Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War (68 page)

Fortunately for the allied cause, however, the Admiralty was not exclusively officered by slow seadogs. One department of the highest importance – intelligence – fell into the best possible hands. From November 1914 Room 40 was directed by Captain Reginald ‘Blinker’ Hall – the nickname derived from a habit of constantly blinking his eyes. Hall had been a rising star at sea, most recently commanding a battlecruiser, when poor health caused him to be relegated to a shore job. He had gained some experience of amateur intelligence work in1908 by borrowing a yacht from the Duke of Westminster in which he sailed down the German fleet anchorage at Kiel enumerating and photographing its ships while masquerading as a holidaymaker. Now, turned professional, this physically insignificant figure became a vital force, one of the intelligence wizards that Britain occasionally throws up.

An eyewitness described his ‘incisive way of talking’, adding that ‘it was his face and eyes that caught one’s attention. A majestic nose over a rather tight-lipped mouth and a firm, cleft chin made one feel instinctively that this was not a man with whom one could take liberties. He looked rather like a peregrine falcon, an impression reinforced by his penetrating eyes, darting around the assembled company.’ Another acquaintance described Hall as ‘half Machiavelli, half schoolboy’. The latter portion of his character was displayed by his response, in a story he liked to tell himself, when a judge gave a convicted German spy a light sentence, on the grounds that the man was only passing on factory locations to Germany. Hall, intensely irritated, allegedly caused German intelligence to be informed that the judge’s home was ‘an important factory site’.

Room 40’s task was critically assisted by the capture at sea of three German naval codebooks. On 11 August an Australian naval officer seized at pistol point the codebook of the German steamship
Hobart
, off Melbourne, though as a result of dilatoriness this prize did not reach London until the end of October. The Russians passed on another codebook, captured when the cruiser
Magdeburg
ran aground off the Estonian coast in the Baltic on 25 August; this got to the Admiralty on 13 October. Finally, on 30 November a British trawler off the Texel retrieved the codebook of a German destroyer sunk there on 17 October. By December 1914, with the aid of a group of brilliant German-speaking academics recruited for the purpose, Hall’s team thus held the secrets of all three principal enemy naval codes – known as VB, HVB and SKM. Later, it would crack others.

Those were days in which wireless still seemed a miracle to men born before its inception. Aboard Beatty’s flagship
Lion
at Scapa Flow, one night
in its radio room an officer donned headphones and listened entranced to Morse chatter across the airwaves: ‘We heard the Russian commander-in-chief in the Baltic; we heard Madrid; we heard the German Commander-in-Chief, from his fastness across the North Sea; and it amused me to turn the wavelength back and forward between the German and British commanders – the two voices that mean so infinitely much to us all – to contrast their tones, and to imagine what they were saying.’

Thanks to Room 40, the British high command soon knew many of the answers to the German end of that puzzle. A growing volume of messages intercepted by a chain of Admiralty radio receiving stations along the east coast were decrypted, translated and read within a few hours. The navy grudgingly forgave civilian translators for their ignorance of nautical parlance, which resulted in the Operations Department being passed a decrypt which asserted – for instance – ‘the [German] 2nd Battle Squadron will run out at 2 p.m. and return to harbour athwartwise at 4 p.m.’. Because the High Seas Fleet operated from Wilhelmshaven, where many orders were issued on paper or by telephone, ‘Blinker’ Hall could not be confident of anticipating every German motion. But, because of the technical excellence of their transmitters, Ingenohl’s ships communicated by wireless more than did the Royal Navy. Moreover, one of the first British actions as a belligerent had been to sever Germany’s submarine telegraph cable links with the rest of the world. This obliged Berlin to use wireless for much sensitive international traffic, while naval signals often gave the Grand Fleet several hours’ warning that the enemy was putting to sea.

In the months following Heligoland Bight, however, the fortunes of the struggle tilted to and fro, in a fashion that frequently embarrassed the Royal Navy. On 22 September U9 was able to sink three old British cruisers performing pointless ‘picket duty’ off the Dutch coast.
Hogue
,
Aboukir
and
Cressy
were idling along on a steady course, their captains oblivious of any submarine threat. When the first ship was hit, and then the second, incredibly each cruiser in succession stopped to rescue survivors; 1,400 men thus perished. Many sailors of the High Seas Fleet expressed envy of U9’s commander, who went home in triumph. Lt. Knobloch of
Rostock
wrote wistfully in his diary: ‘It must be a heartwarming feeling to re-enter harbour after such an achievement.’ More exalted officers felt the same way. Ernst Weizsäcker wrote proudly of U9’s success, in sharp contrast to the surface fleet’s inertia: ‘One feels happy to be a naval officer today.’

On 27 October, the new British dreadnought
Audacious
was lost to a mine off the north coast of Ireland. For months afterwards the Admiralty made itself ridiculous by declining to admit the sinking even in naval orders, though hundreds of American passengers aboard the passing liner
Olympic
had witnessed it, and German schoolchildren enjoyed a celebratory holiday. Meanwhile commerce raiders, most famously the
Emden
, achieved some embarrassing successes on the far side of the world, in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. There was a dismaying episode on the evening of 1 November, when Rear-Admiral Sir Christopher Cradock’s antiquated cruiser squadron was destroyed by Admiral von Spee at Coronel, off the coast of Chile.

‘Kit’ Cradock had once published a little book entitled
Whispers from the Fleet
, in which he warned that ‘the headstrong unthinking naval “dasher” is bound to come to grief’. Yet he himself chose to play precisely that role: he led his squadron beyond reach of support from the 12-inch guns of the pre-dreadnought battleship
Canopus
, which had been placed under his command.
Canopus
’s captain was informed by his engineering officer that technical problems made it necessary to reduce the ship’s speed to twelve knots. Thirty-six hours later, it was found that the man concerned had suffered a nervous breakdown – there was no real need for the reduction of speed, which had opened a three-hundred-mile gap between the battleship and the rest of the squadron:
Canopus
could have fought at Coronel.

But this revelation came too late to save Cradock. Though his old armoured cruisers
Good Hope
and
Monmouth
had been mobilised with reservist crews and his only efficient ship was the light cruiser
Glasgow
, he declined a chance to cut and run in the face of overwhelming odds. A loyal courtier, he had been knighted for ‘personal services’ to the King; like every officer in the navy, he had observed the obloquy heaped upon Admiral Ernest Troubridge in August, for rejecting a chance to fight
Goeben
and
Breslau
in the Mediterranean at the outbreak of war. Though his own force was relatively much weaker than that of Troubridge, Cradock engaged the enemy and was promptly dispatched along with 1,600 British sailors and their ships. Asquith wrote testily to Venetia Stanley: ‘I am afraid the poor man has gone to the bottom: otherwise he richly deserves to be court-martialled.’

Coronel, though strategically unimportant, was a blow to British prestige, and rattled an already nervous government. Jellicoe is often criticised as a plodder whose caution later denied the Royal Navy a big victory at
Jutland. Yet the commander-in-chief’s prudence, unexciting though it was, contrasted favourably with Cradock’s suicidal gesture, Beatty’s impulsiveness, and the tactical stupidity which caused
Hogue
and its sister cruisers to be sunk by U9. The problem persisted, however, that in London the government was becoming desperate for some conspicuous British successes. Asquith, with the accustomed flippancy which emphasised his unfitness as a director of war, wrote to Venetia Stanley on 4 November, after Coronel: ‘I told Winston … it is time he bagged something, & broke some crockery.’

In truth, of course, the First Lord was the last man who needed encouragement to take risks: he had just made one extraordinarily perilous decision. In October Prince Louis of Battenberg was hounded from office, and Churchill sought to remedy the lack of grip at the Admiralty by installing as his successor former First Sea Lord Admiral Lord Fisher. One of the wild, brilliant spirits whom Churchill loved – he described ‘Jacky’ Fisher as ‘a veritable volcano of knowledge and of inspiration’ – the begetter of the
Dreadnought
was now seventy-three. His admirers justly point out that during his second tenure as First Sea Lord he displayed better judgement and more consistency on operational matters than his intemperate correspondence suggests. But Churchill and Fisher soon fell out, and embarked on a struggle for dominance which contributed to neither the efficiency nor the happiness of the Admiralty.

Fortunately for British prestige, Cradock’s defeat at Coronel was erased on 8 December: two battlecruisers commanded by Sir Doveton Sturdee, detached from Beatty’s flotilla for the purpose, destroyed Spee’s ships when he rashly attempted a raid on the Falklands Islands, to secure coal, instead of obeying orders to make for home. Old
Canopus
played a belated part here: it was deliberately beached in Port Stanley harbour and its fire-control equipment was moved onto a hill above the town: this enabled the ageing battleship to fire the first shots of the action. The British were fortunate that Spee made no attempt to close the range and attack with torpedoes as Sturdee’s ships left Stanley, probably the Germans’ only chance of averting destruction.

Back in England, everybody was too pleased about the victory to take much heed of the prodigious quantity of ammunition the British were obliged to fire – 1,174 12-inch shells over a period of five hours – to sink much weaker opponents. Sturdee’s ships achieved only one hit per gun every seventy-five minutes, which augured ill for a fleet encounter in the North Sea. The German press dismissed Spee’s lost squadron as old vessels
of no strategic importance, which distressed the Kaiser’s sailors. ‘I think it is mean to depict those brave ships as inferior … and worthless, after they gave of their best,’ wrote aggrieved naval cadet Walter Stitzinger of SMS
Lothringen
. The lesson both sides brought home from Coronel and the Falklands was that to engage a much superior enemy constituted not courage, but reckless folly. Moreover, Jellicoe’s caution was intensified by accumulating evidence about the lethality of mines and submarines: ill-luck or a bad misjudgement could transform the fleets’ balance of strength alarmingly quickly. And soon, indeed, the Grand Fleet experienced – all unknowing – the most dangerous moment of its war.

The Germans hankered to assuage the bitterness of Heligoland Bight. Attempts by four destroyers to mine the Thames estuary resulted in all being sunk before they had even started laying a field. Another minelaying operation was planned, off Yarmouth, and Hipper gained the Kaiser’s consent to take his battlecruisers in support. On 3 November the German ships staged a brief, futile bombardment of the English east coast town’s beach. They fired without effect on some small craft, and escaped home without being engaged. The Admiralty was unable to believe that an assault on harmless little Yarmouth was the sole purpose of the sortie. The Sea Lords sent no ships to chase Hipper, because they thought his movement must be a feint, to distract their attention from some more serious threat. In any event, the raiders got home unscathed, save that an old cruiser,
Yorck
, hit a German mine while approaching Wilhelmshaven, and sank with the loss of 235 lives.

But the limp British response to Yarmouth encouraged Ingenohl to repeat the operation on a grander scale. On 14 December, Hall’s Room 40 warned the Admiralty that Hipper’s battlecruisers would come out the following day. The codebreakers had no inkling that, in truth, the entire High Seas Fleet intended to put to sea. In London, a decision was made to dispatch Beatty, reinforced by a squadron of battleships and attendant light cruisers and destroyers, to await the Germans at Dogger Bank, in the midst of the North Sea, and to cut off their escape home. The British did not know Hipper’s exact target, but they chose to allow the Germans to strike unimpeded, because this would give them a much better chance of trapping Hipper’s battlecruisers on the way home – when his objective had been revealed – than on the outbound passage, when he might be headed anywhere along three hundred miles of shoreline. The objective of sinking the enemy’s battlecruisers outweighed any consideration of deflecting the enemy from British hearths and homes.

Jellicoe, when informed, was once more deeply troubled by the prospect of seeing the Grand Fleet divided; he wished to bring out his entire force. This was vetoed by the Admiralty, anxious to nurse the big ships, whose engines were wearing out alarmingly quickly under the strain of frequent sea-keeping. The dreadnoughts of Beatty and Rear-Admiral Sir George Warrender sailed in appalling weather conditions, which caused some of the destroyer and light cruiser escorts to be sent home. The six British battleships and four battlecruisers – two of the latter squadron had not yet returned from the Falklands – would be lightly supported at Dogger Bank. Yet bearing down upon them was the entire High Seas Fleet, with its eighteen dreadnoughts, eight pre-dreadnoughts, nine cruisers and fifty-four destroyers. The scene was set for fulfilment of Jellicoe’s nightmare: an overwhelmingly powerful German force was approaching a detachment of the Grand Fleet which it had firepower enough to destroy, thus eliminating British superiority in capital ships.