The Dandarnelles Disaster (13 page)

Curiously, the not inconsiderable factor of the German capital ship's superior armour was never mentioned, whether at the inquiry or at Troubridge's ensuing court martial: even if his cruisers had been able to get
within their own firing range before being knocked out, the shells from their contemporary type of 9.2-inch guns might well have have bounced off
Goeben
's main armour, made from Krupp's finest steel plates. But Troubridge could have deployed his light cruisers and fast destroyers in simultaneous torpedo attacks from several directions at once, while his heavy cruisers, suitably positioned, would have added to a plethora of targets which the Germans could not possibly have disabled, or even engaged, simultaneously. Even in 1939 capital ships proved incapable of coping with more than two targets at once. When Commodore Harwood's three cruisers took on the German pocket battleship
Admiral Graf Spee
in the south Atlantic that year, she could engage only two of them at a time, enabling the weaker British ships to ‘wing' her and drive her into Montevideo (she scuttled on emerging from harbour rather than face the enemy again). All this is to miss the point: Troubridge's real offence was to put discretion before valour, to let his head rule his heart, to adopt the gallant course at first and then change his mind: he failed to try. All he needed to do was to ‘wing' the
Goeben
so that the battlecruisers could come up and finish her off.

Accordingly the court of inquiry on 22 September, chaired by Admiral Sir Hedworth Meux, commander-in-chief at Portsmouth, supported by Admiral Sir George Callaghan, immediate past commander-in-chief of the Grand Fleet, concluded that Troubridge did indeed have a case to answer. The Admiralty therefore wrote to the rear-admiral saying he would be tried under the Naval Discipline Act, on a charge that he did ‘from negligence … forbear to pursue the chase of His Imperial German Majesty's ship
Goeben,
being an enemy then flying'. Had the word ‘cowardice' been substituted for ‘negligence' here, Troubridge would have faced the death penalty. The trial of an admiral for avoiding battle in wartime was an extreme rarity; even so, while it was not held in secret (except when national security was deemed to be involved), no journalist applied to attend. It began at Portland on 5 November 1914, aboard HMS
Bulwark
, the 15,000-tonne pre-dreadnought battleship which flew the flag of the commander-in-chief, Plymouth, Admiral Sir George Egerton. He presided, assisted by a vice-admiral, three rear-admirals, four captains and the deputy Judge Advocate of the Fleet. The prosecutor was Rear-Admiral Sydney Fremantle, who had the moral courage to resist the pressure from within a vengeful Admiralty to charge Troubridge with the hanging offence of cowardice. Mr Leslie Scott, KC, MP, a prominent advocate, was ‘the Accused's Friend', the technical term for the defender at a court martial, and managed to make a strong case for his client.

Unfortunately for Troubridge, his trial began just one week after Souchon had taken his command under the Ottoman flag into the Black Sea to shell the four Russian naval ports. The 5th of November was the day on which, in consequence, Britain and France formally declared war on Turkey, three days after Russia and Serbia; on 9 November, the final day of the court proceedings, the Sultan of Turkey declared a jihad, or holy war, against the Entente. The dreadful consequences of Souchon's preventable escape into the Dardanelles were at last appallingly clear for all to see three months after the event, and Troubridge now faced condemnation by hindsight.

Yet he was acquitted. The court accepted, however reluctantly, that in the absence of the battlecruisers Troubridge was entitled in the particular circumstances to regard the
Goeben
as a superior force which he had been ordered not to engage, and that he had been right to give priority to the watch on the Adriatic, as also ordered. The members of the Board of Admiralty were invited, in reverse order of seniority, to minute their comments on the verdict. Nearly all were hostile; the most penetrating came from the Third Sea Lord, Rear-Admiral Frederick Tudor: ‘That the … Cruiser Squadron stood a chance of being severely punished … can be accepted, but that they [
sic
] could have been destroyed, or nearly destroyed, before the
Goeben
had expended all her 11-inch ammunition appears to me to be out of the question.'

There was one tragic, if indirect, consequence of the
Goeben
affair half a world away. Rear-Admiral Sir Christopher Cradock, a man already possessing a record of exceptional courage, took on the formidable heavy and light cruisers of Admiral Graf Spee off the coast of Chile at the Battle of Coronel on 1 November 1914 with a scratch squadron, as we saw. Spee's heavy cruisers, the only modern ships of their type in the German Navy, were superior in speed, protection and number of guns to British armoured cruisers. Expressly determined to avoid the ignominy heaped on Troubridge's head by the
Goeben
affair (‘I will take care I do not suffer the fate of poor Troubridge', he wrote to a brother-officer shortly beforehand), Cradock could have avoided action without disgrace – an 1897 battleship that should have been with him had fallen 300 miles behind – but he deliberately took on an obviously much stronger force. Two British heavy cruisers (similar to Troubridge's) were sunk with the loss of all hands, including Cradock; one auxiliary cruiser and one light cruiser escaped. Cradock, in preserving his honour and avoiding Troubridge's fate, incurred something rather worse; unfortunately so did more than 1,600 men
of the Royal Navy, lost with him. At the Admiralty Cradock was criticised for not falling back on his sole battleship, HMS
Canopus
, which at least had four 12-inch guns (Spee reported after the battle that he would not have expected to overcome the British had she been on hand; as it was, his victory had cost him half his ammunition). It was the worst British naval defeat in more than a century, since the American victory at Lake Champlain in the War of 1812. Lord Fisher wrote to his most celebrated protégé, Admiral Beatty: ‘Steer mid-way between Troubridge and Cradock and all will be well. Cradock preferred …'

When war broke out in August 1914, the Committee of Imperial Defence, whose pre-war ruminations on what to do in the event of war with Turkey were considered in detail in Chapter One, became the War Council. It was now a war Cabinet in all but name (the term was not used before 1939) and had the same overall membership as the CID: the Prime Minister in the chair; the Secretaries of State for Foreign Affairs, War and India; the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the First Lord of the Admiralty, supported by the former premier, Arthur Balfour, and advised by the First Sea Lord and the Chief of the Imperial General Staff. A few other key officers such as the Director of Naval Intelligence attended when needed. As with the CID, the secretary was Maurice Hankey, whose personal note of the proceedings is the main source of what took place at the War Council's meetings.

The official reaction in London to events at the Dardanelles and beyond, apart from a short bombardment of the entrance forts by Carden's squadron on 3 November 1914, was remarkably lethargic. It is inconceivable that the humiliating escape of the German ships into Turkish waters and the potential implications thereof were not discussed, at least informally: Churchill and Kitchener met at the end of August, for example, to consider what action to take in the event of war with Turkey. They debated the idea of an attack on the Dardanelles by the Royal Navy in conjunction with a landing by the Greek Army on Gallipoli as a combined threat to Constantinople. The Prime Minister of neutral Greece, Eleutherios Venizelos, was well disposed towards the Entente; the King of Greece, Constantine I, however, related by marriage to the Kaiser's House of Hohenzollern, was not. This was an interesting variation on the generally accepted belief on the Allied side that an attack on the Dardanelles should take the form of a combined operation, on land as well as water, something to which Churchill at this time subscribed as unquestioningly as the admirals and generals did.

But the minutes of the War Council contain no mention of Turkey before 25 November 1914. At that time there was concern about defending Egypt and the Suez Canal against a possible Turkish attack from Syria. The First Lord, Churchill, argued that the best way of defending Egypt was to attack the Gallipoli peninsula: ‘This, if successful, would give us control of the Dardanelles, and we could dictate terms at Constantinople.' It was, however, a ‘very difficult operation requiring a large force', he said. Fisher, the First Sea Lord, suggested persuading the Greek Army to attack Gallipoli. Churchill said that at this juncture one battlecruiser and one light cruiser were stationed off the Dardanelles, with three British and three French submarines; France had been asked to send three battleships. Although the French had the leading naval role in the Mediterranean, they were content to leave the command in the Aegean Sea at its eastern end to a British admiral, while retaining responsibility for guarding the Adriatic against any Austrian naval initiatives.

Churchill recognised as clearly as anyone at the meeting that the ‘ideal method' of defending Egypt was a combined operation against the Dardanelles and the Gallipoli peninsula which overlooked the straits. Not for the first time, still less the last, Kitchener, as Secretary of State for War, said that there were no British or imperial troops available; they were all needed on the Western Front. This view was naturally supported by Sir John French, commanding the BEF, and the French Army, which wanted all the help it could get. There was also a shortage of shells, which were being expended at an alarming rate in France and Flanders. The admirals, most of the politicians on the War Council – the Chancellor, Lloyd George, to the fore, and not least Hankey, its secretary, who may well have thought of it first – were in favour of Churchill's idea, which amounted to outflanking the Central Powers: such a move could knock Turkey out of the war and persuade Italy and the Balkan neutrals to join the Entente. In the end, Kitchener's flat insistence that no troops could be spared for a major initiative in the Near East was decisive. In matters of grand strategy his word was law. There the matter rested as, after five months of war in Europe, 1914 drew to a close.

The Royal Navy managed to deliver a sensational piece of good news from the other end of the world in December. It came from the south Atlantic. Acting with unusual dispatch and determined to avenge Admiral Cradock, Fisher detached Vice-Admiral Sir Doveton Sturdee from his duties as Chief of Naval Staff and ordered him to take a squadron led by two
battlecruisers,
Invincible
(flag) and
Inflexible,
with three heavy and two light cruisers, to find and destroy Graf Spee's squadron. A third battlecruiser, HMS
Princess Royal
, armed with six of the latest 13.5-inch guns and supported by an armoured cruiser, provided distant cover by guarding the central Atlantic in case Spee tried to run home (as indeed he planned to do after one last stroke against Britain).

Sturdee arrived off the Falkland Islands, a British dependency in the south Atlantic, on 7 December 1914. HMS
Canopus
, which had avoided Coronel because her chief engineer, Commander William Denbow, RN, terrified of a battle, had faked engine trouble (he was certified by three doctors and sent home on a cargo ship even before battle was joined), was already there. Captain Heathcoat Grant, RN, had beached her so she could serve as a coastal battery, part of the defences arranged by Grant in case Spee came calling. Just before dawn on the 8th, lookouts sighted two German ships,
Gneisenau
(heavy cruiser) and
Nürnberg
(light), off Port Stanley; they had been detached to make the port unusable for the British and further to damage their morale. Spee never acknowledged repeated warnings from Berlin, relayed by the German transmitter at Valparaiso, Chile, that a British heavy squadron was after him. The message may never have reached him. His two detached ships soon sighted the unmistakable tripod masts of the battlecruisers in harbour and reported them to Spee. The British ships were busy coaling, to such effect that warning visual signals from
Canopus
were not seen amid the coal dust (she had no telephone connection with Sturdee). The old battleship however opened accurate fire on the Germans, who retired southward on their admiral.

This gave Sturdee a couple of hours to finish coaling and raise steam for full speed. Two heavy cruisers and the two battlecruisers, with the battered light cruiser
Glasgow
, survivor of Coronel, as scout, moved out in line ahead into remarkably calm south Atlantic waters to meet Spee as he headed northward, also in line ahead, consisting of
Scharnhorst
(heavy cruiser and flagship),
Gneisenau
and three light cruisers. The battlecruisers opened fire at nine miles, one more than the German heavy cruisers' biggest, 21-centimetre guns could manage. But the British shooting was abysmal; the Germans were far more accurate as Spee dispersed his light cruisers and turned to face the battlecruisers. But there was only one way the action could end, even though it was the first director-controlled (i.e. centrally synchronised) gunnery engagement in British naval history. The 12-inch guns began to strike home as the range closed, and after expending more than 1,100 12-inch shells the British saw Spee's graceful pair of heavy
cruisers sink (the shattered
Gneisenau
scuttled herself only when her last gun was immobilised) with the loss of some 2,200 men, including Spee and his two lieutenant-sons. Only one of his three light cruisers, the
Dresden
, got away from the scene (to be caught and sunk only in March 1915). Sir Christopher Cradock and his men were well and truly avenged. In Britain Churchill and the Admiralty were grimly satisfied even as they acknowledged the gallantry and proficiency of Graf Spee and his ships and crews. The press and the public were delighted: this, at last, was what they had longed for and expected from the Royal Navy.