Heligoland (21 page)

All the while the forcibly exiled Heligolanders, virtually interned in what should have been only a temporary settlement near the Elbe, were pining for their homeland. Although the men were not required to join the German armed forces, they knew too much about the coast and the fortifications to be allowed the smallest chance of escaping abroad. It was hard for them, especially the veterans, to be herded into internment camps, and many of the elderly did not survive the experience. This was the dark period for the island when no Heligolander remained to hoist and salute the island’s tricolour. It broke a continuous thread of civilian occupation that was said to have begun before the time of Christ.

On Heligoland itself the morale of the 4,300-strong garrison had been dented by the fortress’s lack of effective involvement in the Battle of Heligoland Bight and the Cuxhaven Raid. Indeed, having so far only succeeded in getting the main armament to fire one shot, the senior gunnery officer was severely reprimanded. The troops there became disillusioned and bored, and for consolation they allegedly turned to the wine cellars of the absent islanders and helped themselves. On the Oberland they wandered about with their hands in their pockets, staring out to sea and wondering if the British might be plotting an invasion. Even a visit to Heligoland by Kaiser Wilhelm in the summer of 1917 (suggested by Paul von Hindenburg, chief of the army general staff) did little to improve morale.

The aftermath of the Battle of Jutland on 31 May 1916 provided an opportunity to reflect on the wisdom of allowing Germany to fortify Heligoland, which lay just 100 miles south of the battle area. The battle itself had ended in stalemate, although the British claimed the victory as the German ships sailed away. In a way it was a tremendous victory for Germany too – three decades earlier it had effectively had no navy to speak of, but now its navy had equalled, if not bettered, the world’s greatest naval force. Fourteen British and eleven German ships had been lost off Jutland Bank, and the British ships had proved to be inferior in armour and guns. In Germany the clash was, for a time, the subject of much pride. Kaiser Wilhelm in his memoirs described it as a ‘great victory’. And indeed it might have been an overwhelming victory for Germany if just a few more German warships had been present at the battle. This could have been achieved had not Germany’s leaders – encouraged by Wilhelm – squandered millions in pointlessly widening the Kiel Canal. But the greatest single distraction of naval funds away from warship building had been Heligoland itself. Between 1890 and 1914 the German Exchequer had been required to supply an estimated £35 million for the construction of the island’s harbours and fortifications.

However, in Britain the indecisive Battle of Jutland stunned public opinion, which had been expecting an outright triumph, and prompted questions as to whether the outcome would have been more favourable if the Royal Navy had been better resourced. Did this not show, newspapers wondered, that Salisbury should have been stopped from handing over Heligoland to Germany twenty-six years earlier? Sensing the possibility of a future public demand for the return of Heligoland to Britain, on 16 September 1916 Arthur Balfour, the First Lord of the Admiralty, circulated to the Cabinet a confidential memorandum on the pros and cons of retroceding Heligoland in future peace negotiations with Germany. Balfour, who was – perhaps significantly – Lord Salisbury’s nephew, was himself not much in favour of altering the status quo.

‘The man in the street’, he informed his colleagues, ‘whether the street be in London or Berlin, undoubtedly holds the view that the possession of Heligoland has been a great naval strength to Germany and that whether Great Britain was right or wrong to cede it under the settlement made in 1890, modern developments both in sea power and air power have proved that she made a very bad bargain.’
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Balfour, rather unconvincingly, went on to claim: ‘It is clear from such informal conversation as I have had on this subject with high naval authorities, that this is not their view at all.’ In order to ‘clear this matter up’ he drew up a series of questions whose answers, he hinted, might provide a foundation for any decision which Britain might be called upon to take. Having initially asked if Germany’s possession of Heligoland was helpful to the German fleet, he moved on to wonder if Britain’s possession of the island would help the British fleet.

Typically, it was the unpredictably grim weather of the Heligoland Bight which appeared to demonstrate how strategically important Heligoland had become to Germany. During the winter of 1916/17, when the Elbe and other main German rivers were frozen over, sixty-six submarines used Heligoland as a base. During the two months of that severe frost their sallies from the island reputedly did a massive £30 million-worth of damage to Allied shipping. Heligoland’s significance as a submarine base increased further on 1 February 1917 when Germany committed itself to a strategy of unrestricted submarine warfare. Suspiciously quickly, Kaiser Wilhelm seized upon the island’s new worth, citing it as belated proof of the wisdom of his enthusiasm for the 1890 Heligoland–Zanzibar swap. Having been so closely associated with the deal, he inevitably felt personally aggrieved, even many years later, when it was criticised. In his memoirs he revealed that ‘Not until the World War was on did I see articles in the German press which unreservedly admitted the acquisition of Heligoland to have been an act of far-sighted statesmanship.’
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On 21 September 1917
The Times
quoted Herr Engel as claiming, ‘The German submarine war would be almost an impossibility if Germany did not hold Heligoland’; three days later that newspaper published a despatch from Amsterdam authoritatively quoting the Kaiser as commenting of the island: ‘Today this trouser button holds our whole suit together.’

In response to pressure from President Woodrow Wilson to seal off Germany’s main U-boat bases, in May 1917 the Admiralty’s operations division devised an audacious plan to jam the Elbe and Weser by sinking hundreds of Allied concrete blockade ships. First, Heligoland would need to be quickly captured – by means of poisoning the garrison with clouds of ‘Blue Star’ chlorosulphic gas released from specially fitted submarines. Preparations were made in consultation with the Army’s gas expert, Brigadier Charles Foulkes. But Churchill – who had now returned to office – was less keen on capturing Heligoland than the island of Borkum. The entire scheme was abandoned that autumn because the US Navy Department, and then Admiral Jellicoe and the Naval Staff, believed the invasions to be impracticable. In May 1918 also dismissed was another secret Admiralty plan, to temporarily occupy a West Frisian island of the neutral Netherlands for use as an advance base from which to bomb Heligoland’s fortifications with two hundred RNAS aircraft.

A consequence of the drubbing received at the Battle of Jutland was that Germany’s heaviest battleships were not allowed to put to sea in wartime again. Such evasion caused resentment among the crews of the capital warships, especially as they were being deprived of resources in favour of the upstart submarine fleet. With the end of the war in sight, on 21 October 1918 Admiral Scheer recalled all U-boats from their war on merchant ship convoys ‘in order’, he claimed, ‘to avoid anything that might make the attainment of peace more difficult’.
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Rather oddly, at the same time he issued another order ‘to make the High Seas Fleet ready for an attack on, and battle with, the English Fleet’. The venue for this clash, as envisaged in ‘Operation Plan 19’ devised by the naval staff at Wilhelmshaven, was to be off the Dutch Frisian Island of Terschelling. Now the disgruntled battleship crews really smelt a rat: they suspected that Kaiser Wilhelm, foreseeing that Germany was going to lose the war, had ordered this last-ditch sortie so he could sacrifice his beloved battle squadrons gloriously and thus avoid having to surrender them. So unhappy were the crews that they could not be relied upon to obey orders, and on 29 October 1918 the plan had to be abandoned just before the battle-cruisers put to sea. Admiral Franz von Hipper ruefully noted in his journal: ‘Our men have rebelled. I could not have carried out the operation even if the weather conditions had permitted it.’
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Ironically the mighty battleship
Helgoland
, whose name ought to have symbolised an expanded, unified Germany, played a part in the country’s capitulation. In late October 1918, while she was anchored in the Schillig Roads off the Jade estuary, just north of Wilhelmshaven, her crew mutinied. Arming themselves with guns, wrenches and even meat cleavers, they mounted attacks on officers and petty officers. The mutiny spread to other capital ships of the High Seas Fleet at Wilhelmshaven and thence to other bases, notably Kiel, which by 4 November was in the hands of revolutionaries, with every battleship there flying the Red Flag. Although the large surface warships had fallen to the mutineers, throughout the fleet the lesser ones had, almost without exception, remained loyal. Hoping to separate some units of the High Seas Fleet from the corrupting tidal wave of mutiny von Hipper ordered all submarines and torpedo-boats – nearly a hundred of them in total – out of Kiel and Wilhelmshaven. Some sailed westwards to Borkum, many others for the sanctuary of Heligoland.

But on Heligoland the garrison’s sense of boredom had evolved into rebellion. Control of the island had been seized by a Soldiers’ Council, which was in no mood to give shelter to the loyalists’ little ships. They refused them entry by closing down the U-boat and torpedo-boat harbours. Symbolically the great iron gates on the Pottchen, installed to thwart a British invasion, and loathed in peacetime by the islanders as a shadow on their liberty, were now barred in the face of the naval loyalists. ‘We were without a refuge’, von Hipper later recalled, ‘ships without a port. The Flying Dutchmen, ja?’ On Saturday 9 November the squadrons were ordered back. They had no choice but to capitulate to the mutineers.
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On that day too Kaiser Wilhelm abdicated and fled to exile in Holland. The war was virtually over. For the fleet that had been his pride and joy there seemed to be no end of shame. Rounded up by the Allies, a fortnight later, on 21 November, the German Fleet sailed out from its harbours, past Heligoland for the last time, and across the North Sea to be interned at Scapa Flow. There Admiral Beatty obtained a souvenir from the battleship
Helgoland
: a piece of metal which he transformed into a simple inkwell for his desk at his country house in Buckinghamshire.

On 5 December 1918 the Heligolanders returned to their island. From the foredeck of the ship carrying them came sobs and cries of joy from the weary and emotional people as the deep red cliffs of their island home appeared: ‘Ach, Helgoland! Unser Heim! Schön Helgoland!’ On arrival they found their little homes were in a terrible condition. The storms of the last four years had damaged many of the old-fashioned, red-tiled roofs. Salt was encrusted upon the inner walls. The wallpaper hung in shreds. The floors were green and rotten, and fungi flourished in the damp rooms. The gardens were choked with weeds, the white palings blown down, the paving tiles lifted by grass. Penniless and hungry, the islanders set to work to put their houses in order, to paint and distemper, to polish the silver and brass name-plates which were the pride of every cottage, to prop up fences and cultivate their gardens.
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Soon they had their fishing smacks seaworthy again, and moored them inside the war harbour, from where such craft had been rigorously excluded in former times.

The refurbishment work they had partly expected, but they were totally shocked to find that some houses had been occupied by German naval officers who had brought their families to the island with them. Worse still, virtually all other homes had been ransacked by the unruly garrison. At nights the island folk sat by their stoves amid their belongings, which had been trashed by the German military, and in their own Frisian-type tongue emotionally agreed that such actions would never have been allowed to occur when Heligoland was a British colony. Benignly neglectful though Britain certainly had been of the island, its governors had always been protectively mindful of the islanders’ basic rights. The contrast between British and German rule was now sharper than ever before. Combined with the shock of the German vandalism, it suddenly made many islanders wistful for what now, more than ever, seemed to have been the golden age of British suzerainty.

It was a fundamentally defining moment, and has remained so: because not only do the Heligolanders know their history well, but they have long memories. A favourite maritime hymn, which the islanders love to sing in church at Christmas, is ‘I Saw Three Ships Come Sailing In’. They gathered in December 2000, at their Nordseehalle, to witness a pageant re-enacting their predecessors’ first Christmas on the island after the First World War. When the appearance of the British Navy was depicted they all sang ‘I Saw Three Ships Come Sailing In’, and it was quite noticeable that many of the older islanders had tears in their eyes.

After the war the military aspects of the island came under temporary British control. The members of the Royal Navy landing party that arrived on the island in late 1918 were surprised to find so many visible remains of the earlier British rule. Especially outstanding was Government House, the residence vacated by Governor Arthur Barkly and his family twenty-eight years earlier; there were also English street names and the bronze tablet on the church tower, with the English inscription commemorating its installation. A search in the churchyard revealed a tombstone with English wording, erected in memory of a drowned sailor. What astonished them most was that the first inhabitant to meet them was a pensioner of the Royal Navy. He had been unable to collect his pension for some years and was anxious to receive it! With him was a party of islanders who asked for it to be known that they wanted Heligoland to revert to being a British territory again.

Sensing the prospect that Britain might be about to recover its long-lost North Sea colony, on 16 November 1918
The Times
ran a headline story headed ‘The Man who hauled down the British Flag’. In a remarkable piece of popular investigative journalism that would not disgrace a tabloid today the newspaper had tracked down Henry Hedger, the coastguard who just before midnight on 9 August 1890 had lowered the British flag at Government House for the last time and had been the last Englishman to leave Heligoland. Now in his sixties and a verger of a parish church at Herne Bay, overlooking the Thames estuary, he was living in a house with many photos and other small mementoes of his four years’ service in Heligoland. Among the most interesting was a picture of the coastguard group showing six bearded Englishmen, the English officer and fifteen Heligolanders. ‘If it should’,
The Times
helpfully ventured, ‘become necessary to hoist the Union Jack again over Heligoland, Mr Hedger might be fittingly employed to do it.’