Heligoland (18 page)
Authors: George Drower
Tags: #Heligoland: The True Story of German Bight and the Island that Britain Forgot
From 1895 onwards the Dover–Heligoland races served their declared sporting purpose of attracting yachts to Kiel. On 20 June that year Wilhelm officially opened what came to be known as the Kiel Canal, entering it at Brunsbüttel on the Elbe aboard the imperial yacht
Hohenzollern
before ceremonially cruising through it. Present at Kiel were some three hundred yachts and eighty warships from fourteen nations. This international gathering was reputedly the most impressive assemblage of warships Germany had ever seen. On 26 June, at Kiel, Wilhelm dined on board the visiting British flagship
Royal Sovereign
. Speeches and ceremonies emphasised the commercial benefits of linking the North Sea and the Baltic, and praised the Kiel Canal as an international waterway for the benefit of merchant shipping, but its real purpose – as had always been intended – was militarily strategic. With its opening the importance of Heligoland – as had been predicted since Bismarck’s time – also increased considerably.
Events in the Solent that summer had a farreaching impact on the development of the German Navy and on perceptions of Heligoland. Wilhelm was no longer satisfied with his usual escort of a dozen torpedo-boats. In 1895 he also brought with him four large battleships. These caused immense irritation to influential yachtsmen by obstructing the racing course, while their crews flooded the quiet town of Cowes. Further annoyance was caused by the firing from his warships of numerous salutes. To the bafflement of most British present these apparently boorish displays were in celebration of Germany’s military triumphs – and the humiliation of her enemies – in the 1870 Battle of Wörth. The Emperor treated Cowes as though it were Kiel, and the Prince of Wales nicknamed him ‘the boss of Cowes’. The Kaiser’s psychological state was observed by a member of the crew of Erskine Childers’s sailing boat, which was close by when the Kaiser came ashore from the
Hohenzollern
at the Royal Yacht Squadron steps:
A well-set-up little person and a little lop-sided owing to his left arm being shorter than the other. He was exceedingly dramatic and obviously very vain. He spoke English very well and took pride in picking up and making use of English slang expressions and the colloquial phrases that have become a habit to many English people. He would omit the ‘g’ in words like hunting and yachting, which was in him affected and grotesque, and in his anxiety to copy the colloquialisms of ourselves he would often get them wrong.
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Significantly, also present at the regatta was the American cruiser USS
Chicago
, commanded by the versatile Captain Alfred Mahan, who was much better known as the author of the thought-provoking work
The Influence of Sea Power upon History
. Over many months the Kaiser had read the book thoroughly from cover to cover, scribbling many annotations in its margins. It became his guide for an awesome expansion of the Germany Navy. The process was prepared for him by Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, who took office in June 1897. His first memorandum was explicitly anti-British. It set down that the most dangerous naval enemy was England; that a shortage of German coaling stations outside Europe meant Germany should avoid a global war with England; and that Germany must build as many battleships as possible. Lastly, he insisted that: ‘Our fleet must be so constructed that it can unfold its greatest military potential
between Helgoland and the Thames
’. These recommendations were destined to be put into effect in 1898 when the Reichstag approved Tirpitz’s plan for a massive warship-building programme. It won the support of expansionists such as von Bülow, who famously remarked in the Reichstag that December: ‘We don’t want to put anyone in the shade, but we too demand our place in the sun.’
On 3 May 1897 the Kaiser ordered the High Command of the Navy to prepare an operational study for war against England. Ludwig Schröder, the Admiralty staff officer entrusted with the work, went so far as to advise the Kaiser that Germany should ‘out-Copenhagen’ the British by seizing neutral Antwerp and the mouth of the Schelde in a sudden
coup de main
before war had been declared, and mounting an invasion of England from the Belgian coast. This plan of Schröder’s was dismissed as ‘insane’ by Tirpitz, who favoured the concentration of a powerful fleet of battleships in the North Sea, which might opportunistically wrong-foot a Royal Navy debilitated by its world-wide commitments.
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Wilhelm later revealed in his autobiography
My Memoirs
(1922) that in February 1900, while he was with the German fleet on manoeuvres at Heligoland, he had received an astonishing telegram from Berlin. Russia and France had approached Germany with a proposal to make a joint attack on Britain now that she was involved elsewhere (the Boer War was in progress), and to cripple her sea traffic. Wilhelm objected and ordered that the proposal should be declined. Assuming that both Paris and St Petersburg would present the matter in London in such a way as to make it appear that the proposal had originated in Berlin, Wilhelm immediately telegraphed from Heligoland to Queen Victoria and the Prince of Wales, explaining the facts of the Russo-French proposal and his repudiation of it. Victoria answered, expressing her hearty thanks, while the Prince of Wales replied with an expression of astonishment. Later Victoria told Wilhelm confidentially that the false version of the story had indeed been told in London, just as he anticipated, and that thanks to his despatch she had been able to expose the intrigue to her government. Somewhat implausibly, Wilhelm also remembered, ‘she added that she would not forget the service I had done England in troubled times’! And yet, only three years earlier, the Schröder plan had been devised on his orders.
Erskine Childers was busy writing his adventure novel
The Riddle of the Sands
at that time. It was the fictional tale of a patriotic English yachtsman, Arthur Davies, and his Foreign Office accomplice, Carruthers. While sailing the converted lifeboat
Dulcibella
around the Frisian Islands they discover a secret German plot to use the islands’ remoteness to conceal an armada of barges for transporting troops to invade the east coast of England. Carruthers spies on the Kaiser’s late-night inspection of the secret fleet, which proves the scheme is being formulated with the approval of the highest authority. Romantic interest is provided by Clara, the daughter of the scheme’s fictional mastermind, Dollmann. The
Dulcibella
is safely towed through the Kiel Canal by a trading schooner, but not before Davies’s heroic little yacht is nearly lured to destruction by Dollmann. The villain of the piece hoves to at the Elbe Outer Lightship, not far from Heligoland, and maliciously urges the
Dulcibella
to take a short cut to Cuxhaven (and thence on to Brunsbüttel) initially, via the dangerous, semi-submerged maze of shoals between the Scharhorn sands and the shifting Knechtsands.
By coincidence the plot uncovered by the plucky yachtsman was remarkably similar to the audacious 1897 Schröder plan, and there has always been speculation as to where Childers obtained the elements for his ‘fictitious’ yarn. Heligoland now seems to provide the answer. His main invasion warning appears in the epilogue to
The Riddle of the Sands
, where Carruthers argues that the likely landing place for an invasion would be on the flats of the Essex coast, just north of the Thames estuary, ‘between Foulness and Brightlingsea’. Such a shore, he hypothesised, ‘would form an excellent roadstead for the covering squadron, whose guns would command the shore within easy range’. However, Carruthers insisted, the expedition would be doomed ‘if by any mischance the British discovered what was afoot in good time and could send a swarm of light-draft boats, which could get amongst the flotillas while they were still in process of leaving the siels [shallows]’. Surprisingly, what has hitherto never been detected is that this was precisely the argument made by the anti-Heligoland cession campaigner Robert Heron-Fermor in a speech on 9 July 1890. That evening he had asked:
What would be the consequence to England of the incorporation of Holland with the German Empire? Why, in the event of war, our whole East coast would be open to invasion. Because from the Thames to the Humber we have no harbours nor roadsteads where vessels could lie under the protection of guns. On the other hand the creeks and inlets of Holland swarm with places of refuge where fortifications could be thrown up, and an invading flotilla could lie concealed under their shelter in perfect safety.
As a clerk at Westminster, Childers would have had access to the House of Lords library, and it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that he came across Heron-Fermor’s 1890 pamphlet there, and with it a full transcript of the speech. Perhaps it was HeronFermor’s forewarnings of the folly of swapping Heligoland that supplied the strategic substance of
The Riddle of the Sands
.
The novel was published in London in May 1903 and rapidly became an enormous success, eventually selling some two million copies. It established Childers as a pioneering practical yachtsman, one of the few willing to venture so far in a small, makeshift, cruising yacht.
Vixen
’s cruise to the Frisian Islands and the Baltic did, however, have a precedent. In 1889 Edward Knight had published
The Falcon on the Baltic
, an obscure account of a cruising yacht’s voyage from Hammersmith to Copenhagen. In it, Knight referred to the ‘old enemy, the north-west wind’.
But it was Childers’s book that caught the public imagination, with its thrilling combination of high adventure and nautical yarn. The sailing sequences in
The Riddle of the Sands
were some of the most beautiful ever written in the English language. Unfortunately for Heligoland, despite Childers’s affection for the Frisian Islands, he set the novel’s most memorable episodes among low-lying islands, either at night or in dull weather, in order to maximise the dramatic effect. This immensely popular novel certainly romanticised the Frisian Islands – and by association Heligoland – and brought them to public attention, but in the process unwittingly gave the lasting impression that such dismal conditions were usual there.
A shock naval defeat on the far side of the world just a year after the publication of Childers’s novel utterly transformed Heligoland’s strategic importance. As tensions mounted between Russia and Japan, on the night of 8 February 1904 Admiral Togo’s battle squadron suddenly appeared at the outer harbour of Port Arthur and pounded Russia’s powerful Pacific Squadron into smoking hulks. Caught entirely by surprise the Russian ships scarcely fired a shot.
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This attack echoed Germany’s ‘Copenhagen 1807’-type nightmare, especially because the shelling had occurred
before war had been declared
. That October the furious reaction of British public opinion to the Dogger Bank incident – when Russian warships fired on Hull fishing boats in the North Sea just 230 miles from Heligoland – frightened the Germans quite as much as the Russians. In fact German suspicions that influential decision-makers within the British naval establishment were calling for a
coup de main
against Germany’s rapidly growing navy were partly justified. In early 1904 Sir John Fisher, the pugnacious First Sea Lord,
had
in fact suggested to King Edward VII that it would make sound sense to ‘Copenhagen’ the German fleet before it got too strong. The king replied: ‘My God, Fisher, you must be mad!’ The belief that ‘Fisher was coming’ actually caused a panic at Kiel at the beginning of 1907.
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The collapse of Russian military power in the Far East and the first stirrings of revolution at home threatened to remove the Russian Empire from the ranks of the great powers. As a result, Germany had much less to fear from the northern power on her eastern boundary. This meant that German naval planners came to regard the North Sea and not the Baltic as the principal German naval area. However, as Büchsel noted in a lengthy memorandum to Tirpitz in early 1906, the defences around the Elbe estuary would be totally inadequate in the event of a surprise British attack, hence there was a pressing need to turn Cuxhaven into a first-class fortress now that the High Seas Fleet was to be based on the Elbe. He suggested the development of a triangular system of fortresses to protect the mouth of the Elbe, using Heligoland and two other islands several miles offshore: Borkum, off Emden, and Sylt, just by the Schleswig-Holstein coast. All three islands would require fortifications, underwater defences, docks and communication systems.
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These strategic constructions seemingly justified the warnings in
The Riddle of the Sands
. Childers became ever more insistent that Whitehall should heed his advice and develop a North Sea base for major British warships, in the Firth of Forth or at Harwich. In early 1906 he sent a memorandum to the Cabinet’s Committee of Imperial Defence entitled
Remarks on the German North Sea Coast in its Relation to War between Great Britain and Germany
, in which he advocated that officers should be sent to ‘explore’ the coast in order to gain practical personal knowledge for future operations and landings. Some yachtsmen volunteered to go as freelance agents; one such was Brigadier Gordon Shephard, who got himself arrested at Emden. In 1910 two characters were invited by Naval Intelligence to make a ‘walking tour’ of the newly fortified Frisian Islands. Marine Captain Barney Trench and Lieutenant Vivian Brandon spent three weeks that spring on their tour, visiting Heligoland, then Sylt, Cuxhaven, and each of the islands in the Frisian chain until they reached Borkum. In the course of their fact-finding tour they took photographs of secret installations and filled notebooks with technical observations. At Borkum they were arrested as spies before being transferred to Leipzig. At their celebrated show trial – well reported in British newspapers – they were sentenced to four years’ imprisonment.
Tirpitz was more inclined to invest in effective warships than in fortresses, and was uneasy about allocating substantial capital resources for the fortification of Heligoland. He was not alone. Various other leading figures in Berlin thought so too; indeed, it was in connection with such work that – as Kaiser Wilhelm recalled in his memoirs – ‘the Empire and Prussia fought like cat and dog’.
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Tirpitz believed that if money was to be allocated for the fortification of the Frisian Islands, it ought to be spent on defending Heligoland which could then assist in offensive sorties by the battle fleet.