Read Strange Intelligence: Memoirs of Naval Secret Service Online

Authors: Hector C. Bywater,H. C. Ferraby

Tags: #Autobiography, #Military, #World War I, #Memoirs, #True Crime, #Espionage, #Engineering & Transportation, #Engineering, #History, #Intelligence & Espionage, #Naval, #Politics & Social Sciences, #Politics & Government, #Specific Topics, #Historical

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The point we wish to drive home is this: it was not for want of advance information as to the details of German naval equipment that we neglected to provide ourselves with material equally good. The secret service agent’s job was done when he had gathered this information and, after verifying it as far as possible, forwarded it to the proper quarter. If it were not made use of, the blame did not rest with him.

Whatever the explanation may be – absence of a proper naval staff or excessive conservatism in high administrative circles – there remains the inexorable fact that our pre-war Navy, despite its splendid ships and incomparable personnel, was lacking in certain material elements that were absolutely vital to complete fighting efficiency. The absence of these was responsible for more than one tragedy of lost endeavour.

CHAPTER 8

SOME NOTABLE ‘SCOOPS’

M
ODERN NAVAL WARFARE
is so complicated a business that it can be waged only by specialists. That, of course, is a truism, but we are writing here with reference to the actual weapons employed, not to strategy or leadership. Each weapon has its ardent devotees. The torpedo specialist likes to think of his beloved ‘tin fish’ as the most potent engines of destruction afloat, and, incidentally, his conviction – or obsession – on this point is largely responsible for the extreme complexity of the modern large warship. There are even naval officers, mainly of junior rank, who think that aircraft will eventually dominate the surface of the sea.

But the navy as a whole prefers the gun to all other weapons, and with reason. It was the arm that decided every important action of the Great War – Heligoland Bight, Dogger Bank, Coronel, the Falklands, and Jutland.

The battleship is essentially a floating platform for big guns,
and when we increase her tonnage, her speed, and her armour protection, we do so only in order to enlarge her capacity for carrying big guns, to give the platform greater mobility, and to render it less vulnerable to counter-attack. In a word, the ship exists for the gun, not the gun for the ship.

Hence the supreme importance that is almost universally attached to gunnery.

Some account has been given in the previous chapter of the extraordinary pains that the Germans took to develop an efficient shell for their heavy guns, and of the spectacular results it produced at Jutland. But unless accurately aimed, the best projectile is wasted. We shall now disclose the methods by which the German Navy attained its high standard of gunnery, and how, in due course, these jealously guarded secrets were penetrated by the British secret service.

Long after the high-powered naval breech-loading gun had been introduced, target practice in every navy was still conducted at comparatively short range. Although the gun itself could throw its projectile with accuracy up to a very considerable distance, its powers in this respect were not exploited – for the sufficient reason that no system of controlling fire at long range had been evolved.

But in the nineties of last century certain progressive naval officers in this country and elsewhere began to demonstrate the possibility of long-range gunfire, having first devised, quite independently of one another, the requisite instruments. The four men chiefly responsible for initial progress in this direction were Admiral Sir Percy Scott, Admirals Fiske and Simms in the United States, and Admiral Thomsen in Germany.

In each case the telescopic sight was the prime element in
the new system. Using this in conjunction with the ‘dotter’, ‘deflection teacher’, and other devices invented by himself, Scott obtained astonishing results with the guns of successive ships he commanded. He also revived the old method of broadside ‘parallel firing’, by which the axes of all guns bearing on the broadside are so adjusted as to give the weapons a common point of aim. This was the genesis of salvo firing, as distinct from independent shooting.

Finally he invented the director system that bears his name. This enables one man to aim and fire all the guns in the ship. If his aim be accurate – and it depends not merely on his own skill, but on that of the colleague who is ‘spotting’ the fall of shot from a masthead position, and also on abstruse mathematical calculations that are being made in the ‘transmitting station’ deep in the bowels of the ship – the target may be hit by a full broadside, just as the smallest miscalculation or error of judgement will cause all the shots to miss the mark.

Under the inspiration of Admiral Thomsen, the German Navy began experimental practice at long ranges in 1895. In the following year a concentration shoot by battle squadrons was carried out near Swinemünde, in the presence of the Kaiser, who was so impressed by the results that he exerted his personal influence to secure the steady development of long-distance gunnery in the fleet.

A new navy is apt to be less conservative than one of older standing, and thus it was that, in Germany, every innovation that promised to increase the fighting efficiency of the fleet was assured beforehand of official encouragement. In England, unfortunately, it was too often the other way about, inventors and would-be reformers having an uphill fight to gain official recognition.

The Germans, having proved long-range firing to be practicable, at once proceeded to give their naval guns an extremely high angle of elevation. The importance of this needs a word of explanation. Within certain limits, the higher the angle at which a gun is fired, the further the shot will travel. A 12-inch gun firing at 15 degrees will throw its shot 16,000 yards, but if the muzzle is raised to 30 degrees the extreme range will be increased to 24,000 yards.

As the Germans, as far back as 1900, were giving their turret guns an elevation of 30 degrees, while the guns of contemporary British ships were limited to 13 and a half, it follows that the German vessels outranged ours by a very substantial margin. Had war broken out at that period, the German fleet would have enjoyed an immense, perhaps a decisive, advantage by its two-fold superiority in range and accuracy of fire.

Although we soon got wind of the German high-angle mountings, their significance appears to have been minimised, probably because we knew little or nothing about the quality of the German fleet’s gunnery. Our ignorance on this subject persisted until a very few years before the outbreak of war, but from time to time scraps of information percolated through which, when pieced together, made it clear that our prospective enemies were leaving nothing undone to improve their naval marksmanship. An intelligence agent in 1909 drew attention to the high rate of fire of which the German guns seemed to be capable, the 11-inch discharging three, and the 9.4-inch four, rounds a minute. This rapidity could not be equalled by the main armament of British battleships.

When Germany designed her first dreadnoughts she took occasion to overhaul her gunnery system. Numerous and costly
experiments were made with new methods of fire control, the best elements of each being subsequently incorporated in a standard system with which all the newer ships were equipped. This, the ‘Richtungsweiser’, or direction pointer, had certain features in common with those of the Scott director, though in other respects the rival systems were dissimilar.

Of director control, as understood in the British Navy, the German fleet had none
until a year after the Battle of Jutland
, yet the brilliance of its gunnery in that action was attested by the results.

They were the natural fruits of twenty years of intensive work, carried on with characteristic German perseverance and thoroughness. For every hundred pounds we spent on gunnery research and experiment during this period, Germany spent a thousand. To give but one example: secret service agents in 1910 disclosed that the ammunition allowance for practice purposes was on a far more generous scale than that of the British fleet, the number of rounds per heavy gun being 80 per cent higher. Practice with ‘live’ shell against armoured targets was quite a common occurrence, though it was rarely, if ever, indulged in by the British Navy.

These facts are adduced to show that there was nothing miraculous in the accuracy of German naval gunfire. The guns themselves and their projectiles were of first-class quality, it is true, but the almost uniformly high standard of shooting was the perfection that is only born of unremitting practice.

From the secret service point of view, gunnery data were valued more highly than almost any other class of information, and for fairly obvious reasons they were very difficult to obtain. There were several ways of securing details of a new ship, a new gun, or a new torpedo. For example, by accepting certain risks the
agent might procure what he wanted by personally visiting a dockyard or an ordnance factory. But while such visits were, in fact, not infrequently made, it was a very different matter to go on board a foreign warship and watch her carry out firing exercises.

Oddly enough, the only secret agent who is supposed to have performed this feat was working on behalf of the United States. According to letters exchanged between two American naval officers – and, apparently with their permission, published in the American press in 1925 – an American contrived to be on board a British battleship when she was engaged in long-range practice, and noted that the anti-torpedo bulges on one side were flooded to give her a list, thus increasing the elevation of her guns. Neither the dale nor any other details of the incident were given, and it is quite possibly apocryphal.

Be that as it may, no British agent in Germany ever claimed to have effected as dramatic a coup. Nevertheless, by employing less direct methods we were able to get more than one glimpse of German naval gunnery, which ought to have left us in no doubt as to its quality.

The introduction of high-angle mountings in the German fleet has already been mentioned. Actual photographs were obtained, depicting pre-dreadnoughts of the
Deutschland
and
Braunschweig
class with their turret guns cocked up at acute angles.

We knew, too, that several of these ships had carried out ‘bombardment’ shoots at ranges up to 14,000 yards, the targets being stationary and the ranges plotted to advance.

This item of news was valuable as confirmation of the long range of German guns, but it had no other significance, for in those days (1907), and for several years afterwards, the High Seas Fleet never exceeded a range of 10,000 yards when firing
at moving targets. In Germany, as in this country, shooting at any greater distance was regarded as a waste of powder and shot.

When the first German dreadnoughts were laid down it was naturally inferred that their guns would have an angle of elevation at least as high as that in the earlier ships. In fact, our original intelligence reports on the
Nassau
and
Helgoland
class credited their big guns with 30 degrees of elevation. The truth was not discovered until the ships had been in commission for some time. It was then found that their mountings permitted an elevation of only 16 degrees.

What had happened was this. The 11-inch and 12-inch guns with which the German dreadnoughts were armed were of exceptionally high velocity. They were designed for flat trajectory fire, and consequently their range, even at a very moderate degree of elevation, was far beyond that at which accurate aiming was considered to be feasible. It was therefore deemed pointless to give them an elevation above 16 degrees – equivalent to about 19,500 yards’ range – especially as high-angle mountings were heavier, more complicated, and more expensive than the other type, and also necessitated a larger gun port, this latter tendering the turret more vulnerable to shell splinters.

From 1907 to the end of the Great War Germany built and completed twenty-six dreadnought battleships and battlecruisers, their guns in every case having a maximum elevation of 16 degrees. Within the same period we built and completed nearly forty similar ships, all but ten of which (the 12-inch gun ships) had a maximum gun elevation of 20 degrees. Thus, while Germany was lowering the elevation of her big naval guns, we were raising that of our own weapons, the procedure in each case having been dictated by practical reasons.

In our own case the step up from 15 to 20 degrees was made necessary by the introduction of the 13.5-inch gun. As this piece had a lower muzzle velocity than the 12-inch, it became advisable to give it a higher angle of elevation in order to maintain equality of range. As, during most of this time, target practice in both fleets continued to be carried out at an extreme range of 10,000 yards, the difference in their gun-elevation standards appeared to be a matter of small moment.

To anticipate matters, it may here be remarked that this difference proved to be of great importance. From 1911 onward the development of long-range fire was extraordinarily rapid, and during the war hits were made at distances almost twice as great as the average target-practice range of pre-war days. In many British narratives of the naval campaign emphasis is laid on the supposedly superior range of the German big guns. The late Sir Percy Scott himself fell into this error. The truth is that at Jutland our ships as a whole definitely outranged those of the enemy, and in more than one phase of the action held them under a galling fire to which they could offer no reply, owing to the limited elevation of their guns.

In 1910 some important experiments were carried out in the Baltic with the Direction-Pointer system of fire control, the ships concerned being the
Nassau
and
Westfalen
. It was then demonstrated that a fair percentage of hits could be obtained on moving targets at ranges exceeding 12,000 yards, and after certain improvements had been made in the system further practical tests were arranged. Our intelligence men at that period made frequent references to this pronounced activity in the sphere of fleet gunnery, but of reliable and detailed information there was little or none. All that we knew for certain was that the Germans
were doing their utmost to develop long-range shooting; of the actual results we remained in ignorance.

But in March 1911 definite and very illuminating information was obtained.

It described an experimental shoot by a division of German 11-inch gun ships. At ranges averaging 12,500 yards they had scored 8 per cent of hits on a towed target, the sea being rather choppy, and visibility only moderately good.

These results were so far in advance of anything previously recorded that British experts were at first inclined to be sceptical, but corroborative evidence was soon forthcoming. Thereafter our secret service redoubled its efforts to keep in touch with the progress of German gunnery. At some risk, and after the exercise of much ingenuity and endless patience, certain avenues of communication were opened by means of which we hoped to secure the desired intelligence. The precise nature of the means employed cannot be disclosed even now.

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