CHAPTER 17

Plans for Attack

From the very first days of the war Churchill was looking for ways to use the navy in an attacking role in the North Sea. Within five days of the start he had produced quite a detailed plan to occupy the Dutch islands and submitted it to Battenberg and Sturdee, the current chief of war staff. He intended to draw out the German destroyers and make them fight with their guns, which were lighter than those fitted to British destroyers. It would also give the short-range C-class submarines ‘a part in the oversea warfare from which they are now excluded, and thus compensate to some extent for our deficiencies in numbers of big boats’. He was not worried about the violation of neutrality; the Germans would have to carry out ‘a much more tangible violation of Dutch territory to respond’. It is difficult to see how that would have weighed much in the diplomatic balance and it was not explained what would have happened if the Dutch had declared war on Britain. No more was heard of it.¹ By 19 August he had written a memorandum suggesting an attack by aircraft or destroyers on the Kiel Canal which linked Germany with the Baltic. Perhaps inspired by Fisher, he hoped this would allow the British fleet to enter the Baltic even before the High Seas Fleet had been defeated, but he did not explain how an invasion of Britain could be prevented – perhaps he had ‘flotilla defence’ by submarines and destroyers in mind.² Again there was no immediate result as the situation in France and Belgium remained fluid, but more would be heard of the Baltic.

By chance the Admiralty acquired three vessels which mounted quite heavy guns and were suitable, in some respects at least, for inshore work. In 1912 Brazil had ordered three river gunboats for use on the Amazon, with a wide beam, very shallow draft and two six-inch guns in turrets. The country could not pay for them due to a fall in rubber prices and they were put up for sale by Armstrong’s yard on Tyneside. As war approached Churchill was concerned about them falling into enemy hands and they were taken over along with the Turkish and other ships, at a cost of £155,000 each. It was soon found that they had their problems, their shallow draft of 4 ft 6 ins meant that they were blown sideways in a moderate wind, and their propellers were larger than the draft which meant they had to operate through a tunnel, which made it impossible to go astern until modifications were made. But they would soon find their uses in the shallow waters off Belgium.³

After the failure of Churchill’s Antwerp enterprise, the way was open for the Germans to occupy most of the rest of Belgium and perhaps secure control of some of the ports on the English Channel. On 16 October, ten days after he left Antwerp, he wrote to Kitchener: ‘Now that the operations extend up to the North Sea between Ostend and the advanced defences of Dunkirk, it would be important for the two allied navies to participate in these operations by supporting our left wing and acting with long-range guns on the German right wing.’⁴ Rear-Admiral Horace Hood, recently Churchill’s naval secretary, was in charge of the new Dover Command and was tasked with obstructing the enemy along the coast. He used the three ex-Brazilian ships, now known as monitors, and after being delayed for two days due to winds they entered the fray supported by cruisers and destroyers. Four German destroyers were sunk when they attacked the force. A U-boat fired a torpedo at one of the monitors, the Severn, but it passed under her shallow hull. It was often difficult for the monitors to see the targets beyond the sand dunes, but signalling systems were set up, and two captive balloons were sent out to direct the fire. One of them located an enemy battery but had to descend due to gunfire; it was set up again 5,000 yards further from the line. The enemy advance was stalled, but Churchill was still worried and wrote to Sir John French on 26 October:

… how damnable it will be if the enemy settles down for the winter along lines which comprise Calais, Dunkirk or Ostend, there will be continual alarms and greatly added difficulties. We must have him off the Belgian coast, even if we cannot recover Antwerp.

I am getting old ships, with the heaviest guns ready, protected by barges with nets against submarines, so as to dispute the whole seaboard with him. On the 31st instant Revenge, four 13½ inch guns, will come into action if required, and I have a regular fleet of monitors and ‘bomb ketches’ now organised which they all say hit the Germans hard, and is getting stronger every day.⁵

The French and Belgian armies attempted a counterattack with naval support. As usual the telegrams from the Admiralty showed the First Lord’s personal touch. On 27 October he directed Hood to ‘husband ammunition till good targets show, but risks must be run and the Allies’ left must be supported without fail by the Navy’. The Belgians wanted him to fire more rapidly, but shortage of ammunition was a major factor as ships used far more rounds in a shore bombardment than they would do in a naval battle. Churchill issued the rather ambiguous order: ‘Save ammunition where possible, but don’t lose any chance of hitting the enemy … You have full discretion to go ahead.’⁶ But the attack failed and the allies had to accept that Ostend was in German hands, though Dunkirk was saved.⁷

It is notoriously difficult to assess the real effects of shore bombardment, especially if the territory involved falls into the hands of the enemy. The official naval history claimed that ‘It is scarcely too much to say that the naval assistance for which all three of the allied armies had called had turned the scale.’⁸ The army history says very little, merely commenting that a German staff officer had reported that the ships ‘furnished valuable support to the defence’. Nevertheless, ‘Although shelled at long range from the sea by Admiral Hood’s squadron, the German 5th Reserve Division … nearest the coast, achieved the most success. It actually crossed the Dixmunde-Nieuport railway embankment, which formed the main Belgian line of defence, and secured possession of Ramscappelle … beyond.’⁹ Churchill did not take sides on this issue in his book, The World Crisis, but merely reproduced telegrams between Hood and the Admiralty. But seeds had been sown about the possibilities of army-navy co-operation in coastal waters.

Charles M. Schwab of the Bethlehem Steel Company arrived from the United States in the liner Olympic, having seen the sinking of battleship Audacious off the north coast of Ireland. He reached the Admiralty on 3 November, at just the right moment: Churchill was looking for ways to take the offensive, while Fisher had just been installed as First Sea Lord and was receptive to new ideas. Among other business Schwab mentioned that he had four twin 14-inch turrets for Germany nearing completion, prevented from delivery by the British blockade. Churchill and Fisher snapped them up as it would bypass the usually protracted process of making new turrets, and they had ideas about how to use them while still staying within the deadline for the projected end of the war. D’Eyncourt, the Director of Naval Construction, began design work on two armoured monitors to be built in four months with a very light draft of 10 feet to operate inshore and protected by ‘crinolines’ or anti-torpedo bulges. He and his staff worked hard to produce a design by 17 November, but it was for a very ugly, unbalanced ship which horrified conventional naval architects. Because of the bulges resistance in the water would be very high, they would be very difficult to control and would be blown sideways like the Brazilian ships. Four ships were ordered, coded ‘Styx’ to conceal their function, and were ready by the middle of 1915.

The Brazilian ships were already known as monitors by the beginning of 1914. The name originated with the American Civil War ironclad, which her inventor John Ericson had intended as a ‘monitor’ or warning to other naval powers, She battled with the Confederate Virginia in 1862 and introduced the gun turret to the world’s navies, but the concept had long since been left behind by naval development. It was now revived to mean a ship dominated by heavy guns, usually in a single turret, on the smallest practicable hull, protected as far as possible by armour and torpedo bulges, but ultimately cheap and expendable, unlike a battleship. The name also reflected the American origin of the guns, but when the Admiralty named the four ships after American commanders it was not appreciated as undermining their neutrality. They were re-named after historic British generals, perhaps reflecting their role with the army.

Meanwhile more monitors were ordered, in a programme which was largely controlled by the availability of guns and their mountings. On 11 December 1914 Churchill ordered eight more using spare 13.5 and 15-inch guns, but that proved impracticable as mountings would take too long to produce. Instead 12-inch guns were found in older pre-Dreadnoughts and were fitted in the Lord Clive class. However, two 15-inch turrets were freed because the new battlecruisers Repulse and Renown needed only three each, rather than four for the battleships they replaced. These were fitted in the Marshal Soult and Marshal Ney, named after Napoleon’s commanders, but Churchill and Fisher made the mistake of using unreliable diesel engines. Early in 1915 Fisher turned his attention to smaller monitors using obsolete 9.2-inch guns and 6-inch guns which had to be removed from the Queen Elizabeths because their low positons in the hull made them impossible to use. In all 33 monitors were ordered during the Churchill-Fisher period, plus the three Brazilians and two Norwegian coast defence vessels; only two more would be built in the rest of the war.¹⁰

There were recurring plans to launch a land offensive along the Belgian coast, but it was complicated by the fact that the northern end of the great trench line was occupied by the French rather than the British. On 10 December Churchill pointed out that from the 14th onwards the tides would be suitable to support an army advance to Ostend, with a force including two pre-Dreadnoughts, the three monitors and six destroyers. After that the taking of Zeebrugge would eliminate a submarine base and ‘add greatly to the safety of our ships’. But Sir John French could not muster French support in time and by the 18th it was too late: ‘… no ships can fire tomorrow. Monitors alone would be knocked out by the enemy’s batteries. … It is not justifiable to expose Majestic to submarine risk unless to support a real movement in which every risk will be run and ample support provided.’¹¹ On 13 January the War Council (which had been established in November 1914 and included Asquith, Grey, Lloyd George, Kitchener and Churchill) discussed the Zeebrugge plan and Churchill agreed that ‘the clearance of the coast would be a first class victory’, but efforts were diverted elsewhere.¹²

As the stalemate on the Western Front was prolonged and the High Seas Fleet refused to come out, Churchill revived a plan to provoke the Germans. In the spring of 1913 Rear-Admiral Lewis Bayly had been given the task of planning an attack on the island of Borkum – the most westerly of the German Friesian islands and more than 20 miles from the German mainland, which would have made it difficult to use land-based artillery against the operation. Bayly had the help of Captain Arthur Leveson and Colonel George Aston who would later take initial command of the marines at Antwerp. They were given a room on the ground floor of the Admiralty building and had it cleared of sample naval uniforms. Bayly commissioned a plasticine model of the area including rivers, railways and canals, and invited Churchill and Grey the Foreign Secretary to stand on a table and view it.¹³ Churchill showed the plan to Jellicoe as Second Sea Lord, but he ‘expressed a view unfavourable to the report’. It was not the end of Jellicoe’s opposition. On the eve of war he went on: ‘After a consideration of the proposals for seizing Borkum or Sylt … I am not of the opinion that the advantages to be derived from the use of such a base are worth the cost in men and ships of capture. It is doubtful whether the Army could spare the men for such an attempt even if it was considered desirable …’.¹⁴

Meanwhile Fisher had a grander scheme for an attack in the Baltic, which he pushed harder after his return to the Admiralty in October 1914. It was based on an attack on Germany from the north. He compared it with Frederick the Great’s campaign in the Seven Years’ War, when he was invading France while threatened by Russia from the east. ‘He knew that a blow in force from the Baltic could at any time prevent him from striking right and left, and it was in dread from this from Russia that he began by pressing us [the British] so hard to provide him with a covering fleet in that sea.’¹⁵ Fisher wanted to land Russian troops on a ten-mile stretch of the Pomeranian coast only 90 miles from Berlin.¹⁶ He planned to use up to 50,000 mines to make the North Sea uninhabitable to the Germans and thus prevent an invasion of Britain, though nothing like that number were available and Churchill suggested it was more like a lottery whether they would sink anything if sown indiscriminately.

It is difficult to believe that the Baltic scheme would have worked. Entry to the sea might have inspired a German invasion of Denmark which would have cut off most of the route. It would be very difficult to co-ordinate the efforts of the British navy and the Russian army, divided not only by culture and operational practice but by language and even alphabet. Landing on a hostile shore was far more difficult than Fisher allowed for, and it was not credible that the Germans would have left vital sectors of their coast undefended once the threat had arisen. Nevertheless Churchill did not criticise it severely, perhaps to retain the support of Fisher for his own schemes. Churchill wrote in December 1914: ‘I am wholly with you about the Baltic. But you must close up this side first. You must take an island and block them in, à la Wilson; or you must break the canal or the locks, or you must cripple their fleet in a general action.’¹⁷ Sir Arthur Wilson, highly respected as a tactician, stated on 10 December: ‘I do not think we can do any good in the Baltic with any combined fleet of French and English such as we could make up even with the help of the Italians in the Mediterranean without reducing the North Sea fleet below the safe limit until we have found some means of greatly reducing the danger from submarines, or else of completely blocking the canal.’¹⁸

Churchill even allowed Fisher to order three more ‘large light cruisers’ which were intended to support the Baltic scheme. The Glorious and Courageous were armed with four 15-inch guns each, with the speed and armour of cruisers; they may have been intended to use their speed for protection and to bombard the German defences. The Furious was even stranger, with two 18-inch guns. Though he had consented to them, Churchill called them ‘an old man’s children’.¹⁹ To others the three ships were ‘the weird sisters’ and no one could find any use for them in their original configuration until they were eventually converted to aircraft carriers.

Churchill’s island plan, as he admitted, was descended from the one which had left him incredulous when Sir Arthur Wilson presented it at the CID in August 1911, but now it was better presented and planned and with different targets. He rejected any idea of taking the fortified island of Heligoland as ‘the most difficult to take and miserably small when taken’. It focussed on two separate islands, Sylt and Borkum, which fulfilled four essential conditions.

(a) They cannot be attacked from the mainland, except across several miles of sand intersected by channels, the whole flooded twice daily by the tide. This means they cannot be attacked at all, except in boats and form the sea.

(b) They cannot be bombarded at any point by heavy howitzers of field guns.

(c) They contain deep water anchorages (6 to 8 fathoms) sheltered in all weathers, out of range of howitzers and field guns, and

(d) They are large enough to give ample elbow room for all our purposes once we have gained them.²⁰

Sylt is seven to twelve miles off the coast of Schleswig Holstein, which Germany had taken from Denmark in 1864, and Churchill had studied it in some detail. It was nearly 23 miles long but only half a mile wide except in the middle. It was also dominated by dunes with about 3,500 inhabitants who mostly depended on fishing, though it was also a popular holiday resort. According to Churchill on 2 December, ‘On the land side it is protected by 8,000 to 14,000 yards of sand covered twice daily by the tide. These sands, the neighbouring island of Rom and the mainland opposite Lister Deep for 6,000 yards inland, can be dominated by the fire of warships lying in Lister or Romer Deep. This fire will also prevent reinforcements being brought to the enemy from one part of the island to another.’ He proposed to land a brigade of 4,000 infantry on the north of the island and to establish a destroyer, submarine and aircraft base from which the German coast could be harried and ‘to maintain a regular observation and control upon the debouches of the Heligoland Bight, thus preventing any raid or invasion from putting to sea unperceived and without full warning’. Old battleships of the Majestic or Royal Sovereign classes were to bombard, with the three monitors closer inshore – though several days of calm and fair weather would be needed to get these craft across more than 300 miles of sea.²¹

By 3 January 1915 Churchill had an expanded and more detailed scheme to take Sylt by landing 12,000 infantry in flat-bottomed craft plated against rifle fire and armed with machine guns. Monitors would carry out the advance bombardment from shallow water, supported by cruisers further off, and that would silence the German batteries. Destroyers, mines and indicator nets would protect against submarines. The force would advance under cover of night and protected by smoke. Meanwhile a fleet of 40 submarines and 60 destroyers would keep the High Seas Fleet cooped up.²²

The alternative island was Borkum, which was situated at the mouth of the River Ems leading to Emden. It was 5¾ miles long and 3½ broad and consisted of two parts joined artificially. It was largely sand dunes and most of the 3,100 inhabitants were seafarers and their families living in Borkum village, but the island was also a resort, attracting 20,000 summer visitors per year before the war. The ever-aggressive Keyes reported on 2 January 1915 that Borkum could not be ‘commanded by [German] gun fire from the mainland or the island of Juist’. He presumed the approaches to Emden would be blocked up, and did not think ‘the defence of Borkum from seaward would be a difficult matter provided a sufficient number of submarines, destroyers, trawlers and aircraft can be maintained there in an efficient condition’. He advocated a force of nine C- and nine E-class submarines with two depot ships. He planned to berth the ships in the Fischer Balje which he believed had recently been deepened. The eastern flank should be mined.²³

Two days later Churchill wrote to Jellicoe that they should take advantage of the ‘priceless information’ from decoded messages while the advantage lasted:

But everything convinces me that that we must take Borkum as soon as full and careful preparation can be made. The possession of an oversea base quadruples our submarines making all our B and C boats available for service in German waters. It is the key not only to a satisfactory naval policy, but to future military action whether by the invasion of Schleswig Holstein or (better perhaps) Oldenburg. Troops for Borkum will be available: and although the capture is a difficult operation I am sure we ought to make the attempt, and am also confident that success will be obtained.²⁴

He elaborated a week later:

Having taken the island in question, we must make it the most dreaded lair of submarines in the world, and also the centre of an active mining policy …. Once established there we should confront him with all the ugliest propositions. If he sends mine-sweepers out destroyers will sink them. If he sends transports covered by bombarding battleships, what more could our submarines ask? … Our position there would be intolerable to him. He would have to come out to attack us not at any point he chose on our sparsely guarded coast, but where he would have to face a concentrated swarm of submarines.²⁵

The island projects became an obsession. As Rear-Admiral Oliver tried to get some well-earned sleep after a long day in the War Room, Churchill would often look in and ‘tell me how he would capture Borkum or Sylt. If I did not interrupt or ask questions he could capture Borkum in 20 minutes.’ By 9 March Churchill had fixed a firm date for an operation and wrote to Jellicoe: ‘the First Sea Lord is making extraordinary exertions to complete six monitors by May 1st, three 14-inch, two 15-inch, and one 12-inch. Allowing a fortnight to haul and veer on, the attack on Borkum should take place on or about the 15th of May … in three days the capture will be complete; in six the new base will be established.’²⁶ But by that time Churchill was deeply embroiled in another campaign, and he would not be at the Admiralty much longer.

Churchill never completely dropped the Borkum and Sylt schemes. Even after the failure at the Dardanelles and his own dismissal from the Admiralty, he wrote detailed plans in July 1917 while out of office. If these were not practicable, he suggested artificial islands instead. ‘A sufficient number of flat-bottomed barges or caissons made, not of steel but of concrete, should be prepared in the Humber, at Harwich and in the Wash, the Medway and Thames. … on arrival at the buoys marking the island, sea-cocks would be opened and they would settle down on the bottom. … by this means a torpedo and weather-proof harbour, like an atoll, would be created in the open sea, with regular pens for the destroyers and submarines, and launching platforms for aeroplanes.’²⁷

However from his new office as Minister of Munitions he did not support the one apparently successful amphibious operation of the war, when his old protégé Roger Keyes raided Zeebrugge on 22 April 1918. It provided some cheer at the height of German advances on the Western Front, but did not completely block the harbour entrance. In any case, as Churchill argued, Ostend and Zeebrugge were not, as some argued, ‘the source of submarine warfare’ whose destruction was vital. ‘As a matter of fact, these harbours … have never been and never could be the main base of submarine warfare’ but were merely ‘serious annoyances’.²⁸