Photo 8.1 HMS Truant Royal Navy Historical Branch
Crisis at Sea
THE DEBATE OVER UNRESTRICTED submarine warfare became the German navy’s main concern as 1916 ended. The stalemate on land brought the German army’s leaders to believe an unrestricted campaign might be the only way to achieve decisive victory. While the motivations for this dangerous escalation contained as much emotion as reason, there was an effort absent at the beginning of 1915 (which remained absent when considering the zeppelins’ bombing campaign) to base the argument upon facts. The Admiralstab used civilian experts to produce a case that, given the state of the global wheat crop, sufficient tonnage could be sunk within six months to bring the United Kingdom to the brink of starvation. The British would be forced to sue for peace, even if they survived the internal dissent that would follow mass shortages of food. To figures of tonnage, the Admiralstab added the old idea that the campaign would frighten neutrals to the point they would withdraw their vessels from Allied shipping routes.
The argument accepted some risks and ignored others. It was based on reasonable estimates of ship availability, including British and Allied performance in repair and construction. The Germans understood the extent to which the French, the Italians, and the Russians were dependent on British supply by sea. The navy was prepared to accept the possibility of neutrals entering the war, notably Denmark, about whose potential occupation the Admiralstab was more sanguine than the army, as well as the United States. Both Admiralstab and the army were dismissive of the capacity of the Americans to contribute to the Allied effort. The politicians were much less confident, but it was difficult to argue the point when unrestricted warfare’s key promise was that the desired results could be achieved in only six months.
There were other weaknesses in the German navy’s case. Although operational U-boats had increased to more than 100 by the end of 1916, sustaining operations at the required level would strain the force to the utmost. Mass production, however, was not part of the concept. Orders for only 45 UB-type boats and six larger units were signed around the time the unrestricted campaign started. Completions of existing orders, and high survival rates through the poor results of the Allied defense, allowed operational availability to pass 120 by the middle of 1917, but it hovered there for the remainder of the year. The U-boat force would need to manage with what it had. The Germans may also have been guilty of projection, assuming their own problems of industrial mobilization extended to the British. They had justification, given the obvious fall in British merchant ship production. The same assumption extended to the British ability to manage their national food supplies on an equitable basis, something Germany had so far failed to do, starkly demonstrated during the coming “turnip winter.” That the British might be able to combine political will and administrative capacity to solve both problems seems to have been outside the imagination of the Great General Staff and the Admiralstab and of their civilian experts. The Germans also underestimated not only the ruthlessness with which the British would deal with anxious neutrals, but how much America’s entry to the war would strengthen the Allied position. In effect, full control of global resources and transport passed into Allied hands. The United States would have no interest in making profits from the Central powers, and neutrals would be under much greater pressure to comply with the Allies. The halfmillion tons of interned German merchant shipping lying in U.S. and South American ports were another potential resource that the German shipping magnate Albert Ballin feared would be put to good use.1 The Admiralstab believed these ships would be rendered useless by sabotage before the Americans could take control, but this proved another false judgment. Perhaps most dangerous for the navy’s and for Germany’s leadership was that they were staking their remaining credibility with the German people on the promise of success in six months. It should not have escaped the German admirals that they were taking the same risk within the navy itself.
The Allied Response
The Allies were aware of the German dilemma, as were the Americans. While the diplomatic and military attachés of the United States in Berlin were increasingly isolated from both official and personal contacts, their reports to Washington demonstrated a good understanding of the progress that proponents of unrestricted warfare were making. The bell was already tolling for the British, confirmed by Jellicoe’s reluctant translation to Whitehall. The war on trade had become the greatest problem for the Allies at sea. The rate of sinkings had increased rapidly between October and December 1916, to an average of some 300,000 tons every month. The steep rise by comparison with the previous prize warfare campaign was largely because so many more U-boats were operational than in 1915. The Allies were being overwhelmed. The Admiralty’s access to signals intelligence was imperfect, but enough to be sure that claims of U-boat sinkings by forces at sea were still often wrong, even when the evidence on scene seemed overwhelming.
The new organization at the Admiralty had many problems to fix, and the Anti-Submarine Division got no breathing space before difficult decisions had to be made. The first requirement was to improve coordination of patrol forces and the multitude of local commands around the coast. An early step was reorganization of the Auxiliary Patrol, to standardize procedures and share experience. The compartmentalization between local commands reflected a wider problem of excessive restrictions on disseminating information, particularly intelligence, and the Admiralty tried to open channels of communication. The problem was exacerbated by continuing reliance on independently sailed merchant ships, each of which needed to be kept informed of danger areas and safe passages. As the Admiralty staff history commented, “the great defect of routeing [sic] lay in its powerlessness to control traffic in the light of an immediate situation.”2 Further, not all local authorities received the information they needed for planning or the short-term diversions that might have been possible. The processes for passing on signals intelligence and other information about U-boat activity had also to be placed on a systematic basis.
The Admiralty and Jellicoe have been heavily criticized for their failures in the campaign against the U-boats. Some of this was justified. The Admiralty was tragically slow to adopt convoy and did not think through the fundamental advantages of the system (an intellectual exercise arguably not formally undertaken until after World War II). Nevertheless, the work to coordinate action within the navy and encourage the efforts of the nation was fundamental to eventual confinement of the problem. As early as January 1916 Jellicoe had urged the Admiralty to “persuade the Government to build merchant ships.”3 It may be that the new First Sea Lord’s inability to achieve real improvements in this area during his first months in Whitehall was as significant a personal failure as his reluctance to convoy. The revival of merchant shipbuilding and drastic improvements in repair times would be vital factors in holding the line against the U-boats. This work of coordination was so important because, although some innovations proved extremely useful in combating the U-boats, no real solution to the combined problems of detection, classification, and destruction was available before the end of the war. There was no silver bullet in 1914–18.
Defensive arming of merchant ships was accelerated, the Director of Naval Ordnance noting in November 1916 that he was “busy trying to take up every available gun.”4 This was reasonable, given the proportion of U-boat attacks conducted on the surface and it got high priority, extending to the selective removal of 4-inch guns from the Grand Fleet’s older capital ships, more useful in merchant ships than as a last-ditch defense against torpedo craft. Much hope was attached to disguised “Special Service Ships” (or “Q Ships”), which also relied upon their attacker approaching on the surface. By the end of 1916 at least five U-boats had fallen victim and, although the Germans were increasingly alert to the threat, their desire to economize on torpedoes and the “stop and search” nature of prize warfare still gave the Q Ships some opportunities. Another tactic that had potential was a submerged submarine under tow by a decoy vessel. On the latter being attacked, the tow would be slipped, allowing the submarine to maneuver and attack the U-boat.
There were technological developments that promised to give the antisubmarine forces some ability to fight back, but it was difficult to be sure just what worked—and none, even in combination, were a panacea. On 6 December, the destroyer Ariel attacked a surfaced U-boat southwest of Land’s End. A depth charge dropped on the diving position failed to explode, but the destroyer deployed armed paravanes, one of which fired. The Admiralty later assessed this as a “possible.” The boat concerned may have been UC19, although this is not certain. Postwar analysis suggested it might have been UB29, but that boat was caught off the Goodwin Sands by the destroyer Landrail on 13 December. In a night encounter that also started with the submarine on the surface, Landrail forced UB29 under. On this occasion, aided by shallow water that prevented the U-boat’s ability to go deep, depth charges were employed with what seemed to be success. This appeared to be the first loss of a German submarine to a depth charge but could only be assessed as a “possible” as no wreckage was initially found. The wreck was finally located in 2017, sixty miles closer to Zeebrugge. Rather than being sunk by a depth charge, the already badly damaged UB29 seems finally to have fallen victim to a mine.5
The initial allocation of two or four depth charges to each ship was inadequate. At 40, 80, and even 120 feet, the early hydrostatic settings also proved largely ineffective except in shallow water. Given the very limited lethality radius of the charges, all a submarine had to do was to dive quickly and deep enough to avoid damage. By early 1917 work was in hand to allow activation down to two hundred feet. Equally important, production was increased tenfold, although it was well into 1918 before the allocation of depth charges to dedicated antisubmarine craft was increased to the thirty to fifty necessary.6
Hydrophones were beginning to be manufactured in numbers. Their first use was as coastal detection systems, with arrays of hydrophones monitored from ashore. Their logical weapon was the controlled mine, triggered when the submarine was directly over the hydrophone. Such systems’ effective detection range was inevitably limited by background noise, including that of local shipping. As for hydrophones at sea, during World War I they were more useful to submarines. The latter were relatively quiet when operating on batteries underwater and could minimize self-noise to improve detection ranges (and reduce the range at which they themselves could be heard). For the Germans, with their much smaller antisubmarine challenge, listening devices for U-boats were the priority. By 1917, German submariners were becoming increasingly expert in their use. The problem for surface vessels, although the solution of streamlined bodies containing hydrophones towed clear of the ship was eventually identified, was that moving at any speed reduced the hydrophones’ detection ranges to practically nothing. In effect, a ship had to stop each time its hydrophone operators needed to listen. This meant hydrophone barrages, both permanent and temporary ones made up by ships in line, became a favored method of searching for a U-boat or attempting to block its passage. In the open sea, given that the submarines could well detect the surface ships first, such lines of observation were easy to avoid. At this stage of technology, while a submarine’s bearing and movement could be estimated and triangulation across a base line of multiple hydrophones was possible, a moving target could not be located precisely enough to give any of the available underwater weaponry a significant chance of achieving a killing blow.
This limitation in hydrophones had another important effect. The only submarine detection method for a warship moving at a speed necessary to escort even the slowest merchant ship was what is now colloquially termed “the Mark One Eyeball.” This was an abiding element in any discussion over the merits of the direct protection of merchant ships—convoy. What should never be discounted, but has not always been highlighted in subsequent analysis, was the concern that the merchant ships in convoy would be targets that their escorts would be unable to protect. The fear the escort could do little more than stand by as its charges were attacked was at the root of some of the objections to grouping merchant vessels together. This also underlay at least part of the Admiralty’s concern about attempting to convoy neutrals, since these ships could be surrendering what little remaining privileged status they had for a false promise. It may also have underlain the collective objections of many merchant captains to being convoyed, a view firmly expressed to Jellicoe at a meeting on 22 February 1917.7 Himself the son of a master mariner, perhaps the First Sea Lord gave their views too much weight. It was not yet understood that the great strength of the convoy system, even in the absence of effective escorts, was that convoys, by concentrating ships in such small areas, reduced the likelihood of detection by comparison with widely distributed single ships, and confined the U-boats’ opportunities for attack. The seas emptied with the introduction of convoy and each submarine realistically only had one clear chance of firing before it would be forced deep and left astern. Small convoys, even if heavily escorted, were as a system much less effective in this respect than large ones.
Efforts to solve the submarine problem, despite ingenuity, devoted service, and huge mobilization of men and material, were hindered by two other continuing misapprehensions, which also contributed to the tardy acceptance of convoys. These were the insistence on “hunting” submarines because such offensive operations were considered the most effective way to deal with the U-boat menace. The second was the idea of patrolled areas with individual ships moving within them. The latter concept was refined to become “patrolled lanes,” but even this idea of fixed routes with concentrated surveillance and response was doomed to at least partial failure. It reduced the submarines’ success rate, but only to a limited extent. Patrol lines with units distributed at five-mile intervals looked good in theory and on a small-scale chart, but the intervals needed to be much smaller even against U-boats operating under the prize rules. Submarines could destroy their targets and escape before the antisubmarine forces could get to the scene—two ten-knot armed trawlers would take fifteen minutes to converge on an incident midway between their patrol stations. This would be even more true when unrestricted warfare began, with its increasing proportion of submerged attacks. Although fog could hinder the U-boats as much as their enemies, the normal moderate visibility around British waters limited the range of detection of submarines on the surface by patrol forces much more than it did U-boats looking for large, sometimes smoky, merchantmen. U-boats also were more likely to spot the smallest warship before being seen themselves. Even if a patrol vessel was early on scene, the submarine could still dive too quickly for the latter to have any serious chance of destroying it.
The difficulties that surface forces had in attacking U-boats intensified the Admiralty’s concern that it did not have enough escorts for a convoy system to work. In part, this was based on a false understanding of the numbers of major merchant vessels involved, but even with the correct figures that eventually came to light, it was a legitimate issue. Furthermore, although the total tonnage losses were always the metric of concern, together with the associated number of large oceangoing ships, the U-boats took a heavy toll of a much larger number of small coasters, sailing vessels, and fishing vessels. UC17 was one of the most successful of the Flanders-based boats, but of the 96 ships that the submarine sank over two years from November 1916 to October 1918, 42 were under 500 tons and 34 were under 200 tons.8 These vessels also deserved protection and it seemed, given the numbers and the complexities of management, that keeping them within well-defined, heavily patrolled coastal areas was the most workable approach.
The fishing industry was becoming a major concern. By the beginning of 1917, the combined effects of taking into naval service some 1,400 of the 1,900 British trawlers, along with the toll taken by enemy action to reduce the national catch to dangerous levels, threatened supply of one of the staple foods of the working class. Losses were not being made up because shipowners were unwilling to order new construction likely to be requisitioned by the Admiralty. Means had to be found to increase the take and provide better protection for the fishing fleets. This was the subject of much discussion in the first months in 1917. In part, these problems were already perceived and much was hoped not only from the Flower-class sloops that were appearing in increasing numbers, but the smaller, and at twenty knots, faster P- and PC-class patrol boats. Additional units were ordered in January 1917, with the PC class built to resemble small merchant vessels as another form of Q ship. Because the supply of civil craft was effectively exhausted, 250 trawlers were ordered in November 1916 to three standard designs and 150 more would be ordered in 1917. When completed, these ships were shared between the Auxiliary Patrol and the minesweeping service.9
Crisis point in the submarine war had already been reached for the French. The loss of many of their own coalfields to the Germans made them dependent upon supply from British fields at the rate of more than 1.5 million tons a month. Much of this was carried in Norwegian colliers, which hitherto had not been integrated into the warning and route control system organized for Allied ships. Their losses were heavy and the reduction in the amount of coal arriving in France was made worse by the standard response to a high U-boat threat, suspension of sailings. The French naval staff did its own analysis and rapidly formed the view that the suspensions equated to a blockade of up to 40 percent effectiveness. By the end of December, the French were pressing for the introduction of convoy, a plea also made by the British Committee for the Supply of Coal to France and Italy. The French argument put by Commandant Vandier had a sting: “You yourself will be forced to form convoys and to escort them in order to continue to trade. We forced you to do it twice in the past, with our pirates. You will be forced to do it once more. This organisation of the French coal trade that I am requesting will be a trial run for you.”10
Although the Admiralty tried to mask the status of the Norwegian colliers and other neutral ships by designating the procedures that were rapidly agreed as “controlled sailing,” there was no ambiguity about the actual arrangements. Convoys would be dispatched daily from Swansea, Portland, and Dover under escort. The scheme was approved on 22 January 1917 and the first convoy sailed on 10 February. The coal convoys’ low loss rate was a factor in the Admiralty’s change of thinking on convoy in coming months. Another, which has received less attention, was the careful work of the French naval staff in defining the problem and proposing a practicable solution. This provided an example for the Admiralty that may well have been critical.
The subject of convoy was also being aired for the Scandinavian trade. Norwegian shipowners had become increasingly concerned at their losses and were putting pressure on the Foreign Office and the Board of Trade. Britain could underwrite their insurance, but this was obviously not enough if the German attacks continued. The Admiralty worried about the legal problems of providing armed protection for neutral vessels. On this matter the Foreign Office, bearing the brunt of Norwegian complaints, was more robust than the navy. Since the Norwegian government itself would provide no assistance, the British had to find a method that met both operational and legal requirements. Eventually, a system of controlled sailings was set up that combined the maximum use of the dark hours for crossing the Norwegian Sea with the provision of escorts when close to British waters. These arrangements would help a little, but the Scandinavian problem had not been solved. It certainly concerned the new C-in-C. Beatty was frustrated by the failures to intercept either the raiders that left German waters at the end of 1916 or the homeward-bound Prinz Friedrich Wilhelm and other merchant ships. He began to argue for the imposition of British control over Norwegian territorial waters to the extent necessary to prevent their use by the Germans. The War Cabinet’s rejection of the proposal was a setback for the increasingly frustrated Beatty, but he did not abandon his campaign.
Grand Fleet Operations
The Grand Fleet was settling into a new pattern of operations that continued for most of the war. In part, the reduction in the capital ships’ activity was driven by shortages of fuel. While oil supply was being hit particularly hard by the U-boats, the demand for coal by a battle fleet based so far north represented a significant burden, particularly as the new C-in-C maintained the view of his predecessor that enough colliers had to be in the fleet anchorages to allow the immediate resupply of every major unit—effectively a collier for every battleship. The distance to Scapa Flow and the strain on both shipping and the railway system were strong arguments for the move to Rosyth.
Beatty sought to make operation of the Grand Fleet as a whole more flexible with the issue of his first Grand Fleet Battle Instructions in March 1917 and progressive modification of the voluminous Grand Fleet Battle Orders. Although the first release of Instructions was only a few pages in length, it eventually became clear that, even as principles for guidance, the size and complexity of the fleet required them to be highly detailed. By late 1917, work was in hand to incorporate Beatty’s plans for fighting his fleet into an expanded set of Instructions, while the systems for maneuvering the force and conducting routine operations were incorporated into the new Grand Fleet Manoeuvring Orders. The new system finally came into force in February 1918.11
In some ways, this focus on the main fleet was increasingly irrelevant. There was another aspect to the fleet’s new operating modes, a shift to formations of the lighter, high-speed vessels supported by individual squadrons of capital ships. These new arrangements were still immature, but the transition was under way and the deployment patterns of the Grand Fleet’s squadrons would reflect this in the months ahead. One indication of the change was that responsibility for maintaining a presence in the North Sea fell increasingly on the light cruisers. Partly triggered by continuing reports of German raider movements, it was also because light cruisers provided the best mix of fighting capability with limited commitment. Powerful enough to deal with most threats, they were also fast enough to escape heavier metal and agile enough, despite the experiences of August, to be very difficult targets for submarines. The availability of the new antisubmarine paravanes provided another justification for ventures into the North Sea to hunt errant U-boats. There were, however, not enough light cruisers to protect this sort of destroyer work and be available to support the Grand Fleet should the battle squadrons deploy. Such operations were also not without their cost in the terrible winter of 1916–17. Recent changes in the command of squadrons and ships may have contributed to casualties in both Southampton and the newly arrived Sydney and Melbourne. The latter two ships suffered multiple dead and injured during the heavy weather of 21 December,12 while Southampton lost her first lieutenant and three ratings on 18 January. Through inexperience, the ships were probably driven too hard in appalling conditions. Southampton’s gunnery officer’s testimony suggests a chapter of errors, his new captain being unaware there were personnel working in darkness on the forecastle to secure gear that had gone adrift.13 The squadron itself was certainly steaming at too high a speed for the prevailing weather. Goodenough had only recently been replaced in command of the Second Light Cruiser Squadron by Commodore Cecil Lambert, who had not been to sea since before the war.14
February saw the new routine of the Grand Fleet continue. The battle squadrons were not wholly idle. The protected waters of Scapa Flow were employed for tactical exercises and subcaliber firings, while full-caliber shoots were conducted in Pentland Firth. The British routine was sustained in other ways. Light cruisers conducted seven sweeps into the North Sea and the Norwegian Sea in February. They had no more success than their predecessors in either intercepting German iron ore traffic from Norwegian ports or detecting any German surface traffic. The weather was still intensely cold, punctuated by storms that more than once forced operations to be curtailed or cancelled outright. The only sortie by the fleet as a whole was north of the Shetlands to test the fleet’s response to encountering the enemy battle squadrons in unfavorable conditions. The mismatch between the speed and effective gun range of the most modern battleships and those of the original 12-inch gun dreadnoughts proved an increasing problem. Attempting to mass the entire firepower of the Grand Fleet almost inevitably involved delay and thus the loss of tactical opportunities. More encouraging was the first trial in such an environment of the newly joined K-class submarines. The flotilla was not yet at full strength, but Beatty thought that the new type had real potential in a fleet action. The possibility that the submarines could be positioned on the disengaged flank of the enemy was attractive—any turn away by the High Sea Fleet would leave it open to a mass torpedo attack.15
The other focus of Grand Fleet operations was the mining effort in the Heligoland Bight. The shortage of suitable mines continued to bedevil the British but work to create a barrier across the Bight began in earnest with seven fields laid in January. These amounted to only 912 mines, a drop in the bucket compared with the estimates of between 60,000 and 80,000 that the Grand Fleet and Admiralty staffs calculated would be required. The pace increased in February, with nine fields with 1,464 mines being laid, but not only were many of these fields deliberately given short lives with sinking devices, but defects and natural attrition meant the British were only just beginning to create a credible level of mine threat in German waters. The developing British effort did not go unnoticed, however. The Germans were anxious that the U-boat passages into the North Sea should remain clear and aware what an effective British effort could do to close them off. They were also alert to the submarine minelayers. The latter could individually lay few mines but, as U-boats were demonstrating on the other side of the North Sea, skillfully handled, they could seed weapons in areas hitherto thought safe and whose closure, however temporary, created significant disruption. From the beginning of 1917, the mine clearance forces of the Bight were strengthened, an effort that continued until the end of the war, but which had a price. The minesweeper M56 went down in February, while M15, M16, and M26 were sunk in March.
The Channel again became the center of the surface war in late January. The High Sea Fleet dispatched the Sixth Flotilla to reinforce the Flanders command on 22 January. Radio traffic was intercepted by the British, who suspected Zeebrugge was the flotilla’s intended destination. The Harwich Force of six light cruisers, a flotilla leader, and ten destroyers immediately sailed, with another leader and six destroyers dispatched from Dover in support. Tyrwhitt’s dispositions were relatively straightforward. He divided his cruisers into two divisions, well to seaward of the Dutch coast across the most likely German line of passage south. The destroyers were distributed much closer inshore, with seven ships to the north and the remainder in two divisions led by Nimrod and Simoom to the south. These arrangements created the chance the British could have two strikes at the Germans if the latter continued to make for Zeebrugge, but they depended on each British force retaining a good idea of where it was—and where the other friendly forces were. It was very dark, but relatively clear on what veterans would remember as the coldest night at sea of the entire war.16
The first encounter took place at 0240 when Tyrwhitt’s own cruiser division, consisting of Centaur, Aurora, and Conquest, was sighted by V69, leader of the Sixth Flotilla about two thousand yards ahead. Although the German ships were on the starboard quarter of the British, the latter were sufficiently alert that their sighting of the torpedo boats was almost simultaneous. A sharp and inevitably confused action followed. The British light cruisers avoided the German torpedoes, but the torpedo boats’ immediate use of smoke made them very difficult targets, particularly as the British did not take the risk of shining their searchlights. What did help was the old coal burner problem of flaming funnels as the German torpedo boats’ furnaces were stoked for higher speed, giving “quite a reasonably good point of aim.”17 Only V69 was hit—seriously enough to jam her rudder—taking the torpedo boat across the bows of her consort G41. Subsequent damage from the collision was relatively superficial for V69, but G41 was harder hit, her speed reduced to eight knots. In the melee, V69, G41, and S50 separated from the rest of the flotilla. The eight remaining boats kept in touch with each other and, out of sight of the British, resumed their passage to Zeebrugge. The undamaged S50 also turned south when she was sure the British were not in the way, while the two damaged boats limped for the coast. Contact having been lost with the Germans, all Tyrwhitt had to go on was the apparent withdrawal of the disabled V69 to the northeast, which he reported by radio before beginning his own search in that direction. S50 may have been seen fleetingly by Aurora, but the cruisers found nothing, not even the disabled torpedo boat they expected to encounter when they returned to the scene of action a few minutes later.
The second cruiser division—consisting of Penelope, Undaunted, and Cleopatra—had seen the flash of guns on the horizon and its commander, Captain Hubert Lynes, sensibly moved to block the most likely German course of withdrawal. The decision soon paid a dividend when the cruisers encountered V69. The unfortunate torpedo boat suffered at least four hits in rapid succession, killing the flotilla commander, Max Schultz, and many of the bridge personnel and blowing away the after funnel. Temporarily dead in the water, V69 appeared so badly damaged the British thought she was sinking and left her to seek other targets. Heavily hit as she was, V69’s survivors managed to control the damage and get under way again. As she was in no condition to return to Germany or risk facing the British forces that lay between her and Zeebrugge, the only alternative was a Netherlands port and V69 made for Ymuiden, into which she struggled the next day. The Dutch did not intern her, as the torpedo boat was legally allowed to make the repairs essential to become seaworthy again. V69 eventually limped home to Germany, monitored by Dutch warships while she remained in Netherlands waters. The Dutch had no intention of permitting a British coup de main.
The night was not yet over. Tyrwhitt directed all his forces to remain in their patrol areas, since this still gave the best chance of another encounter. The damaged G41 passed through the northern destroyer patrol lines a few hours before dawn but remained unseen. The Sixth Flotilla’s main body also avoided being detected by either of the destroyer groups in the southern patrols, probably because the latter had not yet regained their stations as directed by the commodore. So far honors rested with the British, despite the success of the German evasions. At 0413, however, the destroyer Simoom encountered an enemy torpedo boat cutting across her bows at close range. This was S50 following her consorts to Zeebrugge. Simoom turned to ram, but passed close astern of S50, thereby opening herself up to the inevitable torpedo, which struck home. Simoom’s forward magazine exploded, rendering her immediately hors de combat. What followed demonstrated once more the problem of dispersed friendly forces at night. The two British destroyer formations in the south were much closer to each other than either group realized. Consequently, when Simoom’s consort, Starfish, took up the pursuit, the first ship seen was immediately assumed to be enemy. Shaping course to ram, only the sudden showing of her British fighting lights by Moorsom gave Starfish enough time to recognize her error and steer clear, “missing our [Moorsom’s] stern by inches.”18 Nimrod’s division had seen the initial encounter and themselves made fleeting contact with S50, but any chance of pursuing the German after S50 passed down the British line at only four hundred yards distance was spoiled by two things. First, the night was so cold that many guns were “seized up with solid ice.”19 Second, was the sudden manifestation of Starfish. By the time the situation was sorted out, S50 had disappeared. Damaged and with casualties from Simoom’s gunfire, she turned for Germany and home. S50 was safe in the Ems early the same afternoon. The even more badly damaged G41 had been brought into Zeebrugge that morning by her consorts and sent to Bruges for repairs.
Simoom’s battered stern section remained afloat. After the survivors were removed, there were attempts to take the wreck in tow, but neither Nimrod nor Matchless could get Simoom under control. Commodore Tyrwhitt arrived on scene just after dawn. With a German seaplane observing proceedings and the force vulnerable to submarine attack, Tyrwhitt directed that Simoom be sunk with “despatch.” Gunfire from Matchless quickly made an end to what remained. There were few new lessons for the British, although the need had been confirmed for effective star shell to illuminate the enemy without creating the aiming point that searchlights did. Tyrwhitt again emphasized that night fighting differed from day action in one key respect. Friendly forces could not converge uncontrolled on an action without creating confusion.
The Germans’ Sixth Flotilla did not spend much time licking its wounds and undertook two sorties in the following week. The first was a bombardment of Southwold. The Germans fired ninety-two rounds into the town, badly damaging some buildings but causing no casualties. So brief was the fusillade at three minutes, the British were uncertain whether the attack had been by a U-boat or surface craft. The Germans knew the destructive effect of the torpedo boats’ main armament was minimal and were focused on undermining local morale. Their communications security while operating from Zeebrugge was so much better than that of the High Sea Fleet the British had no idea that the flotilla, supported by units of the First Half-Flotilla, had been at sea at all. As it was, when school resumed at Southwold, the main excitement for the children was picking up pieces of shrapnel in the playground.20 The Germans took advantage of a lull in the weather to conduct another night sortie on 29–30 January. This did not proceed far into the North Sea. Looking for enemy shipping and isolated patrols, it found nothing. Like the first venture, radio silence meant the operation passed unnoticed by the British.
In the meantime, the German die was cast. On 31 January 1917, the German government informed the United States that unrestricted submarine warfare would be resumed the next day in a zone encompassing British and French waters, the Western Approaches, much of the North Sea, and the Mediterranean. The Americans broke off diplomatic relations on 3 February. On 2 April, the president sought a declaration of war against Germany from Congress; this followed on 6 April. Perhaps the best indication of what lay ahead for Germany was the immediate and well-executed seizure of its merchant ships that had been sheltering in American ports since 1914.