Castles of Steel (25 page)

[The British firm of Vickers was now building submarines under license from Holland and Electric Boat.]

Nevertheless, he attracted a number of bold, sometimes eccentric young officers. Enthusiasm was high and clothing irregular; his men, Keyes said, “dressed like North Sea fishermen.” The rest of the navy looked upon them and their vessels as “almost a service apart.”

Fisher, in retirement after 1910, never abandoned his passionate advocacy of submarines. Ten years after his warning vision of “death near—momentarily—sudden—awful,” he was vigorously pressing the new First Lord, Winston Churchill, to “build more submarines!” On December 13, 1913, he wrote, “I note by examining the Navy list there have been no less than 21 removals of submarines since I was First Sea Lord and only 12 additions.
Do you think this is satisfactory??
And the remainder of
A
and
B
classes are now approaching 10 years of age and there are 19 of them which figure in our totals.
We are falling behind Germany in large submarines!
”

When war came, the eight boats of the
D
and nine of the new
E
class were assigned to carry the offensive into German waters. Based at Harwich and commanded by Keyes, they were under the direct control of the Admiralty and not of Jellicoe; as a result, like Tyrwhitt’s destroyer flotillas, they led a somewhat freewheeling life of their own. To help overcome a submarine’s inherently restricted range of vision even in clear weather, Keyes acquired two modern destroyers to scout ahead of his flotillas. Flying his commodore’s pennant in
Lurcher,
Keyes personally led a number of early scouting operations deep into Heligoland Bight. Duty aboard these “overseas” submarines was arduous and frustrating. There were no big targets. The German battleships rarely came out and the men remained cramped below because, as Keyes reported, “the notoriously short, steep seas which accompany westerly gales in the Heligoland Bight . . . make it difficult to open the conning tower hatches and vision is limited to about 200 yards. There was no rest to be obtained on the bottom . . . even when cruising at a depth of sixty feet, the submarines were rolling and moving vertically twenty feet.”

On September 13, one of Keyes’s submarines scored the flotilla’s first major success.
E-9,
commanded by Lieutenant Commander Max Horton, had spent the previous night lying on the bottom six miles south of Heligo-land. At daybreak, the submarine surfaced and at once sighted a light cruiser less than two miles away. Horton fired two torpedoes at a range of 600 yards and, as
E-9
dived, one explosion was heard. Rising again, Horton could see that the cruiser had stopped, but shots from an unseen vessel splashed nearby and
E-9
dived again. When Horton came back to the surface an hour later, he saw nothing but trawlers searching for survivors. His victim had been the eighteen-year-old, 2,000-ton German light cruiser
Hela.
Three weeks later, on October 6, patrolling off the Ems, Horton torpedoed and sank the German destroyer
S-126.

An earlier encounter involving one of Keyes’s boats may have been the first of its kind. On September 10,
D-8
saw a surfaced enemy submarine,
U-28,
and fired a torpedo. The German, seeing the torpedo coming, quickly submerged and, as a British staff monograph remarked, “Under the circumstances, stalemate was practically inevitable for neither boat knew what to do with the other; and after an hour and a quarter during which the two boats simultaneously rose and simultaneously dived again, the German retired.” On October 18, however, the British submarine
E-3,
patrolling off the Ems, was stalked, cornered, torpedoed, and sunk in a coastal bay by a German submarine. This event, too, was a first of its kind.

Originally, Alfred von Tirpitz, founder of the Imperial German Navy, had scorned submarines. When the subject came up in the Reichstag in 1901, Tirpitz announced, “We have no money to waste on experimental vessels. We must leave such luxuries to wealthier states like France and England.” Every pfennig was to go into the massive battleship-building program designed to challenge the Royal Navy. By the time of the 1905 estimates, Tirpitz had given ground and Krupp was told to build one
Unterseeboot
(abbreviated in German as
U-boot
and in English as “U-boat”), “for experiments connected with submarines.” Germany thereby became the last major naval power to possess a submarine. When
U-1
completed her sea trials in 1907, she was pronounced satisfactory for coastal operations, but it was warned that “her employment on the high seas is attended with danger.” Gradually, however, Tirpitz released more money, and between 1908 and 1910, fourteen more U-boats were ordered. All were powered on the surface by kerosene engines and underwater by an electric battery. In 1910, German builders switched to diesels for surface propulsion; again, Germany was the last major naval power to make this shift. At the outbreak of war, Germany had twenty-four U-boats in commission, with fifteen under construction. She now ranked fifth in the world in number of submarines—behind Britain, France, Russia, and the United States. But, because Germany had started later, she had as many modern submarines as anyone else.

Nevertheless, Tirpitz and the Naval Staff had little faith in the capabilities of U-boats, and the initial role assigned to German undersea craft was defensive. This stemmed in part from the Naval Staff’s obsessive belief that in the event of war, the British navy would charge into the Bight in an attempt to engage and destroy the High Seas Fleet. In accordance with this fixation, all U-boats were based on Heligoland, where the submarines were integrated into the defensive arrangements of the Bight. By day, an outer observation line made up of a destroyer flotilla patrolled on a concentric arc thirty miles northwest of Heligoland. The U-boats, usually a half-flotilla of seven, formed a static line, riding on the surface at mooring buoys, twenty miles out. The plan called for the outer-line destroyers to retreat, drawing approaching enemy forces over this line of U-boats, which was to submerge and launch torpedo attacks. In conjunction with massed torpedo attacks by German destroyers, the Naval Staff hoped that the U-boats would be able to whittle away at the numerical superiority of the attacking British squadrons before the High Seas Fleet sortied from the Jade.

On the eve of war, when the main body of the High Seas Fleet returned from the Norwegian coast to assemble in the Elbe and the Jade, the U-boat flotillas awaited orders at Heligoland. The orders came quickly: Commander Hermann Bauer, chief of the U-boat flotillas, was ordered to reconnoiter the North Sea, discover the whereabouts of the Grand Fleet, and establish the location of any British patrol or blockade lines. On the second day of the war, August 6, at 4:20 a.m. in thick, rainy weather, ten older submarines from the 1st Flotilla—
U-5, U-7, U-8, U-9,
and
U-13
through
U-18,
selected because their captains were the more experienced commanders—sailed from Heligoland. Reaching a position near the Dogger Bank, they spread out on a sixty-mile front—seven miles between boats—and began a surface sweep northwest up the North Sea. Their goal was the latitude of the Orkneys.

Throughout their 350-mile outward voyage, the nine U-boats (one had engine trouble and returned home) failed to sight even one enemy warship. Then on August 9, between the Orkneys and the Shetlands,
U-15
had her fatal encounter with the light cruiser
Birmingham.
On August 12, seven of the original ten submarines returned to Heligoland. One had returned earlier,
U-15
had been sunk, and nothing was ever heard from
U-13;
it was speculated that she had struck a German mine in one of the defensive minefields laid in the Bight. The results of this pioneering operation did little to vindicate the U-boat in the eyes of the German Naval Staff. Ten U-boats had failed to damage, let alone sink, an enemy warship, yet two of their number had been lost. “Our submarine fleet was as good as any in the world—but not very good,” said one German officer. Although the U-boats brought back the first evidence that there was no close blockade, they had been unable to establish the location of a blockade line. The Naval Staff did not know that
U-15
had reached the Orkneys and concluded that the Grand Fleet was so far away from Germany that it was beyond the capacities of U-boats to find it.

A few U-boats continued to sail, and one of these sorties led to revenge for the sinking of the
U-15.
Certain that major British warships were based at the Firth of Forth, Bauer persuaded his superiors to let him post a regular patrol of two U-boats off the estuary. On August 30, 1914,
U-20
and
U-21,
the only two submarines available for offensive operations, were ordered to attempt an attack inside the Firth. On September 5,
U-20
came up the estuary almost as far as the Forth Bridge, but seeing nothing and unaware that Beatty’s battle cruisers were anchored a few hundred yards above the bridge, turned back. Meanwhile, out to sea, Captain Otto Hersing, in
U-21,
spotted the 3,000-ton light cruiser
Pathfinder
on patrol off Abs Head, ten miles southeast of May Island. Although his submarine was pitching and rolling in a stormy sea, Hersing maneuvered until he was within 1,500 yards—just short of a mile—and fired one torpedo. The torpedo hit and the explosion detonated the ship’s forward magazine. Four minutes later,
Pathfinder
plunged to the bottom, taking with her more than half her crew of 360.
U-21
escaped, having achieved the war’s first sinking of a British warship by a German submarine.

Pathfinder
was a ten-year-old ship of marginal value, but her loss had a strong impact on Jellicoe. The torpedoing confirmed the Commander-in-Chief in his belief that the southern and central North Sea were dangerous for large warships, and thereafter he held the Grand Fleet as far to the north as the Admiralty would permit. Some British officers found Jellicoe’s fears exaggerated, and in other parts of the navy operating orders and tactical routines relating to submarines were more relaxed. The result was a spectacular disaster. Only three and a half weeks after Beatty’s triumph in the Bight, the Royal Navy lost more men in ninety minutes than the Germans had lost in the all-day battle around Heligoland. The weapon responsible for this British defeat was one small German submarine.

At the beginning of the war, the Royal Navy possessed a multitude of elderly surface warships that Fisher had wanted to scrap, but which remained afloat, requiring crews whose numbers were out of all proportion to the vessels’ fighting value. Among these were the six 12,000-ton armored cruisers of the
Bacchante
class, laid down in 1898 and 1899, and now thoroughly worn out. Their engines, designed to make 21 knots, could scarcely produce 15. Nevertheless, rather than scrapping them outright, the Admiralty had placed the
Bacchante
s in Reserve Fleet limbo; no money was to be spent repairing them, but they were to be kept in the inventory until they were utterly useless. In the summer of 1914, they were tied up, rusting peacefully, at Medway on the Thames estuary.

The outbreak of war brought these old ships back to life. Each cruiser carried two 9.2-inch guns and eight 6-inch guns, which might be used to punch holes in any German light cruisers or destroyers their shells managed to hit. For this reason, a coat of fresh, gray war paint was applied, ammunition and supplies were hoisted in, and more than 700 officers and men marched aboard each ship. The seamen came from the Royal Navy Reserves and the Fleet Reserves, a pool of navy pensioners, many of them middle-aged family men. Like many reserve ships in the Royal Navy, the old
Bacchante
s were local ships; most men in the crews came from nearby towns and villages, which took pride in their men now going to sea. To compensate for the inexperience of the crews, the old armored cruisers were assigned regular navy captains and officers. In addition, each ship was alloted nine young cadets from the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth, most of them boys under fifteen.

Because the cruisers were old and slow and their crews were new, there was never a thought that they should operate with the Grand Fleet. Instead, they were assigned to patrol the “Broad Fourteens,” a patch of the southern North Sea off the Dutch coast named for its latitude. Five of the ships,
Bacchante,
Aboukir,
Hogue,
Cressy,
and
Euryalus,
were based at Harwich, where their mission was to support Tyrwhitt’s destroyers and Keyes’s submarines in blocking any German surface force attempting to attack the transports carrying the BEF to the continent. Frequent bad weather had altered this arrangment, however, and instead of acting in support of the smaller ships, the old cruisers, better able to cope with the rough seas, became the front line. Back and forth, day after day, the cruisers patrolled their beat, remaining at sea without rest, taking turns going in to coal. As the autumn advanced and the seas rose higher, the accompanying destroyers frequently returned to port. Meanwhile, the cruisers had fallen into bad habits. It was intended that they maintain 15 knots, with occasional zigzagging. Fifteen knots proved impossible, as the ships’ aging engines suffered repeated breakdowns; Rear Admiral Arthur Christian considered himself fortunate if he had three of his five cruisers available at any time. At over 13 knots, the
Bacchante
s gobbled up coal; accordingly, they usually plodded at 12 knots, which often slipped to 9. None of the British cruisers zigzagged, because none had ever sighted a periscope.

The danger attached to this disposition had been noticed elsewhere. From Harwich, Tyrwhitt and Keyes insisted that the old ships were museum pieces that never should have been sent to sea. On August 21, Keyes wrote to Rear Admiral Sir Arthur Leveson, director of the Admiralty’s Operations Division: “Think of . . . [what will happen if] two or three well-trained German cruisers . . . fall in with those
Bacchantes.
How can they be expected to shoot straight or have any confidence in themselves when they know that they are untrained and can’t shoot? Why give the Germans the smallest chance of a cheap victory and an improved morale [?] . . . For Heaven’s sake, take those
Bacchantes
away! . . . The Germans must know they are about and if they send out a suitable force, God help them . . .” In giving these warnings, all were thinking of a sudden attack by fast, modern surface ships; no one—not even Keyes, who was Commodore for Submarines—worried about a threat from German submarines.