CHAPTER 37
Jellicoe Leaves, Beatty Arrives,
and the Americans Cross the Atlantic
John Jellicoe, slow to appreciate the value of convoy and hesitant to begin without sufficient escorts, nevertheless guided the navy in 1917 to the brink of victory over the submarines. Whereupon, on Christmas Eve, he was sacked—to use one of Lloyd George’s favorite words. Jellicoe had been appointed First Sea Lord by Arthur Balfour and arrived at the Admiralty a week before Balfour left for the Foreign Office. The new First Lord was Sir Edward Carson, a Protestant Irishman whose resistance to Home Rule had won him the prewar title of “uncrowned King of Ulster.” Carson did not pretend to any knowledge of the navy—“My only qualification is that I am absolutely at sea,” he told an audience—but he worked hard to learn, frequently visited the fleet, and won the admirals’ trust. “As long as I am at the Admiralty, the sailors will have full scope,” he told a public audience. “They will not be interfered with by me and I will not let anyone interfere with them.” This arrangement worked on Carson’s side, but Jellicoe still could not escape from meetings where every politician insisted on having his say. “I am overwhelmed with work at present. War Councils waste half my time,” he wrote to Beatty after two weeks in office. “I spent from 10.30 a.m. till 6.15 p.m. on War Council yesterday and decided nothing. This is the common routine,” he wrote soon after. And later still: “The Imperial War Cabinet meets three times a week besides the ordinary War Cabinet daily and I find as a consequence very little time for the work of the war. The waste of time is abominable, but I cannot be away or something may get settled to which I should object.”
In his first winter at the Admiralty, Jellicoe suffered from influenza and severe neuritis. In January 1917, Fisher found him in bed, “seedy but indomitable. Poor chap! His one and only terror was the German submarine menace which, as he truly says, one and a half years of Admiralty apathy has made so prodigious as to be almost beyond cure!” By May 1917, what Lloyd George perceived to be Jellicoe’s unwarranted delay over the convoy decision placed the First Sea Lord high on the prime minister’s list of men who must be removed. For his part, Jellicoe regarded the prime minister as dangerously frivolous. On the eve of a visit by Lloyd George to Rosyth, the First Sea Lord warned Beatty: “You will remember no doubt what an impressionable man he is and how apt to fly off at a tangent. One has to be cautious in talking to him. He is a hopeless optimist and told me seriously the other day that he knew for a fact we could feed the population even if all our supplies were cut off!! He gets figures from any source and believes them if they suit his views.” Jellicoe knew, of course, that Lloyd George was displeased with him. “I have got myself much disliked by the Prime Minister and others,” Jellicoe wrote to Beatty on June 30. “I fancy there is a scheme on foot to get rid of me. The way they are doing it is to say I am too pessimistic. . . . I expect it will be done by first discrediting me in the press.”
Carson vigorously defended his First Sea Lord. “Wherever you read criticisms of my colleague, Sir John Jellicoe, try to find out what is the origin of them,” he advised one audience. It did not matter. Jellicoe had no trouble identifying the source of his troubles: it was 10 Downing Street. Hankey noted early in July that “the PM is hot for getting rid of Jellicoe.” King George V later said that the prime minister “had his knife into him [Jellicoe] for some time.” Carson himself wrote later, “At one point, Lloyd George was so rude to Jellicoe that the First Sea Lord came to me and pressed me to accept his resignation.”
“My dear Admiral,” I said, “who is your ministerial chief?” And he replied, “Why you, sir.”
So I said, “Have you ever found that I lacked confidence in you?” and he was good enough to reply that there were the happiest relations between us.
“Then my dear Admiral,” I said, “let me say to you what I should say to the youngest officer in the service—Carry on.”
Nevertheless, the attack on the First Sea Lord and the Admiralty broadened. Lord Northcliffe, the owner of The Times and Daily Mail (the “reptile press,” according to Vice Admiral Sir Charles Madden, Jellicoe’s brother-in-law), commanded half of the London newspaper market and had trained his sights on Jellicoe. “You kill him. I’ll bury him,” the prime minister supposedly said to Northcliffe regarding the admiral. “No one can feel the smallest confidence in the present Admiralty,” editorialized Northcliffe’s Daily Mail. “If it does not fall soon, it will bring down our country with it.” The inventor-journalist Arthur Pollen assaulted Jellicoe in the press, at London dinner parties, even by writing to leaders of the American government. In a letter written to President Wilson’s press secretary and intended for the president’s eyes, Pollen declared, “The British Admiralty has done nothing of a constructive character since the war began and . . . if we [Americans] act on the assumption that they have, we will face disaster.” To Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt, Pollen spoke of the “extraordinary folly” of Jellicoe and the Admiralty. *74 Behind the First Sea Lord’s back, a group of young naval officers used the office of the War Cabinet secretary, Maurice Hankey, to place their complaints before the prime minister. Later, Jellicoe wrote: “One can gather from some books written since the war that there were apparently certain junior officers who went to, and were received by, Mr. Lloyd George, who gave him their ideas for dealing with the submarine menace. Personally, I never heard of their proposals. It is true that Mr. Lloyd George did make one or two suggestions to me for dealing with the menace, but these were of such a nature that they could not have emanated from the brain of any naval officer.”
Beatty’s attitude toward Jellicoe at this time has been described as “ambivalent”; a better word would be “hypocritical.” To Jellicoe’s face, Beatty was supportive. On July 2, he urged the beleaguered First Sea Lord to ignore “what the intriguers set themselves to do. And you must stick at all costs to your intention of not volunteering to go, that would be fatal. Do not be goaded into any step of that kind no matter what the press or anybody else says. Keep yourself fit and damn the Papers and the Critics.” And yet the previous month, Beatty had written to a woman friend that “J. J. [Jellicoe] was always a half-hearted man . . . [who] . . . dislikes men of independence and loves sycophants and toadies.” Beatty assured this friend that if he wanted the Admiralty for himself, he could have it, “if J. J. departs, as he would if I started a war to the knife. . . . I am faced with a quandary. If I go the whole length of denunciation with the Admiralty and their ways and I am successful, it means that I should have to go to the Admiralty. That means leaving the Grand Fleet. It is a question of which is the most important appointment to the Nation.”
Meanwhile, whatever her private feelings toward her husband, Ethel Beatty worked faithfully in London to promote his career and to undermine Jellicoe as First Sea Lord. She made a friend of Arthur Pollen and in May 1917 wrote to Beatty, “I telephoned Mr. Pollen to come and see me which he did. He tells me he has declared open warfare against Jellicoe and he is going to have him removed in a month’s time.” Later, at a dinner party, “I talked to Pollen and he says in another two months Jellicoe will go. . . . The American admiral [Sims] was there. . . . Pollen had been putting him right about the battle of Jutland.”
Lloyd George, meanwhile, had decided that he himself could best run the Admiralty but that “unless I were present at the Admiralty every day to supervise every detail of administration, it would be impossible for me promptly to remove all hindrances and speed up action.” As a first step, he removed Carson on July 17 and installed his own man. The new First Lord was Sir Eric Geddes, a Scot described by Sims as “a giant figure whose mighty frame, hard and supple muscles, and power of vigorous and rapid movement, would have made him one of the greatest [of] heavy-weight prize fighters.” In fact, Geddes was a railway man who had worked for the Baltimore and Ohio Railway, managed a railway in India, and then risen to the top of the British North Eastern Railway. In wartime, he went to the Ministry of Munitions and then was asked to reorganize the railway system behind the British front in France. Fond of medals and titles and saying that he needed status to facilitate his work, he had been given the honorary military rank of major general. In May 1917, Lloyd George moved him to the Admiralty as controller, to supervise all shipbuilding for the navy and the merchant marine. Before going, Geddes insisted on being made a vice admiral. He was supplied with a uniform, which he wore to work with his officer’s cap tilted down over one eye—in the manner of Beatty.
The navy hardly knew what to make of this “masquerading” admiral; Lord Esher, the backstage close friend of King Edward VII, Admiral Jacky Fisher, and almost everyone else of consequence in British political life, described Geddes as a figure from Gilbert and Sullivan: “a general today and an admiral tomorrow.” Admiral Oliver, the Chief of Staff, was disgusted. “We have been upside down here ever since the North-Eastern Railway took over. Geddes is mad about statistics and has forty people always making graphs and issuing balance sheets full of percentages.” Geddes’s chief statistician, Oliver said, “used to bother me frequently for material to work on. To keep peace and to keep him away and occupy him and his staff, my staff used to make up data mixed with weather conditions and phases of the moon which kept them occupied. In a few months, wonderful graphs appeared.” It fell to Jellicoe to tell Geddes that his new methods were not working:
I said that the organisation set up by him had failed to produce better results—if as good results—as the old organisation in the hands of naval officers and Admiralty officials. I mentioned that the shipbuilders could not work with the new officials . . . that their methods caused great and avoidable delays. I also found the armament firms very dissatisfied with the new organisation which delayed matters and was much inferior to working direct with the Director of Naval Ordnance. I knew well that great pressure was constantly brought to bear on the Director and Chief Inspector of Naval Ordnance to accept designs and munitions which were not up to the standard of efficiency required for the Navy.
Ignoring protests, Geddes pushed forward. He was accustomed to being obeyed, and senior admirals were no more to him than subordinate railway officials. At one point, disputing Jellicoe’s attempt to recommend a knighthood for Admiral Duff, the First Lord withheld approval, saying that he did not like this admiral’s manner. Jellicoe replied that he was recommending Duff “for his services not his manner.” On Christmas Eve, 1917, Lloyd George’s ax, eagerly swung by Geddes, fell on Jellicoe. The First Sea Lord was in his Admiralty room, about to go home to his pregnant wife and his four young daughters. His last appointment that day was with a group of Grand Fleet captains who had presented him with a silver model of his flagship, Iron Duke. The visitors were leaving when at 6:00 p.m. a special messenger delivered a blue envelope marked “Personal and strictly private.” It was from the First Lord:
After very careful consideration, I have come to the conclusion that a change is desirable in the post of First Sea Lord. I have not, I can assure you, arrived at this view hastily or without personal regret and reluctance. I have consulted the Prime Minister and with his concurrence, I am asking to see the King to make this recommendation to him.
Jellicoe replied that night:
I have received your letter. You do not assign a reason for your action, but I assume that it is due to a want of confidence in me. Under these conditions you will realise that it is difficult for me to continue my work. I shall therefore be glad to be relieved as soon as possible.
The next morning, Christmas Day, Geddes telephoned Lloyd George and reported that the deed was done. “It’s a good thing,” the prime minister said. Then, addressing Jellicoe as “Dear Sir,” the Welshman wrote him a single sentence: “I have the honor to inform you that His Majesty has been pleased to approve of my recommendation that the dignity of a peerage of the United Kingdom should be conferred on you. Yours faithfully, D. Lloyd George.” Jellicoe pondered and then decided to accept for the sake of the navy and his children. He was made a viscount, “a title usually reserved for a moderately efficient Cabinet Minister on retirement,” said Jellicoe’s friend Admiral Bacon.
Geddes said later that he fired Jellicoe “in the way I thought least likely to offend his feelings,” but the firing occurred at a moment when no newspapers would appear for two days. The Sea Lords—excepting Vice Admiral Sir Rosslyn Wester Wemyss, who had already agreed to succeed Jellicoe as First Sea Lord—were informed on Christmas Day. When Jellicoe told them that “the change was not of my seeking,” the admirals protested to Geddes: “We had full confidence in Sir John Jellicoe’s ability and fitness to perform his responsible duties and were most gravely concerned and disturbed by this sudden removal. . . . We therefore decided to request you . . . to inform us of the reasons which caused this step to be taken.” Geddes agreed to see the Sea Lords two at a time and informed them that, two months earlier, he had spoken to the two previous First Lords, Carson and Balfour, in the presence of Lloyd George, and that both former First Lords had told him that they did not consider Jellicoe the best man to lead the Admiralty. Carson vehemently denied ever having said this; Balfour was vague. Geddes then reversed himself and denied that he had ever quoted Carson against Jellicoe. Carson, now enraged, declared that not only had he never declared that Jellicoe was not the best man for the post, but indeed he had said that Jellicoe “was the only man for First Sea Lord.” Entangled in this briar patch, Geddes turned back on the Sea Lords and huffed, “I would remind you that the appointment and removal of Sea Lords is entirely a matter for His Majesty and His Majesty’s government.” Constitutionally, Geddes was correct. The Sea Lords, who had considered collective resignation, told Jellicoe that as “we have realised that we cannot possibly bring you back and we may do great harm to the country,” they had decided to remain.
News of the dismissal spread quickly. Almost worse than the fact of it was the way it was done. Vice Admiral Sir Stanley Colville, Commander-in-Chief, Portsmouth, called it “disgraceful” and “a personal affront to the navy.” Madden, second in command of the Grand Fleet, was “mutinous, explosive and very bitter”; Vice Admiral Sir Cecil Burney, a former Grand Fleet battle squadron commander, called it “scandalous and wicked”; Prince Louis of Battenberg declared, “I cannot find words to express my disgust and indignation”; Goodenough said, “Never a man stood higher in the estimation of his friends, his brother officers and every man and boy in the Service.” Asquith wrote to Jellicoe, “No one knows better—perhaps no one as well as I—what the state and the Allied cause owe to you. When history comes to be written, you have no reason to fear the verdict.” Margot Asquith declared flatly, “I look upon the Government as insane.” Messages of devotion came from around the fleet. “We want you back,” said the men of the 10th Submarine Flotilla. “You are our Idol and one who we would follow to the death. ‘Come back!’ is the message from the Lower Deck to you.”
Jellicoe did not come back. Britain’s senior admiral had been dismissed by a costumed railway man, acting on behalf of a prime minister whose attitude toward the “High Admirals” was “Sack the lot!” The man who had trained the Grand Fleet for battle, who had issued the crucial deployment command at Jutland and sent the German navy fleeing into harbor, whose fleet had enforced the blockade that destroyed Germany’s will to fight, and who, before departing, had broken the back of the U-boat campaign, was gone. Three months later, Sir Edward Carson told the House of Commons what had happened: “The whole time that I was First Lord of the Admiralty, one of the greatest difficulties I had was the constant persecution—for I can call it nothing else—of certain high officials in the Admiralty who could not speak for themselves—constant persecution which, I have no doubt, could have [been] traced to reasons and motives of the most malignant character. Over and over again while I was at the Admiralty, I had the most constant pressure put upon me to remove officials, among them Sir John Jellicoe.”
When Jellicoe left the Grand Fleet, David Beatty succeeded him as Commander-in-Chief. Promoted at forty-five to become the navy’s youngest full admiral, he had boarded Iron Duke, whose crew, devoted to Jellicoe, was unhappy to see him; as Beatty arrived, it took a direct order from the ship’s captain to wring a halfhearted welcoming cheer from the men. Nor did the relationship improve. Somehow, the flamboyant hero of the battle cruiser force cut a poor figure on Iron Duke. “At sea,” explained one young torpedo man, describing the difference between the two admirals, “a figure in a duffel coat and sometimes wearing a white cap cover would come through the mess decks with an ‘Excuse me’ and that would be Sir John making his way to the bridge. When Beatty came on board it was ‘CLEAR LOWER DECKS!’ and a file of marines wearing short arms with Beatty in the middle. We never liked him.” Beatty felt the antipathy and because, in addition, he wanted a newer, bigger, faster ship, he transferred his flag two months later to Queen Elizabeth. “There was,” he wrote, “too much of Jellicoe in Iron Duke.”
The new Commander-in-Chief inherited an enormous, complex nautical war machine, trained by Jellicoe over twenty-eight months against the day when it would destroy the German navy. Under Beatty, the mission remained the same. The Grand Fleet, swinging on its moorings at Scapa Flow, commanded the surface of the sea, making possible both the blockade that was crippling Germany, and the effort against the U-boats. Had this massive surface sea power not existed, Germany would have won the war—without needing U-boats. Abruptly and catastrophically, Allied maritime commerce would have been disrupted and then severed by German surface ships; British soldiers and munitions would not have crossed the Channel into France; subsequently, American troops would not have embarked for Europe. Britain would have been forced to choose between starvation and surrender; either way, her participation in the war would have ended. The United States on its own would have confronted a victorious Germany able to draw on the combined resources of Europe. These facts seemed obvious, but not everyone was able to grasp them. “One of my difficulties during 1917,” Jellicoe said later of his tenure as First Sea Lord, “was to make the prime minister realise that the whole of the Allied cause was dependent on the Grand Fleet holding the surface command of the sea.” In any case, now that Jellicoe was gone, David Beatty became “the one man on either side who could lose the war in an afternoon.”
Three weeks after taking command, Beatty led the Grand Fleet to sea to test his skill at controlling so large a body. There was a mishap that was not Beatty’s fault: two destroyers collided and sank, with most of their crews. Back in Scapa Flow, Beatty began rewriting the fleet’s tactical Battle Orders. Always critical of Jellicoe’s rigid system, under which the Commander-in-Chief controlled every movement of the fleet, he decentralized authority. Battle squadron and division commanders were encouraged to act independently and even to anticipate the Commander-in-Chief’s wishes. This loosening did not go too far: in action, the fleet was still to be concentrated in a single line of battle. If, however, enemy destroyers threatened a torpedo attack, as they had at Jutland, Beatty declared himself willing to face the risk rather than turn away. “Only by keeping the enemy fleet engaged can the initiative remain with the British fleet and a decision be obtained,” he said. “The torpedo menace will be accepted and the fleet turned toward the retiring enemy.”
Aside from this important change in tactics, Beatty’s overall North Sea strategy became almost more cautious than Jellicoe’s. Maintaining British naval supremacy now was Beatty’s duty. On paper, the task seemed simple enough. Numerically, the British preponderance in dreadnoughts was even more overwhelming than it had been under Jellicoe. Three more 15-inch-gun Resolution-class battleships had been added to the fleet, and by March 1917, Beatty commanded thirty-two British dreadnought battleships; Scheer then had twenty-one. *75 Similarly, British superiority in battle cruisers was comfortable. After losing three of these ships at Jutland, where the Germans lost one, the Grand Fleet had seven battle cruisers to Germany’s four. Then, in August and September 1916, the British added two more: Renown and Repulse, armed with six 15-inch guns. Not until February 1918 did Hipper received the new battle cruiser Hindenburg, sister of Derfflinger, with eight 12-inch guns. But numbers, as Jutland had taught, were not everything. Beatty now feared what Jellicoe had feared: that British ships, particularly the battle cruisers, were structurally inferior to German in armor and underwater protection. Equally worrisome to Beatty was the constant draining of Grand Fleet destroyer strength for the antisubmarine campaign. Beatty asked for help; possibly some destroyers could be sent from the Mediterranean. Unfortunately, the Admiralty replied, it was impossible to spare any from anywhere. Worried that his fleet had been left too weak in screening craft to fight a battle, Beatty told an Admiralty conference on January 2, 1918, that “the correct strategy of the Grand Fleet is no longer to endeavour to bring the enemy to action at any cost, but rather to contain him in his bases until the general situation becomes more favourable to us.” The Admiralty and the War Cabinet approved.
It was the Germans who provoked the first surface action during Beatty’s North Sea command. Britain had promised a monthly shipment of 250,000 tons of British coal to Norway, and convoys composed largely of neutral ships were sailing daily, usually escorted by two British destroyers and several armed trawlers. U-boat success against the convoys had been minimal, so Scheer decided to try a surprise surface attack. The distance to the convoy routes from Horns Reef was between 300 and 350 miles; only twelve to fourteen hours’ steaming for a 30-knot vessel. Poor weather in autumn and winter decreased the likelihood of such vessels being observed. Scheer chose the fast new minelaying light cruisers Brummer and Bremse, each armed with four 6-inch guns and—more important—possessing a speed of 34 knots. On October 17, 1917, a westbound Scandinavian convoy of twelve merchant vessels was under convoy by two British destroyers, Strongbow and Mary Rose, and two armed trawlers. At dawn, lookouts on Strongbow reported two strange vessels on a converging course. The destroyer, taking them for British cruisers, flashed recognition signals. There was no response until suddenly, before the crew could reach action stations, Strongbow was smothered by accurate 6-inch gunfire at a range of 3,000 yards. Mary Rose hurried up and was dealt similar punishment. Both destroyers sank, and then nine merchant vessels were hunted down and sunk. No British ship was able to send a wireless report and, although at the time of the attack, sixteen British light cruisers were at sea south of the convoy route, the German cruisers returned to port unscathed. Beatty did not learn what had happened until 4:00 p.m.; “Luck was against us,” he said.
Two months later, on December 12, Scheer attacked again. The assailants this time were four modern German destroyers; the victims, an eastbound Scandinavian convoy of five neutral merchant ships escorted by two British destroyers. The attack took place twenty-five miles off the Norwegian coast in blinding rain squalls and a heavy sea that concealed all but the masts and funnel tops of the destroyers. Again, German gunnery was excellent: within forty-five minutes, all the ships in the convoy and one British destroyer were sunk. This time Beatty sent out battleships, battle cruisers, and twelve light cruisers to intercept, but the German ships escaped through the Skagerrak. “We do have the most cursed luck,” Beatty complained. “I never anticipated that the Hun would use destroyers so far afield.” Daily convoys to Scandinavia were terminated and larger convoys were dispatched every fourth or fifth day, now escorted by dreadnoughts of the Grand Fleet.
This offered Scheer a different, perhaps greater opportunity. Aware that the convoys were being escorted by battleships, he decided on a bold stroke. The German battle cruisers and light cruisers and a flotilla of destroyers of Hipper’s Scouting Groups would attack the convoy and its escort while, with the rest of the High Seas Fleet, Scheer waited sixty miles to the southwest. If all went well and the British took the bait, he might at last be able to achieve what German admirals had sought since the beginning of the war: the destruction of an isolated dreadnought squadron of the Grand Fleet. At 5:00 a.m. on April 23, 1918, the German battle cruisers, three dreadnought battle squadrons, three light cruiser squadrons, and four flotillas of destroyers sailed from Schillig roads. Neither side had much information about the other. Scheer had restricted wireless to an absolute minimum, sharply limiting Room 40’s ability to provide useful information, and a dense fog over the entire North Sea restricted air reconnaissance by zeppelins. Nevertheless, all was going well; Hipper and the attack force were forty miles off the Norwegian coast in the vicinity of Bergen, when, at 5:10 a.m. on the twenty-fourth, Moltke suffered a mechanical breakdown. Her starboard inner propeller dropped off and before the turbine could be stopped racing, a gear wheel flew to pieces. Metal shards from the broken wheel tore into an auxiliary condenser, the engine room flooded, and the starboard and center engines ceased to work. Hipper ordered Moltke to fall back on the battle fleet. Moltke tried to obey, but salt water in her boilers reduced her speed to a crawl. At 6:40 a.m., she broke radio silence and told Scheer that her breakdown was serious and her speed only 4 knots. At 8:45 a.m. she reported that she was “out of control.” At 10:50 a.m. the battleship Oldenburg took Moltke in tow and the main fleet turned back for home. Scheer meanwhile ordered Hipper to go forward with the operation and the battle cruisers continued steering northwest at 18 knots. Hipper crossed and reconnoitered the convoy route, found nothing, and, at 2:10 p.m., turned back. In fact, there was no convoy; the Naval Staff had miscalculated its sailing date by twenty-four hours. British intelligence had been no better that day. Not until Scheer and Hipper began talking by wireless was the Admiralty even aware that a large German naval force was operating far out in the North Sea. Early that afternoon, the Grand Fleet cleared the Firth of Forth in a thick fog: thirty-one battleships, four battle cruisers, twenty-four light cruisers, and eighty-five destroyers. It was the last time during the war that the full strength of the Grand Fleet was set in motion, but once again Beatty’s luck was out. The High Seas Fleet was 100 miles ahead of him and out of reach. At 6:37 p.m., Scheer reached the swept channels through the minefields and Moltke cast off her tow from Oldenburg. She was lumbering home when a torpedo from the British submarine E-42 struck her. Eighteen hundred tons of seawater poured in, but Moltke still managed to reach the Jade under her own power. Considering what Scheer had hoped for, he, too, had been unlucky.
In the winter of 1915, when the Admiralty first moved the battle cruisers to a permanent base in the Firth of Forth, Ethel Beatty established a residence for herself and her husband on shore. The place she chose was Aberdour House, a comfortable old stone and stucco house with a tiled roof on a hill overlooking the Firth from the north, about six miles from the fleet landing at Rosyth. Beatty promptly ordered construction of a clay tennis court, where, when his ships were in harbor, he played every fair afternoon. Usually, he came ashore in his admiral’s barge for lunch, being met by his automobile and driven the fifteen minutes up the hill to Aberdour House. Beatty loved tennis, “because it is exercise in concentrated form and you don’t waste valuable time chasing a miserable, helpless ball over the hills.” On the court, he played as if he were at war. He slapped his partner on the back, cheered good shots, and exhorted greater effort when they seemed to be losing. “Here, we can’t let it stand like this!” he would cry. “It will never become us to be beaten.” When it rained, Beatty and his guests—admirals or captains from the fleet—took long walks over the hills or joined the party dancing before a huge open fireplace in a large hall at nearby Aberdour Castle. Beatty seldom danced but he liked watching, enjoying the warmth, the music, and the presence of women. Reluctantly, he left to return to his ship for dinner, in obedience to his own order that all hands be back aboard by 7:30 in the evening. When he took command of the Grand Fleet and moved to Scapa Flow, this pleasant routine was interrupted, but the lease on Aberdour House and its tennis court was continued.
The truth was that most of the activities centered on Aberdour House were a charade. Beatty was miserable in his marriage. His wife and her “utterly unpredictable moods” dominated his thoughts; Beatty described some nights with Ethel as “worse than Jutland.” Lady Beatty had always considered her husband selfish because he was so consumed by the navy and went off to sea, leaving her alone. As long as he commanded only the battle cruisers and they were based in the Firth of Forth, she could have him around and could play the grand hostess at Aberdour House. When he moved to Scapa Flow, in the far north, she felt herself abandoned again. Her response was renewed promiscuity, a matter that was common knowledge in the couple’s intimate society, but never mentioned. Beatty, however, was constantly reminded. Once, he left Aberdour House to return to his ship and then, remembering that he had left his cigarette case behind, returned to collect it. He found his wife in bed with one of his officers. Yet he never considered divorce. He continued to write to “Darling Tata,” and signed himself “Ever your devoted David.” He blamed himself for her moods and behavior. “Tata,” he wrote on one occasion, “you accuse me of being cross, bad-tempered, saying cutting things which indeed were far from my thoughts or intention.” A month later, he wrote again,
You must give me a little more time to get accustomed to the new conditions and your changed feelings. You see, in the past you have spoiled me horribly and given me so much love and sympathy that it is difficult to realise that I must do without it or without so much of it. . . . Let me impress upon you that I am really tumbling to the altered conditions, that I in no way wish to monopolise your entire life, that I have no wish to be the orbit, against your will, round which everything will revolve, to be the center of your efforts to live, which, as you put it, makes me a horribly selfish, egotistical person. I truly am not that, really. . . . I realise you like to be more independent and indeed am thankful for it. All I ask is that you should do exactly as you wish at all times. All I truly care for is that you should be happy and contented.
Rejected and lonely, Beatty found consolation. During the last two years of the war, the Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Fleet was deeply involved in a love affair with Eugenie Godfrey-Faussett, a woman in her early thirties with much-praised long golden hair. Eugenie’s husband, twenty-one years older than she, was Captain Bryan Godfrey-Faussett, of the Royal Navy, the intimate friend and equerry of King George V who had arranged Ethel Beatty’s presentation at court. Eugenie initiated the correspondence with Beatty, writing to him in June 1916 to congratulate him on his role at Jutland. His reply, addressed to “Dear Mrs. Godfrey,” noted properly that he had been glad to see her husband “looking so well” when he had visited the fleet with the king, and concluded, “Yours ever, David Beatty.” Through the remainder of 1916, Eugenie kept writing. After becoming Commander-in-Chief, Beatty replied that, “exiled” to Scapa Flow, he appreciated “your letters more than ever, so will you write and tell me all the news?” Formality began to erode and Beatty wrote, “Bless you my dear (is that too familiar?) for your delightful letters, the best I ever get.” In January 1917 he began calling her Eugenie—“because Godfrey told me to”—and asked her to stop calling him Sir David. Boldly, Eugenie sent him a new mattress for the bed in his new flagship’s cabin and he replied that he would “dream all the pleasanter now that I know you tried it.” When she began doing volunteer hospital work, he wrote that he was “sure you look delicious in your hospital garb. I wish I could see you. Is that asking too much?” By April 1917, it was “Eugenie, you are a darling and I love you and your letters more than ever.” On April 17, he came to London for two days of Admiralty conferences and a private lunch with Eugenie. Returning to the fleet, Beatty wrote, “Eugenie, dear, was it a dream? That one perfectly divine day . . . three very short hours of intense pleasure.” At the beginning of May, he told her that he read “the nicest parts” of her letters “over and over again,” and, “I wish, how I wish, that it were possible for you to do all the nice things you said you would like to do.”
In August 1917, Beatty brought the major part of the Grand Fleet down to the Firth of Forth and persuaded Ethel to invite Eugenie to come and stay at Aberdour House. (“Tata loves having you,” Beatty assured her.) Eugenie stayed a month; Beatty later wrote, “for four weeks I was able to see you almost every day.” Captain Godfrey-Faussett had remained on duty in London and Ethel was often away; as a result, says Beatty’s most recent biographer, “the indications are that Bryan was well and truly cuckolded.” Thereafter, Eugenie became Beatty’s “dearest comrade of Dreamland.” He reprimanded her when she told him that she had burned a letter written to him at midnight “because it was not respectable. There is nothing that could be ‘not respectable’ between us and I should have adored it and I don’t like respectable things of any sort anyway. . . . I love you all over from your glorious hair to the tips of your toes.”
Meanwhile, Beatty’s private relationship with his wife continued unchanged. On September 4, soon after he and Eugenie left Aberdour—he for Scapa Flow, Eugenie for London—he wrote to Ethel, “You must know that I am quite unhappy when you are not with me. I know, dear heart, that I am rather an impossible person, difficult to get on with and moody and peevy at times. I know also that it has cost me some change in your feelings towards me. But you must believe me when I say that I just worship you today as I have ever done from the moment I first saw you.”
After another short meeting in London in October 1917, Eugenie asked Beatty by letter, “Did anything that happened when you were here make some of your thoughts come true?” He answered, “They all came true [and] the reality was sweeter and more divine than my ‘thoughts.’ My visit to London was a visit to fairy land with a beautiful golden-haired Fairy Queen.” In January, she sent him a collection of erotic fairy stories she had written, set in an imaginary land of the Arabian Nights. Beatty wrote back that he could “administer love potions just as successfully” as her characters. In April, when she wrote saying she wanted to see her “Comrade in Dreamland,” he replied, “It would not be a case of a Comrade in Dreamland for I would never let you sleep—unless you swooned and then I would bring you to with caresses.” The admiral then produced a literary effort of his own:
Here’s to you and here’s to Blighty,
I’m in pajamas, you in a nighty,
If we are feeling extra flighty,
Why in pajamas and Why the nighty?
Beginning in April 1918, when the entire Grand Fleet was permanently based in the Firth of Forth, Beatty and Eugenie often met in the afternoon at the North British Hotel in Edinburgh. Eugenie would take a room; Beatty would arrive and go straight up. That summer, she sent him a book about techniques of lovemaking. “What an amazing book!” he wrote to her. “To learn that all the Troubles in Domestic Life are due to the fact that the man is too quick and the lady too slow. What a tragedy! I am sure that the man should do all he could to prolong the thrills, they are so damnably short, but how is it to be done?” In his next letter, he proposed his own solution: to “kiss you from the tips of your toes upwards and take some time about it, Adorata Mia.”
Despite his affair with Eugenie, David and Ethel continued exchanging gossip and belittling people they didn’t like; it was as if they realized that denigrating common enemies brought them closer together. Beatty wrote that Lloyd George was a “dirty dog” and “a demagogue, pure and simple.” Geddes was another “dirty dog,” “weak as ditch water.” Edwin Montagu, minister of munitions—the man who had taken Venetia Stanley away from Asquith—was “the Jew Montagu.” “Yes,” Beatty wrote to his wife, “he is appalling to look at with that immense conceit and self-confidence common to the Hebrew tribe.” Ethel called Churchill “a dead dog” and “a disappointed blackguard.” When the war ended, Beatty left the Grand Fleet and returned to London with Ethel. He now had two women in the same city. As he and Ethel were expected to present the picture of a happily married hero and his devoted wife, he and his “Golden-Haired Comrade” had to reconsider their relationship. Eugenie took the lead, asking what their future would be. Beatty replied that he was “a selfish beast,” who “ought to say that I must not trouble you more and ought to retire gracefully out of your life”—the implication being that he hoped she would say that he did not have to. He explained his feelings for his wife as those of duty and gratitude, not passion: “I am truly devoted to Tata, so much so that I efface myself in my desire to see her happy. I cannot forget all that she has been to me for the last twenty years, all that she has done for me, all that she has given me.” But once the war began, he said, he had “looked for love and sympathy and did not get them . . . until you came along and gave me both.” Nevertheless, the signature on this letter, written in April 1919 as Beatty was leaving for France with Ethel, told Eugenie much. He had written: “Heaps of love, Ever Yours, David.” *76
In July 1917, Sims accompanied Jellicoe to Scapa Flow and, on returning to London, relayed to Washington the First Sea Lord’s urgent request that the U.S. Navy send its four strongest coal-burning battleships to reinforce the Grand Fleet. The reason for Jellicoe’s appeal was that the Royal Navy was short of manpower; there simply were not enough trained seamen to man the new British light cruisers, destroyers, and submarines about to be commissioned. The Admiralty’s proposed solution was to take five of the Channel Fleet’s predreadnought King Edward–class battleships out of commission and use their crews—each of these old ships carried 1,000 men—to provide officers, gunnery and torpedo ratings, and other personnel for the new warships. The King Edwards, whose task had been to guard the eastern approaches to the Channel, would be replaced by four Superbs, the oldest dreadnoughts in the Grand Fleet. The Superbs in turn—if the Americans agreed—would be replaced in the Grand Fleet by four U.S. Navy dreadnoughts.
Despite Sims’s endorsement, the Navy Department in Washington at first rejected Jellicoe’s request. One reason was doctrinal: most American admirals were disciples of Alfred Thayer Mahan, the apostle of sea power, who had decreed that a battle fleet must remain concentrated. Already, the American admirals felt that they had compromised their fleet’s integrity by giving up the destroyers needed to screen their battleships; now they were resolved not to dribble away the battleships themselves. Behind this decision also lay the long-range concern that, should the Allies lose the war, the United States alone might have to face the German fleet. In addition, there was the deep American suspicion of Japan and fear of a two-ocean conflict. On top of all this, there was a practical reason for refusing to send the battleships to Europe. The fleet had been providing gun crews to scores of armed American merchant vessels, so the gunnery complement of many warships, including battleships, was sadly depleted. Until new men could be trained, the ships were not ready to fight.
No officer felt more strongly that American battleships should remain in American waters than the navy’s senior admiral, Chief of Naval Operations William S. Benson. In May, a month after America entered the war, a British government mission including Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour had tried to convince Benson and Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels to postpone the American 1916 dreadnought-building program in favor of building more destroyers for escort work. Their views had not changed. “The future position of the United States must in no way be jeopardized by any disintegration of our main fighting fleet,” Daniels said. Benson concurred: “The U.S. believes that the strategic situation necessitates keeping the battleship force concentrated and cannot therefore consider sending part of it across.” Refusing to give up, Sims replied, “I cannot see that sending a division of ships would be any disintegration of our fleet, but merely an advance force interposed between us and the enemy fleet.”
At the Navy Department, Mahan’s principles were sacrosanct, but views began to change when America’s two most senior American admirals—Admiral Henry T. Mayo, Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Atlantic Fleet, and then Benson himself—traveled to the British Isles. Mayo arrived in London on August 29, 1917, for discussions at the Admiralty followed by a visit to the Grand Fleet at Scapa Flow. There, Beatty was at his hospitable best, briefly hauling down his own Commander-in-Chief’s flag from Queen Elizabeth and hoisting the four-star flag of his American guest. Beatty’s private description of Mayo was less generous; to Eugenie, he characterized the American admiral as “a dear old cup of tea who never did anything wrong in his life; an impeccable old gentleman—that’s no use now, is it?” Back in London, Mayo heard Jellicoe ask again for American battleships and, on the basis of what he had seen and heard, responded favorably. Now only Benson blocked the way.
On November 7, the Chief of Naval Operations arrived in London, where three days of discussions at the Admiralty produced another conversion. On November 10, Benson cabled Secretary Daniels, recommending the sending of four coal-burning American dreadnoughts to the Grand Fleet. Benson went further: if conditions warranted, he was willing in the spring to send the entire U.S. battle fleet to Europe. Benson’s abrupt reversal stemmed from more than a sudden attack of Anglophilia. He could see that the presence of American battleships would give the navy a greater voice in Allied naval strategy and would enhance the prestige and morale of the U.S. fleet. He also recognized that if America’s powerful battleship fleet remained idle throughout the war, it might be difficult to extract money from Congress to build future dreadnoughts. On November 25, Battleship Division 9 of the U.S. Atlantic Fleet—New York, Wyoming, Florida, and Delaware—sailed from Hampton Roads for Scapa Flow.
Antagonism between the American and German navies went back to June 1898, when an American naval squadron commanded by Commodore George Dewey had a potentially dangerous confrontation with a German force under Vice Admiral Otto von Diederichs in Manila Bay. In the months preceding this episode, the kaiser had announced, “I am determined, when the opportunity arises, to purchase or simply to take the Philippines from Spain.” In May 1898, the German consul in Manila told Berlin that the time had come to choose a German prince to become king of the Philippines. Then war broke out between Spain and America. Dewey caught the Spanish Far Eastern Squadron at anchor, quickly annihilated it, and, lacking troops to land and seize the Philippine capital, established a blockade of Manila. A German flotilla, larger than Dewey’s force, appeared and was responsible for minor infractions of international blockade regulations. When Dewey insisted on stopping German warships crossing his blockade line, Diederichs sent his Flag Lieutenant to the American flagship Olympia to protest. Dewey lost his temper. “Why, I shall stop each vessel whatever may be her colors!” he said. “And if she does not stop, I shall fire at her! And that means war, do you know, Sir? And I tell you, if Germany wants war, all right, we are ready.”
In the years that followed, Dewey and Diederichs each became the senior officer of his respective navy. Each was convinced that war between the two countries was possible, but German contingency planning was far more thorough. After defeating the U.S. fleet off the east coast of the United States, Norfolk, Hampton Roads, and Newport News were to be occupied, after which the Germans would move up Chesapeake Bay toward Washington and Baltimore. “Unsparing, merciless assaults” would follow against New York City and Boston. Long Island was to be the springboard for attacks on New York, and Great Gull, Gardiner, Fishers, Plum, and Block islands were given special consideration. Brooklyn would be seized and Manhattan bombarded in an operation for which “2 to 3 battalions of infantry and 1 battalion of engineers seem fully sufficient.” There was no thought of penetrating farther inland; these blows to America’s seaboard population centers were considered enough to bring the nation to terms.
The American war plan against Germany at the turn of the century never imagined the German army being landed on American soil. Instead, American planners expected a German naval assault in the Caribbean aimed at acquiring naval bases in the West Indies and colonies in South America. To meet this threat, the American Atlantic Fleet would concentrate in the Caribbean where the decisive battle would be fought. Given the problems a German fleet would face in crossing the Atlantic and in coaling upon arrival, the Navy Department—and especially Dewey—was confident of an American victory.
This irrelevant strategy had not been updated since the outbreak of war in Europe, and in April 1917 the U.S. Navy was wholly unprepared for the battles it was about to fight.
It was afflicted with a serious imbalance in warship types. It possessed fourteen modern dreadnought battleships, but only seventy-four destroyers. These were far too few to screen the dreadnoughts and still look after the navy’s twenty-three predreadnoughts, its ten armored cruisers, and its twenty-five light cruisers. No provision whatever had been made for destroyers doing convoy duty for merchant ships. This discrepancy was not entirely the navy’s fault. For years, the Navy Department had asked Congress for money to build four new destroyers to accompany the construction of each new battleship; every year Congress had appropriated money for only one or two. In 1917, the latest American destroyers were among the best in the world, but only fifty-one of the seventy-four in commission were modern. More new ships were under construction, but the same imbalance persisted: six dreadnoughts, ten light cruisers, and only ten destroyers.
The American navy’s construction plans, like those of the German navy, had been victimized by the Dreadnought revolution. No president believed more passionately in sea power than Theodore Roosevelt, and during his eight years in office, the United States had laid down thirteen battleships. All became instantly obsolete with the commissioning of Jacky Fisher’s HMS Dreadnought. And when, at the end of his presidency, Roosevelt painted his new predreadnoughts white and sent them around the world to parade American naval power, the Great White Fleet served mainly to advertise its own obsolescence. Immediately, the Americans, like the Germans, responded to the British dreadnought by building their own. By December 1917, when Benson sent the battleships to Scapa Flow, fourteen American dreadnoughts were in commission.
Even so, the four dreadnoughts sent to Europe were not America’s most modern. They were coal burners rather than oil burners and their selection was due, not to Benson’s reluctance to send his latest ships, but to the Royal Navy’s candid admission that, while it had ample coal, it could not pro-vide fuel oil for America’s new oil-burning battleships. In speed and armament, the four American ships sent were the equivalent of most of Beatty’s ships. Delaware, the oldest, was commissioned in 1910, carried ten 12-inch guns, and was capable of 21 knots. Florida, completed in 1911, and Wyoming, completed in 1912, carried twelve 12-inch. New York, commissioned in 1914, and her sister Texas, which stayed home, were the last coal-burning dreadnoughts in the U.S. Navy. The ten 14-inch guns of New York and Texas had leap-frogged the armament of the British 13.5-inch-gun battleships; they, in turn, had been leap-frogged by the British Queen Elizabeths and Resolutions with their eight 15-inch.
Off the Newfoundland Grand Banks, the four American battleships bound for Europe encountered a ninety-mile-an-hour Atlantic gale. Gigantic seas battered the ships, crushed lifeboats, and sprang deck hatches. Tons of water poured into New York, putting her down by the bow with eight feet of water in her forward storerooms. When the storm-scarred ships entered Scapa Flow on the morning of December 7, 1917, a young American lieutenant on New York saw “a glorious golden dawn . . . hills blending with clouds, purple and gold. . . . When our anchors plunged into the flow, three mighty cheers went up from Beatty’s Queen Elizabeth.” Beatty himself was watching and raised his hat in salute. A few days later, this same American officer “climbed to the crest of a little island called Flotta to look over the great land-locked harbor. Spread out below me, swinging aimlessly to the whims of the eddying currents, lay the Grand Fleet.” And when his ship first sailed from Scapa Flow, “I came on deck in the morning in blazing sunrise and beheld a sight never to be forgotten. The Grand Fleet stretched before me, belching dense volumes of black smoke.”
The American battleships were placed under the operational control of the Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Fleet and designated the 6th Battle Squadron. British flag signals, radio codes, tactical maneuvering orders, and fire-control methods were adopted and Royal Navy signalmen were lent to the American battleships to teach British methods. Less could be done to help American gunnery. Target practice in Pentland Firth revealed the difference between the veteran British and the novice American ships. The Americans’ rate of fire and their accuracy were “distinctly poor and disappointing,” Beatty told the Admiralty. Nevertheless, he said, they were “desperately keen” and he would try not to hurry them too much.
The American battleships and their crews, accustomed to the long blue swells of the Pacific, the cobalt waters of the Caribbean, and even the gray storms of the North Atlantic, were unprepared for the character of the North Sea. “It is not that it blows any harder in the North Sea than in many other parts of the world,” Rear Admiral Hugh Rodman, the commander of the American battleship force, wrote to Benson, “but that it seems to be almost continually blowing, shifting rapidly from one point of the compass to another and kicking up a rough cross sea. In addition there is a great deal of snow, hail, sleet and rain, often coupled with fog and mist.” In the Pentland Firth, with a strong tide running against the wind, the strong tidal currents and heavy seas pushed battleships a quarter mile out of position. The upper and main decks even of dreadnoughts were repeatedly smothered. “I have seen the largest battleships apparently sucked under until only the superstructures on the upper deck were visible when they would slowly rise from their submergence and the water pour off their decks as it might from some huge turtle . . . [coming] to the surface.”
Personal relations between the British and American sailors were excellent. Rodman, a tall, blunt-spoken Kentuckian, noted for his amiability, his earthiness, and his excellent hand at bridge, had graduated sixty-first in a class of sixty-two from Annapolis, served with Admiral Dewey at Manila Bay, and earned a high reputation for seamanship. Beatty did his best to make the Americans feel welcome. When the fleet was in the Firth of Forth, Rodman and his senior captains were frequent guests at Aberdour House. At Scapa Flow, the Americans were allotted space for a baseball diamond. On the Fourth of July, Beatty gave the American battleships two days off and sent them to a separate cove in the Flow to celebrate. The Commander-in-Chief sent greetings on “this greatest of Liberty Days,” and many Grand Fleet admirals boarded New York to help celebrate. In relays, 200 men at a time from each American ship were allowed to go ashore. Most congregated at the Temperance Hotel in Kirkwall. Privately, Americans complained that British ships were “too cold for men brought up in American homes. They are likewise poorly ventilated by our standards. They do not go in for laundries and other labor-saving devices such as motor-driven dough mixers and potato peelers.” But British ships had one convenience American sailors envied: rum for the men and whiskey for the officers, both prohibited on ships of the U.S. Navy.
On February 5, Beatty wrote to Ethel, “I am sending old Rodman out on an operation of his own which pleases him and gives them an idea that they are really taking part in the war. I trust they will come to no harm.” The following day, February 6, the 6th Battle Squadron took its first turn at escorting a convoy to Norway. The four American battleships left the “lavender, snow-powdered hills” of Scapa Flow with a squadron of British light cruisers and screening destroyers, all under Rodman’s command. At sea, wrote the young American officer, “the atmosphere was crystal clear, seeming to magnify each star a dozen times.” In the middle of the night, “the north burst into a brilliant arc of light, and moving streamers. A magnificent display of the aurora borealis followed, rolling its curtains of delicate fire across a surface of reflected brilliance. Against this arc, our ships stand out silhouetted sharply black.” Next day, the rising mist revealed “the coast of Norway: against a wall of snow-capped mountains backing up its jagged cliffs.” Having delivered the convoy’s thirty merchant vessels and while waiting to pick up a return convoy, Rodman’s ships were attacked by submarines—or so they believed. Three of the four battleships reported seeing periscopes and torpedo wakes. Wyoming’s captain was unconvinced that submarines had been present, and a British destroyer reported porpoises. Rodman, however, was certain that his ships had been attacked and officially reported two torpedoes fired at Florida and two at Delaware. After the war, German naval records revealed that no U-boat had attacked battleships that day off the Norwegian coast.
Returning to Scapa Flow, the 6th Battle Squadron was augmented by the arrival of the battleship Texas, New York’s sister. This addition resulted from Rodman’s request for a fifth battleship so that his division could maintain a constant four-ship strength and still allow for repair and refit. Texas, trying her gunnery, proved inferior to the four ships that had spent two months with the Grand Fleet. Although Texas had won an Atlantic Fleet gunnery trophy, Rodman grumbled, “she was not ready to fire under wartime conditions.”
On March 8, it was again the Americans’ turn to escort the Scandinavian convoy and Rodman put to sea with four battleships, five light cruisers, and twelve destroyers. Again, the convoy was delivered and Rodman waited through the night to pick up the returning convoy. A thick fog at dawn made the rendezvous difficult to manage and several big ships narrowly escaped collision. Three of the four battleships were separated and did not rejoin until morning. Once again, Florida and Delaware reported periscopes. On April 17, the Americans sailed on their last convoy assignment. Again, they had bad luck. Texas reported a periscope, which no one else saw. A gale came up, pushing merchantmen and escorts here and there, and when the wind died, the scattered convoy stretched across the sea for sixty miles.
Gradually, the gunnery of the American battleships improved. By June, after six months in the North Sea, Rodman reported the firing as “exceptionally fine, much better than we have ever done previously.” Beatty did not agree. Because of the American ships’ poor performance and the permanent absence of one Grand Fleet battleship division off escorting the Scandinavian convoys, he never permitted release of the three Superbs which the American dreadnoughts had been brought over to replace. The Commander-in-Chief, according to one of his staff officers, still considered the American ships “rather as an incubus to the Grand Fleet than otherwise. They have not even yet been assimilated to a sufficient degree to be considered the equivalent to British dreadnoughts, yet for political reasons he [Beatty] does not care that the Grand Fleet should go to sea without them.” At sea the 6th Battle Squadron was always stationed last in line, “where they were least likely to interfere with the movements of the fleet.”
On July 29, the battleship Arkansas, a sister of Wyoming, arrived to relieve Delaware, which returned to Hampton Roads. In target practice, Arkansas was every bit as poor as the other American battleships had been when they arrived. By November 9, 1918, she was coping with another enemy: she had 259 influenza cases on board, and eleven men died.
During the summer of 1918, three more American dreadnought battleships arrived in Europe. The Admiralty and the Navy Department feared that the German Naval Staff might send one or more fast battle cruisers into the North Atlantic to attack troop transports crowded with American soldiers. If the 27-knot Derfflinger could place herself in the midst of a troop convoy, thousands of American soldiers would drown. To protect the convoys, the new oil-burning dreadnoughts Nevada and Oklahoma, along with the coal-burning Utah, were ordered to Berehaven, Ireland. The three dreadnoughts at Berehaven were under American, not British, operational control, but they had been assigned no screening destroyers. Meanwhile, thirty-four American destroyers commanded by the British admiral Lewis Bayly were based at Queenstown, 100 miles away. Before the American battleships could go to sea, therefore, their admiral had to borrow American destroyers from Bayly. For tactical, not national, reasons, Bayly was reluctant. He agreed that the battleships must be screened in submarine-infested waters, but he also feared the disruption of his finely tuned convoy assignments. He promised to do his best and managed from time to time to loan destroyers for the battleships to go to sea for gunnery practice. Only once, on October 14 when two troop convoys were entering the danger zone, was a real alert sounded for a surface raider. The three American battleships put to sea escorted by seven American destroyers. No raider appeared.
During the war, nine American dreadnoughts served in European waters; six with the Grand Fleet, three at Berehaven. Two more, Pennsylvania and Arizona, came over after the armistice. *77 None of these American dreadnoughts ever met the High Seas Fleet. But neither, after Jutland, did any British dreadnought.
Americans from the president on down wanted the war to end quickly, and they were not put off by convention, effort, or expense. One grandiose American proposal was the complete sealing off of the North Sea by a barrier from Scotland to Norway to block the passage of submarines. Some American engineers made the preposterous suggestion that this be achieved by building a massive stone breakwater 230 miles long and 300 to 900 feet deep. On May 10, 1917, the British naval mission in Washington heard another grand-scale proposal involving a vast webbing of mines and nets that would stretch across the same area. Reporting to the Admiralty, the mission said that the “United States is prepared to bear the cost and maintain the barrier with necessary small craft. . . . This scheme involves the violation of Norwegian territorial waters concerning which the Foreign Office could express opinion. A formal protest by Norwegian government is probable but there is strong feeling here that it should be overridden.” The plan’s strongest advocate was Franklin D. Roosevelt, the enthusiastic assistant secretary of the Navy. “It is physically quite possible to construct a thousand miles of nets two hundred feet in depth,” Roosevelt urged. “It is also perfectly possible to construct 500,000 mines. The cost of manufacturing, transporting and installing 1,000 miles of net and 500,000 mines has been variously estimated at from $200,000,000 to $500,000,000. The Allied governments can well afford the expenditure if only in comparison with the value of the merchant tonnage sunk during the first five months of the present year.”
The Admiralty was appalled. The distance, the depth of the water, the effect of storms and strong currents on mine anchors and tethers, the amount of material required, the impossibility of finding ships to bring these materials from America—all made the gargantuan proposal appear inconceivable. But Roosevelt and the Americans did not give up. In September 1917, during his visit to London, Admiral Mayo raised the idea again. This time, the Admiralty was willing to discuss the project, although more in an effort to conciliate the Americans than because of a genuine conversion. Finally, in October, the Admiralty approved what was to be called the Northern Barrage, providing the Americans supplied the mines and most of the mine-layers.
The American navy went to work. In mid-October, the Navy Department awarded a contract for 100,000 mines. Four months later, on March 3, 1918, the first mines of the Northern Barrage splashed into the North Sea. The minefield, divided into British and American zones, was 230 miles long and 30 miles wide. Over this expanse, 15 rows of mines were laid; the mines were set 100 yards apart at depths of 45, 160, and 240 feet. Through the spring, summer, and fall of 1918, minelaying continued and, although the armistice came before the Northern Barrage was complete, over 70,000 mines were laid—56,571 by the Americans, 13,546 by the British. The cost was $40 million. The problem of Norway was never solved. British and American patrols often saw U-boats using Norwegian coastal waters and Wemyss advised the War Cabinet that “U.S. naval authorities realise that the results of their exertions in production and laying a vast quantity of mines are largely reduced by the inertia of Norway.” Norway, nevertheless, remained unwilling to prevent U-boats from using her territorial waters, either by mining them herself or by allowing the Allies to do so.
The Northern Barrage did not close the North Sea to U-boat passage; submarines traveled back and forth at a rate of thirty or forty a month. The toll taken by the Barrage is uncertain. Only four submarines are known to have been destroyed. One was U-156, a large Deutschland-class minelayer returning from the U.S. East Coast, where one of her mines had sunk the American cruiser San Diego; her fate was assumed from the fact that her captain signaled his base that he was approaching the Barrage and would signal again once he was through; he and his boat were never heard from again. Sims believed that at least four more submarines had been sunk and six seriously damaged crossing the Barrage; German naval records do not support this belief.
In the summer of 1918, seven large Deutschland-class U-boats appeared off the Eastern Seaboard of North America, assigned to mine convoy assembly points and attack unescorted shipping. Mines were laid from Newfoundland to Cape Hatteras, with particular attention paid to the entrance to Chesapeake Bay. The campaign sank 110,000 tons of merchant shipping and the obsolete American armored cruiser San Diego. An eleven-year-old, 14,000-ton ship with a crew of 1,250, San Diego had been escorting troop convoys across the Atlantic. Her value in this line of work is difficult to imagine; against a submerged U-boat, she could do nothing; had she been asked to confront Derfflinger or any other German battle cruiser sent into the North Atlantic, her lot would have been martyrdom. Even so, on the morning of July 19, 1918, San Diego was steaming down the Long Island coast bound for New York to pick up a convoy. Off Fire Island, the ship struck a mine laid by U-156, sank rapidly, and left more than a thousand men bobbing in the water. Because the coast was nearby, many rescue vessels arrived quickly and only six lives were lost. San Diego was the only large American warship lost during the war.
The U.S. Navy played a major role in transporting over 2 million American soldiers to Europe. By June 1918, American troops were pouring into France at the rate of 300,000 a month. The safety of their troop convoys lay in a combination of speed and heavy escort: troopships never moved at less than 12 knots; many reached 15; and the big ocean-liner greyhounds reached 22 and more—all far beyond the speed of a submerged submarine. In addition, a convoy of four or five large troopships would be surrounded by as many as ten or twelve destroyers. Under these conditions, the U-boats were as ineffective as they had been against Grand Fleet dreadnoughts in the North Sea.
More than half of the vessels carrying the soldiers were British or—ironically—German. Before the war, Americans going abroad were ac-customed to traveling on European ocean liners and few large American passenger ships had been built. The great British liners—Aquitania, Mauretania, and Olympic—became troop transports. And within hours of the declaration of war, the U.S. Coast Guard seized all North German Lloyd and Hamburg-America vessels interned in American harbors. Among these were several prewar luxury liners, including the world’s largest, the giant 52,000-ton Vaterland, which, renamed Leviathan, became a U.S. Navy troop transport. By “hot bunking”—assigning one bunk to two men, each man having ownership for twelve hours—the ship’s capacity was doubled and Leviathan carried 8,000 or 9,000 soldiers to Europe on every voyage. Other German ships were given new names and pressed into service: Cincinnati became Covington, Kronprinzessin Cecilie became Mount Vernon, Kaiser Wilhelm II became Agamemnon. The German liner President Lincoln kept its original name.
The U-boats’ mission was to sink these British and former German ships filled with seasick young Americans. Only one was sunk carrying soldiers to France. This was the transport Tuscania, torpedoed on February 5, 1918, off the coast of Ireland with 2,179 American soldiers on board, mostly National Guardsmen from Michigan and Wisconsin. One hundred sixty-six soldiers drowned, along with forty-four members of the British crew. The toll of troopships returning to North America was heavier. President Lincoln was torpedoed, westbound from France to the United States, with 715 men on board including sick and wounded soldiers, two of them completely paralyzed. All were evacuated into lifeboats and picked up fifteen hours later by two American destroyers, which had raced 275 miles at 25 knots. Twenty-seven crewmen died; all of the soldiers were saved. The troopship Covington, returning home from Brest, went down with a loss of seven men. Antilles went down with sixty-seven men, Moldavia with fifty-six, and Ticonderoga with 215. Mount Vernon, the former Kronprinzessin Cecilie, was attacked when she was homeward bound and carrying 350 sick and wounded soldiers, 150 of whom were unable to move. Thirty-five sailors were killed by a torpedo explosion and the ship settled ten feet deeper in the water. But she did not sink. One troop transport struck back. On the night of May 12, 1918, the giant White Star liner Olympic, sister of Titanic, crammed with American soldiers, sighted U-103 on the surface. Making 24 knots, Olympic rammed the submarine and cut her in half.
In every war, there is a last man killed in action; in naval war, a last ship sunk in battle. In the Great War, the last sinking on each side involved a submarine, first as victim, then as assailant. On October 25, 1918, two weeks before the armistice was signed, UB-116 sailed from Heligoland carrying eleven torpedoes; Captain Hans-Joachim Emsmann’s intention was to enter Scapa Flow and torpedo as many moored battleships as he could. Unfortunately, Emsmann was badly advised on two counts. Six months earlier, the Grand Fleet had moved south to the Firth of Forth. In addition, Hoxa Sound, which he had been told was unguarded, was defended by hydrophones, which picked up the sound of approaching ships; by seabed cables, which caused a galvanometer needle to flick when an electric current was induced by the magnetic field of a crossing vessel; and by mines, which could be detonated electrically from the shore. This combination of defenses was too much for Emsmann to overcome and UB-116 was efficiently and suddenly destroyed. *78
The last British warship sunk was Britannia, a predreadnought battleship of the 16,500-ton King Edward VII class. Bound for Gibraltar on the morning of November 9, 1918—two days before the armistice was signed—the ship saw and managed to avoid two torpedoes before being struck by a third. She went down slowly and her crew was taken off by escorting destroyers. Three hours later, the battleship sank. From her resting place on the ocean floor, the nearest point of land is Cape Trafalgar.