Strange Intelligence: Memoirs of Naval Secret Service (10 page)

In April 1911 one of our agents in Germany got wind of a coming cruise by a ‘special service’ division, consisting of the battleship
Elsass
, the armoured cruiser
Blücher
, and a light cruiser. Discreet inquiries left no doubt as to the purpose of this undertaking. Even before the ships left Kiel it was known that twenty officers, all of whom were gunnery experts, had been specially detailed to make this cruise, and that with them was the deputy chief of the
Waffen-Abteiling
(ordnance department) of the German Admiralty and two high officials from the firm of Krupp. The secret service agent who was engaged on this inquiry discovered, further, that the division was to cruise in northern waters, perhaps even as far as Iceland.

In due course it sailed, and was away for nearly three weeks.
The return of the ships found our agent again in Kiel, and in less than a week he had secured a fairly complete account of the cruise!

Before going ashore the bluejackets from the ships in question had been expressly cautioned by their officers not to talk about the events of the cruise. This was probably a mistake, for experience proves that when a large number of persons are enjoined not to reveal something because it is a strict secret, that ‘secret’ almost immediately becomes common property.

It was so in this case.

In many a tavern of Kiel the incidents of the cruise were soon being freely discussed by liberty men from the
Elsass
and
Blücher
, some of whom, indeed, talked loudly of the wonderful target practice their ships had made off the Faroe Islands. While information gleaned from tap-room gossip is apt to be misleading, the stories he heard on this occasion tallied so closely as to carry conviction to our man’s mind. Once armed with news that, if vague as a whole, was quite definite on certain points, the agent was able to prosecute his inquiry in other quarters. By the sixth day, after a very discreet interview at the ‘Franziskaner’ café in the Holsten-strasse, he had collected, and verified to his own satisfaction, sufficient material for a long report.

The cruise, it became clear, had been undertaken to test the respective merits of the existing fire-control system, as installed in the
Elsass
, and the new system, with which the
Blücher
was experimentally fitted. A firing ground was chosen some 30 miles south-west of the Faroe Islands, the target being the light cruiser attached to the division. Of course the cruiser herself was not fired at directly. It was what is known in British naval parlance as
a ‘throw-off’ shoot: that is to say, while the gun sights are trained on the target ship, the guns themselves are deflected a fraction out of alignment, with the result that when the aim is true their shots fall some distance astern of her.

The chief advantage of this method – which the Germans claim to have initiated – is that it dispenses with the usual form of gunnery target, which is a heavy and unwieldy structure that can only be towed at rather low speed, and is liable to be wrecked if the weather becomes rough.

The scoring in a throw-off shoot is to some extent approximate, since the conclusive evidence of holes in the target is wanting, but at the same time it is a method that enables the accuracy of gunfire to be determined with a precision sufficient for all practical purposes.

During the first runs on the firing ground the
Elsass
and
Blücher
opened at a range of 11,000 yards, which was gradually increased to 13,000 yards, while the cruiser acting as the target steamed at varying speeds between 14 and 20 knots.

These conditions were abnormally severe for those days, and were, in fact, judged by several British gunnery experts who subsequently ‘vetted’ the intelligence report to be prohibitive to effective shooting. Yet it is none the less true that some very fine shooting was made on this occasion.

At 11,000 yards, the
Elsass
, with her old type 11-inch guns, was dropping one salvo out of three in the wake of the target, which meant that she would have been hitting frequently but for the slight deflection of her guns. Even at 13,000 yards she had little difficulty in finding and keeping the range.

The
Blücher
was armed with twelve 8.2-inch guns of a new type. She, too, picked up the target with ease, a high percentage
of her salvoes pitching in and about the ribbon of broken water that denoted the cruiser’s wake.

On the second day the range was extended to 14,000 yards. The weather was clear, and a swell caused the ships to roll slightly. In spite of the increased range, the fire from the
Elsass
was fairly good, but the
Blücher
’s shooting surpassed all expectations.

Steaming at 21 knots, with the target moving at 18, she secured a ‘straddle’ at the third salvo, and, according to the umpires watching from the target cruiser, one or more hits would certainly have been registered by each of the eleven other broadsides she fired. Having regard to the comparatively small calibre of the guns, the speed at which firing ship and target were travelling, and the state of the sea, the results of this day’s shoot were justly considered to be phenomenal.

All these details, and many others, were embodied in the report drafted by the British secret service agent.

When it reached the admiralty certain senior officers were disposed to reject it as spurious. The agent responsible was invited to London to discuss the matter. He was then informed that results such as were recorded in his report were ‘absolutely impossible’, that no hits could be made on a moving target at any range above 12,000 yards, and that, in short, he had been deceived. This notwithstanding, his own confidence in the accuracy of the figures remained unshaken, and it was with no surprise that he learnt, months later, that his account of the
BIücher-Elsass
cruise had been confirmed in every particular.

By a pure coincidence this development in German naval gunnery took place within a few weeks of the British Navy’s first trial of the Scott director system. HMS
Neptune
, the first ship to be fitted with it, carried out experimental practice in March
1911, with excellent results. But official conservatism retarded for nearly a year the extension of the director system to other ships, and it was not until November 1912 that a competitive trial shoot between the
Thunderer
, fitted with director control, and the
Orion
, using the old system, took place. Each ship fired at a separate target, to ensure equal conditions of wind, light, and weather. Sir Percy Scott gave the following description of the practice:

The interest of this extract lies in the revelation of the difference between British and German gunnery performance at that period. As will be seen, the
Blücher-Elsass
firings were conducted at much greater ranges and speeds than the
Thunderer-Orion
shoot.

To the best of our knowledge, the first British battle practice at 14,000 yards’ range was held in 1913, when the
Neptune
scored hits at this distance. Yet only a year or two later our battlecruisers were in action against German ships at a range of over 10 miles, and making very good shooting.

In the Dogger Bank fight, the
Blücher
was disabled by a direct hit at 17,000 yards.

This seems to show that the gunnery experts who scouted
as ‘impossible’ the results achieved in the German trials off the Faroe Islands had failed to realise what the modern naval gun could do when its fire was controlled by highly scientific methods.

Following the Faroe experiment, the new system of control was applied to all German dreadnoughts and battlecruisers with the least possible delay. Many other practices were held, and of some of these we obtained good reports.

A real triumph was achieved by one of our men in Germany at that time, for he secured actual photographs of certain German targets that had been used for these special gunnery trials.

It is pretty obvious that photographs of that sort would not be hawked about. After all, the German authorities had gone to great expense to obtain confidential information of a very important kind for themselves, and they would watch every print known to be in existence that recorded the results.

They had towed four obsolete battleships out to sea, and these vessels had been simultaneously engaged by the ships of the High Seas Fleet. The photographs that were taken showed the effect on the ships, the damage done to the armour plating, the wreckage occasioned inside the ship, and so on – information of the highest value to those concerned with artillery problems.

Our man got hold of a complete set of the photographs. He never told anyone how he did it, and he died some years ago, so the secret will presumably never be disclosed. But the sensation those photographs caused in the ID will never be forgotten by those who remember their arrival.

Another agent working on naval artillery questions had almost as great a triumph as his colleague who secured the photographs, though in his case it was a matter of piecing together
isolated scraps of information rather than the acquirement, complete, of the whole of the documents required.

He put into the hands of the admiralty in the course of a few months full information about the direction-pointer firing system, both for the main and secondary armament of the German ships. He sent through details of the new long-base range-finders, then newly introduced into the capital ships, and other particulars of gunnery equipment. But, more remarkable still, because of the infinitude of detail, he compiled for the admiralty, from fragments of information picked up here and there, complete tabulated statements showing the ballistical qualities of every German naval gun.

He gave the initial velocity, muzzle energy, armour penetration at different ranges, and further details.

His tables differed materially from those passed for publication in technical annuals at the time. It was clear from the evidence he gathered that those tables were simply by way of being catalogues for the information of foreign buyers. They represented the facts about standard models that the German firms were prepared to build for installing in foreign ships (the minor navies nearly all had their ships built in British or German yards in those days), but the figures in the tables were not related very closely to the armament actually produced for the German Navy.

The chief problem of concentrated fire is to distinguish and identify the salvoes from each ship. When two or more ships are engaging the same target, it is soon hidden in a ‘forest’ of splashes, for the fall of a heavy shell throws up a geyser as high as the masthead, and estimated to contain 2,000 tonnes of water. But unless the splash of each salvo can be instantly
identified by the ship that fired it, there is no means of correcting the aim.

This problem was solved by an instrument known in Germany as the ‘
Aufschlagmelde-Uhr
’ (literally, ‘splash reporting clock’), and in the British Navy as the ‘time-of-flight’ clock.

The principle is ingenious but simple. The time taken by a projectile to cover any given distance between the muzzle of the gun and the target being known, the clock is adjusted in accordance with the range at which each salvo is fired. It is set in motion at the instant of discharge, and at the precise moment when the salvo is due to arrive at the target the clock emits a buzzing sound. By this means the gunnery control officer is able to determine which set of splashes comes from his own shots, and so to correct his aim.

But for the time-of-flight clock it would have been impossible for the Germans at Jutland to concentrate so accurate a fire on the
Queen Mary
, which was destroyed by rapid salvoes from the
Derfflinger
and another battlecruiser. In the same way, at a later stage of the action, the
Invincible
was overwhelmed by concentrated fire from the
Lützow
and
Derfflinger
.

As already stated, the German direction-pointer system of control for main and secondary armament, the long-base range-finders installed in all capital ships of the High Seas Fleet, and many other items of gunnery equipment, were all investigated and reported upon by our secret agents.

Nor was inquiry confined to technical details. We knew, more or less accurately, the gunnery standard of every important German ship; as, for instance, that the
Von der Tann
was at the top of the battlecruiser list for three successive years, that in 1912 the
Posen
was the best-shooting ship of her class, and that the
cruisers
Scharnhorst
and
Gneisenau
, of the Asiatic Squadron, were the ‘crack’ gunnery ships of the whole navy – a fact that received tragic confirmation at the Battle of Coronel, when, in spite of failing light and a rough sea, they covered the
Good Hope
and the
Monmouth
with bursting shell and destroyed both ships with appalling swiftness.

Thus, during the last few years before the war, the guns of the rival fleets facing one another across the grey North Sea were steadily thundering away in preparation for the supreme test of battle, when the lath-and-canvas targets of peacetime would be replaced by great, steel-clad ships housing hundreds of men – targets that not only hit back at their assailants, but sometimes returned the fire with terrible effect.

Amidst the tumult and smoke of battle, with ships moving at utmost speed and turning this way and that to confuse the enemy’s aim, it would be too much to expect the same degree of accuracy in shooting as can be attained under the less disturbing conditions of ordinary target practice. Those who had observed the development of German naval gunnery before the war knew what we had to expect, and if they were surprised at all, it was only by the fact that in the Battle of Jutland the German percentage of hits to rounds fired did not exceed three and a half.