Castles of Steel (73 page)

When they arrived, the British pilots and observers looked down into “a thick ground fog drifting in masses . . . which blotted out everything except what was lying immediately under the machine.” One aviator descended to an altitude of 150 feet and still could not see the ground. Another set his course by a line of railway tracks and passed over villages, farms, and plowed fields. Eventually, the tracks led him to the Jade estuary where he flew over seven light cruisers, many destroyers, and a battle cruiser, all of which vigorously fired at him. Another pilot dropped his three bombs on sheds that he thought might constitute a seaplane base. One bomb scored a hit, but the sheds subsequently turned out to be structures for drying fish. Of the seven seaplanes that had taken off, only one reached the Nordholz zeppelin base. Its crew had been mistakenly briefed that the base was farther to the south and, because dense fog obscured the immense airship hangar, they failed to recognize it and contented themselves with bombing two antiaircraft guns. Only two of the seaplanes came close to harming the enemy. One dropped three bombs near the light cruisers
Stralsund
and
Graudenz;
the closest fell into the water 200 yards from
Graudenz.
Another seaplane, her engine misfiring, gave up the search for the zeppelin base, turned back, and, passing low over the Schillig roads, caused consternation among the crews of the warships anchored there. All of the ships opened fire on the small plane and some attempted to get under way.

[A long-perpetuated myth was that in the confusion caused by the appearance of British seaplanes over the Jade, the battle cruiser
Von der Tann
collided with another vessel and was severely damaged. This, supposedly, was the reason that
Von der Tann
was not present a month later at the Battle of Dogger Bank. Actually, during that battle,
Von der Tann
was in dry dock undergoing routine maintenance.]

The seaplane was hit, but the observer, Lieutenant Erskine Childers, a Royal Navy reserve officer now on active duty and the author of the popular thriller
The Riddle of the Sands,
managed to perform his mission. Childers was an expert on the German North Sea coast and river estuaries and, knowing exactly where he was and what he saw, he pinpointed the location of seven battleships and three battle cruisers in Schillig roads.

By 9:30 a.m., the raid was over. The British seaplanes had done no military harm. Ten bombs had been dropped on woods, fields, sheds, water, and sand. Six of the seven seaplanes, flying separately, had reached Norderney and were heading out to sea to find the carriers. Their fuel tanks were almost empty.

As British seaplanes flew this way and that over German farms, fishing sheds, and naval anchorages, and while Tyrwhitt’s force was steering for the recovery position, the German surface fleet remained at anchor. This was fortunate for the attackers. Once it became clear to scouting German patrol vessels, airships, and seaplanes that there were no dreadnoughts supporting Tyrwhitt’s little force in the Bight, even a few German light cruisers would have sufficed to overpower the unarmed and unarmored seaplane carriers. Tyrwhitt’s ships enjoyed this lucky exemption from surface attack because of a misunderstanding on the part of the German Naval Staff. The Germans had been expecting an attack on the Bight, not from the air, but on the surface. The British Admiralty had been collecting merchant vessels to convert into masquerade battleships and battle cruisers—the dummy fleet. Word of this collection process had reached Berlin. The German Naval Staff, however, did not know its purpose and believed that the assembled ships were to be brought in and sunk in the North Sea river and estuary channels, in order to block egress by the High Seas Fleet. They assumed that the raid, when it came, would be escorted by the Grand Fleet. On December 24, the Naval Staff received “dependable information” that the British were coming on Christmas Day. Expecting that the attack would be delivered by a massive British force that could be challenged only by the entire High Seas Fleet and mindful of the kaiser’s injunction that the battleships must not be risked, Ingenohl assigned the defense of the Bight on Christmas Day to U-boats and airships only. Even when reports from patrolling submarines and zeppelins indicated that the attacking British force was small, Ingenohl’s caution remained unshakable; Tyrwhitt’s ships, he assumed, were the vanguard of a larger British force. As a result, no German surface warship moved. Four battle cruisers,
Seydlitz, Moltke, Derfflinger,
and
Von der Tann,
were in Schillig roads, torpedo nets retracted, ready to proceed to sea, but the signal never came. At 10:00 a.m., they were ordered to reextend their torpedo nets. By then, in any case, it was too late; a thick fog had spread over the estuaries. Germany’s superior surface strength was useless.

Nevertheless, German pilots and airship crews did their best. At 7:35 a.m., the first zeppelin most British seamen had ever seen appeared in the sky ten miles south of Tyrwhitt’s force. This was the
L-6,
which had been cruising above the Bight in search of the British and whose efforts were rewarded when it spotted Tyrwhitt’s ships. Twenty minutes later, British lookouts saw a German seaplane on the horizon in the same direction. Meanwhile, as the ships moved west,
Empress
developed boiler difficulties and began falling behind. Soon, this circumstance made the converted former packet boat the focal point of the first air-sea battle in history. At 9:00 a.m., two German seaplanes attacked
Empress.
The first dropped seven 10-pound bombs from 1,600 feet; the bombs burst in the water 200 yards off the starboard bow. The second seaplane dropped two 22-pound bombs more accurately from 1,800 feet; they exploded only twenty and forty feet from the ship.
Empress
’s captain did his best to throw the Germans off by zigzagging while his crew enthusiastically fired rifles at the German planes. No harm was done on either side.

Meanwhile,
L-6,
drawing closer, descended from 5,000 feet to 2,000 and, approaching
Empress
from astern, attempted to reach a position directly overhead. Despite his own ship’s apparent vulnerability, Captain Frederick Bowhill of
Empress
soon discovered that the airship above him could not turn quickly. Bowhill took quick advantage: “My method of defence was to watch [the zeppelin] carefully as she manoeuvred into position directly overhead. I then went hard over. [When] I could see her rudders put over to follow me, I put my helm over the other way.” By repeated turns,
Empress
was able to avoid the three 110-pound bombs dropped by
L-6,
although two fell only fifty yards away. When her bomb racks were empty,
L-6
departed.

A few minutes before ten, the Harwich Force arrived at the recovery position thirty miles north of Norderney. The sea and the sky were empty. Minutes later, two British seaplanes appeared overhead, landed near
Riviera,
and were hoisted aboard. Almost simultaneously, ten miles nearer the coast, another seaplane had landed alongside the destroyer
Lurcher,
from which Keyes was supervising his submarines. The pilot taxied up to the destroyer, shouted that he had only five minutes’ worth of fuel remaining, and asked the direction to the carriers. Realizing that the rendezvous was too far off, Keyes invited the pilot to come on board and took the seaplane in tow. Tyrwhitt, meanwhile, continued to wait for the remaining seaplanes. At 10:30 a.m., his ships were attacked again by two German seaplanes, which dropped seven bombs. All missed. These air attacks convinced Commodore Tyrwhitt that “given ordinary sea room, ships had nothing to fear from either seaplanes or zeppelins.” Later, writing to his sister, Tyrwhitt said, “Zeppelins are not to be thought of as regards ships. Stupid great things, but very beautiful. It seemed a pity to shoot at them.” Once the last attack had died away, Tyrwhitt realized that the four overdue seaplanes were far beyond their fuel endurance and must be considered lost. He signaled, “I wish all ships a Merry Christmas,” and turned his force back to Harwich.

In fact, three of the four missing planes had landed in the water near Norderney and their crews had been rescued by Keyes’s submarine
E-11.
At 9:30 a.m., Captain Martin Naismith in
E-11
was waiting submerged off Norderney when, through his periscope, he spotted a British seaplane in the air. He ordered his boat to surface. The pilot, seeing the red and white band around
E-11
’s conning tower, landed nearby, reported that he had only five minutes of fuel remaining, and asked for a tow to the nearest carrier. Naismith agreed. Ten minutes later, as he was getting under way with the seaplane attached, a German airship (it was
L-5
) was seen approaching from the east. Then, to complicate matters, a submarine appeared on the surface, heading directly toward his little procession. In fact, it was the British submarine
D-6,
which had seen the seaplanes land and was coming to see whether she could help. Naismith, however, assumed she was a U-boat. A minute later,
D-6
dived—she did this because of the approach of the German zeppelin—but Naismith interpreted this maneuver as that of an enemy submarine preparing to attack. Suddenly, to add to Naismith’s concerns, two more of the missing British seaplanes appeared at the end of their fuel endurance and landed near
E-11.
Naismith now faced the problem of rescuing four additional airmen in the face of what appeared to be imminent attack by an approaching airship and a submerged submarine. Casting off the towline, he maneuvered so close to one of the newly arrived seaplanes that the pilot and observer were able to step directly onto the submarine’s deck; he told the two airmen in the other plane to swim to his boat. By then, the zeppelin was less than a mile away, but Naismith, mindful of orders to destroy British seaplanes that could not be brought home, ordered a machine gun brought up to the conning tower and had a seaman begin firing at the floats of the three empty seaplanes. Before the planes obliged by sinking, the zeppelin was overhead and Naismith was forced to crash-dive. Two bombs from the airship tumbled down; their explosions shook but did not harm the British submarine. Naismith took
E-11
down 140 feet to rest on the seabed, decided to remain, and there the submariners and their five guests sat down to a Christmas dinner of turkey and plum pudding.
D-6
had a narrower escape. When her captain brought her back to the surface, he looked up and found
L-5
fifty feet directly over his head. With machine-gun bullets clanging against his hull, he quickly submerged and headed for home. Six seaplanes were now accounted for; the crew of the seventh was picked up by a Dutch trawler. The fishermen kept the airmen on board for a week and then returned them to Holland where they were returned to Britain as “ship-wrecked mariners.” On Christmas Day in the Cuxhaven Raid, not a man was lost on either side.

But loss was to follow. Jellicoe, hoping that the seaplane raid would provoke the High Seas Fleet to make an appearance, had spent the day cruising with the Grand Fleet 100 miles north of Heligoland. At dusk, the wind and sea were rising and by 10:00 a.m., on the morning of the twenty-sixth, a gale was raging with mountainous waves. Jellicoe turned north for home. During the passage, three men from destroyers were washed overboard and one was swept off the deck of the light cruiser
Caroline.
Three badly battered destroyers had to be sent into dry dock.

There was more. In the black hours before dawn on December 27, the Grand Fleet, pitching and rolling in the huge seas of Pentland Firth, approached Scapa Flow. When the lead battle squadron, showing no lights, turned north from the Firth into Hoxa Sound, the captain of the battleship
Monarch
suddenly saw a patrol trawler dead ahead. Attempting to turn,
Monarch
slewed directly into the path of her sister
Conqueror,
following astern. The two big ships collided, with
Conqueror
driving her bow into
Monarch
’s stern; both bow and stern were fractured and partially crushed. By December 29,
Monarch
had been mended sufficiently to permit her to sail for serious repair at Devonport. But
Conqueror
could not leave Scapa until a special salvage unit had made a temporary patch to permit her bow to take the punishment of an oncoming sea. When the crippled battleship sailed on January 21, the seas were still too heavy for her tender bow and she had to turn back for more patchwork. She finally reached Cromarty Firth on January 24; there she underwent further repair in the Invergordon floating dry dock before moving on to Liverpool for a complete reconstruction of her bow.

The loss of two of his most powerful ships was a blow for Jellicoe.
Monarch
was gone for three and a half weeks and rejoined the Grand Fleet on January 20.
Conqueror
did not return until March 6. Their absence, added to the permanent loss of their sister
Audacious,
reduced the 2nd Battle Squadron, the Grand Fleet’s most modern, from eight ships to five. This deficit, plus the programmed absence of other vessels for essential overhaul, brought the Grand Fleet down to its lowest point of numerical superiority over the High Seas Fleet during the war. For several weeks in January 1915, Jellicoe and Beatty each had only a one-ship advantage over their German counterparts: eighteen dreadnought battleships to seventeen; five battle cruisers to four. Here was the numerical parity the German Naval Staff and Admiral von Ingenohl had been seeking; achieved, “not by their exertions,” as Layman puts it, “but by pure luck.” But Ingenohl, intimidated and cautious, would not have attempted to exploit the opportunity, even had he known it existed.

The Cuxhaven Raid destroyed no zeppelins or zeppelin sheds, but it had taught the Admiralty and the fleet that the previously dreaded aerial monsters need not be feared by ships at sea. Tyrwhitt wrote to his wife on December 29, “They [Churchill, et al.] are awfully pleased with the raid and most complimentary. Couldn’t be nicer! I was really surprised at everybody’s pleasure and delight. They want more and I expect they will get it before too long.” Materially, the raid cost the British more than it did the Germans. Four British seamen had been swept overboard, four seaplanes had been lost, and two dreadnought battleships and three destroyers had been disabled. The Germans suffered no casualties and lost one seaplane. But, morally, the opposite result had been achieved. Once again, a British force had steamed into the Bight, challenging the Imperial Navy. From airship and submarine reports circulating through the German fleet, everyone soon learned that no British dreadnought had been present to support the raiding force. Four German battle cruisers, a dozen light cruisers, and scores of destroyers had been poised to go to sea, but had been denied permission. The result was shame, frustration, and renewed discussion of the need to find a new Commander-in-Chief for the High Seas Fleet.