almost unimpeded, a priceless advantage over the Central Powers. The German and Austrian press denounced the allied blockade as the warmaking of cowardice: ‘They Want to Starve us Out!’ read one headline. Whatever its shortcomings in implementation, the Royal Navy’s interdiction of enemy shipping movements caused the Central Powers substantial difficulties from an early stage of the war. That autumn, all the warring armies found themselves short of baggage and draught animals, vital to mobility, because hundreds of thousands of horses and mules had foundered or been killed. The British and French were able to purchase replacements in the United States, Argentina, Australia, and ship them to Europe. The Germans, however, could not do
this. They were obliged to depend on conscripting ever more beasts from the continental territories under their control, where agriculture was already crippled by loss of draught animals. Transport shortages hampered the German army’s operations. Lack of imported fertilisers impacted severely upon German food production. These were humdrum issues, viewed against popular expectations of a Nelsonian clash. But naval lieutenant Hermann Graf von Schweinitz was right when he wrote in his diary, shaking his head at Britain’s mighty array of warships: ‘They control the oceans on all sides … That makes all our victories on land irrelevant.’

The longer allied planners contemplated their position, the more appealing it seemed to avoid any grand gamble, to focus instead on maintaining the status quo, in a fashion which coincided with German thinking. Admiral Hugo von Pohl, later naval C-in-C, declared: ‘nothing could turn out better for the English, and nothing could so damage our [reputation], as that our fleet should be the loser in a serious engagement’. Hipper, commanding Germany’s battlecruisers, wrote on 6 August: ‘If we were to risk battle now … we would not only gain no success but our High Seas Fleet would disappear in a trice – the best possible outcome for England.’ For both sides deterrence and defence, preservation of assets in being, became the dominant theme of the next four years, at the expense of offensive action.

Yet elements of the Grand Fleet were always at sea, exercising or patrolling in all weathers. Sailings, often at night, were intensely romantic events for those stationed on upper decks, one of whom wrote: ‘The dark shapes round you melted into the surrounding void, the loom of the land faded into the universal blackness, and there set in that blowing which was the wind of destiny, which would not cease until you touched the shores of death or of home again. Before you and on either hand was absolute blackness; behind you one shadow of grosser blackness, which was the ship astern; and from blackness into blackness, nose to tail, thirty thousand tons apiece, we were rushing at twenty miles an hour. And that was … routine.’

Routine did not suffice, however, for the Royal Navy’s eager spirits: senior officers began to think furiously about how they might carry the struggle to the enemy. Two Young Turks – submarine commodore Roger Keyes and Harwich destroyer commodore Reginald Tyrwhitt, conceived the idea of surprising the German light forces which by day and night swept Heligoland Bight, the High Seas Fleet’s home waters. They proposed luring some of Ingenohl’s destroyers within range of the guns and
torpedoes of a superior force of British warships and submarines, at a low tide when German dreadnoughts could not get out of harbour across the Jade bar. The Admiralty initially rejected this notion out of hand. Keyes was an officer of modest intelligence but immense dash and energy. He had made his name as the hero of many adventures in China’s 1900 Boxer Rising, for instance once conning a railway train through a throng of enemies, holding a revolver against the engineer’s head. Now, figuratively speaking, he used an equally bold gambit – appealing over the heads of the admirals, direct to the First Lord. Churchill immediately embraced Keyes’s plan, and ordered its execution.