The Great War at Sea: 1914-1918 Read online

  The Great War at Sea: 1914-1918

  Richard Hough

  The history of the First World War is dominated by the monumental battles of Northern France

  But the Great War was fought at sea as well as on land.

  And it witnessed the greatest naval battle of all time.

  In ‘The Great War At Sea: 1914-1918’, the historian Richard Hough tells the story of those naval battles and how they shaped the eventual outcome of the war.

  It is a history as much of men as of ships; men like Sir John Jellicoe, ‘Jacky’ Fisher, and Winston Churchill, who together succeeded in jolting the Royal Navy out of its nineteenth-century complacency.

  The narrative follows the race to war, including the construction of the Dreadnought, the biggest, fastest, most heavily gunned battleship in the world; and against the backdrop of feuds, scheming, and personality clashes at the Admiralty, examines the triumphs and tragedies of the great battles and campaigns.

  Could the appalling losses have been avoided during the Dardanelles?

  Was there ‘something wrong with our bloody ships’ as David Beatty said at Jutland?

  Why was the Battle of Jutland inconclusive?

  ‘A truly excellent history, technical enough for the specialist, handy and well-found for laymen, and since the Silent Service could normally be relied on for its quota of personality clashes and blazing rows, human interest is well-served. So too is drama.’

  – Christopher Wordsworth, The Observer

  ‘An admirable book which everyone interested in the history of the war should read’

  - The Glasgow Herald

  Richard Alexander Hough was a British author and historian specializing in maritime history.

  Endeavour Press is the UK’s leading independent digital publisher.

  Richard Hough

  THE GREAT WAR AT SEA

  1914-1918

  To the memory of Arthur Marder

  PREFACE

  Following the publication of his third volume of ‘Jacky’ Fisher’s letters in 1959, Professor Arthur Marder suggested that I should write a biography of his hero, and gave me much assistance and advice when I agreed to do so. Then, sometime before his untimely death on Christmas Day 1980, he and the Oxford University Press approached me with the suggestion that I should embark on a one-volume history of the Royal Navy 1914-18. In this proposed new work I was to have additionally the bonus of access to all Marder’s papers and, of special value, the papers he had accumulated since the publication of the five volumes of From the Dreadnought to Scapa Flow. On his death this material was all in characteristic Marder order in preparation for further revised and expanded editions of his own work.

  Arthur Marder and I had been friends and mutual critical admirers since the late 1950s. I was never so professionally stimulated as when with him, either in England or southern California. In Marder’s company, ‘shop’ ruled everything, and I can recall with some embarrassment a private dinner at the Garrick Club during which, at opposite ends of the table, we found ourselves overwhelming all other conversation and rearranging the cutlery in a prolonged Jutland debate. We did not agree on all matters, nor all judgements, but that only added a spice to our relationship.

  In the last months of his life he asked me to read and comment upon the manuscript of his last great work, Old Friends, New Enemies; and in his last letter to me written a few days before he died he wrote warmly about my biography of our mutual friend, Lord Mountbatten. I was able to talk to Marder, all too briefly, about my preparatory work for this book. I most earnestly hope that he would have approved of it in this final form. I know that he would have been gratified that I had the continuous and invaluable advice of Lieutenant-Commander Peter Kemp, who proved himself Marder’s own ‘ready and constant counsellor’ for so many years, and to whom I, too, owe a great deal over twenty-five years of writing naval history.

  RICHARD HOUGH

  ‘AN ENORMOUS SHIP’

  The influence of the German Emperor – Britain’s new alliances – Admiral Fisher appointed First Sea Lord – The need for naval reforms – The conception of the Dreadnought, and her critics

  An onlooker described the launch of HMS Dreadnought as ‘the greatest sight I have ever seen – it made me proud of my country and of the Navy’. ‘She went in without a hitch,’ a naval cadet wrote home, ‘She is an enormous ship.’(1)

  The battleship was launched by Edward VII at Portsmouth on a chill, dour day in February 1906. The King sang ‘For those in peril on the sea’ as ardently as anyone present. He was afterwards presented with an oak casket, carved from Nelson’s flagship, HMS Victory. It contained the mallet and chisel used in simulation to sever Dreadnought’s last cable securing her to the slip.

  The first Dreadnought had been built in 1573 and fought against the Spanish Armada, the sixth distinguished herself at Trafalgar. This was the ninth ship in the Royal Navy to carry the name, and her historical associations were as numerous as her innovations. Almost every feature of this battleship was notable and novel. As those who had been chiefly responsible for her proudly proclaimed, the Dreadnought was to be the biggest, fastest, and most heavily gunned battleship in the world. She was also to be heavily armoured and protected from fatal damage by elaborate compartmentation. For the first time in a battleship, the Dreadnought was to be driven by efficient and clean turbines in place of reciprocating engines.

  This battleship, floating high out of the waters of Portsmouth harbour, flags taut in the breeze, and, to the sound of music and cheers, being nursed towards her fitting-out basin by paddle tugs, was to lend her name to every subsequent capital ship built for the world’s navies. Even the Germans, the future enemy who built almost as many as the British, called them Dreadnoughtschiffe. It was a breed of fighting ship that in its size and grace and provocative appearance celebrated appropriately the last generation of the big-gun man o’war. The Dreadnought, built at unprecedented speed and at once making every other battleship of the world outdated, became a political and material factor in the naval arms race already under way between Britain and Germany. ‘Germany has been paralysed by the Dreadnought’, Admiral Sir John Fisher, First Sea Lord, wrote gloatingly and with every word underlined, to King Edward VII. Germany was dismayed, even outraged, but not paralysed for long. Ten years later Germany could put to sea a fleet of twenty-one dreadnought battleships and battle-cruisers in the greatest naval battle in the war: a war which the dreadnought and the competition she intensified, had in large measure brought about.

  Fifteen years earlier Germany had possessed a negligible navy of small coast-defence vessels, and though the Germans were powerful on land, the sea was not an element that had previously inspired their interest or ambition. For Britain the Pax Britannica had been sustained since Trafalgar and the Napoleonic wars by a Navy which incontestably ‘ruled the waves’, boasting a numerical strength greater than that of any likely combination of navies afloat. The strength and quality of the Royal Navy were as unquestioned by the mass of the people as those of God and Queen Victoria. Everyone gave ‘…three cheers and one cheer more, for the hardy Captain of the Pinafore,’ and ‘the ruler of the Queen’s Navee’ would still have been an object of veneration even if Gilbert and Sullivan had not kept the nation humming. The Diamond Jubilee review of the fleet in 1897 was described by the The Times as ‘this unexampled scene… Nothing could be more impressive than the long lines of ships anchored in perfect order, spreading over miles of water in apparently endless array.’

  The Navy’s influence and presence were world-wide. From the rivers of China to the Navy’s coaling station in the Falkland Islands, from Newfoundland to Simon’s Town in South Africa,
and from Malta to Wellington, New Zealand, the white ensign flew and gunboats or second-class protected cruisers, battleships, or torpedo boats, were available for any occasion, ceremonial or unruly.

  Sir Walter Raleigh at the time of an earlier great queen had written that ‘There are two ways in which England may be afflicted. The one by invasion… the other by impeachment of our Trades.’ Few English people read Raleigh in the 1890s, and even fewer bothered to define or comprehend the meaning of the maritime supremacy the nation enjoyed. This task became the responsibility of an obscure American naval captain, Alfred Thayer Mahan, who wrote several works of history on the influence of sea power.(2) These were read with wonder and admiration in Britain, and alerted many people to the importance of retaining the superiority they had taken for granted for almost a century. If her Trades were impeached, Britain’s industry would be silenced, her people starved.

  Mahan’s work was timely. In those final decades of the nineteenth century the colonial appetite of other nations was growing apace, and with it an interest in trade and the sea upon which it depended. Mahan was read in Washington and Berlin, Tokyo and Paris, and a consciousness of the value of naval strength spread through the defence councils of nations which would benefit from it, as well as many others concerned with prestige and power over their neighbours.

  Soon after the completion of the Dreadnought, others of her kind even larger, more expensive, and more powerful were ordered by three South American republics, by Spain, Italy, Greece, and Turkey, as well as by the major powers. In Japan, newly built shipyards constructed some of the finest men o’war of their time. The United States Navy, so insignificant that it had been openly challenged by Chile in 1891, expanded rapidly and began ordering battleships.

  Before the end of the nineteenth century the growth of navies all over the world was already shaping the direction of twentieth-century history. Nowhere was the course more sharply and uncompromisingly delineated than in Germany; nowhere were the lessons of Captain Mahan studied more zealously.

  The rise of the German Navy from the early 1890s to 1914 was a remarkable achievement. A navy demands a multitude of special skills both in the construction of ships and the training of the men to serve in them. The Germans lacked experience equally in the manufacture of armour-plate and heavy naval ordnance as in gunnery, signalling, and manoeuvring a large number of ships at sea. Nor did they possess any naval traditions or history. They were starting from the first riveter working on the first strake and the first gunlayer behind the sights of an 8.2-inch naval gun in a choppy sea. But the Germans learned fast and – like the new United States and Japanese navies – largely from the British Navy.

  The inspiration for the German Kriegsmarine came from the Emperor himself, Kaiser Wilhelm II. He was a ruler whose withered left arm was matched by a flawed mind, who laboured under grievances all his life, the most dominant in the early years of his reign being envy for the navy of his grandmother, Queen Victoria. It caused the Kaiser real suffering not to be supreme. He boasted the greatest army in the world as well as the grandest personal uniforms and decorations. When he saw his nephew enjoying Cowes Week, and winning races there, the Kaiser set about building the finest ocean cutter in the world and applying himself with earnest seriousness to the art of racing. After expressing his complaints about the handicapping, his will to win prevailed until the future Edward VII could bear it no longer: ‘The regatta at Cowes was once a pleasant holiday for me,’ he remarked sadly, ‘but now that the Kaiser has taken command there it is nothing but a nuisance.’ And he never went again.

  Kaiser Wilhelm did not care to be seen in an inferior Royal Yacht to his grandmother’s so he ordered a bigger and grander one. Wherever the Kaiser sailed in his glittering Hohenzollern he saw evidence of the dominant power of Britain at sea. He resented deeply the Royal Navy’s size, strength, and apparent efficiency. He resented the respect for and acquiescence to the Royal Navy by the rest of the world, and Britain’s pride in the service which he saw as no more than arrogance.

  The Kaiser’s partner who shared and encouraged his ambition was Alfred von Tirpitz, who was ten years older (born 19 March 1849) and had originally served in the old and unesteemed Prussian Navy. Tirpitz showed no special distinction as a sailor in this minor service, but revealed himself as a brilliant and ambitious administrator and political manipulator. He strongly attracted the attention of the Emperor, and became Secretary of State for the Imperial Navy in June 1897, a date which marks the birth of the mighty High Seas Fleet.

  Tirpitz needed all his Machiavellian qualities, and all the Kaiser’s powerful support, to persuade the Reichstag to pass the first of his German Navy Laws in 1898 against the liberal-pacifist element on one side and the Prussian Army clement which was equally hostile. This law provided for the considerable expansion of the service, and was followed by a second in 1900 of a much more ambitious nature. It called for a fleet including 38 battleships, 20 armoured cruisers and 38 light cruisers – a fleet which he justified in these momentous and threatening words:

  In order to protect German trade and commerce under existing conditions only one thing will suffice, namely, Germany must possess a battle fleet of such a strength that even for the most powerful naval adversary a war would involve such risks as to make that Power’s own supremacy doubtful. For this purpose it is not absolutely necessary that the German fleet should be as strong as that of the greatest naval Power, for, as a rule, a great naval Power will not be in a position to concentrate all its forces against us.

  These words were heard with dismay in Britain. Germany’s colonial expansion in Africa and the East – the Weltpolitik – and hostile events such as the despatch of the provocative anti-British ‘Kruger Telegram’ of 1896, and the Anglophobic chorus conducted by German statesmen and the Press during the Boer War, all combined to cause alarm and a massive reappraisal of the naval position of Britain and her Empire at the end of the old century.

  The death of Queen Victoria on 22 January 1901 caused conflicting shocks of grief and disbelief that the old lady was not after all immortal. Her eldest, once recalcitrant and much abused son succeeded at a moment in the nation’s history of anxiety and the need for far-reaching decisions. France, Russia, and Germany were all hostile. No one approved of Britain’s war against the Boer farmers, and suspicion and disapproval of her imperial power and stance were widespread. Now her Navy was being directly threatened by the most powerful military nation in the world.

  As one writer was to put it, ‘Without the supremacy of the British Navy the best security for the world’s peace and advancement would be gone. Nothing would be so likely as the passing of sea-power from our hands to bring about another of those long ages of conflict and returning barbarism which have thrown back civilization before and wasted nations.’(3) Between them, Kaiser Wilhelm II and the head of his navy had brought about an end to the Pax Britannica even before the first keel of the first of the new German battleships was laid down.

  For Britain, the end of the old century and the death of the old Queen marked also the end of isolation. The accession of that most gregarious of monarchs, Edward VII, could not have occurred at a more appropriate time for the nation. Britain was in need of friends.

  Within a few years, the Anglo-Japanese Treaty of Friendship (30 January 1902) and the Entente Cordiale (8 April 1904) with France, lovingly prepared by Edward VII, permitted Britain eventually to withdraw the greater part of her naval strength from the Far East and the Mediterranean, and concentrate her battle fleets in home waters. This was just what Tirpitz had declared Britain would not be able to do.

  Would these steps be sufficient to meet the growing threat from across the North Sea, which had already been renamed in German atlases ‘German Ocean’? Were the matériel and the fighting efficiency of the Royal Navy equal to the task?

  The Royal Navy at the outset of the twentieth century was like a rich, vain old man, swollen with self-confidence and living on the memory of
past glories. He cannot move quickly nor see very well. He is a gregarious clubman but has as little regard for modern times and trends as he has for those outside his circle.

  The best that can be said of the Royal Navy in 1904 is that it had known worse days quite recently. In the early 1880s the service could look back forty years without pride on a record of ultra-conservatism. As far as the sailors were concerned they were fed, treated, and paid as if Nelson were still their commander-in-chief. Hardships were made tolerable by companionship and the ever-liberal rum ration. The officers were indifferently educated, unimaginative, their style and conduct ruled by elaborate protocol, custom, and tradition. For them the Navy was as exclusive as a Guards regiment. In war they would doubtless have performed with all the valour of their ancestors. In peace, for decade after decade, the old brotherhood which had linked them in battle with the lower deck had withered.

  The Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty had long since established a principle that experiment and innovation must be avoided. Others could be inventive if they wished. Britain might follow in due course if she thought fit. This principle applied to all manner of advances, most conspicuously to the acceptance of steam propulsion and the end of masts and yards. When the battleship Inflexible was commissioned in 1881 she was the wonder ship of her day, with the biggest (16-inch) guns in the service and armour-plate of 24 inches, a thickness never exceeded. She could steam at almost 15 knots. But she was a sort of nineteenth-century hybrid, linking the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. While she enjoyed the unique advantage of electric light she was also fully rigged, and as much time and skill were devoted to hoisting sail and taking in a reef as if she had been Sir John Jervis’s flagship at St Vincent. Traditionalism in the Royal Navy had been strengthened after the introduction of pioneering breech-loading guns in 1860 and their hasty abandonment after several accidents. Twenty years were to pass, when the breech-loader was long since established in foreign navies, before the Admiralty would countenance their return.