CHAPTER 38

Finis Germaniae

The German gamble to win the war with an unrestricted U-boat offensive had failed. Britain did not starve and sue for peace, America joined the Allies, the blockade continued to reap its grim toll, and Germany was on the brink of physical and psychological exhaustion. Then, unexpectedly, the German Supreme Command was given one last chance. After the fall of the tsar, the provisional government had kept Russia in the war for another eight months, but the success of the Bolshevik coup d’état in November 1917 led to Russia’s surrender. A million German and Austrian troops including fifty divisions of veteran infantry were released from the Eastern Front, and Ludendorff was offered another opportunity. Through the winter, trains carrying hundreds of thousands of German soldiers and 3,000 guns rumbled west across Germany. In the spring, for the first time since August 1914, the German army would have approximate numerical parity with the Allies on the Western Front. But this equivalence would be only temporary. Once the masses of American infantry now assembling in their training camps at home were transported across the Atlantic, the advantage Germany had gained by the defeat of Russia would be eliminated. It was clear to Ludendorff that he must strike before the Americans arrived.

In January 1918, on the eve of this last great German offensive, 6.5 million men faced one another on the Western Front. Allied soldiers numbered 3.9 million: 2.6 million French, 1.2 million British and empire troops, and 100,000 Belgians. Facing them were 2.5 million Germans, but by March 1918, with the addition of the million soldiers brought from the Russian front, Ludendorff would have 3.5 million men. The date set for the attack was March 21 and the kaiser assumed a victory. “If an English delegation came to sue for peace,” he told his entourage, “it must first kneel before the German imperial standard, for this is a victory of monarchy over democracy.”

All Germans had ridiculed the idea that an unmilitary nation like America could produce a large army. In addition, Germany’s admirals had promised that, even if America adopted conscription, U-boats could prevent the passage of this army across 3,000 miles of ocean. In April 1917, when the United States entered the war, it seemed the Germans were right; there was then no unit in the U.S. Army larger than a regiment. In the first three weeks after war was declared, only 32,000 American men voluntarily enlisted. Then, on May 18, Congress passed a draft law, authorizing immediate expansion of the regular army to 488,000 men and the National Guard to 470,000. Nine million draft-eligible men registered on June 5; selection among them began on July 20, and 2,810,000 were ordered to report by September to training camps still being built. Meanwhile, on May 28, Major General John J. Pershing, the newly designated commander of the American Expeditionary Force, had left New York for Liverpool. On June 28, the first elements of his force—four regular army infantry regiments and one artillery regiment, newly combined into the 1st Division of the U.S. Army—landed at St. Nazaire and on the Fourth of July paraded before cheering crowds on the Champs-Elysées. Two days later, Pershing forwarded to Washington his appraisal of what would be required. “A force of about 1,000,000 men,” he cabled the secretary of war, “is the smallest unit which in modern war will be a complete, well-balanced, and independent fighting organization.” This might not be enough to win the war, Pershing said, but it was the number “which may be expected to reach France in time for an offensive in 1918.”

At first, the Americans came slowly. By early November 1917, there were only 87,000 American soldiers in France. By the end of December, there were 175,000, including four complete divisions. These American divisions were huge—each had 25,000 to 28,000 men, including 16,000 riflemen; in contrast, the rifle strength of many French divisions was now down to 5,000 or 6,000 men. But the American soldiers arrived poorly trained and woefully ill-equipped with modern weapons of war—“naked so to speak,” said a German staff analyst. Many units actually underwent basic training in France, learning from British and French instructors how to throw hand grenades, use machine guns, fire trench mortars and field artillery, do night signaling and wire-cutting, and prepare for gas attacks. Most of the heavy military equipment the Americans possessed was supplied by the French: 3,100 pieces of field artillery, 1,200 howitzers, 4,800 airplanes. By March 1918, when the United States had been at war for almost a year, the American army in France still numbered only 318,000 men. Only one division, the 1st, which had crossed the Atlantic the preceding June, was actually on line on the Western Front and it was assigned to a quiet sector of eastern France where its presence permitted the withdrawal of veteran French troops for use in the fighting zones.

The newspaper Kölnische Zeitung, sensing that Ludendorff’s offensive would be the last great battle of the war, called it the Kaiserschlacht, the Kaiser’s Battle. It was planned as a rolling series of blows designed to fall sequentially at different points along the Western Front. The first massive stroke, code-named Michael, fell on the British army on the northern part of the front on March 18, 1918. According to Winston Churchill, who was present behind the lines, “There was no surprise about the time or general direction of the attack. The surprise consisted in its weight, scale and power. . . . There rose in less than one minute the most tremendous cannonade I shall ever hear.” Ten divisions of the British Fifth Army were shattered. By March 26, Ludendorff had penetrated thirty-seven miles through the British lines and was close to rupturing the French and British fronts at their point of juncture; this done, he could choose between rolling the British back to the Channel or driving the French before him toward Paris. *79 With the integrity of the whole Allied front threatened, unity of command from the Alps to the Channel became an imperative. On April 3, Ferdinand Foch, Chief of the French General Staff, was asked “to coordinate the action of the British and French armies” and on April 14, he was formally appointed Supreme Commander of all Allied armies on the Western Front. In this crisis, Pershing offered his Americans: “Infantry, artillery, aviation—all that we have are yours; use them as you wish.” In fact, Pershing possessed little artillery or aviation, but he did have infantry and the Allies reached for it eagerly. By the end of April, 302,000 British soldiers, more than a quarter of the British army in France, had been killed, wounded, or taken prisoner; German losses were equally heavy: between March 21 and April 10, the Germans lost 349,000 men.

In the days that followed, a glimmer of hope was provided by the arrival in April of another 119,000 Americans in France; by the end of that month, the American Expeditionary Force numbered 430,000 men. More arrived in May; by June 1, there were 650,000 American soldiers in France. In June, another 279,000 came and in July still another 250,000, so that by July 31, more than a million American soldiers were on the continent of Europe. And millions more were on the way; the success of Ludendorff’s spring offensive had inspired Wilson to authorize creation of an army of eighty divisions numbering 4 million men. The immediate question was how the American soldiers already in France were to be used. The British saw in the packed infantry of the large American divisions the replacements needed to rebuild the ten British divisions shattered by Ludendorff. Pershing, despite his impulsive gesture of March 26, was adamantly opposed to amalgamation. Unlike Sims, who was willing to use the American navy as a pool from which Allied navies could draw reinforcements, Pershing was committed to the creation of an independent American army that—once enough American divisions had been trained—would operate in its own sector of the line under his command. Field Marshal Haig, the British Commander-in-Chief in France, considered Pershing’s attitude “obstinate” and “stupid,” but Marshal Joseph Joffre—old “Papa Joffre,” the hero of the Marne in 1914—agreed with Pershing that attempting to mesh American troops into Allied formations would be a mistake. “There would be an adverse effect,” he told Per-shing. “American battalions would find themselves commanded by a British general with a British staff. They would resent orders received under such circumstances, [orders] which they would accept without question under an American commander. In case of a reverse, there would be the tendency to blame the command. There must also be considered the effect on the American people.” Nevertheless, as Ludendorff continued to hammer the Allied armies, and Allied generals and politicians pleaded desperately for the integration of arriving American manpower into existing veteran British and French units, Pershing gave ground, permitting American troops to be loaned to foreign commanders but only in units of at least divisional size. Always, he emphasized that once enough American divisions were trained and ready to fight, he wanted them back to fight under his command in a sector of the battlefront that would be strictly American.

Ludendorff had calculated in March that the Americans could not reach the front in sufficient numbers to make a difference until midsummer. At the beginning of May, he still believed that he had three months, May, June, and July, to win the war. On May 27, he hurled another thunderbolt, this time at the French sector of the front, advanced forty miles, and reached the Marne east of Château-Thierry. On May 31, the Germans crossed the river and seized a bridgehead fifty-six miles from Paris. Soissons fell and Amiens and Rheims were threatened; on June 1, the French government began preparing to leave Paris for Bordeaux. In this new crisis, when General Henri Philippe Pétain asked Pershing for help, two American divisions were ordered to the front. Suddenly, in Churchill’s words, “the roads . . . began to be filled with endless streams of Americans . . . [an] inexhaustible flood of gleaming youth . . . crammed in their lorries . . . singing the songs of a new world at the tops of their voices . . . arriving in floods to reanimate the mangled body of a France bled white by the innumerable wounds of four years.” On June 2, the American 2nd and 3rd Divisions joined in an Allied counterattack along the Marne. At Belleau Wood, an overgrown former hunting preserve, the 2nd Division, which contained a brigade of U.S. Marines, cleared a square mile of dense wilderness that seemed to have a machine gun behind every tree. The Marines suffered 5,200 casualties, but earned a compliment from a staff officer of the German Seventh Army: “The moral effect of our own gunfire cannot seriously impede the advance of the American infantry.”

By the end of June, time was running out on Ludendorff. American divisions were regularly being fed into the active battle; by mid-July, six were at the front and another twelve were in the line or in reserve in quiet sectors. Seven more were in training in France and fifty-five were assembling in the United States. And given the dense mass of American infantry in these units, the twenty-five American divisions already in France equaled fifty British, French, or German divisions.

The final blow of the Kaiserschlacht was launched on July 15, when Ludendorff attacked between Rheims and Soissons. Six German spearheads crossed the Marne and advanced four miles, but then were stopped in their tracks. Two days later, Foch counterattacked on the western side of the Marne salient with twenty-three divisions including five double-strength American divisions. On the night of July 18, Ludendorff ordered the German troops that had crossed the Marne three days before to retreat across the river. Three weeks later, in the north, the British army, which had not been heavily engaged in three months and now was reinforced to a strength of sixty divisions, began its offensive. On August 8, a British, Canadian, and Australian attack, spearheaded by 600 tanks rolling through fields of ripening wheat, advanced seven miles the first day and captured thousands of prisoners and hundreds of guns. German morale was shattered; retreating troops shouted, “You’re prolonging the war,” at fresh units coming up. “August 8 was the black day of the German Army in the history of this war,” Ludendorff said later. In the 120 days following March 21, the German offensive had inflicted 448,000 casualties on the British army and 490,000 on the French. The Americans had lost 9,685 dead and wounded. But the German army, which had no reserves on which to draw, had suffered 963,000 casualties. “The war,” Ludendorff announced, “must be ended.”

During July, the American army in France had increased by another 306,000 men, bringing the total in France to 1.3 million. On July 24, Per-shing finally achieved his personal goal, command of an American army in the field, when he signed an order creating the First Army, American Expeditionary Force, which would become operational on August 10. On September 12, fifteen American divisions and five French and French colonial divisions, all under Pershing’s command, attacked the Saint-Mihiel salient, a 200-square-mile protrusion jutting thirteen miles west into the Allied line south of Verdun. The Germans already were abandoning the salient and the Americans captured it within two days, along with 13,000 prisoners. On September 26, Pershing launched the largest American offensive of the war: 550,000 Americans and 110,000 French and French colonial troops plunged into the woods, ravines, streams, and gulches of the Meuse-Argonne, driving north toward Sedan. Meanwhile, in September, 257,000 more Americans arrived in France; another 180,000 were due to arrive in October. Ultimately, 2.08 million men of the AEF crossed the Atlantic.

The American army did not defeat the German army in 1918, nor was it the fighting ability of American soldiers that persuaded the German government to seek an armistice. Casualty figures best reveal who fought the Great War: 1.7 million French soldiers died, as did 1.7 million Russians, 1 million from the British empire, 460,000 Italians, 340,000 Rumanians, Belgians, and Serbs, and 116,000 Americans. And on the other side, 2 million Germans, 1.5 million from Austria-Hungary, 350,000 Turks, and 95,000 Bulgarians. Essentially, it was not important how well the new American army fought; what was decisive was that these enthusiastic, green American soldiers were pouring into Europe in a massive, endless torrent. Their arrival had the same demoralizing effect on the German Supreme Command as on the average German soldier. In four years of war, Germans had defeated the Russians and the Rumanians and had held at bay the combined armies of the French and British empires, But now they were confronted by an entirely new enemy with (for practical purposes) unlimited resources. This dire situation was a direct result of the colossal misjudgment made by Germany’s military and naval leaders in authorizing unrestricted submarine warfare. Ultimately, the American army came to France, not just in spite of the U-boats, but because of them.

“You don’t know Ludendorff, who is only great at a time of success,” Bethmann-Hollweg once told a colleague. “If things go badly, he loses his nerve.” This characteristic was strikingly apparent on July 18 as Foch stunned German Supreme Headquarters with his first powerful counterattack. Hindenburg proposed a maneuver to deal with the French offensive. “Then, all of a sudden, General Ludendorff joined in the conversation,” said a staff officer who was present. “He declared that anything of that sort was utterly unfeasible and must therefore be forgotten as he thought he had already made abundantly clear to the field marshal. The field marshal left the table without a word of reply and General Ludendorff departed, clearly annoyed and scarlet in the face.” The confrontation resumed later that day. “This is how we must direct the counterattack; that would solve the crisis at once,” Hindenburg declared.

“At this General Ludendorff straightened up from the map and with an expression of rage on his face turned towards the door letting out one or two words like ‘Madness!’ in profound irritation. The field marshal followed and said to him, ‘I should like a word with you.’ ”

After the “Black Day” of August 8, Ludendorff ricocheted among panic, indiscriminate rage, and cheerful, irrational optimism. Alarmed, his staff arranged for a psychiatrist to visit. At the end of his interview, Dr. Hocheimer told Ludendorff that he was “overworked” and that his “drive and creative power had been damaged.” Ludendorff nodded, agreeing with this analysis. On August 14, only six days after the “Black Day,” Ludendorff and Hindenburg met the kaiser, Chancellor von Hertling, the crown prince, and the thirty-year-old Austrian emperor, Karl, at the Hôtel Britannique in Spa, Belgium. Karl had come to announce that Austria could not continue the war through the winter; “We are absolutely finished,” he said. But Ludendorff, overruling the idea of absolute finality, proposed, instead, “gradually paralyzing the enemy’s will to fight by a strategic defensive,” a policy and a phrase that, the German historian Fritz Fischer has pointed out, contain “almost incomprehensible contradictions.” In essence, Ludendorff was admitting that the war could not be won, but asserting that if a defensive front could be maintained, Germany might still be able to keep Belgium and Luxembourg, and Austria might salvage her multiethnic empire. To achieve this “strategic defensive,” Ludendorff demanded help to bolster the Western Front; Emperor Karl, diverted from his original purpose, found himself promising to send Austrian divisions to France. Hindenburg closed the conference by saying, “I hope that we shall be able to make a stand on French soil and thus in the end to impose our will on the enemy.” A different appraisal of the situation came a few days later from army group commander Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, who wrote to Prince Max of Baden, “By the mistaken operation beyond the Marne and the series of heavy reverses which followed—absolutely fatal both materially and morally—our military situation has deteriorated so rapidly that I no longer believe we can hold out over the winter. It is even possible that a catastrophe will come earlier.”

Emperor Karl returned to Vienna, and on September 10—“like lightning out of a clear sky”—reverted to his original intention and addressed an Austrian peace offer to the United States. It did no good; Secretary of State Lan-sing immediately rejected the note. On September 20, the Social Democrats in the German Reichstag demanded that Chancellor von Hertling ask for an immediate armistice on the basis of no annexations and the complete democratization of the German political system. On September 27, Bulgaria pleaded for an armistice, offering to demobilize her army and restore all conquered territory. Meanwhile, in the Hôtel Britannique at Spa, Ludendorff’s maps were pinned to the walls of his suite one floor above Hindenburg’s; there, on the afternoon of September 28, Ludendorff disintegrated. Trembling, he began to storm against the kaiser, the government, and the politicians in the Reichstag. His staff closed the door to muffle his ranting until he gradually subsided. At six that evening, still pale, Ludendorff descended to Hindenburg’s suite to explain his reasons for demanding an immediate armistice. He believed that in the west Germany would have to accept Wilson’s Fourteen Points, but that in the east the immense booty of the Brest-Litovsk treaty with the Soviets might still be kept. The next day, the kaiser, Chancellor von Hertling, and Foreign Minister Paul von Hintze arrived at the Britannique. Ludendorff, again in control, brusquely announced that an armistice must be concluded “at once, as early as possible”; it would be best to arrange it within twenty-four hours. The kaiser, Hertling, and Hintze were dumbfounded; the only way to end the fighting so quickly would be to surrender. Nevertheless, William agreed that Wilson should be approached about an armistice. For the seventy-five-year-old Hertling, this was too much: he resigned. On October 1, the kaiser asked his own cousin Prince Max, heir to the Grand Duchy of Baden, to become chancellor and to seek an immediate armistice. Max accepted, but said that negotiations would take time; he begged for “ten, eight, or even four days before I have to appeal to the enemy.” Ludendorff, saying, “I want to save my army,” bombarded Prince Max with telegrams—six on a single day—and attempted to hurry the kaiser. “I am not a magician,” William testily replied. “You should have told me that fourteen days ago.” On October 4, King Ferdinand of Bulgaria abdicated and fled to Vienna. On October 5, Prince Max sent a note to Wilson via Switzerland, accepting the president’s Fourteen Points as a basis for negotiations. Lansing replied on Wilson’s behalf on October 8, demanding prompt German evacuation of all occupied territory in France and Belgium as a preliminary to an armistice and a guarantee of good faith. On October 12, Germany pledged do this. During these days, the Allied armies rolled forward all along the line in France and the Flemish coast. On October 17, Ostend and, on October 19, Zeebrugge were evacuated by the Germans after four years of occupation, forcing the German navy to blow up four U-boats and five destroyers that could not be made ready to sail.

Meanwhile, continuing war at sea threatened to upset the momentum toward peace. On October 4, the passenger vessel Hirano Maru was torpedoed off the coast of Ireland with the loss of 292 lives. On October 10, a twenty-two-year-old German U-boat captain torpedoed the Irish mail steamer Leinster and then torpedoed her again while she was sinking. Of the 720 people on board, 176 drowned, including women and children. On October 14, Wilson, through Lansing, demanded the end of the U-boat campaign and announced that neither the United States nor its allies “will consent to consider an armistice so long as the armed forces of Germany continue their illegal and inhuman practices. . . . At the very time the German government approaches the United States with proposals of peace, its submarines are engaged in sinking passenger ships at sea—and not the ships alone, but the very boats in which the passengers and crews seek to make their way to safety.” Balfour was more succinct: “Brutes they were and brutes they remain.”

Command of the German navy was now in new hands. On August 11, Admiral von Holtzendorff, suffering from severe heart disease, had been replaced as Chief of the Naval Staff by Scheer, who, in turn, handed over the High Seas Fleet to Hipper. Scheer promptly moved Naval Staff headquarters from Berlin to Spa; there, he could coordinate policy more closely with Ludendorff, whom he admired. Defying the reality that the war was almost over, Scheer refused to give up on the unrestricted submarine campaign and immediately demanded a preposterous crash program to build 450 new submarines at a rate of thirty-six a month. When Wilson insisted on termination of the unrestricted submarine campaign, Scheer and Ludendorff joined in fierce opposition. “The navy does not need an armistice,” Scheer declared on October 16, while Ludendorff said the next day, “To allow ourselves to be deprived of our submarine weapon would amount to capitulation.” The two warriors lost this battle. Prince Max, by threatening to resign, obtained an order from the kaiser and, on October 20, Germany renounced the submarine campaign against merchant shipping. Ludendorff later complained that this “concession to Wilson was the heaviest blow to the army and especially to the navy. The cabinet had thrown in the sponge.” On October 21, Scheer, angry at being overridden, recalled all submarines at sea and placed them at the disposal of the High Seas Fleet commander for action against Allied warships. After twenty-one months, Germany’s unrestricted U-boat campaign was over.

On October 17, at a conference in Berlin, Ludendorff suddenly denied that he had ever demanded an armistice within twenty-four hours and declared that Germany possessed sufficient strength to keep fighting. On October 23, Wilson added a new condition for peace: the kaiser’s removal. If the United States government “must deal with the military masters and monarchical autocrats of Germany,” the president said, “it must demand, not peace negotiations, but surrender.” Hearing this, William and his wife, Dona, approached hysteria. “The hypocritical Wilson has at last thrown off the mask,” William announced. “The object of this is to bring down my House, to set the monarchy aside.” The empress raged at “the audacity of the parvenu across the sea who thus dares to humiliate a princely house which can look back on centuries of service to people and country.” Ludendorff rebelled against Wilson’s military conditions, saying that they went far beyond the simple battlefield armistice he was seeking. On October 24, defying the authority of the chancellor, he issued a proclamation to the army, countersigned by Hindenburg. Wilson’s proposals, he declared, are “a demand for unconditional surrender [and are] thus unacceptable to us as soldiers.” Prince Max, enraged by this insubordination, again gave the kaiser a choice: Ludendorff or himself. On October 26, William summoned Hindenburg and Ludendorff to Bellevue Castle in Berlin. Speaking first to Ludendorff, William upbraided the general for countersigning a proclamation to the army that was in direct conflict with the policy of the chancellor and the government. Ludendorff immediately offered his resignation, which William accepted. Clicking his heels, the soldier who had dominated Germany for twenty-six months departed. Hindenburg subsequently offered his own resignation, but was curtly told, “You stay.” Afterward, William was happy. The “Siamese twins,” he declared, were now separated. Outside the castle, Ludendorff, furious that Hindenburg had not resigned with him, would not accompany the field marshal back to the General Staff building. “I refuse to drive with you,” he said. When Hindenburg asked why, Ludendorff replied, “I refuse to have any more dealings with you because you treat me so shabbily.”

On October 27, Germany accepted all of Wilson’s conditions. On Octo-ber 29, Austria-Hungary agreed to an armistice with Italy and, on No-vember 2, with the rest of the Allied powers. On October 31, Turkey left the war. That afternoon, Prince Max, stricken with influenza, was given a massive dose of sleeping drops and slid into two days of unconsciousness.

With the German empire in its death throes, two groups in the German navy, first the admirals, then the seamen, took matters into their own hands. The submarine weapon had been sheathed but the High Seas Fleet remained a powerful force. Enraged by the U-boat decision, Scheer and the Naval Staff decided to use the surface ships in one last offensive thrust, a bold variation on earlier unsuccessful attempts to lure the Grand Fleet over a U-boat ambush. The difference this time was that the Germans intended to fight a battle whether or not the U-boats had managed to reduce the Grand Fleet’s numerical superiority. Further, the German admirals did not care whether the High Seas Fleet won or lost; they cared only that it inflict heavy damage on the Grand Fleet. Hipper agreed with Scheer that “an honorable battle by the fleet—even if it should be a fight to the death—will sow the seed for a new German fleet of the future.” Besides preserving honor, a battle that inflicted severe damage on the Grand Fleet might also influence the peace negotiations in Germany’s favor.

The operation was set in motion on October 22 when Captain Magnus von Levetzow of the Naval Staff Operations Department came to Wilhelmshaven and orally gave Scheer’s order to Hipper: “The High Seas Fleet is directed to attack the English fleet as soon as possible.” Nothing was put in writing, for two reasons: first, Scheer wished to keep the plan secret from the British; second, knowing the impact the operation would have on armistice negotiations, he wished to hide it also from the German government in Berlin. Neither the kaiser nor the chancellor was informed. Scheer explained later that he had already mentioned to the kaiser that giving up submarine warfare meant that the surface fleet would again have “complete freedom of action.” The kaiser had not reacted and Scheer seized upon William’s silence as tacit approval. Subsequently, Scheer defended himself more boldly: “I did not regard it [as] necessary to obtain a repetition of the kaiser’s approval. In addition, I feared that this could cause further delay and was thus prepared to act on my own responsibility.” Prince Max said later that if he had known of Scheer’s plan, he would have approved it, but at the time he was given no chance to approve or disapprove. “I specifically reiterate that I did not recognize the chancellor’s competence over operational measures and for that reason I did not seek his approval,” Scheer declared.

Hipper issued his tactical orders on October 24. The entire High Seas Fleet would leave Heligoland Bight at night and advance into the southern part of the North Sea. The force would be more powerful than that commanded by Scheer at Jutland: Hipper would bring five battle cruisers, eighteen dreadnought battleships, twelve light cruisers, and seventy-two destroyers. The purpose of the operation was to lure the Grand Fleet over freshly laid minefields and six lines of waiting U-boats into the southern North Sea, where the High Seas Fleet would be waiting to engage whatever British warships survived the passage south. To create this lure, German light cruisers and destroyers would launch provocative raids along the Belgian coast and into the Thames estuary. Specifically, one destroyer flotilla supported by three light cruisers would bombard the coast of Flanders, which had been abandoned by the German army a week before, while five destroyers and seven light cruisers attacked shipping in the Thames estuary. The Flanders bombardment would be supported by Hipper’s battle fleet of eighteen dreadnought battleships escorted by forty-three destroyers, while the Thames attack was to be covered by five German battle cruisers including the new Hindenburg. After the raids, the retiring squadrons and flotillas would retreat to the Dutch coast, where the entire High Seas Fleet would concentrate. There, Hipper expected to meet the Grand Fleet coming down from the north and to bring it to action on the evening of the second day, October 31. If, by some mischance, the two battle fleets did not meet, all available German destroyers were to break away and sweep north toward the Firth of Forth. If the British fleet was found, the destroyers were instructed to launch their torpedoes in mass volleys, no less than three from each destroyer at a single time. The operation, for all its “death ride,” Götterdämmerung appearance, was well planned and stood a chance of success—at least, as success was defined by Scheer and Hipper. Both admirals hoped that, in addition to salvaging the honor of the German navy, “a tactical success might reverse the military position and avert surrender.”

On October 27, Scheer approved Hipper’s plan and the operation was set for October 30. Twenty-two U-boats took positions along the Grand Fleet’s probable line of advance from Scotland; one of these was UB-116, which would be blown up by shore-controlled mines while trying to enter Scapa Flow. The surface ships of the High Seas Fleet began to assemble in Schillig roads on the afternoon of October 29, with the sortie scheduled for dawn the next day. The admirals had not reckoned, however, on the war-weariness and defeatism of the German crews. Rumors of the impending operation and the words “suicide mission” were spreading from mouth to mouth and ship to ship. On October 27, when light cruisers of the 4th Scouting Group were ordered to load mines at Cuxhaven, forty-five stokers from Strassburg hid themselves in the dockyard. When the battle cruisers passed through the locks from Wilhelmshaven’s inner harbor into the roadstead, 300 men from Derfflinger and Von der Tann climbed over the side and disappeared ashore.

The arrival in the anchorage of three battleship squadrons from other naval bases gave substance to the rumor that the fleet was about to go out to seek a glorious end off the coast of England. Unlike the admirals and officers, the seamen had no intention of being sacrificed for honor’s sake. Not only could they see no point in defeat and meaningless death, but they regarded the operation as a deliberate attempt to sabotage negotiations to end a war already lost. When one Markgraf seaman jumped on a turret and called for three cheers for President Wilson, a deck crowded with men roared approval. Insubordination welled up on König, Kronprinz Wilhelm, Kaiserin, Thüringen, and Helgoland. On all these ships, seamen had no interest in “an honorable death for the glory of the fleet”; they wanted surrender, discharge, and permission to go home.

A red sunset on the evening of October 29 turned the calm waters of the anchorage crimson. About 7:00 p.m., the wind came up, bringing a series of rain squalls. Hipper summoned his admirals and captains on board his flagship, Baden, for a final briefing. The conference was delayed because on Thüringen the crew made trouble about the captain’s boat leaving the ship. At first, Hipper tried to disregard news of these disturbances, but at 10:00 p.m., he changed his mind and decided that the fleet was not ready to sail. Next morning, when the destroyer crews learned of the disturbances on the battleships, they asked to continue alone with the planned operation. Hipper considered this possibility, but when he heard that the trouble had spread to Friedrich der Grosse and König Albert and that the disturbances on Thüringen and Helgoland had developed into full-scale mutinies, he decided that he had no choice but to cancel the entire operation. To prevent the spread of mutiny, he ordered the dreadnought squadrons dispersed to Kiel, Cuxhaven, and Wilhelmshaven.

Thüringen and Helgoland remained behind. When their crews still refused orders, Hipper ordered marines to arrest them. Two steamers carrying 250 heavily armed marines approached the battleships, while a submarine and five destroyers, their torpedo tubes loaded, cleared for action at pointblank range. The mutineers surrendered and were taken to prison in Wilhelmshaven. Meanwhile, however, Hipper’s dispersal of the fleet, instead of quarantining the disloyal groups, served only to spread the infection. The 3rd Battle Squadron—König, Kronprinz Wilhelm, Kaiserin, and Markgraf—reached Kiel on November 1 with many seamen in irons. On arrival, 4,000 sailors paraded in the streets and demanded release of the prisoners. Workers’ and Sailors’ Councils were formed and on November 4 took control of the port. The battleship König had gone into dry dock with the flag of the Imperial Navy still flying. On November 5, when a sailor attempted to replace the flag with a red banner, the ship’s captain shot him dead near the mast. The response was rifle fire from buildings overlooking the ship, which wounded the captain and killed two officers. Later that day a band of sailors invaded the residence in Kiel Castle of Grand Admiral Prince Henry of Prussia, the kaiser’s brother and Commander-in-Chief of the Baltic Fleet. Henry fled, escaping from Kiel driving a truck that flew a red flag. By the end of the first week of November, mutiny had become revolution. Thirty-five thousand armed sailors crowded the streets of Wilhelmshaven, Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils had been established in the port city, and briefly there existed a Republic of Oldenburg with Leading Stoker Bernhard Kuhnt as president. On November 9, when the red flag was hoisted on Hipper’s flagship Baden, the Commander-in-Chief of the High Seas Fleet silently packed his bags and went ashore. Groups of sailors streamed out of Kiel and Wilhelmshaven by truck, train, and ship and raised red flags in naval harbors along the North Sea and Baltic coasts. Then came the great commercial ports of Hamburg and Bremen and, as revolution spread across Germany, interior cities such as Cologne, Hanover, Frankfurt, Dresden, Munich, and, eventually, Berlin.

On Friday morning, November 8, Marshal Foch, representing all Allied armies, and the First Sea Lord, Admiral Wemyss, representing the Allied navies, waited on a train parked on a siding in the forest of Compiègne for the arrival of Germany’s armistice delegation. While a cold rain fell on the oak trees outside, Foch assured Wemyss that if the Germans refused to agree to Allied armistice terms, he could force the capitulation of the entire German army within three weeks. At 7:00 a.m. a train carrying the German delegates, led by the Reichstag leader, Matthias Erzberger, rolled into another siding 200 yards away. Other than the French sentries in blue-gray uniforms pacing under the trees, there was nothing in sight but rain and falling leaves.

The meeting began at 9:00 a.m. and Foch presented the Allies’ terms. The naval demands included demilitarization of Heligoland, all nations to be given access to the Kaiser Wilhelm Canal, surrender of all submarines and internment of Germany’s ten latest battleships, six battle cruisers, eight light cruisers, and fifty most modern destroyers. Failure to execute any of these terms would allow the Allies to resume the war within forty-eight hours. Meanwhile, until the treaty of peace was actually signed, the blockade of Germany would remain in force. The German naval representative, Captain Vanselow, protested that internment of the German fleet could not be accepted because the fleet had never been beaten. Grimly, Wemyss replied that if that was what was needed, the German fleet had only to come out. When Wemyss asked for 160 submarines, Vaneslow replied that there were not nearly 160 to be had. This gave Wemyss the chance to demand what he really wanted: all German submarines. The meeting was adjourned so that the German delegation could communicate these terms to Berlin.

On November 9, even as Foch was dictating terms to Erzberger, Admiral Scheer informed the kaiser that he could no longer rely on the navy. “My dear admiral,” William replied, “I no longer have a navy.” In fact, he was losing far more than that. Before the end of that day, William had abdicated, both as German emperor and as King of Prussia, and the establishment of a German republic had been proclaimed from a balcony of the Reichstag building. Early the following morning, William was persuaded to leave Spa for the Netherlands, thirty miles away, where he had been offered refuge in Kasteel Amerongen, the home of the Dutch-English Count Godard Bentinck. On the journey through a driving rain, William was silent. But when the car pulled up in the rain before the main entrance of the moated seventeenth-century château, he gave a deep sigh of relief. “Now,” he said to Count Bentinck, rubbing his hands together, “you must let me have a cup of real, good, hot, strong English tea.” Instead of English tea, he got a real Scots high tea: Amerongen had a Scots housekeeper, and soon a teapot and a tray of biscuits, scones, and shortbread were set before Queen Victoria’s eldest grandson.

A week later, on November 16, Erich Ludendorff disguised himself with a false beard and a pair of blue spectacles and sneaked away to Denmark. Recognized in Copenhagen, he fled again, this time to Sweden, where he lived for three months in a country house near Stockholm before returning to Germany. He met Adolf Hitler and in 1923 marched at his side in the unsuccessful Munich Beer Hall Putsch. In 1924, Ludendorff was elected to the Reichstag as a Nazi deputy and in 1925, Hitler persuaded him to run for president of Germany. Of 24 million votes cast, Ludendorff received 280,000.

The German delegation returned to Compiègne on Sunday, November 10, and was received at midnight. At 5:10 a.m. on November 11—the 1,586th day of the Great War—the weary delegates finally signed the document ending hostilities that day at 11 a.m. Before signing, Erzberger looked at Foch and said, “The German people, who stood steadfast against a world of enemies for fifty months, will preserve their freedom and unity no matter how great the external pressure. A people of seventy millions may suffer but it cannot die.” Steadily gazing back, Foch said, “Très bien.”

That afternoon, in the Firth of Forth, the Grand Fleet Commander-in-Chief ordered all ships to “splice the main brace”—to serve the men an extra ration of rum. The exceptions to Beatty’s order were the American ships, which were dry. At seven that night, the men in the anchorage were deafened by a continuous din of foghorns, sirens, and steam whistles. Sky rockets and colored signal bombs burst in the air, while searchlight beams swept across water and sky, finding and fixing on White Ensigns and American flags. On the big ships, bands played and sailors mobbed sacrosanct quarterdecks. Queen Elizabeth’s crew came in a body to the admiral’s cabin where Beatty and his staff were sitting down to dinner. “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” rose from hundreds of throats. The men invited the officers to dance, and captains, commanders, and lieutenants waltzed, fox-trotted, and did the military polka with seamen and marines until two o’clock in the morning. At one point, a picket boat from Inflexible came alongside New York to take a group of American officers to the battle cruiser where they could drink champagne.

It was agreed by all the Allied powers that the entire German submarine fleet would be surrendered with no possibility of return. The British and French governments also wanted the German surface fleet surrendered to the Allies. The Americans were less eager for this; they did not want the ships, but preferred that neither the British nor the French have them. Instead, the United States proposed temporary internment of the surface vessels in neutral ports until a final decision was made at the peace conference. This course was adopted and two neutral governments, Norway and Spain, were approached. Both declined to receive the German ships, now seething with mutiny. Accordingly, the Allied Naval Council accepted Wemyss’s suggestion that all seventy-four surface ships be interned at Scapa Flow under the supervision of the Grand Fleet. There, German skeleton crews would remain on board because, under international law, interned ships still belonged to the German government. Little time was allowed for delivery. If the ships designated for internment were not ready to sail on November 18, the Allies said, Hel-igoland would be occupied. On the night of November 12, a radio message from Beatty requested that a German flag officer come to the Firth of Forth to make arrangements. The next afternoon, Hipper’s representative, Rear Admiral Hugo Meurer, left Wilhelmshaven for Scotland on the new light cruiser Königsberg.

At seven o’clock on the evening of November 15, Meurer and four other German officers walked up the gangplank of Queen Elizabeth. Around them, a black night and thick fog in the Firth of Forth hid the shapes and lights of the rows of dreadnoughts near Beatty’s flagship. Reaching the quarterdeck, Meurer was received in silence by two British officers assigned to escort him to the Commander-in-Chief. Powerful electric lights created a path across the quarterdeck to Beatty’s quarters; outside the path everything was darkness, but along its edge stood a line of marine sentries, light gleaming off the steel of their fixed bayonets. Beatty and his officers sat at a large dining room table with their backs to a wall hung with prints of Nelson’s victories. On the table was a small bronze lion, a reminder of the admiral’s years with the battle cruisers. When the Germans entered, Beatty stood and, looking straight at Meurer, said, “Who are you?” “Rear Admiral Hugo Meurer,” the German replied. “Have you been sent by Admiral von Hipper to arrange the details for carrying out the terms of the armistice which refer to the surrender of the German fleet?” Beatty asked. “Yes,” said Meurer. “Where are your credentials?” Beatty asked. These were produced, and Beatty said, “Pray be seated.” Beatty then read his prepared instructions. “They were greatly depressed,” Beatty wrote afterward to Eugenie, “and I kept feeling sorry for them, but kept repeating to myself, Lusitania, Belgian atrocities, British prisoners of war. . . . Meurer, in a voice like lead with an ashen grey face, said, ‘I do not think the Commander-in-Chief is aware of the condition of Germany,’ and then began to describe the effect of the blockade. Germany was destroyed utterly. I said to myself thank God for the British navy and told them to return with their answers in the morning.” Meurer then informed Beatty that three delegates of the Sailors’ and Workers’ Council were on board Königsberg and insisted on accompanying him and taking part in the discussions. “I naturally said I knew them not and did not intend to know them better,” Beatty reported, telling Meurer that no one but the German admiral and his staff would be allowed to leave Königsberg. This “seemed a source of relief to the stricken party.” At 9:00 p.m., the Germans stepped back into the darkness to begin the twelve-mile trip to their ship. Beatty went to bed “and was nearly sick.”

The following morning, the Germans returned two hours late because of what Beatty described as “the thickest fog I have ever seen in the Firth of Forth.” It was arranged that the U-boats would surrender to Tyrwhitt at Harwich and the surface ships to Beatty in the Firth of Forth, from where they would proceed to Scapa Flow for internment. Meurer asked for extensions of time, pleading that German seamen would not bring the ships over. “The men will not obey. . . . I have now no authority. . . . We must have food.” Meurer “prated about the honor of their submarine crews being possibly assailed,” Beatty told Eugenie. “It nearly lifted me out of my chair. I scathingly replied that their personal safety would be assured.” It was a long day; the Germans remained on board until midnight. Finally, when it came to signing the required documents, Beatty thought Meurer “would collapse. He took two shots at it, putting his pen down twice [before he signed].” Before leaving the British flagship, the Germans were given a meal. “I saw a leg of mutton being taken in for the five officers,” said Ernle Chatfield, now the captain of Queen Elizabeth. Afterward, a steward told him, “They left nothing but the bone, sir!” As the Germans were leaving, a marine guard saw a German officer look around nervously and then stuff something inside his greatcoat. The officer was confronted and a large piece of cheddar cheese was found in his pocket.

The first defeated German warships to appear in British waters were the U-boats. During fifty-one months of war, German submarines had sunk a total of 5,282 British, Allied, and neutral merchant ships totaling 11,153,000 tons at the cost of 178 U-boats and 511 officers and 4,576 men. Three hundred and ninety-two submarines had been built before and during the war; therefore, the loss rate was almost 50 percent. At the time of the armistice, the German navy still possessed 194 U-boats, with a further 149 under construction. Britain wanted them all destroyed. Harwich had been designated as the port of surrender and Tyrwhitt was assigned to supervise the operation. When the Harwich Force cruisers and destroyers weighed anchor on November 20 and steamed to a rendevous point off Lowestoft, all hands were at action stations; Tyrwhitt was taking no chances. Out of the morning mist, a German transport that was to take the submarine crews back to Germany appeared, followed in a single line by twenty of the latest U-boats. Tyrwhitt had instructed his men that strict silence must be maintained when passing close to a U-boat and that there must be absolutely no cheering. Nevertheless, as one officer watched “the low-lying, sinister forms of U-boats emerge from the mist,” his feelings overwhelmed him. He likened the moment to being in Piccadilly and “seeing twenty man-eating tigers walk up from Hyde Park Corner and lie down in front of the Ritz to let you cut off their tails and put their leads on.” Tyrwhitt’s force steamed past the submarines, detaching destroyers as they went so that each five U-boats had a destroyer in front and one on each beam. About 10 a.m., this line of ships reached a second rendezvous where two destroyers waited with British prize crews to put aboard the U-boats. The submarines anchored under the guns of the British destroyers; motor launches carried the British prize crews from the destroyers to the submarines. The boarding parties, each consisting of two or three armed officers and fifteen men, hoisted the White Ensign over the German flag. The German captains then were required to sign assurances that their boats were in an efficient condition, with torpedoes on board but torpedo warheads removed, and that no booby traps or other unpleasant surprises had been left aboard. The German crews, having been told that they would be taken into a British port, concluded that they were about to be paraded through the streets. Once assured that this was not so, they became communicative and helpful, explaining the intricacies of their boats to the British officers. “In nearly every case,” said Commander Stephen King-Hall, “the German officers seemed anxious to assist in every way possible and give as much information concerning the working of the boat as was feasible.” As each submarine proceeded into Harwich harbor with a prize crew in control and the German crew lined up on the forward deck, it passed through a swarm of small boats, crowded with spectators. Despite this assembly, Tyrwhitt’s order was obeyed and there was complete silence. At 4:00 p.m., a motor launch came alongside each U-boat, the Germans gathered their personal belongings, the German captain saluted, the salute was returned, and the Germans were taken to the transport ship waiting outside. Behind, “as the sun sank in a splendour of crimson and gold, the long line of twenty U-boats, harmlessly swinging around their buoys, reflecting the last rays of the sun from their conning towers, made a picture which will remain forever in the minds of . . . [those who saw them].”

For the next eleven days, this remarkable procession continued. On November 21, the second day, nineteen more U-boats came over; a twentieth sank or was scuttled in passage. On the third day, twenty-one submarines arrived. One German captain told a British officer that, eight months after the sinking of Lusitania, his submarine had been within 400 yards of Mauretania, the destroyed liner’s sister, with all his tubes ready to fire, but, owing to the crisis involving the United States, he had not fired. And that, on his return to Germany, he had received a personal letter from the kaiser commending him for his discretion. On November 24, twenty-eight submarines came over; on the twenty-seventh, twenty-seven more arrived, including U-9, which had sunk Aboukir, Hogue, and Cressy four years before. On December 1, the arrival of eight more U-boats brought the total number delivered to 123. Meanwhile, another nine had been interned in neutral ports. This left Germany with sixty-two seaworthy U-boats and construction continuing on another 149. When these numbers were ascertained in December by the Allied Naval Council, an ultimatum was issued: every completed U-boat must be made seaworthy and brought to England immediately; those unable to proceed under their own power were to be towed; all boats under construction were to be destroyed. Eventually, 176 submarines were delivered to the British at Harwich. An additional eight foundered on their way across the North Sea although no crew member was lost. The operable U-boats reaching Harwich were divided up and distributed among the Allies: 105 to Britain, forty-six to France, ten to Italy, and two to Belgium. All were destroyed except ten of the forty-six allotted to France

Franz von Hipper refused to lead the German surface fleet to Britain and Rear Admiral Ludwig von Reuter was given the assignment. As Hipper watched his dreadnoughts leaving Schillig roads, he said, “My heart is breaking. I have nothing more to do.” Across the North Sea, the Grand Fleet was waiting. Before dawn on November 21, the light cruiser Cardiff slipped out of the Firth of Forth to meet the German ships and guide them to the rendezvous with Beatty’s fleet. Then, as the sun came up, battleships, battle cruisers, armored and light cruisers, and escorting destroyers—in all, 370 ships—manned by 90,000 men of the British, American, and French navies, left the harbor. It was a sunlit morning, with a light breeze to blow out the flags, although haze limited visibility to about five miles. British ships flew every White Ensign they possessed, as though they were going into action. The crews were at action stations, although, at Beatty’s command, all main turrets were trained fore and aft. Contact was made at 9:30 a.m. about forty miles east of May Island when Cardiff appeared, trailing a kite balloon with observers on board. Cardiff was followed in sunshine and mist by the battle cruiser Seydlitz, then the other German battle cruisers and a long line of battleships, their huge guns trained fore and aft. All told, there were seventy German ships: nine battleships, five battle cruisers, seven light cruisers, and forty-nine destroyers. In each type of ship, there was a deficiency of one in the numbers promised by the armistice agreement: one battleship, König, and a light cruiser, Dresden, had been left behind with engine problems; the new battle cruiser Mackensen, still under construction, was unready for sea; one destroyer, V-70, had struck a mine crossing the North Sea and sunk. Nevertheless, the approaching ships were the cream of the High Seas Fleet. The Allied fleet steamed past the head of the German line, then reversed course and took station in two long columns on parallel courses, one on either side of its former enemies, about six miles apart. Speed was 12 knots. In all Allied ships, fire-control directors were trained on the German vessels, with range and bearing constantly plotted. The turrets were not trained, but ammunition hoists were loaded and shells waited at the breeches of the guns. Targets at ranges of 3,500 and 5,000 yards were assigned and then passed along from one Allied ship to the next so that each German warship was always subject to coverage. Later, it was clear that these precautions had been unnecessary. All powder and ammunition had been removed from the German ships and, in some cases, range finders, gun sights, and breech blocks as well. Passing May Island, Beatty signaled one of the German squadrons to come to 17 knots and close up. The reply came back, “We cannot do better than twelve knots. Lack lubricating oil.”

The procession entered the Firth of Forth and by noon, the German ships were anchored under the guns of the Inchkeith fortifications. Hardly had the anchors been dropped when German seamen appeared at the rails with hook and line to try to catch their dinner. Boats of every description—steamers, yachts, fishing boats, and rowboats—milled about, their passengers staring up at the gray steel ships. Ethel Beatty in her yacht, Sheelah, passed very close to Seydlitz, drawing mocking laughter from the German crew, which enraged the admiral’s wife. Meanwhile, the Grand Fleet steamed past the Germans, proceeding to its anchorage above and below the Forth bridge. Last of all came Queen Elizabeth and Beatty, who signaled, “The German flag will be hauled down at sunset today and will not be hoisted again without permission.” Beatty had ordered silence in the presence of the defeated enemy, but after the Germans anchored, Queen Elizabeth pulled out of line and stopped. As the whole Allied fleet passed by, each vessel cheered, colors dipped, guards presented arms, and bands struck up the national anthems of Britain, France, and the United States. Then, said Ernle Chatfield, “I took the fleet flagship to her buoy above the bridge and told the commander to assemble the crew on the quarterdeck. I walked aft with the admiral and asked him to say a few words to them. ‘I don’t think that there is anything I can say,’ he said. But as he turned to go down the ladder to his cabin with the ship’s company’s cheers ringing in his ears, he faced them and said with a smile, ‘Didn’t I tell you they would have to come out?’ ”

At 3:37 p.m., sunset in the Forth, a bugle sounded on Queen Elizabeth and the White Ensign was lowered throughout the fleet. Simultaneously at Inchkeith, the German imperial flag came down on seventy warships. At six o’clock, Beatty attended a thanksgiving service on the quarterdeck of his flagship and then sat down to dinner with thirty-two guests including Admiral Sims and a French admiral. Not present were the two greatest British admirals of that era: John Arbuthnot Fisher, who conceived and created the Grand Fleet, and John Rushworth Jellicoe, who commanded it through the greater part of the war. No one was willing to say whether these men had been slighted intentionally or whether the Admiralty simply forgot to invite them.

Over the next several days, the interned ships left the Firth of Forth in groups for Scapa Flow. Two German destroyer flotillas went first, on November 22, and the light cruisers and remaining destroyers followed over the next two days. The dreadnoughts started moving on the twenty-fourth, accompanied by British battleships and battle cruisers; by Wednesday, November 27, all seventy German warships were anchored at Scapa Flow. The battleship König arrived from Germany on December 6 along with the light cruiser Dresden and the destroyer V-129, sent as a replacement for the mined V-30. The seventy-fourth and last German ship interned was the new battleship Baden. She arrived on January 9, 1919, as a substitute for the unfinished battle cruiser Mackensen, which the Allies had demanded but which was never sufficiently completed to go to sea.

At Scapa Flow, all radio equipment was removed from the interned ships and the crews were reduced to maintenance size. Twenty thousand men had brought the ships across the North Sea. On December 3, 4,000 returned to Germany on two ships bringing supplies from Wilhelmshaven. Another 6,000 went home on December 6 and 5,000 more on December 12. This left behind a total of 4,815 men, scattered through the anchored fleet. Each battle cruiser kept 200 men on board, battleships 175, light cruisers 80, and each destroyer 20, enough to maintain the ships and to enable them to steam at reduced speed. This provision was important to the Germans because they still hoped that the ships might be returned to Germany on the conclusion of a peace treaty. Thereafter, the thinning out continued and an average of a hundred men went home on the supply ships every month of the internment.

Guard duty over the interned fleet was assigned to battle squadrons of the Royal Navy. After the armistice, the Grand Fleet had been split up, redistributed, and renamed. Admiral Sir Charles Madden became Commander-in-Chief of the Atlantic Fleet and it was his squadrons that did guard duty, rotating a month at a time. The permanent harbor wardens were armed trawlers, which constantly patrolled the lines of German ships. It was impressed on all British officers and sailors at Scapa Flow that until a peace treaty was signed the armistice was only a pause in the war. The sole channel of official communication permitted between the interned ships and the guard ships was from Admiral von Reuter to the British admiral commanding the guard squadron. And unless the matter was urgent, this communication had to be in writing. On occasions when Britons and Germans actually met, salutes were authorized, but handshakes barred. There is a story that, after spending a winter at Scapa Flow, a German officer said to a Briton, “If you spent four years in this place, you deserved to win the war.” The story is assuredly apocryphal; none of the postwar, live-and-let-live camaraderie prerequisite to such a conversation existed between Briton and German at Scapa Flow.

For seven months, the seventy-four interned German warships became a part of the landscape of Scapa Flow. Their crews were demoralized and apathetic. Discipline was loose and unwieldy; even Reuter’s orders had to be countersigned by the Soldiers’ Council. Sailors got up late, did little work, and lounged on deck, smoking in the presence of officers. Cleaning was abandoned and the mess decks were so deep in filth that German officers blushed when British officers came on board. Some destroyers, infested by rats, were left unoccupied. Neither officers nor men were allowed to go ashore. To cope with monotony, sailors fished, wrote letters, played chess, gambled, sang, and danced. Food was adequate—the British insisted that all of it come from Germany and supplies were brought from Wilhelmshaven twice a month—so the catching of fish and seagulls was more for diversion than nourishment. German seamen received 300 cigarettes or seventy-five cigars per month, and a generous allotment of alcohol. There were doctors in the fleet, but no dentist, and the British refused to provide one. Men with decayed teeth or broken dentures had priority in going home. Two German chaplains, a Protestant and a Roman Catholic, served the entire fleet. Out-going mail to Germany was censored; later, incoming also. Only British newspapers were allowed on board and these were delivered four days late. Communication between German ships was by flag or signal light only. No visiting between ships was permitted; it was prohibited even to lower a boat, at the risk of being fired upon.

On Reuter’s flagship, Friedrich der Grosse, an especially disorderly group calling itself the Red Guard made a practice of stomping on the steel deck over the admiral’s cabin when he was trying to sleep. At one point, fearing that this mutinous element might try to take over the ship, Reuter asked the British admiral to give him support if this were attempted. Prompt assistance was promised. Even so, the flagship became, in Reuter’s words, a “madhouse” and on March 25, he shifted his flag to the light cruiser Emden. When two of the worst-behaved seamen were ordered back to Germany and refused to go, two British destroyers came alongside with crews at action stations to remove them and send them to a British prison.

Over the months, Reuter convinced his former enemies that he was a serious, trustworthy officer, doing his best to carry out the terms of the armistice. Both sides understood that the future of Reuter’s ships would be decided in Paris, where the peace treaty was being negotiated and where the future of the German fleet was only one of many important items on the agenda. The subject provoked disagreement. France, which had built no warships since before the war, wanted at least one-quarter of the German ships; Italy wanted another quarter. Britain, with the largest fleet in the world—a fleet beyond her postwar ability to support—wanted the German fleet destroyed. America, creating a new fleet of modern dreadnoughts, had no interest in rusting German warships.

Neither the Allied Naval Council nor the British Admiralty nor the German government let Reuter know what was happening in Paris. The armistice had specifically forbidden the ships’ destruction and Reuter had stressed to his captains that he would do nothing unless the British attempted to seize them without the German government’s consent. Nevertheless, Reuter and his officers all felt themselves still bound by a standing order of the Imperial Navy that no German warship was to be allowed to fall into enemy hands. Accordingly, on June 17, Reuter drew up and distributed a detailed order for scuttling the ships. German captains were instructed that “all internal watertight doors and hatchway covers, ventilator openings and port holes are to be kept open at all times.” Preparations were to be made to open valves, condenser intakes, and submerged torpedo tubes, admitting the sea. Lifeboats complete with white flags of truce would be prepared for the speedy evacuation of crews. The signal for immediate scuttling would be “Paragraph Eleven. Confirm.” Reuter’s task was made easier when two German supply ships arrived and on June 18 departed, carrying home another 2,700 men of the interned fleet. Now, fewer than 1,800 remained on the warships at Scapa Flow; these were men who could be depended on and whose number would not swamp the lifeboats that could be launched.

Reuter’s first awareness that a crisis was approaching came from a copy of The Times of London dated June 17, which reported that the Allies had issued an ultimatum: unless the German government accepted their terms and signed the peace treaty by noon on Saturday, June 21, the armistice would be set aside and hostilities resumed. Reuter did not read this newspaper until the afternoon of June 20. He decided at that moment to scuttle his ships the following morning, June 21. But by the twentieth, its news was no longer accurate. In the interim, the Allies had decided to permit the Germans two additional days to make up their minds; the deadline now was 7:00 p.m. on June 23. Reuter, not having been officially informed of either the original deadline or its extension, now expected the British to attempt to seize his ships at any moment beginning on the morning of the twenty-first. On his own responsibility and without any written order from the German government, he determined to act before British sailors boarded his ships.

The guard ships at Scapa Flow included the five new Resolution-class battleships of the 1st Battle Squadron, commanded by Vice Admiral Sir Sydney Fremantle. Fremantle had received no instructions from the Admiralty or from the First Sea Lord, Admiral Wemyss, in Paris, as to the disposition of the interned ships at the termination of the armistice. Expecting that when the peace treaty was signed, the terms would include the surrender of the German vessels and aware that Reuter might try to scuttle them first, the Allied Naval Council on June 20 authorized seizure of the interned ships at the moment the armistice expired: 7:00 p.m. on June 23. Throughout the internment, the British battle squadrons on guard duty at Scapa Flow had been authorized to carry out training exercises at sea from time to time. On the night of June 20, Fremantle decided to take his ships to sea at 9:00 a.m. on June 21 in order to practice the battle squadron’s defense against a massed destroyer attack. He planned to return to the Flow on the afternoon of the twenty-third and to seize the German fleet that night.

Saturday, June 21, 1919, was an idyllic summer day. The sun shone from a blue sky, the air was warm, and a slight swell was running in the Flow. Reuter prepared himself carefully, wearing his dress uniform with all his decorations. Emerging onto Emden’s quarterdeck, he watched Fremantle take the 1st Battle Squadron to sea: the five British battleships were accompanied by two light cruisers and nine destroyers. Two British destroyers, seven trawlers, and a number of drifters remained behind in the anchorage. At 10:00 a.m., Reuter sent the preparatory message that all ships be attentive to signals from the flagship. The decisive signal was hoisted at 11:20 a.m.: “Paragraph Eleven. Confirm.” Sent by signal flags, the command was repeated by semaphore and searchlights.

For a while, nothing appeared unusual. The 500-ton tug and water tender Flying Kestrel was visiting the interned fleet that morning with an excursion party of 400 children from Orkney schools. As the little vessel passed down the lines of anchored ships, the children saw some German sailors playing mouth organs; other Germans thumbed their noses at the children. Then, as noon approached, a flurry of activity broke out. Brightly colored flags fluttered in the sunlight above Emden’s bridge. At the stroke of noon, all ships hoisted the colors of the Imperial Navy. Then those watching saw Friedrich der Grosse listing to starboard. As water poured into her hull in solid green jets, the great ship rolled farther until her masts, funnels, turrets, and guns began disappearing under water. The great red hull rose up and then plunged down in two wide whirlpools of hissing foam. The time was 12:16 p.m. Other big ships began listing and heeling at extraordinary angles. A young man on the Flying Kestrel remembered steam rushing out of vents “with a dreadful roaring hiss” and the “sullen rumblings . . . as the great hulls slant giddily over and slide with horrible sucking and gurgling noises under the water.” The sinking continued for five hours. Friedrich der Grosse was the first ship to go down and Hindenburg the last, at 5:00 p.m. In that time, fifteen of sixteen German dreadnoughts in the Flow went to the bottom. Baden obstinately refused to sink and was beached in a waterlogged condition. It was possible to tow a few other ships into shallow water before they sank. Four light cruisers, Emden, Frankfurt, Bremse, and Nürnberg, were beached in this manner; four went down. Of fifty destroyers, thirty-two sank, fourteen were beached, and four remained afloat.

The small British guard ships rushed about doing what they could. Some attempted to tow sinking ships. Others, in an effort to drive German seamen back to their ships to stop them from sinking, opened rifle fire on lifeboats flying white flags; in one of these lifeboats carrying thirteen men, three were killed and four wounded. A young woman on the Flying Kestrel saw “a [British] drifter towing two or three lifeboats filled with German sailors. One of them got up with a knife in his hand and tried to cut his boat free of the towrope. A Royal Marine raised his rifle and shot him.” British sailors boarded the battleship Markgraf and found the captain supervising the ship’s scuttling. Seeing the British, he waved a white flag. He was shot through the head. At Scapa Flow that day, nine Germans were killed and sixteen wounded by gunfire.

At 12:20 p.m., Fremantle had received an urgent signal from one of the guard destroyers: “German battleship sinking.” Rushing back at full speed, the British battleships entered the harbor at 2:30 p.m. It was too late. Everywhere, German vessels, large and small, were in various stages of sinking, belching bubbles of air, explosive waterspouts, and gigantic upsurges of oil. Tied together, the destroyers went down in pairs. By five o’clock, only a few German ships remained afloat, with parts of others rising out of the water. A vast stain of oil spread across the Flow, littered with boats, hammocks, life belts, and chests. Reuter was brought aboard Revenge to face Fremantle’s wrath and to learn for the first time that the armistice had been extended by two days. That night, the British battleships sailed for Cromarty Firth with the 1,774 German officers and men on board forced to sleep on steel decks without blankets.

At Invergordon the next morning, Fremantle sent his prisoners ashore, but not before a final confrontation. Speaking to Reuter and his officers lined up on the quarterdeck of Revenge, Fremantle told the German admiral that he had “violated common honour and the honourable traditions of seamen of all nations. With an armistice in full operation, you recommenced hostilities without notice. By your conduct, you have added one more to the breaches of faith and honour of which Germany has been guilty in this war. You have proved to the few who doubted it that the word of the New Germany is no more to be trusted than that of the old. I now transfer you as prisoners of war.”

Afterward, the British navy was criticized for having permitted the scuttling. The French were especially angry, having expected to incorporate some of the largest vessels into their navy. Wemyss’s private reaction was good riddance: “I look upon the sinking of the German fleet as a real blessing. It disposes once for all the thorny question of the distribution of these ships.” Scheer, for a different reason, also was pleased. “I rejoice. The stain of surrender has been wiped from the escutcheon of the German Fleet. The sinking of these ships has proved that the spirit of the fleet is not dead. This last act is true to the best traditions of the German navy.”

The German officers and seamen killed and wounded at Scapa Flow were the last casualties of the war, and the survivors sent ashore at Invergordon became the last prisoners of war. On June 28, 1919, a week after the scuttling of the German fleet, the Treaty of Versailles was signed in the same Hall of Mirrors where, forty-eight years before, Otto von Bismarck had proclaimed the creation of the German empire. Now, the empire had melted away. The fleet was at the bottom of the sea. The Great War was over.