CHAPTER 18

The Scarborough Raid: “Within Our Claws”

Before the Great War, Scarborough, on the Yorkshire coast, was known as the Queen of Watering Places in the north of England. The town’s reputation owed much to its magnificent site: rolling green moors ended abruptly in a sweeping curve of high cliffs overlooking wide beaches of brown, tidal sand. Two broad bays, north and south, are divided by a headland rising 300 feet from the sea; the headland is crowned by a ruined medieval castle with walls eighty feet high and twelve feet thick. Towering over the surf at its base, the great castle on the high rock rears up like a symbol of a defiant, unconquerable England.

The fine sea bathing brought vacationers to Scarborough; once there, they were offered other diversions. The South Cliff promenade provided a panoramic view of the broad sands, the castle, the bay, and the North Sea. Footpaths, crisscrossing down the cliffside, allowed strollers to pass through gardens, rest on gazebo benches, and eventually emerge at a handsome spa on the water’s edge. The town had two theaters, a music hall, an aquarium, and a museum, all permanently booked or heavily patronized. In the summers, Scarborough’s population swelled from a winter low of 40,000 to a high of 200,000, and the large hotels along the clifftop esplanades had no rooms to let. The largest of these, the Grand Hotel, an immense Victorian pile of red and orange brick, was famous throughout Europe. The architect had invoked a chronological theme: four corner towers represented the seasons of the year, twelve stories represented the months, fifty-two chimneys the weeks, and 365 rooms the days. Ultimately, not all of the chimneys or rooms were built, but when it opened in 1867, a journalist reported that in its “greatness, vastness of enterprise, magnificence of appearance and sensational result,” the Grand Hotel “reflected the tastes and tendencies of the pres-ent age.”

In winter, the bathers and strollers departed and a northern austerity settled over the town. As sea and sky turned gray, the fishermen still came and went with the tide, but the rest of the permanent population retired into semihibernation. The war did not change this behavior. Scarborough had no harbor, only a small stone-walled tidal basin, beneath the castle rock, which gave refuge to North Sea herring boats. The town had no industry, no military significance, and no defense.

On Wednesday, December 16, 1914, a heavy mist hanging over the sea and harbor made early morning even darker than usual. At eight o’clock, some townspeople were still in bed; others were getting up; others were having breakfast by gaslight. Suddenly, over the drowsy town, there burst a series of explosions. Hotel guests with rooms on the sea stumbled to their windows. Through the mist they saw and heard stabbing spurts of flame, followed by loud, reverberating booms. “I could see in the mist the outline of a ship only about a mile and a half from the shore, north of the castle headland,” said one hotel guest. “It was steaming slowly south across the bay, discharging salvos.” Fay Lonsdale, a well-known actress, was appearing at a theater in town and staying at the Grand Hotel. “Just before eight o’clock, I heard a tremendous noise and got out of bed,” she said. “I looked out the window and saw a huge flame and cloud of smoke. . . . Then, near the front of my room, a shell struck and the room shook. I got under the table, still partly dressed. Someone shouted, ‘Come downstairs.’ I joined the other residents and maids in the cellar.”

There was more than one ship off Scarborough and the sound of guns merged into a continuing roll of thunder. The flames flashed in the fog; there followed a brief pause, then the boom of the guns, another pause, then the rumble of explosions somewhere in the town. Again and again, the townspeople heard the whistling shriek of incoming shells. When the projectiles came close, the shriek was cut short by a tremendous crash, the shattering of glass, the rumbling of collapsing roofs, and the sudden upward boil of a column of dirty smoke.

The townspeople understood that they were under bombardment. Some remained calm: Sir George Sitwell, father of Edith, Osbert, and Sacheverell, went down to the cellar, but his wife, Lady Ida, remained “resolutely in bed.” Most people, some still in nightclothes, ran into the streets. Men tended to run to the cliffs or the seawall to see what was happening; women grabbed their children and rushed away from the sea, looking for a cellar or some other place of shelter. Soon, thousands of people were streaming through the streets, making their way to the railway station, where they crowded into every railway car standing there, even those not attached to engines. Others jammed the main road, which led up onto the moors behind the town.

Not everyone escaped. At eight o’clock, a postman named Alfred Beal was delivering mail in Filey Road. Margaret Griggs, a maidservant, had just opened the door and Beal was handing her letters when a shell burst against the side of the house. Beal and Griggs both died instantly. John Hall, a member of the town council, was dressing in his bedroom when a shell broke his leg and arm and pierced his chest. When his daughter ran into the room, he told her that he “was killed.” He died on the way to the hospital.

Scarborough Castle, the town’s most prominent landmark, became a target. The high walls of the keep and the outer southern wall were hit and an old yeomanry barracks was demolished. The Grand Hotel, perched on a cliff above the South Bay beach, was another target. Shells punched three large holes in the seaside façade. A glass-fronted restaurant café running along the seafront was wrecked. The following morning a reporter found a welter of bricks and plaster, smashed tables and chairs, and shattered glass. In the middle of the room, he was surprised to discover an unharmed table on which stood a decanter of red wine, untouched.

The town had become a landscape of gaping holes, roofless houses, smashed timbers, scattered bricks, stones, and broken glass. The top half of a severed telegraph pole dangled from its own lines. Live wires from broken tram lines whipped on the pavement. Every hotel window facing the sea on the South Cliff was broken. Three churches were hit. One was St. Mary’s, in whose churchyard Anne Brontë, the younger sister of Charlotte and Emily, was buried. Anne, who had come to Scarborough hoping to cure, or at least stave off, her tuberculosis, died in 1849 at the age of twenty-eight. Sixty-five years later, a German shell passed over her grave and smashed in the western door of the ancient church.

At 8:30 a.m., the guns stopped firing and the ships disappeared into the mist. Seventeen people were dead and ninety-nine had been wounded, all civilians.

Whitby was next. A fishing village twenty-one miles north of Scarborough at the mouth of the river Esk, Whitby possessed an architectural treasure in its twelfth-century abbey standing on a cliff above the town. At nine o’clock that morning, two warships approached from the south. About a mile from shore, they opened fire at their primary target, a coast guard signal station on the cliff near the abbey. The first shell exploded against the cliff just below the station. Frederick Randall, a thirty-year-old coast guard boatman who happened to be walking out of the station, was decapitated by a flying splinter. Another shell struck the brown sandstone ruins of Whitby Abbey a few hundred yards away. Still others burst amid the red-tile-roofed houses of the town below. William Tunmore, a sixty-one-year-old railway cartman, was trying to calm his horse at a rail crossing when a shell burst nearby. He died with a splinter in his chest. Ten minutes after the bombardment had begun, it ceased. The warships departed, leaving behind two dead and two wounded.

Hartlepool, north of the river Tees and about sixty miles up the Yorkshire coast from Scarborough, was a shipbuilding and manufacturing town with a population of 90,000. In 1914, it possessed two tidal basins and six docks covering 850 acres, a boiler and engineering works, iron and brass foundries, steam-saw and timber-planing mills, paint and paper factories, and a soap works. In peacetime and even in wartime, Hartlepool exported machinery, ships, coal, iron ore, woolens, and cottons. For this reason, according to the rules of war, the town was a legitimate target for naval bombardment. Hartlepool’s military defense consisted of three nineteen-year-old 6-inch guns, mounted on the seafront, and a battalion of the Territorial Army’s Durham Light Infantry. In the harbor, the navy had stationed two obsolete light cruisers, four small destroyers, and one submarine.

The army at Hartlepool had been warned that something might happen. At midnight the night before, a War Office telegram had instructed that “a special lookout be kept all along east coast at dawn tomorrow.” Accordingly, eleven officers and 155 men of the Durham Light Infantry were aroused at 4:30 a.m. Each soldier was issued 250 rounds of ammunition and a can of tea. If nothing had happened by 11:30 a.m., the men were told, they would have the rest of the day off. Then the detachment marched off to previously dug trenches north of the town and prepared, the men assumed, to repel invasion. All three of Hartlepool’s coast artillery guns were sited in Old Hartlepool, a peninsula jutting out to sea. Two of these guns, side by side, formed the Heugh Battery; the other gun was a hundred yards away, near an old lighthouse. At 6:30 a.m., the gun crews reported themselves ready. They were not kept waiting long. At 7:46 a.m., their commander received a report that dreadnoughts had been sighted at the mouth of the Tees not far away; a few minutes later, he was told that three large ships were coming in at high speed.

The navy at Hartlepool was not specifically warned; in wartime, the navy was supposed always to be ready. Besides, standing Admiralty orders instructed that all coastal patrol vessels were to be at sea before dawn. But on the two previous days, the weather had been so poor that Rear Admiral G. A. Ballard, commanding all coastal defense vessels along the British east coast, had modified this instruction, instructing his captains to put to sea only when individually ordered to do so. Consequently, on December 16, Captain Alan C. Bruce, of the light cruiser Patrol, who was also the senior naval officer in Hartlepool, had dispatched only his four small, elderly destroyers to sea, holding his two light cruisers and his submarine in port. Hartlepool was a tidal harbor with a narrow channel; the tide was so low that morning, and the swell outside so high, that he judged an attempt to cross the bar with the cruisers and submarine to be unnecessarily hazardous.

At 7:45 a.m., Doon, Test, Waveny, and Moy were steaming on routine patrol five miles northeast of Hartlepool when men on the bridge of the division leader, Doon, became aware of three large vessels approaching from the southeast. The mist was too thick for Doon’s captain to make out the nature or nationality of the vessels, so he signaled his ships to increase speed and investigate. Five minutes later, the strange ships suddenly opened fire; simultaneously, two were recognized as German battle cruisers. Salvos began to straddle the destroyers and, as the German shells burst on contact with the water, the British ships were showered with splinters. Destroyers could harm big ships only with torpedoes and, as the British ships were beyond effective torpedo range, all but Doon turned away. Doon continued to advance; at 5,000 yards she launched a single torpedo, which missed; then she retreated with one man dead and eleven wounded.

The bombardment of the Hartlepools, beginning at 8:10 a.m., came as a shock even to the forewarned shore artillerymen. When the unfamiliar ships first appeared offshore, the waiting British gunners watched them with admiration; they seemed so large, so close, and so powerful that they could not possibly be anything but British. A group of men belonging to the Durham Light Infantry was standing together near the Heugh Battery, treating the affair as if it were a holiday display, when a shell exploded in their midst, killing seven men and wounding fourteen. Both guns of the Heugh Battery immediately fired at the leading ship. The lighthouse gun engaged the third ship in line, which was smaller than the first two. The three enemy ships were firing 11-inch, 8.2-inch, and 5.9-inch shells at the British batteries. That the batteries were not annihilated was due to a fluke: the ships were firing at such short—almost point-blank—range that there was insufficient time to permit the operation of their delayed-action fuses. Also, many of the shells were passing over the battery and hitting houses or falling onto the docks and the town behind. Other shells landing near the British guns ricocheted, bouncing along intact, before exploding.

Meanwhile, inside the harbor, Captain Bruce was trying to get Patrol out to sea. The light cruiser proceeded past the breakwater, but by the time she reached the channel to the open sea, the water around her was boiling with shell bursts. Captain Bruce ordered full speed to make a dash for it, but as Patrol came into clear view of the nearest enemy ship, now identified as an armored cruiser, two 8.2-inch shells smashed into her, killing four men, wounding seven, and forcing Bruce to steer her aground. There she remained. The other British light cruiser, Forward, spent the entire engagement in the harbor trying to raise steam. By the time she emerged, the Germans had vanished.

The submarine C-9 followed Patrol in her dash toward the sea, and the salvos that damaged Patrol splashed all around C-9. To save herself, C-9 submerged although it was near low tide and only eighteen feet of water covered the bar. She instantly grounded and took so long to pull herself out of the mud that by the time she was clear, the enemy was gone. After the raid, Roger Keyes, the Commodore of Submarine, found it “deplorable” that C-9, “which was stationed in Hartlepool solely to meet the situation which arose,” had not been out on morning patrol. With the attacking battle cruisers steaming slowly back and forth and with the armored cruiser having come to a complete halt in the middle of Tees Bay, the German ships would have made ideal targets for a submerged submarine.

The Royal Navy had failed at Hartlepool, but the British shore batteries continued their duel with the enemy ships. Poor visibility caused by mist and swirling dust from the collapse of houses immediately behind them hampered the British gunners, but they managed to track the two battle cruisers, now about 1,000 yards apart, steaming slowly northward. The two guns of the Heugh Battery aimed at the leading ship, concentrating their fire on the masts and superstructure because their 6-inch shells were exploding without much effect against the armored sides and turrets. About 8:25 a.m., both Heugh guns switched to the second ship. A few hundred yards away, the lighthouse gun was firing at and hitting the armored cruiser. Unfortunately, as the cruiser moved north, the lighthouse gun was forced to cease firing because it could no longer shoot without hitting the lighthouse. At 8:52 a.m., when the last round had been fired and the bombarding ships turned out to sea, none of the three British shore guns had been silenced.

The German naval history records that “1,150 shells of heavy, medium and light caliber had been fired at the batteries and other points of military importance in the city.” The damage was severe. The attack had begun as families were having breakfast, leaving for work, getting ready for school. When flashes of light were followed by claps of what everyone took to be thunder, a guest having breakfast in one of the hotels said with a smile, “The Germans have come.” The waiter serving him laughed. Shipyard workers who had picked up their tools at 7:30 a.m. were working at Grey’s shipyard when there was an enormous crash and a column of black water rose inside the breakwater. Seven men in the shipyard were killed and two ships under construction collapsed on the building ways. The mate of a ship in the harbor was hit in the spine by a splinter and died.

When the two battle cruisers shifted their fire from the docks and shipyards to the center of West Hartlepool, they aimed at the steelworks, the gasworks, and the railway cargo and passenger stations. A large gas tank collapsed in flames. Two other gas tanks standing close together were struck and a large volume of gas escaped; that night, with no gas for illumination, West Hartlepool was lit by candlelight. Shell bursts and fires damaged seven churches, ten public buildings, five hotels, and more than 300 houses. In East Hartlepool, three churches and the Carnegie Library were hit. Victoria Place, just behind the lighthouse, suffered worst of all; scarcely a house remained standing. Roads and pavements were covered with broken glass and shattered masonry and the air stank acridly of explosives.

As at Scarborough, people had tried to flee to the train station or to the open country. A family named Dixon was running down a street when a shell burst over them. Fourteen-year-old George, eight-year-old Margaret, and seven-year-old Albert died; Mrs. Dixon, covered with blood, was left alive holding her baby, John, who was unhurt. One shell entered a house and killed a father, a mother, and six children, leaving only an infant alive. A boy had his foot blown off. A body lay in the middle of a street surrounded by hats which been blown out the window of a hat store. Seven-year-old Sarah Wilkinson insisted on going to school, saying, “I must get that medal, mother.” She was blown to pieces in Crimdon Street. Next day, in front of a shattered house in Turnbull Street, a six-year-old boy cried out, “Look, there’s my teddy bear up there. I’m sure mother’s up there, too.”

Eighty-six civilians died in the Hartlepools and 424 were wounded. Including the casualties at Scarborough and Whitby, the German navy had killed 105 men, women, and children and wounded 525. Eight German sailors had been killed in the operation and twelve wounded.

The news that German battle cruisers had bombarded North Sea towns shocked and outraged Britain. For the first time in 247 years, English blood had been spilled on English soil by foreign naval guns. *29 The raiding ships were branded the “assassin squadron” and “the Scarborough bandits.” Winston Churchill publicly assured the mayor of Scarborough that “the stigma of the baby-killers of Scarborough will brand its officers and men while sailors sail the seas.” Sir Walter Runciman, the MP for Hartlepool, wrote to his constituents describing the attack “as a colossal act of murder by ingrained scoundrels with results that will stamp them for all time as heinous polecats.” The fact that two of the three towns were undefended drew particular fury. “The bombardment . . . was an infamous crime against humanity and against international law,” declared the Daily Chronicle of London. The law in question was the Convention on Bombardments by Naval Forces, signed at The Hague on August 17, 1907, by forty-four nations including Great Britain and Germany. Article I of the convention stated: “The attack or bombardment by naval forces of ports, towns, villages, habitations or buildings which are not defended, is prohibited.” The Chronicle drew a distinction between the different towns attacked: “So far as the Hartlepools are concerned, no complaint can be made of the enemy’s action. The bombardment of entirely undefended watering-places like Whitby and Scarborough is another matter. Such action has never in history been taken by a civilized power before the present war.”

The Germans were the primary objects of public anger, but the Royal Navy did not escape. Why had the navy failed to prevent the raid? After spending millions on dreadnoughts to ensure sea supremacy, why had English civilians died from German naval gunfire? The Admiralty, meeting the criticism, admitted that it could not provide absolute security against occasional raids and tried to put the matter into perspective. “Demonstrations of this character against unfortified towns or commercial ports, though not difficult to accomplish provided a certain amount of risk is accepted, are devoid of military significance,” the Admiralty announced. “They may cause some loss of life among the civil population and some damage to private property which is much to be regretted; but they must not in any circumstances be allowed to modify the general naval policy which is being pursued.” The British fleet, in short, would remain concentrated in the north.

Most newspapers stood by the Admiralty, pointing out that the raid had been of no military importance and that one of its purposes was to create public pressure to force the Admiralty to split the British fleet into defensive positions along the east coast. “The best police force,” remarked The Observer, “can firmly preserve general order, but cannot prevent some cases of murder, arson and burglary.” A Times editorial declared: “It would no doubt be very comforting to each cluster of dwellers on the East Coast to see a British dreadnought anchored before their front doors . . . but protection of these shores is not the primary object of the Royal Navy in War.” “The purpose of the Royal Navy,” The Times explained, “is to engage and destroy the ships of the enemy.” The press in the north of England accepted this premise, but not without qualification. “We hope that the authorities will not forget that although the shelling of a town may be insignificant from a military point of view, it is significant enough to the people who live in the town,” said the Northern Daily Mail. “No doubt the larger questions of naval strategy must take precedence over the defence of particular localities, but at the same time, we may be permitted to hope that we are not to be made a target for German ships even in the interest of higher strategy.”

British justice has age-old procedures, immune to modification even in times of war. Here, British subjects had died and jury inquests in the bombarded towns attempted to describe the causes of death and identify the perpetrators. “There has been no attack on an English town by an alien enemy for hundreds of years,” the Hartlepool coroner informed his jury. “Therefore I have no precedent for the guidance of the jury.” In Scarborough, the jury foreman asked, “Cannot we use the word ‘murder’?” The coroner replied that if the jury returned a verdict of murder, he “would have to go through the formality of binding the police over to prosecute someone.” The persons responsible, he pointed out, were the officers of the German ships, and, as the jury was bound to recognize, these persons were unavailable. Frustrated, the prosecutors terminated the proceedings.

Through the autumn, Franz Hipper had been eager to take his battle cruisers to sea and had constantly proposed new operational plans. On November 8, only five days after returning from his abortive raid on Yarmouth, the commander of the 1st Scouting Group had suggested a sortie against British merchant trade in the Skagerrak. The British, he argued, would have been forced by his approach to Yarmouth to bring their battle cruisers south to strengthen their east coast defenses; therefore, a raid to the north might catch them off guard. And if he began sinking British merchantmen in northern waters, the Grand Fleet, or part of it, was bound to rush to their aid. Whereupon, as Hipper planned it, the British warships would fall prey to the waiting U-boats he proposed to station off the Firth of Forth, Cromarty, and the entrances to Scapa Flow.

Ingenohl rejected Hipper’s proposal, but the High Seas Fleet commander recognized that something must be done. Since the Battle of the Bight, his fleet had been fretting at the inaction imposed upon it. Morale was deteriorating. The kaiser had given the Commander-in-Chief a command to hold back the fleet in order to preserve control of the Baltic and permit the release of coast defense troops to alleviate the manpower demands of the army. But William had left a loophole: “This does not, however, prevent favorable opportunities being used to damage the enemy. . . . There is nothing to be said against an attempt of the battle cruisers in the North Sea to damage the enemy.” In the language of this memorandum, Ingenohl recognized that the kaiser, eager for victories but abhorring risk, was willing to settle for smaller, even hit-and-run successes. Specifically, he was willing to expose Hipper’s battle cruisers, but not the dreadnought battleships. Accordingly, on November 16, Ingenohl asked permission to send Hipper alone back to England’s east coast, and on the nineteenth William consented. A submarine, U-27, was dispatched on the twenty-first to reconnoiter the coastal waters and locate the minefields between Scarborough and Hartlepool. The mission was secret, so much so that none of the crew were aware of its purpose; when the submarine returned, her captain reported that the shore defenses were weak, that the commercial coastal traffic was heavy, and that an area reaching out as far as twelve miles off the Yorkshire coast appeared free of mines. Planning for the operation continued. The Naval Staff insisted that all four of Hipper’s battle cruisers participate and, because Von der Tann was in dry dock for boiler repairs, Hipper’s sortie was postponed until mid-December.

The sudden annihilation of Spee’s squadron at the Battle of the Falklands was another spur to the east coast raid. The Falklands defeat had depressed the German fleet and the German people and Ingenohl believed that Hipper’s sortie might provide a tonic. Practically speaking, too, it was clear that British battle cruisers had been stripped from the Grand Fleet and dispatched to the South Atlantic. Ingenohl did not know which British ships had gone, but he was confident that Beatty’s force was now depleted by at least two. (The Germans never learned of the absence of Princess Royal.) An opportunity to attack a weakened enemy should not be ignored; Hipper must strike before these ships returned to the North Sea.

The German plan took shape: Hipper would take four battle cruisers and an armored cruiser (the British Admiralty always classified Blücher as a battle cruiser; the Germans, more accurately, listed her as a powerful armored cruiser), four light cruisers, and escorting destroyers to the Yorkshire coast. At daylight, his ships would bombard Scarborough and Hartlepool while one of his cruisers laid mines in the coastal shipping lanes. Ingenohl would support Hipper by taking the dreadnought battle fleet to the eastern edge of the Dogger Bank. The kaiser had forbidden Ingenohl to risk a major fleet action, and the admiral had no intention of disobeying; his hope was to lure part of the Grand Fleet over minefields, thereby harming the British without loss to himself. Ingenohl knew he was stretching his orders and he was careful to protect himself in a manner common in Imperial Germany: he did not tell the kaiser what he intended to do.

At 3:00 a.m. on December 15, Hipper’s flagship, Seydlitz, sailed from the Jade, followed by Moltke, Von der Tann, the newly completed Derfflinger, Blücher, four light cruisers, and eighteen destroyers. One of the light cruisers, Kolberg, carried a hundred mines. That afternoon, Ingenohl and the main body of the High Seas Fleet followed Hipper into the North Sea. The armada under Ingenohl’s command that day—eighty-five surface warships—was the most powerful German naval force ever to put to sea. And this did not count the twenty-seven ships that had gone ahead with Hipper. Ingenohl’s destination was the eastern edge of the Dogger Bank, where he intended to arrive at daybreak the following morning. This position would not be far enough to the west to provide effective support if Hipper got into early trouble, but it marked the extreme limit of Ingenohl’s courage.

Meanwhile, twelve hours ahead of the battle fleet, Hipper was sweeping at 15 knots across the North Sea. At first, passing Heligoland, the sea was calm and the weather hazy. At noon, a light rain began to fall. Dutch fishing trawlers were sighted and although Hipper worried that some might be acting as British spy ships, he could do nothing. Toward evening, in rising wind and heavy rain squalls, the German ships passed the Dogger Bank. Showing no lights, the destroyer flotillas closed in on the battle cruisers to provide night protection. When Hipper sighted trawlers carrying navigation lights, he altered course, hoping they would not see the big gray shapes sliding past in the darkness. As the night wore on, German radiomen began to pick up British wireless activity and Hipper worried again that one of the fishing trawlers or perhaps a British submarine had given him away. Nevertheless, emboldened by the knowledge that the main battle fleet was behind him, he steamed forward.

At midnight, one of the destroyers in Hipper’s van began calling the light cruiser Strassburg, saying, “Have lost touch. Course, please.” In reply, Strass-burg growled, “Stop wireless.” Hipper, hearing the exchange, was enraged. “Doesn’t the ship [the destroyer] know where we’re heading? Can’t they get in touch again at daylight? The fools will give us away.” Silenced, the lost destroyer, S-33, certain that she could not regain contact, reversed course for home. Along the way, however, she had an adventure. At 4:00 a.m., approaching the Dogger Bank from the west, S-33 stumbled into four British destroyers. Thinking quickly, the German captain turned his ship onto a parallel course with the British, hoping to convince them in the darkness that he was one of them. Although he was only 200 yards from the nearest ship, the ruse succeeded, and for twenty minutes S-33 steamed along in company with her enemies before slightly altering course and slipping away. Again breaking radio silence, the lost destroyer signaled Hipper the position of the four destroyers. Hipper was alarmed to learn that a British force was behind him but reasoned that the destroyers could be gobbled up in the morning by the High Seas Fleet.

An equal concern for Hipper was the rising wind and sea. S-33 had already lost touch and his other destroyers were taking a pounding. Strassburg, now nearing the English coast, reported, “Bombardment off shore not possible owing to heavy sea. Lights visible ahead. Coast not distinguishable. Cannot keep course owing to heavy sea. Turning east.” (The facts were worse than Strassburg reported. Some destroyers had rolled so heavily that they had lost their masts, their main decks were two feet under water, and their torpedo tubes, which had been unloaded, could not be reloaded.) On Seydlitz, Hipper paused to reflect. Strassburg’s Captain Retzmann was trustworthy and his reports and judgment were certain to be accurate. Hipper wondered what to do. Give up the whole enterprise just as he approached his goal? Return home again with nothing accomplished? Hold on with the battle cruisers alone? But could he dispense with the protection provided by light cruisers and destroyers if he sent these smaller ships back to the battle fleet?

Standing in Seydlitz’s chart room, the admiral turned to consult his first staff officer, Commander Erich Raeder. Before Raeder could answer, however, Hipper made up his mind.

“We’ll put this through. I’m not going to let my command down.”

“But the light forces—?” Raeder began.

“Will be sent back to the main fleet. Only the Kolberg will remain with us. She must get rid of her mines.”

At 6:35 a.m., Hipper signaled Strassburg, Stralsund, Graudenz, and the seventeen destroyers remaining with him to turn back and join Ingenohl’s main battle fleet. *30 As the light cruisers and destroyers were turning out of the wind onto an easterly course, Hipper divided the remainder of his force. Rear Admiral Tapkin with Derfflinger, Von der Tann, and Kolberg headed south for Scarborough; Hipper with Seydlitz, Moltke, and Blücher turned north, toward Hartlepool. The Southern Group under Tapkin performed its task as assigned. Initially, the battle cruisers were having trouble navigating in the thick mist along the darkened coast. Then, a brightly lighted train running south along the shore provided guidance and led the German ships to within a mile of the Scarborough headland. At 8:06 a.m., they opened fire with their secondary batteries of 5.9-inch guns. Meanwhile, Kolberg moved south and at 8:14 a.m. began to lay a minefield off Flamborough Head from the coast to ten miles out. The purpose was to block possible interference with the bombardment by the Humber or Harwich flotillas and, in the longer run, to disrupt British coastal trade. After firing for half an hour, Derfflinger and Von der Tann turned north for Whitby, where they bombarded the signal station and the town. They met no opposition.

The Northern Group, Seydlitz, Moltke, and Blücher, had a more difficult experience. At 7:18 a.m., when the German ships first arrived off Hartlepool, Hipper could see the streetlights of the town and the flames of factory furnaces. Hartlepool was known to be a defended port and the young captain of the submarine U-27, which had reconnoitered these waters, was on board the flagship, pointing out to Hipper the location of the 6-inch guns on the headland and other features of the town and harbor. Hipper’s group did not achieve complete surprise. At 7:46 a.m., a signal station at the mouth of the Tees suddenly demanded recognition signals. At 7:55 a.m., four British destroyers appeared out of the mist to the northeast. The German ships opened fire with main and secondary batteries and, amid a storm of 11-inch and 5.9-inch shells, all but one of the destroyers retreated to the north. The remaining destroyer “with remarkable coolness, in spite of heavy fire, renewed the attack,” according to the German naval history. It fired a torpedo and then it, too, turned back into the mist. Thereafter, the bombardment of Hartlepool began. Seydlitz and Moltke, steaming slowly northeast of the town, fired 154 5.9-inch shells and Moltke thirty-eight 11-inch shells at the Heugh Battery. Blücher, to the south, came to a halt in the middle of the bay and fired her 8.2-inch and 5.9-inch guns at the British gun near the lighthouse. The British batteries replied and a brisk artillery engagement ensued. The Heugh Battery hit Seydlitz three times and Moltke once. The lighthouse gun fired so accurately at Blücher that the German ship moved north out of the gun’s arc of fire. At 8:50 a.m., when Hipper’s ships turned out to sea and disappeared, none of the British guns had been silenced. Blücher had suffered four direct hits from 6-inch shells. The bridge and an 8.2-inch turret had been damaged, two 5.9-inch guns were out of action, and nine German seamen had been killed or wounded.

At 9:30 a.m., Hipper rendezvoused with the Scarborough-Whitby force, Kolberg rejoined, and Hipper signaled Ingenohl, “Operation competed. Course south south east. 23 knots.” At this moment, turning for home, Hipper was about fifty miles to the rear of the storm-beleaguered light cruisers and destroyers he had dismissed three hours earlier. These small ships, even though they were now running before the sea, were still in trouble. For this reason, the light forces had split up, each flotilla or half-flotilla proceeding on its own. Hipper wondered whether he should attempt to regather them about him, but visibility was so poor that he decided to let them continue ahead of him toward the rendezvous with the High Seas Fleet. Wanting precise information as to the battle fleet’s position, Hipper asked one of his officers, “Where is the main fleet?” He could scarcely believe the reply: “Running into the Jade.” Hipper let out “an old-fashioned Bavarian oath,” said Captain von Waldeyer-Hartz. Ingenohl had deserted Hipper; he was alone. Nor was that all. Some of his damaged light cruisers and destroyers out in front—between his battle cruisers and Germany—appeared to be encountering British warships.

The margin between the British and German fleets in the North Sea was narrower during the last two months of 1914 than at any other time during the war. Audacious had been lost. Four of Jellicoe’s battleships were refitting as a result of the strain imposed by constant sea-keeping. Three of Beatty’s battle cruisers had been withdrawn to deal with Spee’s East Asia Squadron. Never again during the whole course of the war was the situation so favorable for a German challenge to the Grand Fleet. The three British admirals most concerned, Fisher, Jellicoe, and Beatty, worried about this margin through November. After the Yarmouth raid, Fisher had a hunch that it was a precursor of things to come. He had always recognized the likelihood of German raids involving fast ships taking advantage of the usually poor visibility in the North Sea. He was certain the Germans would come again once they knew that important capital ships were absent from home waters. In late November, he alerted the navy to the probability of a “flying raid” or an “insult bombardment” against the east coast.

Jellicoe needed no warning. Convinced, like Fisher, that the Germans must know that Invincible, Inflexible, and Princess Royal were not in the North Sea, he pinpointed December 8 as the optimum day for a raid because the moon and tides would be favorable. Beatty, for his part, was anxious because if Hipper’s battle cruisers came, it would be his responsibility to intercept and engage. The ratio of British to German strength in battle cruisers was far from Beatty’s liking. On November 6, he had received the new battle cruiser Tiger, but this increase was more than wiped out by his loss of the three ships sent to hunt down Spee. Beatty now had four battle cruisers to Hipper’s five (including Blücher). Even Churchill, by nature an optimist, was wary and on December 11, he warned Jellicoe: “They can never again have such a good opportunity for successful operations as at present and you will no doubt consider how best to prepare your forces.”

The truth was that the Admiralty had more to go on than the First Lord’s intuition. Room 40 had begun to provide useful information. When the German battle cruisers began hit-and-run raiding at Yarmouth on November 4, Room 40 was not yet fully operational, but on the evening of December 14, crucial information was intercepted for the first time. At about seven o’clock that Monday night, Sir Arthur Wilson walked into Winston Churchill’s room at the Admiralty and asked for an immediate meeting with the First Sea Lord and the Chief of Staff. Fisher and Oliver quickly appeared. Wilson explained that Room 40 had pieced together the knowledge that within a few hours, the German battle cruisers and other ships would be putting to sea. There was a strong possibility that the German squadron would be off the English coast at dawn on the sixteenth. But the Room 40 codebreakers did not predict the operation in its entirety. The intercepted signals gave a clear picture of the movements of Hipper’s forces, but damagingly failed to report that Ingenohl would be bringing the High Seas Fleet out as far as the Dogger Bank. Indeed, Wilson, relying on what he had learned from Room 40, told the small group in Churchill’s office that the High Seas Fleet appeared not to be involved. Assuming this to be true, the small group in Churchill’s office decided to respond with less than maximum force. British battleships, battle cruisers, cruisers, and destroyers in sufficient number to deal easily with Hipper’s battle cruisers were assigned to act. At 9:30 p.m. on December 14, the Admiralty signaled Jellicoe at Scapa Flow:

Good information just received shows that German First [Battle] Cruiser Squadron with destroyers leave Jade River on Tuesday morning early and return on Wednesday night. It is apparent from information that battleships are very unlikely to come out. The enemy force will have time to reach our coast. Send at once, leaving tonight, the Battle Cruiser Squadron and Light Cruiser Squadron supported by a Battle Squadron, preferably the Second. At daylight on Wednesday they should be at some point where they can make sure of intercepting the enemy during his return. Tyrwhitt, with his light cruisers and destroyers, will try to get into touch with the enemy off the British coast and shadow him, keeping the Admiral informed. From our information, First [German Battle] Cruiser Squadron consists of four battle cruisers and there will probably be three flotillas of destroyers.

Another telegram, sent to Tyrwhitt at Harwich, instructed him to have his light cruisers and destroyers under way off Harwich “before daylight tomorrow.” A third telegram went to Keyes, dispatching eight submarines with their controlling destroyers, Lurcher and Firedrake, to the island of Terschelling off the Dutch coast to guard against a German move south into the Channel.

Jellicoe obeyed. The 2nd Battle Squadron, commanded by Vice Admiral Sir George Warrender, included the six newest and most powerful ships in the navy, the dreadnoughts King George V, Ajax, Centurion, Orion, Monarch, and Conqueror. The four fast, modern light cruisers of the 1st Light Cruiser Squadron, Southampton, Birmingham, Nottingham, and Falmouth, commanded by Commodore William Goodenough, had been bloodied at the Battle of the Bight. From Cromarty came Beatty’s 1st Battle Cruiser Squadron, now reduced to Lion, Queen Mary, Tiger, and New Zealand. And from Harwich, Tyrwhitt was ordered to put to sea with his light cruisers, Aurora and Undaunted, and two flotillas with a combined forty-two destroyers.

The force selected was immensely powerful, but Jellicoe was worried and annoyed by this division of his fleet; the Commander-in-Chief wished to take the entire Grand Fleet to sea. Jellicoe knew that all his many battle squadrons would not be required to deal with Hipper alone. But who could tell how reliable the Admiralty’s new intelligence source might be? It was Jellicoe’s permanent conviction that to preserve British naval supremacy the Grand Fleet must always be concentrated. The six dreadnoughts of the 2nd Battle Squadron, points out James Goldrick, “were precisely the sort of [detached] force that the Germans dreamed of being able to isolate and destroy.” *31 The Admiralty dispositions—it seemed to Jellicoe—“were giving them that chance.” When Jellicoe protested, the Admiralty made a gesture: still forbidden to bring down the whole Grand Fleet, he was permitted to bring out as insurance Rear Admiral William Pakenham’s 3rd Cruiser Squadron from Rosyth, the four armored cruisers Antrim, Devonshire, Argyll, and Roxburgh.

Ultimately, after events had proved Jellicoe correct about bringing out the entire Grand Fleet, Churchill attempted to defend the Admiralty’s bad decision: “A great deal of cruising had been imposed on the fleet owing to the unprotected state of Scapa and it was desirable to save wear and tear of machinery as much as possible. Moreover, risks of accident, submarine and mine which were incurred every time that immense organization went to sea, imposed a certain deterrent on its use except when clearly necessary. The decision was, in light of subsequent events, much regretted. But it must be remembered that the information on which the Admiralty was acting had never yet been tested, that it seemed highly speculative in character, and that for whatever it was worth, it excluded the presence at sea of the German High Seas Fleet.”

Although the Admiralty determined the strength of the force, Jellicoe remained in operational command and it was he who selected the rendezvous point, twenty-five miles southeast of the Dogger Bank in the middle of the North Sea. With over 300 miles of English coastline exposed, no one could predict where Hipper would strike. Jellicoe therefore selected the position most favorable for intercepting the German battle cruisers on their return. The rendezvous point was about 180 miles west-northwest of Heligoland and 100 miles southeast of Scarborough on the English coast; the British squadrons were to be at this position at 7:30 on the morning of December 16. Unbeknownst to anyone on either side, this spot “was only thirty miles south of the dawn rendezvous point Admiral von Ingenohl had chosen for the High Seas Fleet.”

For the purpose of intercepting Hipper’s returning ships, the rendezvous point was the best that could have been chosen. Churchill, writing later, gives the impression that it was the Admiralty that placed the ships in position to intercept; in fact, it was Jellicoe. The important point, however, is that both the Admiralty and the Commander-in-Chief had coolly decided in advance that they would not attempt to defend English seaside towns; their intention, rather, was to intercept the raiders as they returned home. This meant that the Germans would be able to bombard largely without opposition whatever towns or targets they chose. The Admiralty, applying war’s grim calculus, was prepared to accept this damage in exchange for the destruction of Hipper’s scouting groups. This decision, of course, was unknown to the citizens of Scarborough, Hartlepool, or Whitby and to the British press and general public, which, in the wake of the bombardments, asked, Where was the navy? The secret, whose purpose was to withhold from the Germans the knowledge that their codes had been broken and that Britain had early knowledge of German fleet movements, remained undisclosed until after the war.

Because Jellicoe remained at Scapa Flow with most of the Grand Fleet, command of the intercepting force went to Vice Admiral Sir George Warrender, commander of the 2nd Battle Squadron and second in rank to Jellicoe in the Grand Fleet. It was Warrender who on July 29 had been entrusted to bring the fleet to Scapa Flow, when the Commander-in-Chief, Sir George Callaghan, was summoned to London. An experienced and respected officer, Warrender had made his battle squadron the fleet’s most efficient in gunnery. Nevertheless, given the complexities of modern naval warfare and the rapidity with which decisions had to be made, Warrender should not have been in command. His mind worked gradually and his responses were further slowed by a growing deafness. Goodenough, the light cruiser commodore, praised Warrender as possessing “an imperturbability that no circumstances could ruffle.” But a young lieutenant aboard Southampton put Admiral Warrender’s “imperturbability” in a different context when he wrote to his father, a retired admiral, that Warrender “never spoke in peacetime because he was deaf and everyone thought he must be thinking a lot. When war came, everyone said, ‘Good gracious, what was he doing the whole time?’ ”

Warrender’s six battleships and four light cruisers sailed from Scapa Flow at 5:30 on the morning of December 15, a few hours after Hipper left Wilhelmshaven. High winds and heavy seas running against the strong tide of the Pentland Firth obliged Warrender to leave behind at Scapa all of the destroyers normally assigned to his battle squadron. As it was, his ships clearing the Orkneys suffered in the maelstrom of the Pentland Firth. The sea hammered the small light cruisers Boadicea and Blanche (Boadicea’s bridge and several members of her crew were carried overboard) so badly that both ships had to turn back to Scapa for repairs.

Beatty was at Cromarty on Monday night, December 14, when he received Jellicoe’s order to join Warrender’s force at sea the following morning. Soon after midnight, Lion’s torpedo nets came in and the boiler rooms began to raise steam. Warrender, having left his own destroyers behind, asked Beatty to bring from Cromarty the eight destroyers attached to the Battle Cruiser Squadron. Of the eight, only seven were ready for sea, but those seven sailed with Beatty at 6:00 a.m. From Lion’s deck, an officer watched as the battle cruisers “passed in the dark through the boom defense of Cromarty and out beyond . . . when we encountered a very heavy sea which caused even Lion to roll in a disquieting manner. Daylight found us out of sight of land on a south-easterly course in heavy weather.” Beatty met Warrender off Moray Firth at eleven in the morning and, as Beatty had received no details of the operation or of enemy movements, Warrender used visual signals to give him what information he had. “I think raid [objective is] probably Harwich or Humber,” he signaled. He ordered Beatty: “Do not get more than five miles ahead of me. . . . If you get engaged, draw enemy towards battle squadron. If . . . [Tyrwhitt] does not join us, I fear only enemy’s destroyers. . . . First Light Cruiser Squadron . . . [will be] under your command to engage enemy’s light cruisers and head off destroyers. . . . Warn cruisers to beware of mines floating or dropping astern. Have you any suggestions?” During the afternoon of the fifteenth, Jellicoe, concerned about Warrender’s shortage of screening destroyers, asked the Admiralty to send Tyrwhitt and his flotillas to meet Warrender the following morning at the 7:30 a.m. rendezvous. The Admiralty refused, however, and when Tyrwhitt sailed from Harwich at 2:00 p.m. on the fifteenth with four light cruisers and two flotillas of destroyers, his instructions were merely to be off Yarmouth at daylight and await further orders.

Through the night of the fifteenth, Warrender’s force steamed southeast for the rendezvous they were to reach at 7:30 a.m., half an hour after sunrise. The night steaming formation placed the battle cruisers five miles ahead of the battleships, with the four light cruisers five miles to starboard and the four armored cruisers one mile to port. Admiral Beatty’s seven destroyers were ten miles to port of the battleships, with orders to close in at daylight and act as a screen. Worried about the threat of torpedo attack by German destroyers, Warrender—repeating Jellicoe’s request—asked during the night that Tyrwhitt’s destroyer flotillas be ordered to join him in the morning. Again, the Admiralty refused and Tyrwhitt’s instructions remained in place: simply to be off Yarmouth at dawn.

At 5:15 on the morning of December 16, with their ships steaming at an easy speed toward the rendezvous, the officers and men of Beatty’s four battle cruisers and Warrender’s six battleships were ignorant of the danger they were approaching. No one on the British side had an inkling that the High Seas Fleet was at sea. And yet, several hours away, Admiral von Ingenohl was steering toward them with fourteen dreadnought battleships, eight predreadnought battleships, nine cruisers, and fifty-four destroyers. With this overwhelming preponderance, Ingenohl had only to hold his course to encounter and perhaps destroy ten British capital ships. And on December 16, 1914, these ten ships provided the margin of British naval supremacy.