Photo 9.1 German torpedo boats in formation German Naval Association Archive
Spring in the North Sea
THE HIGH SEA FLEET SPENT A QUIET WINTER. Sea training was constrained by intense cold, which saw ice invade the Kiel training areas. The fleet had to wait until March, when Baden took over as fleet flagship, to train with all three battle squadrons in the Baltic. The newly repaired Kronprinz and Grosser Kurfürst had not improved their welcome back to the fleet by colliding in the Heligoland Bight due to a misunderstood turning signal.1 Both missed the Baltic exercise as they were again under repair, Grosser Kurfürst’s “crooked and bent nozzle [bow]” amusing at least one observer.2 The Baltic presented more problems than ice. Exercises were repeatedly delayed by thick fog, with the inevitable near-misses with other traffic. Visibility improved only briefly before the fog returned and planned weapon firings were not completed before the ships returned to the North Sea.
The battleships’ limited activities made torpedo boats available for the Flanders Command. This allowed reinforcement of the Flanders flotillas in February with six large and four small torpedo boats and Scheer’s eventual consent that the Third Flotilla be permanently reassigned there. The Sixth Flotilla had not yet been recalled to Germany, which made the local forces particularly strong in late February. Continuing poor weather, however, meant they were not very active. Although the British were aware of the accession of German strength and took precautions, another German sortie passed unnoticed, again through a combination of communications security and the absence of encounters at sea. With good reason to expect another strike against the Dover Barrage, the British reorganized to meet a night attack. The vulnerable drifters were replaced after dark by a division of destroyers, individually distributed along the barrage. A light cruiser and another destroyer division were anchored off Deal, with a larger force of destroyers kept at Dover. Monitors protected the merchant ship anchorages in the Downs. The Germans dispatched six boats of the Sixth Flotilla and four of the First Flanders Half-Flotilla on the evening of 25 February, with instructions to attack the units protecting the barrage, bombard British ports if the opportunity arose, and, in the case of the First Half-Flotilla, attack shipping in the Channel. Three boats of the Second Half-Flotilla were ordered to the vicinity of the Maas light ship as a diversion, to attack merchant shipping. Despite the poor weather, aerial reconnaissance had given the Germans a good idea of British dispositions around the barrage, so Lieutenant Commander Tilleson in S49 and Lieutenant Commander Albrecht in G95 knew what to expect.
At 2230, the destroyer Laverock sighted a torpedo boat on her port bow, two thousand yards away and closing. S49’s sighting of Laverock was practically simultaneous. She immediately opened fire and launched a torpedo. With an alert officer of the watch, Laverock avoided the weapon but was subjected to a fusillade of gun and torpedo fire. She replied in kind. Only one of the six torpedoes launched by the Sixth Flotilla struck home. In the heat of action, its impact was not noticed. The weapon failed to explode and only the next day was a dent in the destroyer’s hull identified. In the darkness, with both sides blinded by flash and exploding shells, contact was quickly lost without serious damage to any unit. Thinking he had been engaged by a full division of destroyers and having intercepted Laverock’s enemy contact report, Tilleson believed he had lost the advantage of surprise. He swept back through the barrage, hoping to encounter other British units but finding nothing, turned for home.
The Second Half-Flotilla drew a blank off the Maas, while the First Half-Flotilla did not do much better. A drifter off the northern entrance to the Downs sighted the torpedo boats at 2300 and sent up a flare, just as Albrecht began to bombard North Foreland and Margate. Forty rounds were fired. Since neither North Foreland lighthouse nor wireless station was hit, there was no military effect. The damage was to a cottage further inland, with a mother and two children killed and other children injured. Curiously, the cottage was close to Elmwood, country house of the newspaper proprietor Lord Northcliffe, that also suffered shrapnel hits. Northcliffe was convinced the attack was aimed at him, understandable in the circumstances, but a ploy more sophisticated than Flanders Command was capable of devising.3 Nevertheless, Northcliffe’s scare may well have contributed to the animus his newspapers displayed against Jellicoe and the Admiralty in later months. Standby units from Deal arrived on scene within forty minutes, but they saw nothing of the First Half-Flotilla before the latter withdrew.
Admiral von Schröder was reasonably sanguine about the operation. Little was achieved in material terms, but it was “desirable to remind the English as frequently as possible of the presence of German naval forces directly before their coast.”4 Now that unrestricted submarine warfare had resumed in earnest, any efforts that diverted Allied forces away from antisubmarine operations were worthwhile, particularly if aimed at interrupting the enemy’s supply lines. The window for night operations would open again in two weeks. Meanwhile, Scheer had his own ideas for an attack on the Netherlands-England traffic, utilizing the scouting groups, covered by the battle squadrons. He planned to employ transiting U-boats to create a barrier against British forces in the north, although the speed-time-distance equation was such that his forces could strike and be back in the Heligoland Bight before the Grand Fleet could intervene—provided he achieved surprise. Scheer’s problem was that intelligence relating to convoy movements was very short term, which meant he could not deploy the zeppelins ahead of time to confirm the absence of British heavy forces. Scheer was prepared to take his chances, even if the weather was so bad the zeppelins could not go out, and he sent a warning order to the fleet on 10 March. The C-in-C told the Admiralstab of his intentions, which inevitably involved informing the kaiser. The response from the “All Highest” was unambiguous. The sortie was not to take place unless accompanied by zeppelin surveillance. Unsurprisingly, the weather of mid-spring in the North Sea did not allow this. Scheer’s sortie was never carried out.
The Admiralty decided to take advantage of additional new destroyers to transfer existing units from the Harwich Force to Dover, replacing them in Tyrwhitt’s command with new construction. A full flotilla of sixteen M-class destroyers would eventually be based at Dover, with some of Bacon’s older destroyers transferred to local flotillas in the major home ports. This accession of strength meant, in theory, that Dover Command had sufficient ships to defend against a thrust by the Flanders flotillas at full strength and still allow for boiler cleaning and repairs. Dover Command also needed enough resources to focus on what remained the greatest threat—the U-boat. It remained to be seen how well the new arrangements worked.
Operations in the Norwegian Sea
The watch on the Norwegian Sea gained new priority with reports that a raider was homeward bound. While patrolling ships found nothing in early March, the British were still alert to the prospect of transits and with good reason. Yarrowdale, captured as a prize by Möwe, had arrived in Germany at the end of December. Fast and modern, she was ideal for conversion into a raider, which was undertaken at Kiel early in 1917. Equipped with two torpedo tubes and 150-mm guns transferred from decommissioned ships, Leopard was ready in early March. Unfortunately for the raider, the British patrol lines had recently been strengthened, and Leopard was sighted just before noon on 16 March by the armored cruiser Achilles and the armed boarding vessel Dundee. This tactical group combined the cruiser’s heavy metal with the auxiliary’s relative expendability. In this situation, it proved very effective. After a lengthy chase, the unknown vessel, posing as the Norwegian steamer Rena, was brought to by an increasingly suspicious Dundee. Achilles remained clear while Dundee, carefully holding herself on Rena’s quarter, dispatched a boarding party. The Germans did their best to convince the latter of their bona fides because it was nearly an hour before Leopard revealed herself by opening fire with guns and torpedoes, just as the boarding party’s empty boat came into Dundee’s sight. The much more lightly armed Dundee was well prepared and immediately sent a hail of 4-inch and 3-pound gunfire into Leopard, while maneuvering to keep the German at a disadvantage. Dundee’s 3-pounder was directed at Leopard’s bridge and its twenty hits may well have wiped out the German command team at the outset.5 Leopard’s crew may also not have been fully trained. Despite the range, their fire was ineffective. Although Leopard fought on, the combined efforts of Dundee and Achilles soon reduced her to a flaming wreck, with Dundee expending all her ammunition and having “the time of her life.”6 The raider rolled over and sank at 1632, taking with her the entire crew and Dundee’s unfortunate boarding party. Fear of submarines prevented a search for survivors, although the boarding party’s boat was found by a merchant ship several months later. The British were pleased by their success, but the estimate that the sunken ship was the successful Atlantic raider of December 1916 was wishful thinking; Möwe had not been intercepted.7 The little action was one of the few successes enjoyed by an armored cruiser during the war. The type’s increasing obsolescence was reflected in the ironic greeting given Achilles on her return to Scapa Flow—a battleship’s band struck up “Any Old Iron.” Achilles’ musical response was just as pointed: “And the Green Grass grew all round my Boys.”8
British Submarine Losses
Small ship losses mounted steadily. The destroyer Pheasant blew up on a mine and sank with all hands off Stromness on 1 March. The British ascribed the sinking to an old floating mine, but it was one of four laid by U80 six weeks before. The submarine E5 failed to return from patrol off the Ems in early March. She had experienced a series of encounters with German surface forces during her sortie. These included the entire First Scouting Group, conducting exercises in the Bight on 5 March. Seydlitz and the torpedo boats in her immediate vicinity sighted a submarine, which the light forces attacked with depth charges. This was a fleeting contact at best. E29 later reported sighting E5 north of Juist Island on 6 March. The submarine’s wreck was finally located in 2016, farther west, off the Dutch island of Schiermonnikoog. With no discernible hull damage and open hatches, the cause of E5’s sinking is unlikely to have been the mine to which both the British and Germans later ascribed her loss.9
The British submarine force was under strain. A succession of losses since late in 1916 hit the forward deployed forces hard, although Tyrwhitt denied this when taxed with the matter by Beatty.10 Before the loss of E5, her sisters E30, E37, and E36 had all been sunk by unknown causes since late November, while the modification of several boats for minelaying promised even greater hazards. Other submarines were being employed on antisubmarine patrols around the British coast and across the expected passage routes of the U-boats. These had their successes, such as G13’s destruction of UC43. In theory, this was less dangerous work than operating in the Heligoland Bight, but E49’s loss off the Shetlands on 3 March confirmed that there were few safe areas. Just after leaving her temporary base in Balta Sound, the submarine’s bows were blown off by a mine laid by UC76 a few days earlier. She went down with all on board. The question of safe areas also arose with increasing frequency in relation to friendly surface forces. Both G12 and J1 were attacked by mistake and forced to dive to avoid destruction. G12 was lucky to survive, as her conning tower was damaged by gunfire. The submariners were increasingly concerned about the tendency of the surface ships to shoot first and ask questions afterward. German submarines represented an additional threat for any boat on passage, not only with mines but torpedoes. In some ways, the transit to and from a home port was becoming more dangerous than periods spent in an operating area. There was another pressure: seventeen big, new K-class submarines commissioned before the end of the year, requiring expert commanders and large crews. This stripped many of the older boats of experienced personnel. The steam machinery of the K class was a formidable proposition, requiring retraining of existing submarine personnel and the transfer of artificers and stokers from the surface fleet. The demand for submarines for coastal patrol and antisubmarine work meant even the elderly C class had to remain in operation, although the submarine service rid itself of the handful of even older and smaller B class when they were converted to surface patrol vessels in the Mediterranean.
Operations in the South
The dark nights of mid-March provided a new opportunity for the Flanders flotillas. Seven torpedo boats of the Sixth Flotilla under Werner Tillessen and eight more from the two Zeebrugge half-flotillas were dispatched on the evening of 17 March. The Sixth Flotilla was to attack the western side of the barrage and the First Half-Flotilla the eastern side, while the Second Half-Flotilla attacked the northern entrance to the Downs. The British arrangements were much as they had been in February, with a division of destroyers patrolling the barrage; a light cruiser, a flotilla leader, and four destroyers off Deal; and a reserve of a flotilla leader and five destroyers at Dover. Two monitors were stationed off Ramsgate, covering the Downs. The first encounter came at 2247, when Tillessen sighted a destroyer broad on his port bow. Paragon was less alert and did not see anything until the Germans were well on her beam. Disastrously, instead of engaging straight away, Paragon challenged the newcomers. Tillessen responded by opening fire and Paragon was almost immediately hit amidships by a torpedo. She managed to launch one in return before a second torpedo struck her engine room. Possibly hit by a third weapon, Paragon was torn in two and sank within minutes. The tragedy was complete when a depth charge detonated as the ship went down, blowing off their raft the handful of survivors who had taken refuge there. Only ten men survived. In a counterstroke of luck after the experience of Laverock, Paragon’s single torpedo may have struck home on a German ship but failed to detonate. It was found without its warhead, which could have broken off without detonating if the weapon struck a glancing blow.11
The Germans had their own confusions. The rearmost units lost touch with Tillessen as he maneuvered to engage Paragon, evidence a six-ship formation was too big for night fighting. Their commander sensibly withdrew on realizing his situation. Tillessen himself swept back toward the wreck of Paragon a few minutes after the action and began to withdraw. The affair was not finished, however, for the destroyers Laforey and Llewellyn saw the explosions and converged on the scene. Neither ship appreciated that Paragon had been engaged by surface forces. Their immediate response was to search for survivors and this involved the fatal step of using their searchlights. These Tillessen saw astern of his formation and he immediately turned his ships around. The British, occupied with rescue and night vision impaired by their searchlights, had no idea they were being approached by German torpedo boats. The latter were intelligent enough not to use their guns. S49 and G87 fired torpedoes, one of which passed close astern of Laforey and hit Llewellyn, blowing off her bows forward of the gun mount. Tillessen then circled around and withdrew, undetected. The British destroyers still did not realize they had been subject to a surface attack. Laforey reported that the torpedo was fired by a submarine and confined her efforts to searching for it. Meanwhile, despite the German intent to maintain separation between their forces, the First Half-Flotilla had been set further west than planned. Having seen the searchlights, which had to be British rather than German, the First’s commander was approaching the scene when, to their mutual surprise, the Sixth Flotilla and the First Half-Flotilla sighted each other. Fortunately for the Germans, each made the correct identification. Tillessen combined the groups and withdrew.
The British took some time to sort out what had happened and were fortunate that the Germans did not guess at the confusion, which could have allowed an equally effective second attack. Early reports seemed to indicate at least one enemy submarine was active near the barrage, and the assault’s true nature became clear only when Paragon’s survivors had been interviewed. That it had been a multipronged attack became apparent when reports came in of an enemy formation off Margate. The Second Half-Flotilla was spotted by the destroyer Paramount, which fired flares and alerted other units in the vicinity. The Germans sank the already disabled merchant ship Greypoint and damaged a drifter, but their bombardment of Ramsgate and Broadstairs was superficial, with only three houses hit and no casualties. The Second Half-Flotilla then withdrew, well before the cruiser Canterbury and the destroyers sent from Deal could catch them. One small consolation was that Llewellyn got safely back to Dover for repairs, albeit stern first.
The British again revised their night arrangements. The first change was to concentrate the destroyers into two formations, one on the eastern side and one in the west, rather than distributing them along the barrage. The second and more important step was that issuing a challenge was no longer the default action on sighting an unidentified unit at night. “Destroyers were not to hesitate to use torpedoes at once.”12 Admiral Bacon closed his report with the comment, “I am very hopeful that we may yet give … [the enemy] … a lesson, and one serious blow will, without doubt, make him less eager to carry out these raids.”13 The Admiralty had reason to take the Flag Officer Dover’s predictions with a grain of salt, but this time he would be proved correct. The Germans were also making changes. The Sixth Flotilla returned to Germany on 29 March, but not before the Third Flotilla had arrived in Flanders, together with additional units to make up the First Half-Flotilla to full flotilla strength. The big new torpedo boats were not the only reinforcement. Von Schröder had been pressing hard to get a fair share of the smaller craft being produced, both for minesweeping and for short-range offensive operations. A lightning raid on Dunkirk on 24 March that cost the Allies two merchant ships showed what the small torpedo boats were capable of, even if only as an irritant.
The torpedo boats’ presence gave new priority to sustained air attacks by the British on Bruges and other German installations. British aircraft’s growing capabilities ensured these became more than an irritant. They caused substantial damage, forced the Germans to begin building covered pens for the U-boats and, as Dover Command became aware, to start the practice of moving the torpedo boats to berths or anchorages seaward of Zeebrugge. This created a potential opportunity for the squadron of Coastal Motor Boats, under Lieutenant W. N. T. Beckett, that had been operating from Dunkirk for a few months. In the meantime, Bacon had other plans for both defense and offense. The unreliable monitor Marshal Ney lost her 15-inch turret to the new Terror, but the admiral seized upon the ship as a permanent guard for the Downs. Rearmed with six 6-inch guns and additional antiaircraft weapons when she returned in early April, Ney’s weapons and bulges made her a formidable proposition.
Bacon was also interested in cutting off the water access to Zeebrugge and Ostend from Bruges by destroying the Bruges Canal’s lock gates. The Flanders ports had been the subject of intense debate in recent months. Tyrwhitt was inclined toward a direct assault on the two ports, but this was rejected by both the Admiralty and Bacon.14 They were working on an even more ambitious scheme to eject the Germans from Flanders in cooperation with the British Expeditionary Force. This was a plan that Jellicoe strongly supported, as he had become convinced the U-boat threat was directly related to German possession of the bases on the Flanders coast. A British army offensive would be mounted later in the year. At the right time, Dover Command would mount a divisional size amphibious assault with three massive pontoons, pushed by monitors, each disgorging a brigade at intervals between Westende and Middelkerke.15 Additional troops would be inserted over the following days, with the intent that the landing forces link up with the main advance on land, forcing a full German retreat. The first pontoon was successfully tested at the end of March while the second and third units were under construction.
In the meantime, Bacon proposed a bombardment to maintain pressure. Because of the continuing air attacks on the ports, Bruges’ ability to take both submarines and torpedo boats for repair with relative immunity was critical to the continuing operations of the Flanders squadrons. The lock gates were a small target, invisible from the sea. Given the capabilities of the German coastal batteries, even the 15-inch gun monitors, with their extended-range mountings, would be working at their limit, but Bacon believed it was worth a try, at much less risk than a direct assault. The operation required the ideal combination of visibility, tide, and sea state to allow units to be in position by dawn and for the essential air spotters to be able to do their job. Bacon would also need reinforcement by the Harwich Force to guard against the German flotillas. At best, the window was only open for a day or two every fortnight. While 1917’s spring brought better weather, poor visibility stymied Bacon’s first attempt of 25 March, while conditions were too rough on 8 April. Ten days later, a third try failed through a succession of problems, culminating in Marshal Soult (whose engines, marginally more reliable than those of Marshal Ney, could not be trusted for an operation this precise) breaking her tow line. Not until May would the bombardment be carried out in full. Bacon, disliked by so many other officers, was criticized for his “spasmodic” efforts,16 but his opportunities were indeed few and far between. Furthermore, much of the admiral’s time was taken up by the detailed planning for the amphibious assault intended later in the year. Although the Flag Officer Dover delegated too little, Bacon was becoming a victim of the practical impossibility of balancing the day-to-day demands of command with preparing complex future operations. Many judgments made about the inadequacies of the naval staff organization at the Admiralty are more rightly aimed at this level of British naval planning and command in general, and Dover in particular. Bacon’s successor, Keyes, experienced the same problems, although he does not seem ever to have understood this.
The CMBs got their chance on the night of 7 April, when the squadron attacked German torpedo boats anchored outside Zeebrugge. In shallow water and with a bright moon, the Germans believed themselves secure from both submarine and destroyer attack and focused on supplementing Zeebrugge’s antiaircraft defenses. The CMBs were working at the absolute limits of their capability in deteriorating weather, but tiny and hard to see, they achieved surprise under cover of three seaplanes, which bombed Zeebrugge in succession at twenty-minute intervals. The Germans heard the CMB engines, but assumed the sound presaged another air raid. Despite two CMBs suffering from engine trouble, Beckett in No. 4 hit V81 with a torpedo which did not explode. No. 9 succeeded in sinking G88 with a single weapon. The torpedo boats thought they had been attacked by a submarine, despite the very shallow water. Only later was the attackers’ true nature understood. The affair was a fillip for the CMBs, but the German assessment that the fast boats’ success owed much to their being completely unexpected was fair.17
The Germans waged their own air war against the British at sea, even if engagements against other aircraft were consuming ever increasing resources. Like the Baltic, Flanders Command received a flight of the new torpedo carrying seaplanes and four of these were dispatched on 19 April to attack the Downs. Poor visibility dogged the aircraft, which lost contact with each other and conducted abortive attacks on Marshal Ney and merchant ships. The depth of water was not enough to prevent the torpedoes hitting the bottom on being dropped. Furthermore, as in the Baltic, the fragile and underpowered seaplanes were not up to the mission. When this and a more successful sortie that torpedoed a merchant ship were reported to the Admiralty, however, their significance was recognized. On 2 May a letter was sent to the Grand Fleet to warn of the development and of its possible extension in range “by use of a seaplane carrier.”18 The report fell on fertile ground in a fleet increasingly aware of the importance of the air.
The next German attack on the Dover barrage came on 20 April. Two groups of torpedo boats were dispatched, with the primary mission of sinking any units protecting the barrage and a secondary task of bombarding Dover and Calais. With this sortie, Flanders Command introduced a new system of command and control. It was believed the onshore signals intelligence organization could provide a sufficiently timely assessment of British activities that the flotillas would be most effectively coordinated from ashore. This was a good idea—in theory. Both the Fifth Half-Flotilla to the west and the First Half-Flotilla to the east passed through the barrage without sighting any British units and proceeded immediately to their bombardments. The First’s firing on Calais at 2315 was the first indication to Dover Command of the enemy, swiftly followed by the bombardment of Dover itself by the Fifth Half-Flotilla. Neither attack was particularly effective, a stable being the main victim of the Fifth’s efforts, further confirmation of something the British already understood: small-caliber naval guns were useless for shore bombardment. Gautier of the Fifth soon turned back toward the barrage in the hope of encountering British surface forces.
The British standby destroyers sailed from Dover, but, with four destroyers and the flotilla leaders Swift and Broke already on patrol, they and Admiral Bacon were concerned to prevent confusion. The units in the strait reporting that they saw nothing, Bacon recalled the standby ships. They played no further part. The Fifth Half-Flotilla cast about for enemy units from shortly after midnight. Finding nothing, they turned for home at approximately 0036, no longer expecting an encounter. Swift and Broke had been roving back and forth southwest of the barrage in the hope of finding something. By 0030 they were heading westerly at twelve knots. At 0045 Swift sighted torpedo boats on her port bow, steering in a nearly opposite direction. Swift’s commander, Peck, did not hesitate, increasing to full speed and turning to ram. Unfortunately, flash from Swift’s 6-inch gun temporarily blinded her captain and the destroyer leader passed close astern of the Germans. Torpedoes fired by both sides missed. From behind her consort, Broke sighted the Germans and increased to full speed, but the trio of torpedo boats were rapidly drawing left and out of sight. Broke followed Swift to the southwest, both ships moving at nearly thirty knots. Within minutes their advance carried them into the second line of Germans. Alerted, the leader, S53, hit Broke with a 105-mm round and knocked out a gun mount. Swift turned hard and got a torpedo away into G85, bringing the German to an immediate stop. Broke rammed G42 abreast her after funnel. The two ships were locked together and a confused hand-to-hand action followed before Broke pulled clear. Circling around to the south, Gautier’s boats were sighted by Swift, which turned in pursuit. Although Swift had suffered significant damage, she clearly carried much heavier metal than the remnant of the Fifth Half-Flotilla and Gautier turned away to the east. S53 also managed to escape into the night, not before scoring further hits on Broke. Despite her own severe damage, however, the latter finished off the crippled G85 with a torpedo.
Swift did not continue her pursuit past the barrage, and the early hours of 21 April were spent rescuing survivors from the two German boats and ensuring Broke was kept afloat and clear of the burning wrecks. Eightynine were saved from G42 and G85 and 71 killed, while the British had 22 dead and 29 wounded. The action was a considerable propaganda success, helped by the fact that Commander E. R. G. R. “Teddy” Evans, a celebrated Antarctic explorer and thus already good “newspaper copy,” was made more so by his new label “Evans of the Broke.” The Germans thought they had sunk at least one British destroyer, while the British hoped that they had sunk not two, but three of their enemy. Although both British ships required extensive repairs, the destruction of two German boats provided a morale boost and the Admiralty made the most of the rare success.
The Flanders flotillas had wounds to lick; it was clear the new British arrangements were capable of a concentrated response to a sally against the barrage. An associated problem for the Germans was that the Dutch convoys had escorts of sufficient strength to be a match for the depleted torpedo boat flotillas, while, if the British were given any warning, the Harwich Force could be concentrated in the area. The choice was thus between finding the seas clear of shipping if no convoys were at sea or running the risk of encountering superior forces. The German solution was to use the small and fast torpedo craft in hit-and-run raids against the more vulnerable ports on the French side of the Channel and around the Thames while the larger vessels worked to cut the shipping lanes between the Netherlands and England. In the early hours of 25 April, four torpedo boats of the Second Half-Flotilla bombarded Dunkirk. The monitor Lord Clive and the destroyer Greyhound, stationed off La Panne, attempted to cut off their retreat, but could not get close enough. The Germans encountered the small French destroyer Etendard, which blew up and sank with all hands after being torpedoed by A39. The trawler Notre Dame de Lourdes was also hit hard but managed to make port. The German torpedo boats were convinced they had been attacked by CMBs during their approach to Dunkirk, but there is no report in the British records to substantiate this theory.19
Convoys and Admiralty Reform
One of the most significant developments of the naval war came in April with the establishment of a Scandinavian convoy system. The existing arrangements still failed to provide sufficient protection, and Norwegian pressure for the British to do more was growing. A conference between Grand Fleet and area commanders in east Scottish waters had already resulted in a recommendation to start a convoy regime. The depredations of U30, UC76, and UC45 in the Norwegian Sea in mid-April added new urgency to the problem. Thinking in the Admiralty continued to evolve and that month, key personnel including Oliver, Chief of the War Staff, and Duff, Director of the Anti-Submarine Division changed their views. Most importantly, they were now prepared to accept large convoys with relatively few escorts. Formal approval for Scandinavian convoys was issued on 24 April, while northeast coast convoys began to operate from 29 April. Work to adopt a more comprehensive convoy system throughout the North Atlantic was already well under way. The new scheme was submitted to the First Sea Lord on 26 April and approved the next day.20 In both material and political terms, this step was taken just in time. When the prime minister visited the Admiralty on 30 April, he was “gratified to learn” of the new policy, even if the naval staff continued to have reservations.21 The prime minister’s visit reflected growing concern in the War Cabinet that the U-boat problem was not being well handled. The Admiralty’s credit would depend greatly upon the speed with which the new arrangements were implemented—and their results.
There were pressures from other directions and changes already in the wind. A new dynamic was developing between the Grand Fleet and the Admiralty. Beatty was also increasingly dissatisfied with the naval staff’s performance and vented his feelings on the prime minister and the First Lord at a meeting on 14 April. The combination of the “driblets” of mines placed in the Heligoland Bight, rather than the vast numbers planned, and time it had taken the Admiralty to accept convoy, as well as the delays that seemed to dog implementation of any new measures were justification for Beatty to argue for a reorganization of the Admiralty and for the Grand Fleet’s staff to be brought much more closely into the planning system.22 Beatty had a case, and some of his ideas were reflected in the changes at the Admiralty that followed in the next few weeks, with Jellicoe formally taking on the role of Chief of Naval Staff and Oliver becoming his deputy. The prime minister did force the installation of a civilian, albeit with temporary rank as a vice admiral, as controller. Sir Eric Geddes, a railway expert who had reorganized the transport networks supporting the western front, was brought in with a mandate to reform shipbuilding to meet not only the needs of the navy, but the more pressing demands of the merchant marine. Geddes brought new energy to the task but was soon discontented by the lack of leadership from the First Lord, Carson, while increasingly uncertain of Jellicoe’s performance. Carson’s days were numbered, since Geddes had the prime minister’s ear and support from other elements in government and the army. In July, Lloyd George shifted Carson to a position without portfolio in the War Cabinet and installed Geddes as First Lord.
Beatty, however, was becoming increasingly “imperial” in his outlook. While the Admiralty was prepared to humor him, the Grand Fleet could not deal with the complex, whole of government issues that practically any major initiative involved. Whatever the pretensions of Beatty and some of his officers, they could not act as an alternative naval staff. Nevertheless, the Grand Fleet’s frustrations were justified in two areas. Mine warfare was on the brink of resolution at last with the introduction of an effective near-copy of a German mine, designated the H2. From a poor start in 1914, the Admiralty and its associated establishments had not given development of reliable mines the priority required. The second area would be a source of future ill feeling. Naval aviation was Beatty’s focus almost as soon as he arrived in the Grand Fleet and he had sponsored extensive work to identify the right lines of development for air defense, for reconnaissance, and for strike. In early 1917 aviation was in a state of flux and the problems of coordination between departments, conflicts over resources, and the difficulties of dealing with breakneck technological development that could give one side or the other overwhelming, if temporary, advantages were coming to a head. With the German example (albeit on a small scale), the Grand Fleet was beginning to understand that only a mass torpedo attack on the High Sea Fleet in its anchorages would work. This required both capable aircraft and suitable ships to launch them. The apparent inability of the Admiralty to give these ideas the priority the Grand Fleet thought they deserved did not help relations in the months ahead.
Some of the most important work done in the naval staff came through the efforts of the Convoy Committee, established on 17 May. This board consisted of a small group of officers from the Trade Division, supplemented by a junior officer from the Anti-Submarine Division, and (critically) Norman Leslie, an expert from the Ministry of Shipping. Leslie had already made a key contribution to the recalculation of the shipping statistics that allowed the Admiralty to understand the true scale—and manageability—of the convoy problem. The committee’s report was completed on 6 June. It set out a plan for the creation of an Atlantic convoy system, its management, and the scale of protection required. Convoy itself created two problems. One was the strain it put on the limited numbers of destroyers. The need to detach them for escort work represented an additional constraint on the operations of the Grand Fleet, a problem that would eat away at Beatty’s own morale. In part, convoy had been accepted because of the Admiralty’s expectation that the Americans would send destroyers and other craft to reinforce the effort to counter the U-boat threat. The second was that convoys across the Norwegian Sea and on Britain’s east coast were very attractive targets for German raids. An escort capable of warding off a submarine could well be defeated in detail by a more powerful surface force, leaving the convoy to be annihilated. The possibility that Atlantic convoys might become the target of surface raids could also not be discounted.
The creation of an independent Convoy Section under the direction of the Assistant Chief of Naval Staff, and within it a chart room that could track and direct the passage of each convoy was a vital step. What made this prototype “U-boat Tracking Room” particularly powerful was that parallel reforms to the signals intelligence organization brought Room 40 at last under the control of the Director of Naval Intelligence. This allowed a much more open approach to the use of both cryptographic work and direction finding. As the staff history noted, “The door was now opened wide enough to permit of intercepts and directionals being plotted on the Convoy Chart.”23 The Convoy Section could arrange convoy diversions to avoid areas of high threat, something practically impossible with individual merchant ships, some of which did not have wireless, while many others could not maintain a twenty-four-hour radio watch. Fleet Paymaster Eldon Manisty was appointed organizing manager of convoys, an inspired selection, and a welcome move by the Royal Navy away from the idea that only seaman officers could fulfill such roles.
