The Great War at Sea: 1914-1918 Read online

  Admiral Sir Percy Scott, a figure almost as dynamic, controversial, and far-seeing as Fisher (but lacking his charm and wiliness), and a revolutionary figure in the field of naval gunnery, contributed an article to The Times a few weeks before war was declared arguing that the Fleet of the future would require only aircraft and submarines. ‘Submarines and aeroplanes have entirely revolutionized naval warfare; no feet can hide itself from the aeroplane’s eye, and the submarine can deliver a deadly attack even in broad daylight.’(14)

  The outraged chorus of protests at this suggestion included the voices of all those of conservative inclination and with vested interest in the continued paramountcy of the dreadnought, from shipbuilders and steel-plate manufacturers to most officers serving in the Fleet. Scott’s modest weight of supporters included the Liberal Press which saw in his argument a means of reducing the crippling cost of armaments.

  Nevertheless the threat of the submarine was taken seriously enough for an Admiralty Submarine Committee to be set up to consider proposals for weapons to counter the menace. It remained barren of ideas. ‘It is high time’, declared one admiral at a War College lecture in April 1914, ‘we put the fear of God into these young gentlemen who lie about the North Sea attacking all and sundry without let or hindrance.’ How this was to be accomplished remained for the present unanswered.

  The hard prejudice which hindered the development of the submarine did not apply to naval aviation. It is true that when offered the Wright brothers’ patent in 1907 Lord Tweedmouth on behalf of the Board had turned it down. But two years later when the Hon. C. S. Rolls of the infant Rolls-Royce motor car company offered the Government the use of his Wright aeroplane he used for recreation, it was gladly accepted. Before he resigned Fisher was showing interest on behalf of the Admiralty and had ordered the construction of an airship. As soon as Churchill was appointed, Fisher determined that the subject should not be allowed to drop. ‘Aviation supersedes small cruisers & Intelligence vessels. You told me you would push aviation…’(15)

  Churchill himself needed no pushing. From the first he was an enthusiastic supporter of early experiments and, in the teeth of Treasury opposition, put an Air Department to work. Soon he was able to write to Fisher. ‘Aviation is going ahead. In a few months the Navy List will contain regular flights of aeroplanes attached to the battle squadrons.’(16) There was little or no opposition within the service. The aeroplane and airship were proving useful for scouting, for observing the fall of shot in action as well as locating submerged submarines and minefields. They were seen as an aid to and not a threat to the battleship.

  In Germany, under the inspiration of Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin and with the support of Tirpitz, the lighter-than-air machine was favoured, and before war broke out the German Navy could call on a powerful force of some twenty highly reliable and effective Zeppelins based on Cuxhaven. Churchill respected this force but determined that the Royal Navy should concentrate on the aeroplane which was less vulnerable, cheaper, more adaptable and could be flown off the water on floats or carried in seaplane-carriers.

  At Eastchurch on the Thames estuary a small but efficient naval air arm came into being. In 1913 the Hermes, the world’s first aircraft (seaplane) carrier, was commissioned. The enthusiastic pilots and some admirals (Wilson, surprisingly, was among them) saw an important and wider future for aircraft. By 1914 plans were already being made for seaplanes to carry a charge of gun cotton fused to explode close to submerged submarines. An article in a service magazine in the same year drew the attention of its readers to aircraft as future torpedo carriers.’(17)

  Amidst the mass of work for which Churchill had made himself responsible outside as well as inside the Admiralty, he made a study of the new machines in the greatest detail. He took lessons in flying and was thus able to correct with authority what he regarded as detail flaws, such as inferior seating and flimsy controls. Charles Rolls had already become the first flying fatality and others had been killed or injured. Churchill’s wife and his fellow politicians and friends begged him to desist. He was about to solo when his own instructor was killed and this led him at last to give it up, though with many regrets.

  It was typical of Churchill that he regarded the detail of his work as important as the broad sweep of policy. After two years of his insistence, for example, on examining the working of a submarine’s periscope or a Barr and Stroud range-finder, the cooking equipment at Dartmouth naval college, or the functioning of the feed equipment in a new fleet tanker, the Navy gave up taking offence and (as the German naval attaché had learned) Churchill was generally treated with respect and admiration.

  Gunnery and fire control was one of the largest and most important subjects to come under his critical eye. Percy Scott had for long been concerned at the shortcomings, which could prove fatal under certain conditions, of the practice of individual gunlayers and trainers being responsible for the accuracy of their own gun or guns. With the increase in range of modern gunnery, Scott contended that the gunlayer in action at his relatively low station might well be so blinded by smoke, haze, spume, shell splash, and mist that he might not fire’ on the correct target, let alone hit it.

  From about 1904 Scott began his fight for single, centralized gunnery control, or ‘director firing’, from a station high up in the foremast, using a master sight electrically connected to the sights of each gun, fire being controlled by pressing a single key. He soon gathered disciples about him. Among them was Captain Frederick Ogilvy, whose cruiser Natal was top of the Navy at the gunlayers’ test anyway. This enthusiasm had originally been inspired by Scott when Ogilvy had served under him in HMS Terrible. Ogilvy’s gunnery lieutenant was William James, one of the best in the service (known to his friends as ‘Bubbles’: as a child he was the model for Millais’s famous painting).

  Ogilvy decided to make his own centralized gunnery control with what he could find. ‘I used to visit old ships lying in the dockyard’, James recounted. ‘I was caught one day by a dockyard policeman and there was a devil of a row. The Admiral Superintendent took a poor view of an officer stealing bits and pieces of sights etc from the old ships but Ogilvy fortunately was able to pacify him and I was not court-martialled.’(18) Ogilvy’s ‘master sight’ was rigged on the top of the cruiser’s conning tower, mounted on a Maxim Gun stand, and it came up to all Scott’s expectations. Scott himself, as Inspector of Target Practice from 1905, continued his own experiments and spread wider the gospel of centralized firing. There was deeply entrenched opposition from individual captains of guns and crews who saw the responsibilities of their skills being diminished.

  At a higher level it was also legitimately argued that an error by the Principal Control Officer and his two assistants, the Rate Keeper and Deflection Keeper, (all of them vulnerable to enemy fire) affected every gun in the ship.

  A battleship’s gunnery officer recalled another objection, and the simple counter-argument to the directors’ supporters: ‘I remember that what they [the detractors] feared was that the long line of communications from the top to the guns was vulnerable and might be severed by an enemy shell in the first few minutes of battle. What they forgot was that if the Director was put out of action by a shell, there was no difficulty in changing over to the older system – the gunlayers and trainers at once leaving their instruments and going to their sights.’(19)

  The official acceptance of director firing was delayed by more than prejudice and reasonable argument. Pioneers’ misfortunes inevitably occurred. ‘The instruments gave us a lot of trouble. They were not reliable’, recalled James, now gunnery lieutenant in HMS Neptune, the first dreadnought to be fitted with the full director equipment devised by Scott in conjunction with the shipbuilding and armaments company, Vickers. ‘As the time approached for our battle practice I realized that if the training – pointers went out of step we might fire a salvo at the towing ship. I explained this to the Captain and he decided we should carry out the battle practice in the usual way,
the layers and trainers laying – and training their guns by their sights.’

  This episode became widely known in the Fleet. By chance, James took his Christmas leave that year in Switzerland. ‘The first day I was on the ice, one of the skaters came up to me and said, “Why the devil didn’t you use the director for your battle practice?’’ It was Percy Scott, a very skilled performer on skates. I told him the reason but he was not satisfied and did not speak to me again.’(20)

  It was not until November 1912 that the die was finally cast in favour of the director. On the 13th two dreadnoughts steaming at 12 knots in rough weather at 9,000 yards range were in turn given three and a half minutes’ firing – on the target with their heavy guns. HMS Thunderer fitted with a director fired 39 rounds making 23 hits if the target had been the second ship, Orion. The Orion which employed independent gunlayer firing, then fired 27 rounds and made 4 theoretical hits.

  A second contentious gunnery issue, related to director firing, was the development of fire control. A fire control instrument would provide an automatic plot of one moving ship against another in order that guns could be laid for future positions of the moving enemy target. As the range of guns increased, range-finders found their way into the British fleet in 1892 and into the Japanese Navy the following year. But this did not anticipate and plot the relative course and bearing of the target.

  A man of exceptional ingenuity and originality of mind, Arthur Pollen, began to interest himself in the subject of fire control as the result of witnessing a warship’s target practice at a mere 1,400 yards, and not accurate at that. Yet these same guns, manned by naval gun crews, were at the time engaging Boer targets at Ladysmith accurately at 10,000 yards. Pollen had been a barrister, parliamentary candidate, inventor, and businessman, one of whose hobbies was big game hunting. He now gave much of his time to devising what was in effect a mechanically operated computer decades ahead of its time, an apparatus which produced a true plot which gave an accurate prediction of the deflection and range required to allow for the time of flight of the ship’s shells.

  Pollen was not alone in the field. The son of an astronomer naval gunnery officer, F. C. Dreyer, was working independently along the same lines as Pollen. But it was not until 1913 that, after exhaustive trials, the Dreyer system using a fire control table was accepted by the Admiralty and began to be installed in big ships.

  The competition between the two similar systems aroused a great deal of acrimony among their proponents. In some respects the Pollen system was ahead of the Dreyer, and there can be no doubt that the Admiralty chose the Dreyer system in the end because it originated more or less from within the service and Pollen himself lacked tact and discretion in promoting his case. He had also made himself an enemy of Fisher.

  The Dreyer system was far ahead of any navy’s, and in 1914 too elaborate and complex for the Royal Navy to get the best out of it. Like Pollen’s system, Dreyer’s finally depended for its accuracy on the quality of the range finder.

  In his first days of office Churchill drew up an exhaustive memorandum on the need for setting up a Naval War Staff. It was a brilliant piece of writing, broad in its vision, profound in its historical understanding, masterly in its display of knowledge of sea power and the functions of a modern navy. ‘In the past history of this country the Navy has carried out many maritime campaigns without the help of such a body of trained experts’, ran one paragraph. ‘But this is no proof either that such a body is not required under modern conditions, or that satisfactory results would not have often been obtained with less loss of life and waste of time if it had previously existed… ‘(21) Pointing to the development of new matériel of all kinds in 1911, he related this breathtaking twentieth-century speed with the time when ‘progress in naval architecture was so gradual that the science of naval strategy, as based upon the capabilities of ships and the science of administrative preparation as regards foreseeing their wants, were simple and unchanging’. For centuries only the wind could move the fleets, and for generation after generation the stores and even the ammunition required to fight were identical.

  The case for a Staff was incontrovertible as expressed by the young new First Lord. But his old First Sea Lord remained quite unconvinced. Wilson’s own memorandum opened: ‘The agitation for a Naval War Staff is an attempt to adapt to the Navy a system which was primarily designed for an army… The requirements of the Navy are quite different. In the aggregate probably more thinking has to be done to produce an efficient Navy than an efficient Army, but it is on entirely different lines… The staff that does this thinking is not called by that name. It is comprised of the principal members of every department of the Admiralty…’

  The core of the argument of this old, traditionalist but highly intelligent sailor was contained in the paragraph: ‘The Navy has learned, by long experience, thoroughly to distrust all paper schemes and theories that have not been submitted to the supreme test of trial under practical conditions by the Fleet at sea, and the whole Admiralty has been gradually developed to make the most of the experience so gained.’(22)

  The first reason why Asquith had sent Churchill to the Admiralty was to do what everyone before him had failed to do, and Churchill rode roughshod over Wilson and the great majority of senior officers in Whitehall. The admirals who were lined up against him went as unceremoniously as Wilson. By 8 January 1912 Churchill had an Admiralty War Staff, with a Chief responsible to the First Sea Lord in charge of the three divisions it comprised: Operations, Intelligence, and Mobilization.

  Lord Esher sent his congratulations among a chorus of others. ‘It is the most pregnant reform which has been carried out at the Admiralty since the days of Lord St Vincent’, he declared. The Press was solidly in favour of the step taken by Churchill, which was a new experience for him.

  Churchill suspected, with all the evidence supporting him, that war could start at any time, and the fact remained that after an upheaval as profound as this the Admiralty would take time to settle and the Staff would take time to play themselves in. There was not an officer in the service trained in staff work.

  Another department in urgent need of Churchill’s attention and general reform was the lower deck. Not only had the social restlessness of 1911-12 spread to the lower deck due to poor conditions and pay, but there was a great need to recruit many thousands more sailors to man the growing fleet. Just one penny had been added to the pay of 1s 7d a day granted in 1852, the food was at the best basic, and the system of maintaining discipline was petty and undignified. Churchill’s reforms in 1912 did away with many injustices, and led to higher pay and more generous leave and restrictions on the powers of the ships’ police. Promotion to commissioned rank for petty officers and warrant officers began a process of democratization in the Navy. The fact that it slowed to a snail’s pace after the first rush of reform, that insurmountable class barriers remained in the Navy for decades, and that until very recently a rating or petty officer who rose through hard work and merit to the ward room was treated as a social inferior, was no fault of Churchill. What he accomplished in 1912-14 was enough to lift the spirit and self-respect of the lower deck and lead to an improvement in efficiency and fighting spirit when war came.

  THE ACCELERATION TOWARDS WAR

  Relative dreadnought construction figures, and the worsening relations with Germany – The Hankey minion and Churchill’s proposed ‘naval holiday’ – Austrian and Italian dreadnought construction and the Mediterranean scene – Opposition to the withdrawal of British strength from the Mediterranean – Ever-increasing naval expenditure – The qualities of British and German dreadnoughts compared – Inferior British mines and torpedoes – British and German personnel, their training and contrasting characters – The shortage of exceptional talent among British and German admirals

  The naval ‘scare’ of 1909, which had been the undoing of Fisher, stemmed from predictions of German near-equality in naval strength by 1912. These figures were calculated on G
erman official figures of shipbuilding enlarged by unofficial reports, rumours, and claims from those many in Britain with a vested interest in laying down more dreadnoughts. Typical of the doubtful sources on which ‘scare’ figures were based was the account given to Fisher by members of an Argentine naval mission to Germany in 1909. They had been impressed by the vast resources of Krupps where they had seen stockpiled armour-plate, no fewer than one hundred 11-inch and 12-inch guns nearing completion, and had heard that twelve dreadnoughts were under construction and a thirteenth about to be laid down. Perhaps the German hosts had been deliberately exaggerating in order to impress their visitors: if so, it did them no good as the Argentinians ordered their two dreadnoughts from American yards.

  In fact there was no acceleration of German dreadnought building and no secret ships laid down. The substantiated figures available to Churchill in April 1912 showed Germany with nine completed against the seventeen predicted as possible or thirteen stated to be ‘certain’. To set against this, predictions of Britain’s own dreadnought strength had also been excessive and only fifteen had been commissioned. ‘The gloomy Admiralty anticipations [of 1909] were in no respect fulfilled in the year 1912’, Churchill wrote later. Lloyd George and he, then, had been ‘right in the narrow sense’ in demanding a reduction in British building. But he continued, ‘We were absolutely wrong in relation to the deep tides of destiny.’(1)