Castles of Steel (29 page)

In his October 30 letter, Jellicoe formally restated his intended battle tactics. The Germans, he said, “rely to a great extent on submarines, mines, and torpedoes and . . . will endeavour to make the fullest use of them [in a naval battle. However, they] cannot rely on having all of their submarines and minelayers available unless the battle is fought in the southern North Sea. My object will therefore be to fight in the northern North Sea.” At some point, Jellicoe continued, he expected the two main fleets to meet. When this happened, he would seek a long-range, heavy-gun action; the Germans probably would attempt to involve submarines as well as surface ships. If U-boats accompanied the High Seas Fleet, Jellicoe advised the Admiralty, he would be cautious before rushing into battle.

“This may and probably will involve a refusal to move in the invited direction,” he continued.

If, for instance, the enemy battle fleet were to turn away from our advancing fleet, I should assume the intention was to lead us over mines and submarines and decline to be so drawn. I desire particularly to draw the attention of their Lordships to this point since it may be deemed a refusal of battle and might possibly result in failure to bring the enemy to action as soon as it is expected. Such a result would be absolutely repugnant to the feelings of all British naval officers and men, but with new, untried methods of warfare, new tactics must be devised. . . . [These,] if not understood, may bring odium upon me, but so long as I have the confidence of their Lordships, I intend to pursue the proper course to defeat and annihilate the enemy’s battle fleet, without regard to uninstructed opinion or criticism.

The situation is a difficult one: it is quite possible that half our battle fleet might be disabled by underwater attack before the guns opened fire at all. . . . The safeguard against submarines will consist in moving the battle fleet at very high speed to a flank before the gun action commences. This will take us off the ground on which the enemy desires to fight. . . . [But] if the battle fleets remain in sight of one another . . . the limited submerged radius of action and speed of submarines will prevent them from following . . . [the surface ships] and I feel that, after an interval of high-speed maneuvering, I could safely close.

This cautious attitude was to dominate Jellicoe’s handling of the Grand Fleet during his years as Commander-in-Chief. The primary purpose of the navy, Jellicoe believed, was not destruction of the enemy fleet, but command of the sea with the accompanying ability to maintain the blockade. He was entrusted with the safety of the dreadnought fleet; his greatest fear was that, by chance or a trap, he might find himself in a situation where torpedoes or mines would suddenly devastate his fleet and critically alter the balance of naval strength. The truth was, Jellicoe believed that however agreeable it might be to defeat the High Seas Fleet, doing so was not an absolute prerequisite to winning the war at sea. He therefore had little interest in a pell-mell, winner-take-all attack, wherever and whenever the enemy battle fleet might appear. Such caution might not be in the tradition of Nelson, but no previous British admiral had confronted invisible weapons such as submarines and mines.

To put such a proposal in October 1914 before an Admiralty about to court-martial Admiral Troubridge for his failure to hurl his squadron at
Goeben
required unassailable self-confidence and an iron sense of purpose. But on November 7, the new Admiralty Board approved the Commander-in-Chief’s letter and assured him of its “full confidence in your contemplated conduct of the fleet in action.” Jellicoe, cautious as always, sent a copy of his letter and the original of the Admiralty reply to his bankers for safekeeping.

CHAPTER 8
“Shall We Be Here in the Morning?”

The dangers to the fleet at sea from submarines and mines were hazards posed by powerful, new weapons used with increasing skill by a resourceful, determined enemy. Unfortunately, another peril was inflicted on the British Grand Fleet by its own government and Admiralty. No safe harbor awaited Jellicoe and his ships when they returned from the sea. Arriving at Scapa Flow on August 2, the future Commander-in-Chief found the main war anchorage of the Grand Fleet wholly undefended against surface attack—for example, a sudden violent inrush of enemy destroyers launching torpedoes at the lines of anchored dreadnoughts. There were no man-made barriers to prevent silent, invisible penetration by submerged submarines. The fleet’s other northern bases, Rosyth on the Firth of Forth and Cromarty Firth, near Inverness, were scarcely better protected. As a result, during the war’s early months, Jellicoe always felt more secure when his ships were at sea, despite the U-boats and mines that might be in their path. Thus, between August and December 1914, the Grand Fleet steamed 16,800 miles. During this time, Jellicoe’s
Iron Duke
burned over 14,000 tons of coal, more than half its own weight. The flagship was in harbor for only one day in August 1914, and for six complete days in September. Inevitably, this constant movement meant wear on the ships’ machinery and strain on the men. Postponed maintenance led to increased breakdowns. Gradually, as more and more ships were detached for repairs, the size of the Grand Fleet battle line began to shrink.

Churchill described the situation: “The Grand Fleet was uneasy. She could not find a resting place except at sea. Conceive it, the
ne plus ultra,
the one ultimate sanction of our existence, the supreme engine which no one had dared to brave, whose authority encircled the globe—no longer sure of itself.” This was more than a predicament; it was a scandal. The Royal Navy had led the world in warship innovations that had revolutionized surface naval warfare. The British fleet was the largest in the world; it dominated the oceans; it was supreme in the North Sea. Yet when war with Germany began, this armada had no secure North Sea base. Scapa Flow, the fleet’s principal war anchorage, which guarded the North Sea and the northern passage around the British Isles, had been left undefended. And one of those responsible was the man who had been First Lord during the two years before the war: Winston Churchill.

Before the rise of the German navy, the threat to British naval supremacy had come from Spain, the Netherlands, and France. The Royal Navy’s principal bases—Chatham, at the mouth of the Thames; Portsmouth, shielded by the Isle of Wight; and Devonport, at Plymouth—all were placed to confront those traditional enemies. But in 1904, when concern over the growth of the German fleet led to the beginning of a massive warship construction program and a projected redeployment of the fleet into the North Sea, those well-defended and comprehensively equipped bases were too far away. For a war with Germany, a new naval base on the North Sea was needed. This requirement had been recognized by the British government more than a decade before Jellicoe took command of the Grand Fleet. On March 5, 1904, Prime Minister Arthur Balfour told the House of Commons that the Cabinet had approved an Admiralty request to establish a new base for battleships at Rosyth, on the northern side of the Firth of Forth. The Forth was only 375 miles across the North Sea from Heligoland and Wilhelmshaven; there was ample accommodation for a large number of ships; the anchorage was connected by rail with all of Britain; its single entrance made it defensible against attack from the sea. A drawback was the giant railway bridge spanning the Firth; if collapsed by shellfire or sabotage, the wrecked bridge might trap the fleet in the anchorage upstream. Parliament weighed these factors and approved a major base on the Firth of Forth.

And then the years went by and nothing happened. Political doubts arose as to the need for the new base: perhaps there would never be a war; why provoke Germany? There were technical arguments: some now said that the long approaches to the estuary were vulnerable to enemy minelaying; others declared that the area of deep water upstream above the bridge was insufficient to berth the growing fleet. Interservice turf wars became a factor. Traditionally, the defense of naval harbors was a War Office responsibility—the army built the forts and supplied the guns and the artillerymen. Nevertheless, not unnaturally, the navy wanted a voice in these matters. Further, the establishment of a major base at Rosyth on the Firth of Forth required the building of a small town to accommodate dockyard workers. Who was to pay for this? The new First Sea Lord, Jacky Fisher, disapproved of Rosyth. Soon after his arrival at the Admiralty in October 1904, Fisher advised the First Lord, Lord Selbourne, “Don’t spend another penny on Rosyth!” Fisher believed that the proposed base was too far inland from the open sea and was unsafe because of the presence of the Firth of Forth bridge. He preferred Cromarty Firth, near Inverness, or the Humber River, on the east coast of England. In 1910, Fisher boasted, “I got Rosyth delayed four years as not being the right thing or right place.” Two years later, he wrote to a friend, “As you know I have always been ‘dead on’ for Cromarty and hated Rosyth, which is an unsafe anchorage—the whole fleet in jeopardy . . . and there’s that beastly bridge which, if blown up, makes the egress very risky. . . . Also, Cromarty’s strategically better than Rosyth. . . . I still hate Rosyth.” The result was that during Fisher’s six years as First Sea Lord, no serious work was done at Rosyth. Some in the navy protested; Jellicoe, as Controller at the Admiralty, wrote to Fisher in 1909 that the development of the base was “of the utmost gravity.” Nevertheless, on March 18, 1912, eight years after Balfour’s announcement, the new First Lord, Winston Churchill, informed the House that the two large dry docks at Rosyth would not be ready until 1916.

There was another reason for the delay at Rosyth. When, in 1912, the new strategy of distant blockade dictated shifting the dreadnought fleet to the north to control the gap between Scotland and Norway, work on Rosyth gained in importance, but other northern harbors also came into consideration: Cromarty Firth and Scapa Flow. Cromarty was advocated as an advanced base for dreadnought battle squadrons and Scapa Flow as a war anchorage for light forces. But because war seemed unlikely, work on defense of these harbors proceeded slowly. On the eve of war, Rosyth and Cromarty had been equipped with enough shore artillery to fend off attack by light surface ships, but both remained open to submarines. Scapa Flow remained undefended.

Money, of course, was the primary reason. The Treasury, especially under the Liberal chancellor David Lloyd George, begrudged all money spent on armaments. In allocating the sums it could wring annually from Parliament, the navy thought first of ships, not bases. In 1912, the Admiralty asked for permanent defenses for Scapa Flow. But upon learning that the cost of a modest defense would be £379,000—one-fifth the cost of a new dreadnought—the Admiralty decided that the advantage gained was not worth the cost, and the request was withdrawn. The Naval Estimates for 1913–14 called for an unprecedented £46,409,300, but of this sum only £5,000 was designated for unspecified works at Scapa Flow. The future base of the Grand Fleet was to be left undefended.

Six miles off the northern coast of Scotland, lying in the gray sea that leads to Norway, are the nearest of seventy islands called the Orkneys. There, behind red limestone cliffs and white sand beaches, swept by a wind that makes it difficult for trees to gain a footing, exists a landscape of emerald green. Inhabited since the Stone Age, colonized by the Picts, conquered by the Vikings, and ruled for 600 years by kings of Norway, the Orkneys became a part of Scotland in 1472 and of Great Britain in 1707. For mariners, two features mark the Orkneys. The first is the Pentland Firth, the six-mile-wide gap north of Scotland through which the Atlantic Ocean races into the North Sea at 8 to 10 knots and back again twice a day. The other, just to the north of the Pentland Firth, is a vast, nearly land-locked sheet of sheltered water, ten miles long and eight miles wide, which makes up one of the great natural anchorages in the world: Scapa Flow. Enclosed by a ring of low, gently rounded islands, this great expanse of water covers over 140 square miles. The bottom is sandy and relatively shallow, nowhere deeper than a hundred feet, most of it perhaps fifty feet. It is a harbor large enough to hold all the navies in the world.

In these northern waters, the islands are shrouded, sometimes for days, in mists. But on a summer day, an Orkneyman has written, Scapa Flow becomes a “great seawater lake with its enclosing necklace of islands . . . seeming to float in their own bubble of clear air below the wide arch of a pale blue summer sky.” Crossing the Flow by boat in summer, the visitor travels in brilliant sunshine surrounded by sparkling water, with all the rich green meadows and reddish moors of the Flow acutely visible, only to plunge suddenly into a thick white mist that makes seeing across the deck almost impossible. Then moving back into sunlight, with the mist still blowing off the tops of the hills, the Flow seems even grander, more immense.

The anchorage has three entrances normally used by ships. To the south is Hoxa Sound, four to five miles long and one and a half miles wide at its narrowest, running northward from the Pentland Firth. In the Great War, this became the main entrance for dreadnoughts. The Switha entrance, known as the “tradesman’s entrance,” also opens from the Pentland Firth; it leads to nearby Switha Sound and from there into Longhope Sound, which at first was the base for trawlers, drifters, boom ships, and other small craft. The third entrance, coming in from the west, is the Hoy Sound. In addition, there were other narrower, shallower, and more difficult entrances from the east, used by fishermen. All the entrances are subject to strong tides and tidal currents and water continually flows in and out of the harbor in a powerful, smooth torrent.

As a base for the Grand Fleet, Scapa offered many advantages. Its vast natural harbor was far larger than the anchorages at Rosyth or Cromarty Firth. It was sited on Pentland Firth, the shortest and safest route by which ships on the west coast of Britain could move into the North Sea. It was closer to the gap to be patrolled between Scotland and Norway. Its strong tides and frequent bad weather were expected make its entrances almost invulnerable to hostile warships. There were, on the other hand, drawbacks to Scapa Flow. The island harbor was set apart from the railway system of Great Britain; therefore, everything needed by the fleet—coal, oil, ammunition, food and stores—had to be brought by ship. The tides inside the anchorage would make it difficult to operate large floating dry docks for major ships. And basing the fleet in the Orkneys would place it hundreds of miles away from many vulnerable points the British navy was expected to protect: the Channel and the long, exposed east coast of England. Nevertheless, it was to this remote harbor in a world of mists that, as war approached, the First Lord of the Admiralty and the First Sea Lord dispatched the British fleet. From there, secluded in a place of mystery, it could use its immense power to influence—or, if necessary, to strike—the enemies of Britain.