CHAPTER 7
Submarines and Mines:
“Fisher’s Toys”
Jacky Fisher’s British navy was built to carry massive guns firing heavy shells with enormous penetrating power over long range. To this purpose, the dreadnought battle fleet had been equipped, first with 12-inch, then with 13.5-inch, and ultimately with 15-inch guns. But even as the size and destructive power of naval guns increased, other weapons, less visible and often more dangerous, were being developed to destroy ships. These were torpedoes and mines, designed to explode below the waterline against the hull of an enemy ship. The advantage, as John Keegan has succinctly put it, is that “water conducts shock far more efficiently than air.”
Submarines, torpedoes, and mines all predated the Great War. Mines had been used in the American Civil War, where they were called torpedoes (“Damn the torpedoes,” said Rear Admiral David Farragut as he led his Union squadron over a Confederate minefield in Mobile Bay). But after the Battle of Tsushima in 1905, where the Russian navy was annihilated by Japanese heavy naval guns, it was the big gun, not the torpedo or mine, that was believed to be the decisive weapon. The submarine, however, possessed a unique advantage over the massive, armored ship equipped with great guns: it could make itself invisible. Approaching underwater, it could attack without revealing its presence except for the few chosen moments when it pushed its periscope above the surface. In the 1890s, the world’s most advanced submarines were being built in America by John Philip Holland, an Irish nationalist who, after immigrating to the United States, devoted himself to designing and building weapons that could sink British warships. On the surface, a 160-horsepower gasoline engine gave Holland’s boat a speed of 71⁄2 knots; beneath the surface, it made 61⁄2 knots on power from an electric battery. Holland’s employer, the Electric Boat Company in New London, Connecticut, was a private enterprise and the navies of the world soon beat a path to its door. The Royal Navy purchased a single Holland submarine in 1900 and, impressed by its potential, then built five undersea craft under license. The French navy began with experiments of its own but later came around to Holland’s designs. By the summer of 1914, 400 submarines, most of them evolutionary progressions from Holland’s original design, existed in sixteen navies.
Fisher had been one of the first to see the potential of the submarine. In 1903, he announced their power to revolutionize war at sea: “Death near—momentarily—sudden—awful—invisible—unavoidable! Nothing conceivably more demoralizing!” In 1904, before the Dreadnought was designed, he wrote, “I don’t think it is even faintly realized—the immense impending revolution which the submarine will effect as offensive weapons of war.” The submarine, he repeated constantly, was “the battleship of the future,” and the torpedo the naval weapon of the future. The problem was how to deliver the torpedo to the target. In 1903, the effective range of torpedoes was 1,000 yards. By equipping battleships with quick-firing guns and screening them with anti-torpedo-boat vessels (Fisher named them destroyers), navies could make it hazardous for an enemy surface vessel to come close enough to launch its torpedoes. But a submarine, Fisher realized, was an ideal means of bringing torpedo-launching tubes within range of major enemy warships in daylight.
When Fisher first became interested, submarines were far from the deadly weapons they were to become in two world wars. Slow, limited in radius of action and in time submerged, afflicted with restricted vision in daylight and total blindness at night, they seemed relatively harmless—to some, even ridiculous. Admiral Lord Charles Beresford dismissed them as “playthings” and “Fisher’s toys.” Then, as the potential of the undersea craft became more apparent, scorn was mingled with indignation and fear. Submarines, British admirals grumbled, were unethical and “un-English . . . the weapon of cowards who refused to fight like men on the surface.” Admiral Sir Arthur Wilson, Commander-in-Chief of the Channel Fleet, so despised this “underhanded method of attack” that he wanted the Admiralty to announce publicly that all submarine crews captured in wartime would be hanged as pirates. Fisher thought differently. His objective was to send enemy warships to the bottom of the sea. He did not care whether the weapons that sent them there were cowardly, underhanded, or un-English; he only cared that they worked. If submarines could torpedo and sink enemy warships, Britain should have submarines, and the more the better. To overcome opposition, Fisher looked for allies. He guided King Edward VII through the submarine A-1 when she was in dry dock and took the Prince of Wales (later King George V) with him in the same submarine when she submerged off Portsmouth. (The Princess of Wales, watching from an observation ship, was heard to say quietly, “I shall be very disappointed if George doesn’t come up.”)
As First Sea Lord, Fisher worked with Captain Reginald Bacon, whom he described as “the cleverest officer in the navy” and later appointed as the first captain of the revolutionary battleship Dreadnought. In 1904, Bacon commanded the navy’s entire submarine force, consisting of six small boats. His officers and crews considered themselves an elite corps and, in fleet maneuvers in March 1904, they made a name for themselves. Their enemy was the Home Fleet and they hit Sir Arthur Wilson’s battleships so many times with unarmed torpedoes that umpires reluctantly ruled two of the battleships “sunk.” Unfortunately, the submarine A-1 was rammed and actually sunk by a passing merchant vessel, which had not been warned that an undersea craft might be passing beneath its bow. The real lesson of the maneuvers, Bacon reported, was that the presence of submarines “exercised an extraordinary influence on the operations” of a battle fleet: for safety, battleships now must always be accompanied by a large screen of destroyers. A decade later, Jellicoe was putting this lesson into practice in the North Sea.
By the time Roger Keyes was appointed Inspecting Captain of Submarines in 1910, the British submarine force had climbed to sixty-one boats: twelve ancient A’s, eleven elderly B’s, thirty-seven C’s, the new D-1, and eight more D’s under construction. When war broke out four years later, Britain had seventy-four submarines, more than any other naval power in the world, but this number was grossly misleading. Most of the boats were old coastal vessels of the A, B, and C classes whose average underwater speed (about 8 knots) and endurance (about twelve hours) were too limited to allow them to accompany a friendly surface fleet or to seek and attack an enemy fleet. They rarely remained at sea for more than a few days and never ventured any great distance from the British coast. In 1907, Britain first began to develop the D class, oceangoing vessels of 500 tons, diesel powered, with a surface speed close to 15 knots. The E-class boats that followed grew to a length of 178 feet and a displacement of 660 tons; they could achieve a surface speed of 151⁄2 knots and an underwater speed of 91⁄2 knots, and they could dive safely to 200 feet (the depth at which pressure from the sea would crush the boat was around 350 feet). These submarines were equipped with torpedoes with an extreme range of 11,000 yards and that had gyroscopes enabling the torpedoes to maintain an accurate course.
The appointment of Keyes in 1910 was a surprise. Keyes was a destroyer captain with no experience as a submariner, and his new assignment was not only to command and train the existing force but also to oversee all submarine construction. Keyes made enemies by looking abroad for experimental vessels and periscopes better than those produced at home. *11 Nevertheless, he attracted a number of bold, sometimes eccentric young officers. Enthusiasm was high and clothing irregular; his men, Keyes said, “dressed like North Sea fishermen.” The rest of the navy looked upon them and their vessels as “almost a service apart.”
Fisher, in retirement after 1910, never abandoned his passionate advocacy of submarines. Ten years after his warning vision of “death near—momentarily—sudden—awful,” he was vigorously pressing the new First Lord, Winston Churchill, to “build more submarines!” On December 13, 1913, he wrote, “I note by examining the Navy list there have been no less than 21 removals of submarines since I was First Sea Lord and only 12 additions. Do you think this is satisfactory?? And the remainder of A and B classes are now approaching 10 years of age and there are 19 of them which figure in our totals. We are falling behind Germany in large submarines!”
When war came, the eight boats of the D and nine of the new E class were assigned to carry the offensive into German waters. Based at Harwich and commanded by Keyes, they were under the direct control of the Admiralty and not of Jellicoe; as a result, like Tyrwhitt’s destroyer flotillas, they led a somewhat freewheeling life of their own. To help overcome a submarine’s inherently restricted range of vision even in clear weather, Keyes acquired two modern destroyers to scout ahead of his flotillas. Flying his commodore’s pennant in Lurcher, Keyes personally led a number of early scouting operations deep into Heligoland Bight. Duty aboard these “overseas” submarines was arduous and frustrating. There were no big targets. The German battleships rarely came out and the men remained cramped below because, as Keyes reported, “the notoriously short, steep seas which accompany westerly gales in the Heligoland Bight . . . make it difficult to open the conning tower hatches and vision is limited to about 200 yards. There was no rest to be obtained on the bottom . . . even when cruising at a depth of sixty feet, the submarines were rolling and moving vertically twenty feet.”
On September 13, one of Keyes’s submarines scored the flotilla’s first major success. E-9, commanded by Lieutenant Commander Max Horton, had spent the previous night lying on the bottom six miles south of Heligo-land. At daybreak, the submarine surfaced and at once sighted a light cruiser less than two miles away. Horton fired two torpedoes at a range of 600 yards and, as E-9 dived, one explosion was heard. Rising again, Horton could see that the cruiser had stopped, but shots from an unseen vessel splashed nearby and E-9 dived again. When Horton came back to the surface an hour later, he saw nothing but trawlers searching for survivors. His victim had been the eighteen-year-old, 2,000-ton German light cruiser Hela. Three weeks later, on October 6, patrolling off the Ems, Horton torpedoed and sank the German destroyer S-126.
An earlier encounter involving one of Keyes’s boats may have been the first of its kind. On September 10, D-8 saw a surfaced enemy submarine, U-28, and fired a torpedo. The German, seeing the torpedo coming, quickly submerged and, as a British staff monograph remarked, “Under the circumstances, stalemate was practically inevitable for neither boat knew what to do with the other; and after an hour and a quarter during which the two boats simultaneously rose and simultaneously dived again, the German retired.” On October 18, however, the British submarine E-3, patrolling off the Ems, was stalked, cornered, torpedoed, and sunk in a coastal bay by a German submarine. This event, too, was a first of its kind.
Originally, Alfred von Tirpitz, founder of the Imperial German Navy, had scorned submarines. When the subject came up in the Reichstag in 1901, Tirpitz announced, “We have no money to waste on experimental vessels. We must leave such luxuries to wealthier states like France and England.” Every pfennig was to go into the massive battleship-building program designed to challenge the Royal Navy. By the time of the 1905 estimates, Tirpitz had given ground and Krupp was told to build one Unterseeboot (abbreviated in German as U-boot and in English as “U-boat”), “for experiments connected with submarines.” Germany thereby became the last major naval power to possess a submarine. When U-1 completed her sea trials in 1907, she was pronounced satisfactory for coastal operations, but it was warned that “her employment on the high seas is attended with danger.” Gradually, however, Tirpitz released more money, and between 1908 and 1910, fourteen more U-boats were ordered. All were powered on the surface by kerosene engines and underwater by an electric battery. In 1910, German builders switched to diesels for surface propulsion; again, Germany was the last major naval power to make this shift. At the outbreak of war, Germany had twenty-four U-boats in commission, with fifteen under construction. She now ranked fifth in the world in number of submarines—behind Britain, France, Russia, and the United States. But, because Germany had started later, she had as many modern submarines as anyone else.
Nevertheless, Tirpitz and the Naval Staff had little faith in the capabilities of U-boats, and the initial role assigned to German undersea craft was defensive. This stemmed in part from the Naval Staff’s obsessive belief that in the event of war, the British navy would charge into the Bight in an attempt to engage and destroy the High Seas Fleet. In accordance with this fixation, all U-boats were based on Heligoland, where the submarines were integrated into the defensive arrangements of the Bight. By day, an outer observation line made up of a destroyer flotilla patrolled on a concentric arc thirty miles northwest of Heligoland. The U-boats, usually a half-flotilla of seven, formed a static line, riding on the surface at mooring buoys, twenty miles out. The plan called for the outer-line destroyers to retreat, drawing approaching enemy forces over this line of U-boats, which was to submerge and launch torpedo attacks. In conjunction with massed torpedo attacks by German destroyers, the Naval Staff hoped that the U-boats would be able to whittle away at the numerical superiority of the attacking British squadrons before the High Seas Fleet sortied from the Jade.
On the eve of war, when the main body of the High Seas Fleet returned from the Norwegian coast to assemble in the Elbe and the Jade, the U-boat flotillas awaited orders at Heligoland. The orders came quickly: Comman-der Hermann Bauer, chief of the U-boat flotillas, was ordered to reconnoiter the North Sea, discover the whereabouts of the Grand Fleet, and establish the location of any British patrol or blockade lines. On the second day of the war, August 6, at 4:20 a.m. in thick, rainy weather, ten older submarines from the 1st Flotilla—U-5, U-7, U-8, U-9, and U-13 through U-18, selected because their captains were the more experienced commanders—sailed from Heligoland. Reaching a position near the Dogger Bank, they spread out on a sixty-mile front—seven miles between boats—and began a surface sweep northwest up the North Sea. Their goal was the latitude of the Orkneys.
Throughout their 350-mile outward voyage, the nine U-boats (one had engine trouble and returned home) failed to sight even one enemy warship. Then on August 9, between the Orkneys and the Shetlands, U-15 had her fatal encounter with the light cruiser Birmingham. On August 12, seven of the original ten submarines returned to Heligoland. One had returned earlier, U-15 had been sunk, and nothing was ever heard from U-13; it was speculated that she had struck a German mine in one of the defensive minefields laid in the Bight. The results of this pioneering operation did little to vindicate the U-boat in the eyes of the German Naval Staff. Ten U-boats had failed to damage, let alone sink, an enemy warship, yet two of their number had been lost. “Our submarine fleet was as good as any in the world—but not very good,” said one German officer. Although the U-boats brought back the first evidence that there was no close blockade, they had been unable to establish the location of a blockade line. The Naval Staff did not know that U-15 had reached the Orkneys and concluded that the Grand Fleet was so far away from Germany that it was beyond the capacities of U-boats to find it.
A few U-boats continued to sail, and one of these sorties led to revenge for the sinking of the U-15. Certain that major British warships were based at the Firth of Forth, Bauer persuaded his superiors to let him post a regular patrol of two U-boats off the estuary. On August 30, 1914, U-20 and U-21, the only two submarines available for offensive operations, were ordered to attempt an attack inside the Firth. On September 5, U-20 came up the estuary almost as far as the Forth Bridge, but seeing nothing and unaware that Beatty’s battle cruisers were anchored a few hundred yards above the bridge, turned back. Meanwhile, out to sea, Captain Otto Hersing, in U-21, spotted the 3,000-ton light cruiser Pathfinder on patrol off Abs Head, ten miles southeast of May Island. Although his submarine was pitching and rolling in a stormy sea, Hersing maneuvered until he was within 1,500 yards—just short of a mile—and fired one torpedo. The torpedo hit and the explosion detonated the ship’s forward magazine. Four minutes later, Pathfinder plunged to the bottom, taking with her more than half her crew of 360. U-21 escaped, having achieved the war’s first sinking of a British warship by a German submarine.
Pathfinder was a ten-year-old ship of marginal value, but her loss had a strong impact on Jellicoe. The torpedoing confirmed the Commander-in-Chief in his belief that the southern and central North Sea were dangerous for large warships, and thereafter he held the Grand Fleet as far to the north as the Admiralty would permit. Some British officers found Jellicoe’s fears exaggerated, and in other parts of the navy operating orders and tactical routines relating to submarines were more relaxed. The result was a spectacular disaster. Only three and a half weeks after Beatty’s triumph in the Bight, the Royal Navy lost more men in ninety minutes than the Germans had lost in the all-day battle around Heligoland. The weapon responsible for this British defeat was one small German submarine.
At the beginning of the war, the Royal Navy possessed a multitude of elderly surface warships that Fisher had wanted to scrap, but which remained afloat, requiring crews whose numbers were out of all proportion to the vessels’ fighting value. Among these were the six 12,000-ton armored cruisers of the Bacchante class, laid down in 1898 and 1899, and now thoroughly worn out. Their engines, designed to make 21 knots, could scarcely produce 15. Nevertheless, rather than scrapping them outright, the Admiralty had placed the Bacchantes in Reserve Fleet limbo; no money was to be spent repairing them, but they were to be kept in the inventory until they were utterly useless. In the summer of 1914, they were tied up, rusting peacefully, at Medway on the Thames estuary.
The outbreak of war brought these old ships back to life. Each cruiser carried two 9.2-inch guns and eight 6-inch guns, which might be used to punch holes in any German light cruisers or destroyers their shells managed to hit. For this reason, a coat of fresh, gray war paint was applied, ammunition and supplies were hoisted in, and more than 700 officers and men marched aboard each ship. The seamen came from the Royal Navy Reserves and the Fleet Reserves, a pool of navy pensioners, many of them middle-aged family men. Like many reserve ships in the Royal Navy, the old Bacchantes were local ships; most men in the crews came from nearby towns and villages, which took pride in their men now going to sea. To compensate for the inexperience of the crews, the old armored cruisers were assigned regular navy captains and officers. In addition, each ship was alloted nine young cadets from the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth, most of them boys under fifteen.
Because the cruisers were old and slow and their crews were new, there was never a thought that they should operate with the Grand Fleet. Instead, they were assigned to patrol the “Broad Fourteens,” a patch of the southern North Sea off the Dutch coast named for its latitude. Five of the ships, Bacchante, Aboukir, Hogue, Cressy, and Euryalus, were based at Harwich, where their mission was to support Tyrwhitt’s destroyers and Keyes’s submarines in blocking any German surface force attempting to attack the transports carrying the BEF to the continent. Frequent bad weather had altered this arrangment, however, and instead of acting in support of the smaller ships, the old cruisers, better able to cope with the rough seas, became the front line. Back and forth, day after day, the cruisers patrolled their beat, remaining at sea without rest, taking turns going in to coal. As the autumn advanced and the seas rose higher, the accompanying destroyers frequently returned to port. Meanwhile, the cruisers had fallen into bad habits. It was intended that they maintain 15 knots, with occasional zigzagging. Fifteen knots proved impossible, as the ships’ aging engines suffered repeated breakdowns; Rear Admiral Arthur Christian considered himself fortunate if he had three of his five cruisers available at any time. At over 13 knots, the Bacchantes gobbled up coal; accordingly, they usually plodded at 12 knots, which often slipped to 9. None of the British cruisers zigzagged, because none had ever sighted a periscope.
The danger attached to this disposition had been noticed elsewhere. From Harwich, Tyrwhitt and Keyes insisted that the old ships were museum pieces that never should have been sent to sea. On August 21, Keyes wrote to Rear Admiral Sir Arthur Leveson, director of the Admiralty’s Operations Division: “Think of . . . [what will happen if] two or three well-trained German cruisers . . . fall in with those Bacchantes. How can they be expected to shoot straight or have any confidence in themselves when they know that they are untrained and can’t shoot? Why give the Germans the smallest chance of a cheap victory and an improved morale [?] . . . For Heaven’s sake, take those Bacchantes away! . . . The Germans must know they are about and if they send out a suitable force, God help them . . .” In giving these warnings, all were thinking of a sudden attack by fast, modern surface ships; no one—not even Keyes, who was Commodore for Submarines—worried about a threat from German submarines.
On September 17, Keyes’s warnings reached the navy’s highest level. Churchill and Sturdee were aboard a train traveling north to confer with Jellicoe on board the Iron Duke at Loch Ewe. Tyrwhitt and Keyes, although relatively junior in this company, had been included in the meeting because Churchill admired their initiative. Aboard the train, the First Lord encouraged both commodores to speak up. Keyes mentioned that the Grand Fleet referred to the elderly Bacchantes as “the ‘live bait’ squadron.” Throughout Winston Churchill’s life, there was no better way to attract his attention than to use graphic language. On this occasion, caught by the arresting phrase, he demanded to know what it meant. Keyes explained.
Aboard Iron Duke, Churchill brought up the matter of the Bacchantes and recommended that they be withdrawn. Jellicoe agreed. Sturdee objected, attempting to squash Keyes: “My dear fellow, you don’t know your history. We’ve always maintained a squadron on the Broad Fourteens.” Nevertheless, the following day Churchill sent a memo to Battenberg, who had not been present at Loch Ewe: “The Bacchantes ought not to continue on this beat. The risk to such ships is not justified by the services they render. The narrow seas, being the nearest point to the enemy, should be kept by a small number of good, modern ships.” Prince Louis agreed and told Sturdee to issue the necessary orders. Churchill, assuming that orders given would be obeyed, thereupon dismissed the subject from his mind. Sturdee, however, continued to focus on the danger of a German surface attack on the cross-Channel lifeline. He admitted that the Bacchantes were too slow for tactical work with destroyers capable of more than twice their speed and he agreed that the old armored cruisers should be relieved as soon as possible by the new light cruisers of the Arethusa class beginning to come from the builders’ yards. But of eight Arethusas under construction, only one had actually been delivered to the navy. In the meantime, Sturdee argued, the Bacchantes were better than nothing; in heavy weather, when the destroyers had to be withdrawn, the old cruisers provided essential early warning and a first line of defense for the Channel. Battenberg allowed himself to be persuaded and on September 19 approved an order to the Bacchantes to remain on patrol in the Broad Fourteens. Battenberg did not tell Churchill. Later, Prince Louis admitted, “I should not have given in.”
On the night of September 17, the weather in the Broad Fourteens became so rough that the destroyers screening the old armored cruisers were sent back to Harwich. The 12,000-ton ships remained on patrol at 10 knots, their captains not thinking of zigzagging because they had been told that seas impossible for a destroyer would be equally impossible for submarines. At 6:00 a.m. on September 20, the patrol was reduced from four cruisers to three when Euryalus returned to Harwich to coal. Rear Admiral Christian, who normally would have remained with the squadron at sea, was prevented by the high waves from transferring by boat to Aboukir and so went into harbor with his flagship. Command of the squadron passed to the senior captain, John Drummond of Aboukir.
For two days, September 20 and 21, the three remaining cruisers continued on their beat, pitching and rolling over the Broad Fourteens. By sunset on the twenty-first, Drummond signaled Christian in Harwich, “Still rather rough, but going down.” During the night, the wind dropped almost completely. To the west off Harwich, however, it continued blowing, and Tyrwhitt waited until 5:00 a.m. on the twenty-second to leave there with a light cruiser and eight destroyers bound for the Broad Fourteens. Their journey would take four hours.
At six o’clock that morning on the Broad Fourteens, with the eastern horizon fading from black to gray, Aboukir, Hogue, and Cressy were two miles apart, riding easily at 10 knots through a moderate sea. Because Admiral Christian had left no specific instructions about submarines and Drummond had issued none, the ships were not zigzagging, although all had posted lookouts for periscopes and one gun on each side of each ship was manned. At 6:30 a.m. this tranquil scene was shattered by an explosion on Aboukir’s starboard side.
To Admiral von Tirpitz, submarine attacks on warships at sea seemed an unpromising form of warfare, and to most German naval officers, these vessels appeared too small and fragile even for coastal work. It was, therefore, with a certain compassionate reluctance that the Naval Staff ordered the fleet’s handful of early U-boats to cast off their moorings and set out into the North Sea on August 6. Among these craft was U-9, one of the fourteen kerosene-burning submarines built between 1910 and 1911. One hundred and eighty-eight feet long, displacing 493 tons, this undersea boat had a crew of four officers and twenty-four men. Two torpedo tubes were mounted in the bow and two in the stern, and the submarine sailed with all tubes loaded. Two reserve torpedoes were carried on rails in a forward compartment from where they could be slid into the bow tubes once their predecessors had been fired. On the surface, burning kerosene, the boat could reach 14 knots; beneath the surface, switching to electric batteries, she could manage 8. Cramped space and foul air had given the submarine service a reputation for unhealthfulness as well as danger, and only recently had crews been permitted to sleep on board in port. In December 1912, as an experiment, six U-boats with crews aboard had remained on the surface anchored to buoys for six days in Heligoland Bight; this was considered an astonishing endurance achievement. Diving was always considered risky, and in rough weather, tactical procedure called for attacks to be made with the conning tower above the surface. Nevertheless, because kerosene motors smoked heavily, a U-boat on the surface sailed with a pillar of black smoke towering overhead. This made detection easy for enemy destroyers: of the fourteen kerosene burners with which Germany began the war, twelve were lost.
The captain of U-9 was Otto Weddigen, a slight, blond, thirty-two-year-old Saxon, known for his courteous manner but also as a wrestler, a runner, and a swimmer. Weddigen disdained the common perception that submarines were scarcely more than iron coffins. In January 1911, he survived an episode during a routine training exercise in which U-3 sank to the bottom of Kiel harbor because someone accidentally had left open one of the ventilators. Under thirty feet of water, the boat was filling with water and chlorine gas created by the chemical reaction of salt water with the acid in the battery cells of the electric motors. Nevertheless, the crew managed to close the open ventilator and then use high-pressure air to expel water from the U-boat’s forward buoyancy tanks, raising the bow to the surface. One after another, twenty-eight men escaped through a twenty-eight-foot-long, 17.7-inch wide torpedo tube. Weddigen also was famous for leaping into the North Sea and rescuing a seaman who slipped off the narrow deck of a surfaced U-boat. When the waves hurled him against the steel hull of the boat, Weddigen’s arm was broken. Two weeks later, the base commandant found Weddigen conducting a sailors’ gymnastics class and asked whether, with his bad arm, the exercise was not difficult. “Oh, no,” Weddingen replied. “I have only broken one arm.”
By 1914, Weddigen commanded his own submarine, U-9. He chose his crew carefully and trained it first on land, in dummy submarines. When his men were ready, Weddigen began testing U-9’s limits. Fifty feet down was the normal operating depth, but Weddigen dove deeper. He remained at sea in heavy weather, running his boat through high seas, both awash and submerged. He regularly practiced reloading torpedo tubes at sea, trundling forward the two reserve torpedoes hanging from overhead rails and sliding them into the empty bow tubes. Before long, Weddigen’s men considered themselves one of the elite units of the German navy. When they went to sea, they—and all submariners—were granted special privileges: gramophone players and records, sausages, smoked eels, chocolate, tobacco, coffee, jam, marmalade, and sugar. There was one exception: no beer was allowed on submarines. Weddigen was also practical about life in wartime; on August 14, he was married at the military chapel in Wilhemshaven.
Weddigen’s first wartime assignment was to patrol the stretch of the southern North Sea west of the low, sandy Frisian Islands between Borkum and Heligoland. U-9 sailed from Wilhelmshaven on August 6, but engine trouble forced her to return and kept the submarine in the dockyard for the next six weeks. On September 16, the Naval Staff ordered the Commander-in-Chief of the High Seas Fleet to send a U-boat to attack British transports landing troops at Ostend. U-9 was ready, but a three-day gale postponed the mission; the storm was so severe that on the island of Borkum, a German aircraft shed with two seaplanes inside was washed into the sea. Finally, at 5:00 on the morning of September 20, Weddigen was able to leave harbor, but the weather failed to improve. A rising northwest wind and heavy swells made the submarine’s gyrocompass useless and Weddigen fell back on one of the mariner’s age-old methods: navigating by soundings. Battered by ten-foot waves, he rode out the storm on the surface with his engines turning only enough to keep the bow into the sea. Uncertain of his position, he gave up the attempt to reach the Channel off Ostend and, hoping to get a bearing from a point on land, turned south toward the coast of Holland, a place notorious for shoals. On September 21, he located himself not far from the Dutch seaside resort of Scheveningen; he was fifty miles off course. Stopping his electric motors to conserve their batteries, and hoping to rest his weary crew, he took the submarine down to fifty feet where, still pitching and rolling, U-9 spent the night.
At dawn on September 22, U-9 started her electric motors and rose to the surface. Weddigen had traveled 200 miles on this patrol so far and was ready to turn back for home. Before leaving, he decided to take a last look at his surroundings. When her periscope broke the surface, Weddigen and his First Officer, Johann Spiess, got an agreeable surprise: “Light streamed from the eastern horizon and spread over a cloudless sky,” Spiess wrote after the war. “The wind was a whisper and the sea was calm save for a long, low swell. Visibility was excellent. The horizon was a clear, sharp line where sea met sky. . . . A few Dutch fishing boats lay shadowed against the sunrise as if in some vividly colored print.” There was nothing else. The submarine rose and lay on the surface, and Weddigen went down for breakfast. While the captain was below, Spiess in the conning tower spotted smoke and a mast on the horizon. He immediately turned off the kerosene motors to eliminate the column of smoke overhead and summoned the captain. Weddigen hurried up the ladder, took a look, and ordered the U-boat to dive.
At periscope depth, Weddigen, glued to his eyepiece, watched the mast grow into a ship, then two ships, then three. They were warships steaming parallel, 4,000 yards apart. He thought at first that they must be a screen for a fleet, but, seeing no larger ships behind, he made preparations to attack. Steering in their direction, alternately raising and lowering his periscope, he reported, “three cruisers, each with four funnels.” “I could see their gray-black sides riding high out of the water.” Weddigen steered for the middle ship of the three. Approaching on his target’s port bow, he moved in close “to make my aim sure.” At 6:20 a.m., he fired a torpedo from bow tube number 2 and ordered a dive to fifty feet. As the submarine slid down, the crew listened. At a range of 550 yards, the time required for the torpedo to travel to the target and for the sound of an explosion to travel back would be thirty-one seconds. Thirty-one seconds later, the submariners heard “a dull thud, followed by a shrill-toned crash.” Cheers broke out on U-9, and Weddigen and Spiess forgot formality and slapped each other on the back.
The torpedo hit Aboukir amidships on the starboard side below the waterline. Water flooded into the engine and boiler rooms, bringing the cruiser to a stop and causing a list to port. On the bridge, Captain Drummond, seeing no sign of a submarine, assumed that his ship had hit a mine. He hoisted the mine warning signal and ordered the other two cruisers to come closer so that he could transfer his wounded men. As Aboukir’s list increased to twenty degrees, he tried to right her by flooding compartments on the opposite side. The list increased and it became obvious that the ship would sink, but when “Abandon ship” was sounded, only a single boat was available. The others had been smashed in the explosion or could not be swung out and lowered for lack of steam to power the winches. Twenty-five minutes after she was hit, Aboukir capsized. She floated, her red-painted bottom up, for five minutes, tempting a few seamen to scramble up her slimy bottom and cling to her keel. When she sank, the clingers went with her.
As Hogue and Cressy approached to help, Captain Wilmot Nicholson of Hogue realized that he was dealing with a submarine and signaled Cressy to look out for a periscope. Even so, Nicholson steamed slowly among the men in the water while his crew threw overboard mess tables, chairs, anything that would float, and then stopped and lowered all his boats. His men—those who had a moment to look—were transfixed by a sight none of them had ever seen: a big ship rolling over in her death agony. One young officer remembered seeing “the sun shining on pink, naked men walking down her sides, inch by inch, as she heeled over, some standing, others sitting down and sliding into the water, which was soon dotted with heads.” At 6:55 a.m., as Aboukir was giving her final lurch, Hogue, nearby, was struck by two torpedoes, five seconds apart. There was “a terrific crash . . .” recalled an officer, “the ship lifted up, quivering all over . . . a second later, another, duller crash and a great cloud of smoke followed by a torrent of water.”
After firing a single torpedo at Aboukir and going deep, Weddigen cautiously brought U-9 back near the surface and raised his periscope. Watching the stricken Aboukir, he saw white steam blowing out of the ship’s four funnels as the cruiser heeled over and was impressed by the “brave sailors,” remaining at their gun stations. He also saw Hogue and Cressy creeping through the water, lowering boats. He now knew that his target had not been a light cruiser, as he had originally believed, but a large armored cruiser. And before his eyes were two identical sisters. Weddigen reloaded his empty torpedo tube and selected his second target, Hogue. Through his periscope, he saw the big, gray, four-funneled ship, her White Ensign waving in the morning breeze, her colored signal flags fluttering from their halyards. The ship was stationary, only 300 yards away. Taking no chances, Weddigen fired both bow tubes. As the two torpedoes leaped from the tubes, the shift in weight distribution affected the submarine’s balance and her bow rose and suddenly broke the surface. Hogue’s gunners immediately opened fire. Weddigen struggled to regain ballast, succeeded, and took the U-boat down again to fifty feet. A few seconds later he heard two explosions.
Hogue’s gunners continued to fire even after the two torpedoes exploded against her side. Captain Nicholson ordered all watertight doors closed, but within five minutes the quarterdeck was awash and the cruiser rolled over to starboard. An explosion sounded deep inside and Nicholson repeated the order given by Captain Drummond: “Abandon ship.” Ten minutes after she was struck, Hogue capsized. When she sank, at 7:15 a.m., her boats were just returning with the survivors of Aboukir.
Weddigen, advised by his chief engineer that his electric batteries were running low, nevertheless decided to continue his attack. Two torpedoes remained in U-9’s stern tubes and he had one reserve for a bow tube. Coming back up to periscope depth, he and Spiess looked and saw the water “littered with wreckage, crowded lifeboats, and drowning men.” The third cruiser had stopped to rescue survivors. Weddigen maneuvered so that his stern was aimed at this immobile ship and at 7:20 a.m., one hour after his first shot, he fired both stern torpedoes. “This time we were so bold that we did not dive below periscope depth but watched,” Spiess said. “The range was a thousand yards. We waited and then a dull crash came. We waited for the second. But it never came. The second torpedo had missed.” Weddigen had one torpedo left. He brought the U-boat around again, aimed the bow at the enemy, moved in to 550 yards, and fired his last torpedo.
When a periscope was reported on Cressy’s port bow 300 yards away, Captain Robert Johnson opened fire and put his engines to full speed, intending to ram. He saw and hit nothing and Cressy slowed, stopped, and lowered her boats. While his crew attempted to rescue the men in the water, Johnson began sending wireless signals to the Admiralty: “Aboukir and Hogue sinking! . . .” The message and position were constantly repeated. About five minutes later, a periscope was seen on the starboard quarter and the track of a torpedo at a range of 500 yards was plainly visible. “Full speed ahead, both,” Johnson ordered, but he was too late. Before Cressy could gather momentum, she was hit forward on the starboard side. Those already in the water saw “a sudden explosion and a great column of smoke, black as ink.” The cruiser heeled about ten degrees to starboard, then momentarily righted herself. A second torpedo passed behind her stern, but at 7:30, about a quarter of an hour after the first hit, a third torpedo struck the ship on the port beam, rupturing the tanks in a boiler room and smothering the men there in scalding steam. On deck, Captain Johnson walked around saying, “Keep cool, my lads. Pick up a spar and put it under your arm. That’ll keep you afloat until the destroyers pick you up.” Cressy rolled over to starboard and lay on her side. She paused, then continued to roll until she was floating bottom up with her starboard propeller out of the water. She remained in this position for another twenty minutes and then, at 7:55 a.m., she too went down. Cressy’s distress signal was picked up by Tyrwhitt at 7:07 a.m. The first message gave no account of what had happened or where they were, but Tyrwhitt said, “Knowing where they were supposed to be, I dashed off at full speed and a few minutes later we received their position from Cressy and part of a signal which ended abruptly and then there was no more.”
Cressy’s survivors suffered even more than the crews of her sisters. All of Cressy’s boats had been away, picking up survivors of Hogue and Aboukir; these now returned crowded with men from the other ships. Survivors struggled to climb over the gunwales; as many as five men clung to a single life jacket and a dozen to a single plank. There were Dutch fishing trawlers nearby, but having seen three big ships explode, capsize, and go down before their eyes, they hesitated to approach. Not until 8:30 a.m. did a small Dutch steamship, Flora, out of Rotterdam, arrive, and, regardless of danger, rescue 286 men. “It was very difficult,” said the captain of Flora. “The survivors were exhausted and we were rolling heavily. All were practically naked and some were so exhausted that they had to be hauled aboard with tackle.” Another small Dutch steamer, the Titan, rescued 147 men. Then two British trawlers arrived and pulled more men from the sea. Commodore Tyrwhitt with his eight destroyers came up at 10:45 a.m. Tyrwhitt steamed alongside an English trawler loaded with men and later recalled, “They looked just like rows and rows of swallows on telegraph lines, all huddled together to keep themselves warm; they were all naked or nearly so.” Four of the destroyers began to take aboard survivors from the trawler, while the other four began to hunt for the U-boat. Of those aboard the three old armored cruisers, 837 were disembarked at Harwich, shoeless, wrapped in blankets, their hair and bodies soaked in oil. Sixty-two officers and 1,397 men had drowned.
Weddigen watched his last torpedo hit Cressy’s side, producing a white cloud of smoke and steam. As the stricken cruiser slowly rolled over to port, “men climbed like ants over her side and then, as she turned turtle completely, they ran about on her broad flat keel until a few minutes later, she slid beneath waves.” The U-boat captain was filled with admiration for the British sailors. “She careened far over but all the while the men of the Cressy . . . stayed at their guns looking for their invisible foes. They were brave and true to their country’s sea traditions.” Then, jubilant, Weddigen set a course for Wilhelmshaven, knowing that in the relatively calm sea, British destroyers soon would be coming. His electric power was almost exhausted and he could not remain submerged. On the surface, he saw that the weather was radiant and the swell of the ocean had subsided even more. There was no sign of destroyers, but it could not be long, and U-9 was vulnerable. She could not outrun them; with her plume of kerosene smoke, she could not hide; lacking electrical power, she could not submerge for long. Accordingly, he steered for the Dutch coast, deciding to risk grounding on the shoals in an effort to lose the silhouette of his conning tower against the outline of the shore. At noon, he caught sight of Tyrwhitt’s pursuing destroyers coming up fast, each throwing an enormous bow wave, but fortunately, they did not detect the small U-boat. That night, he again sank to the bottom to wait. At dawn the following day, Weddigen rose to find another clear morning and an empty ocean. As he approached the lightship at the mouth of the Ems, he signaled, “On 22 September between six and nine a.m., U-9 sank three British warships . . . with six torpedoes.”
Rumors of the victory had reached Germany the previous night, following the arrival of Flora and Titan in Holland. On the twenty-fourth, U-9 arrived in Wilhelmshaven to receive an enthusiastic reception from the ships of the High Seas Fleet. Thereafter, all Germany rose in ovation at Weddigen’s achievement. The kaiser awarded Weddigen the Iron Cross, First Class. The Iron Cross, Second Class went to every member of U-9’s crew. Weddigen became Germany’s first naval hero of the war. With a 493-ton boat and twenty-eight men, he had sunk 36,000 tons of British warships and killed nearly 1,400 British seamen. The effect was enormous in neutral countries where, although the prowess of the German army was taken for granted, the supremacy of the British navy had never been doubted.
In Great Britain, the shock was profound. No one believed the German announcement that the catastrophe had been the work of a single U-boat; it was assumed that as many as five or six submarines must have been involved. “It is well-known that German submarines operate in flotillas of six boats,” declared The Times on September 25. “If it is true that only one, U-9, returned to harbor, we may assume that the others are lost.” Practically speaking, the loss of the three old ships scarcely affected the overwhelming superiority of the Royal Navy. The three cruisers, said Churchill, were “of no great value; they were among . . . [our] oldest cruisers and contributed in no appreciable way to our vital margins.” It was the loss of life and the blow to Britain’s naval prestige that stunned the nation. The number of men who died was small compared to the casualties the army was suffering in France, but the suddenness and totality of the loss at sea struck hard. From within the navy came harsh criticism. Beatty, once a lieutenant on Aboukir, wrote to his wife, “We heard Aboukir crying out yesterday morning . . . over 400 miles away, but never contemplated it was a disaster of . . . [this] magnitude. . . . It was bound to happen. Our cruisers had no conceivable right to be where they were . . . sooner or later they would surely be caught by submarines or battle cruisers. . . . It was inevitable and faulty strategy on the part of the Admiralty.” From retirement, Fisher wrote angrily, “It was pure murder sending those big armoured ships in the North Sea.”
A wave of public criticism rolled over the First Lord. Later, Churchill himself ironically summarized his opponent’s arguments: “The disaster . . . followed from the interference of a civilian minister in naval operations and the over-riding of the judgement of skilful and experienced admirals.” In fact, of course, the dispositions were the responsibility of the First Sea Lord and the Chief of Staff, while the faulty tactics were the fault of the admiral and captains on the scene. These, Churchill did not spare: “One would expect senior officers in command of cruiser squadrons to judge for themselves the danger of their task and especially of its constant repetition; and while obeying orders, [they] should have spoken up, rather than going on day after day and week after week, until superior authority intervened or something lamentable happened. . . . Moreover, although the impulse which prompted the Hogue and Cressy to go to the rescue of their comrades in the sinking of the Aboukir was one of generous humanity, they could hardly have done anything more unwise or more likely to add to the loss of life. They should at once have steamed away in opposite directions, lowering boats at the first opportunity.”
Officially, a naval Court of Inquiry, employing hindsight, declared that “a cruiser patrol established in a limited area at so short a distance from an enemy’s submarine base was certain to be attacked by submarines, and the withdrawal of the destroyers increased the chance of a successful attack, while diminishing those of saving life.” On October 2, Admiral Christian was removed from command and placed on half pay. Battenberg later exonerated him and also made allowances for the three ship captains, who “were placed in a cruel position, once they found themselves in waters swarming with drowning men.” Captain Drummond was criticized for not zigzagging and for not ordering out destroyers on the night of the twenty-first as the weather began to moderate, but praised for his conduct once his ship had been hit. Battenberg did not feel that a court-martial for Drummond was justified, but he remained on half pay and did not command again at sea. When Fisher arrived at the Admiralty two months later, he observed “that most of the officers concerned were on half pay, that they had better remain there, and that no useful purpose could be served by further action.”
The sinking of the three ships stimulated immediate changes. The two surviving sisters, Euryalus and Bacchante, were banished from the North Sea and sent to duty at Gibraltar, beyond the range of U-boats. Zigzagging at 13 knots was made mandatory for all large warships in submarine waters. The Admiralty sent a grim command to the navy: “If one ship is torpedoed or strikes a mine, the disabled ship must be left to her fate, and other large ships clear out of the dangerous area, calling up minor vessels to render assistance.” Never again, either in Parliament or the press or at one of his London clubs, did Admiral Lord Charles Beresford describe submarines as “playthings” or “toys.”
Three weeks later, Otto Weddigen was back at sea and, because British captains were still ignoring both the lesson of the Bacchantes and Admiralty orders, he sank a fourth British armored cruiser, this time off Aberdeen on the coast of Scotland. Six ancient ships of the 10th Cruiser Squadron, including the twenty-three-year-old, 7,350-ton Hawke, were patrolling off Aberdeen. On the morning of October 15, these vessels were spread in patrol formation at ten-mile intervals. At 9:30 a.m., Hawke and her sister Endymion stopped dead in the water for fifteen minutes to permit Hawke to send a boat to pick up mail. By 10:30, Endymion had moved out of sight and Hawke, her boat rehoisted, was proceeding at 13 knots but without zigzagging. Suddenly, there was an explosion under her forward funnel, she began to list, and there was time only to lower two boats before she capsized and sank. Because the squadron had steamed over the horizon, none of this was known until, at 1:20 p.m., another ship in the squadron reported a submarine attack. Immediately, the flagship signaled all ships to steam northwest at full speed. All ships replied, except Hawke. A destroyer, sent to search, found a boat holding twenty-one men; a day later a Norwegian steamer picked up another forty-nine survivors from a second boat. The rest of the crew, nearly 500 men, was lost.
Thirty-six hours after Jellicoe learned that Hawke had been torpedoed, he received a report that a U-boat was inside the Grand Fleet base at Scapa Flow. Convinced now that neither the North Sea nor Scapa Flow was safe for the Grand Fleet, the Commander-in-Chief asked permission to withdraw it still farther to the west. Reluctantly, the Admiralty authorized the temporary transfer of two battle squadrons to two new harbors, Loch-na-Keal, on the Isle of Mull on the Scottish west coast, and Lough Swilly, on the east coast of northern Ireland. Both harbors had narrow, easily defended entrances, and Lough Swilly also had a shallow bottom which would make entry difficult for a submerged submarine. Ironically, Jellicoe’s search for security by shifting his battle squadrons led to the Grand Fleet’s first major loss. Having preserved his dreadnought fleet intact for the first three months of the war, he suddenly was stripped of one of his most powerful ships when the new 23,000-ton dreadnought Audacious, carrying ten 13.5-inch guns, was sunk—not by gunfire or a torpedo, but by a German mine.
Because a mine cannot distinguish the nationality of a ship that runs into it, the Hague Convention of 1907 had agreed to keep the open seas free of these lethal weapons floating beneath the ocean’s surface. Belligerents were permitted to lay offensive minefields only in hostile territorial waters; that is, within three miles of an enemy’s coast. Nevertheless, because the North Sea is generally shallow and therefore particularly suitable for moored contact mines, the German navy, preparing for war, began accumulating a large stock with the intention of using them aggressively. Beginning on the war’s first day, when the converted steamer Königin Luise laid her mines off the Suffolk coast, German ships and submarines placed over 25,000 mines in the North Sea, most of them in defiance of the Hague Convention. Commodore Tyrwhitt was appalled by this “indiscriminate and distinctly barbarian mining.” Expecting a short war, he noted that “it will be months before the North Sea is safe for yachting.”
When war came, the British navy was wholly unprepared for large-scale mining, offensive or defensive. Mines had been effectively used in the Russo-Japanese War; Lord Fisher, always open to new weapons and new tactics, had been impressed. But the navy in general considered the mine, like the submarine, a “cowardly weapon,” “the weapon of the weak,” “a weapon no chivalrous nation should use.” Britain, accordingly, possessed few mines and no offensive mining strategy or equipment. In the first ten days of October, a small defensive minefield was laid in an attempt to seal off the northern approaches to the Channel, but the enterprise failed. British mines, poorly designed and constructed, sometimes blew up under the sterns of the minelayers. And within a few weeks, the anchored mines began to break loose from their moorings and drift down the Channel, making passage dangerous for British cross-Channel traffic. Equipment for dealing with German mines was equally inadequate. Before the war, only fourteen elderly British destroyers had been converted into minesweepers. When Jellicoe took command, the Grand Fleet was assigned a total of six.
Lacking minesweepers, the Admiralty discovered that the most effective method of dealing with German mines was to sink the minelayers. Success in this effort was rare. One notable moment came on October 17, when the light cruiser Undaunted and four destroyers of Tyrwhitt’s Harwich Force patrolling off the Dutch coast encountered four old German destroyers steaming west across the southern North Sea. The ships, S-115, S-117, S-118, and S-119, each carrying twelve mines, had left the Ems at 3:30 a.m. Their mission was to lay their mines at the mouth of the Thames, but when they met Undaunted and her squadron at 1:30 p.m., they turned and ran for home. The top speed of the German ships was 20 knots—that of the British, 30; by midafternoon, two Germans had been sunk and the other two, turning back to help, also went to the bottom. Thirty German officers and men from the four ships survived.
Eleven days later, on October 28, the Germans struck back. In mid-October, the fast, 17,000-ton North German Lloyd liner Berlin, armed as a cruiser and equipped with a large number of mines, passed through the North Sea into the Atlantic with orders to mine the approaches to Glasgow on the river Clyde. Off the northern Irish coast, however, Berlin’s captain decided to alter his plan and lay his mines off Tory Island, northwest of Lough Swilly, then serving as a Grand Fleet anchorage. The German captain was unaware of the Grand Fleet’s presence; he chose the site because it lay across the main trade route from Liverpool to America. On the night of October 22, Berlin laid 200 mines across the entrance to the channel used by most shipping in and out of Liverpool. Berlin then sailed north to attack trade with Archangel, but was damaged in autumn gales and forced to seek shelter in Trondheim, where she was promptly interned by the government of Norway. Meanwhile, on October 26, the Tory Island minefield claimed its first victim when the British merchantman Manchester Commerce struck a mine and sank. For several days, word of this loss reached neither the Admiralty nor Jellicoe aboard Iron Duke at Lough Swilly.
Believing that the fleet was safe, Jellicoe ordered Vice Admiral Sir George Warrender to take his battle squadron—the eight newest and most powerful dreadnoughts in the Grand Fleet—to sea for gunnery practice. At 9:00 a.m. on the morning of October 28, the squadron, with Audacious steaming third in line, was just turning onto the gunnery range when a violent explosion occurred under the port side aft of Audacious. The port and center engine rooms began to flood and the vessel began to settle by the stern. No one knew the cause of the explosion, but as a minefield so far to the west seemed implausible, a torpedo appeared the likely culprit. Following Admiralty orders issued after the sinking of Cressy and her sisters, Warrender hurriedly asked Lough Swilly to send help, then gathered up the rest of his squadron and sailed away.
At first, Captain Cecil Dampier of Audacious believed that she was sinking so fast he must abandon her. Presently, as the escorting light cruiser Liverpool circled the dreadnought at high speed, the settling slowed and Dampier found that the battleship still could make 9 knots on her starboard engine. He decided that if he could make the twenty-five miles to Lough Swilly, he might be able to beach her there before she sank. Jellicoe, meanwhile, ordered every available vessel—destroyer, tug, and trawler—out from Lough Swilly and Loch-na-Keal to assist Audacious and to prevent the submarine—if one was present—from attacking again. Until he was certain that no U-boat was present, Jellicoe did not dare send a battleship to attempt a tow, but the old predreadnought Exmouth was put on short notice to be ready to go. Meanwhile, Vice Admiral Sir Lewis Bayly, commander of the other battle squadron still at anchor in Lough Swilly, offered to go to Audacious by destroyer and take command of the salvage effort. Jellicoe agreed.
For two hours, Audacious struggled under her own power, moving fifteen miles nearer Lough Swilly, with the water rising steadily inside her hull. At 10:50 a.m., the remaining engine room was swamped and the vessel came to a halt. Dampier brought her bow around to the sea, and began sending away his crew in boats to the surrounding smaller craft. Because the captain still believed he had a chance to save his ship he and 250 volunteers remained on board as a working party. Nevertheless, Audacious continued inexorably to settle. Then, at 1:30 p.m., the 45,000-ton White Star liner Olympic, sister of the iceberg-destroyed Titanic, on the last day of a voyage from New York to Liverpool, appeared. Responding to distress signals, Olympic’s captain, H. J. Haddock, volunteered to help. Dampier asked Haddock to take his ship in tow and Haddock, ignoring the threat of submarines or mines, attempted to comply. Destroyers carried hawsers from Audacious to the liner, but although Haddock managed to make a little headway with the battleship in tow, the heavy seas and the weight of the sinking dreadnought quickly made the task impossible; Audacious, shearing into the wind, repeatedly snapped the hawsers.
In the early afternoon, a report of the sinking of the Manchester Commerce the night before by a mine in the same vicinity reached Jellicoe. At 4:40 p.m., the admiral also learned that a four-masted sailing vessel had struck a mine the previous night in the same area. At 5:00 p.m., Jellicoe, now certain that Audacious had been mined, not torpedoed, ordered Exmouth to sail from Lough Swilly and attempt to tow in the sinking ship. But by the time Exmouth arrived, it was too late. Admiral Bayly, Captain Dampier, and the few officers and men still on board were taken off and the waterlogged ship was abandoned. Liverpool was ordered to stand by through the night, but at 9:00 p.m., after a twelve-hour struggle, Audacious suddenly capsized and, a few seconds later, blew up. Ironically, this explosion in the empty vessel was responsible for the only casualty in the sinking of the battleship. A piece of debris, flying 800 yards, landed on the deck of Liverpool, where it killed a watching petty officer.
Jellicoe, dismayed by this loss of a dreadnought, was desperately anxious that the sinking be kept a secret. That night, when Olympic reached Lough Swilly, the admiral prohibited any communication between ship and shore. Then he signaled the Admiralty, urging that the news be suppressed. The Grand Fleet’s margin in numbers over the High Seas Fleet was so slight—Jellicoe reckoned that he now had seventeen serviceable dreadnoughts to Ingenohl’s fifteen—that knowledge of this loss might bring the Germans out at the wrong time. Jellicoe realized that, owing to the presence of Olympic, the loss probably could not be concealed for long, but any time he could gain would help. Churchill and his colleagues agreed, but because concealment of naval losses was so contrary to British and Royal Navy tradition, the Admiralty could not issue this order on its own. The decision went up to the Cabinet.
The Cabinet decided to withhold the news, but its decision was based less on the situation in the North Sea than on the situation in the eastern Mediterranean. In Constantinople, by October 28 and 29, the Germans, aided by the presence of Goeben, were on the brink of persuading Turkey to enter the war. Most Turks, the British ambassador warned London, now expected the Germans to win, and news of a dramatic German victory in the form of the sinking of a modern dreadnought might tip the scale. Accordingly, the Cabinet granted Jellicoe’s request. This did no good with regard to Turkish neutrality. Two days later, Admiral Souchon took his battle cruiser and other ships into the Black Sea to bombard Russian ports, and Turkey entered the war.
Even so, for several days, Olympic was detained at Lough Swilly. A number of American passengers were on board, many of whom had lined the rails, snapping their Brownie cameras while the liner attempted to tow the sinking battleship. *12 On November 14, the Philadelphia Public Ledger published a photograph of Audacious sinking. Nevertheless, news of the loss was officially suppressed and the Admiralty announced only that the ship had been damaged. Her crew was instructed to keep the loss a secret and the men were quietly reassigned to other ships. Thereafter until the end of the war, Audacious remained on all lists of ships and fleet movements. *13 Her sinking was announced on November 13, 1918, two days after the armistice that ended the war. By then, the ship had achieved another distinction: of the forty-one British dreadnought battleships that fought in the Great War, Audacious was the only one lost to enemy action.
Four days after the sinking of Audacious, Jellicoe traveled to London to confer with Churchill and the new First Sea Lord, Jacky Fisher. In preparation for this meeting, the Commander-in-Chief wrote a letter to the Admiralty, dated October 30, explaining his concerns about the dangers to his fleet from submarines and mines. Prewar estimates as to the capabilities of German U-boats had been found to be too low: the sighting of U-boats as far north as the Orkneys on the fourth day of the war had convinced Jellicoe that his heavy ships were threatened no matter where they were in the North Sea. His reaction was to move his fleet ever farther away. Already, on September 30, he had written to Churchill, “It is suicidal to forgo our advantageous position in the big ships by risking them in waters infested with submarines. The result might quite easily be such a weakening of our battle fleet and battle cruiser strength as seriously to jeopardize the future of the country by giving over to the Germans the command of the open seas.” Until the threat could be dealt with, Jellicoe suggested, he should operate the battle fleet at a latitude of 60 degrees north—above the Orkneys—with a line of cruisers spread 120 miles to the south to continue the blockade. The Admiralty did not approve, and recurring sweeps by the fleet in the northern half of the North Sea continued.
In his October 30 letter, Jellicoe formally restated his intended battle tactics. The Germans, he said, “rely to a great extent on submarines, mines, and torpedoes and . . . will endeavour to make the fullest use of them [in a naval battle. However, they] cannot rely on having all of their submarines and minelayers available unless the battle is fought in the southern North Sea. My object will therefore be to fight in the northern North Sea.” At some point, Jellicoe continued, he expected the two main fleets to meet. When this happened, he would seek a long-range, heavy-gun action; the Germans probably would attempt to involve submarines as well as surface ships. If U-boats accompanied the High Seas Fleet, Jellicoe advised the Admiralty, he would be cautious before rushing into battle.
“This may and probably will involve a refusal to move in the invited direction,” he continued.
If, for instance, the enemy battle fleet were to turn away from our advancing fleet, I should assume the intention was to lead us over mines and submarines and decline to be so drawn. I desire particularly to draw the attention of their Lordships to this point since it may be deemed a refusal of battle and might possibly result in failure to bring the enemy to action as soon as it is expected. Such a result would be absolutely repugnant to the feelings of all British naval officers and men, but with new, untried methods of warfare, new tactics must be devised. . . . [These,] if not understood, may bring odium upon me, but so long as I have the confidence of their Lordships, I intend to pursue the proper course to defeat and annihilate the enemy’s battle fleet, without regard to uninstructed opinion or criticism.
The situation is a difficult one: it is quite possible that half our battle fleet might be disabled by underwater attack before the guns opened fire at all. . . . The safeguard against submarines will consist in moving the battle fleet at very high speed to a flank before the gun action commences. This will take us off the ground on which the enemy desires to fight. . . . [But] if the battle fleets remain in sight of one another . . . the limited submerged radius of action and speed of submarines will prevent them from following . . . [the surface ships] and I feel that, after an interval of high-speed maneuvering, I could safely close.
This cautious attitude was to dominate Jellicoe’s handling of the Grand Fleet during his years as Commander-in-Chief. The primary purpose of the navy, Jellicoe believed, was not destruction of the enemy fleet, but command of the sea with the accompanying ability to maintain the blockade. He was entrusted with the safety of the dreadnought fleet; his greatest fear was that, by chance or a trap, he might find himself in a situation where torpedoes or mines would suddenly devastate his fleet and critically alter the balance of naval strength. The truth was, Jellicoe believed that however agreeable it might be to defeat the High Seas Fleet, doing so was not an absolute prerequisite to winning the war at sea. He therefore had little interest in a pell-mell, winner-take-all attack, wherever and whenever the enemy battle fleet might appear. Such caution might not be in the tradition of Nelson, but no previous British admiral had confronted invisible weapons such as submarines and mines.
To put such a proposal in October 1914 before an Admiralty about to court-martial Admiral Troubridge for his failure to hurl his squadron at Goeben required unassailable self-confidence and an iron sense of purpose. But on November 7, the new Admiralty Board approved the Commander-in-Chief’s letter and assured him of its “full confidence in your contemplated conduct of the fleet in action.” Jellicoe, cautious as always, sent a copy of his letter and the original of the Admiralty reply to his bankers for safekeeping.