The Dandarnelles Disaster (12 page)

On 5 August two Harwich destroyers sank the German minelayer
Königin Luise
(a converted passenger ship) 50 miles off the Suffolk coast. Unfortunately she had already laid her 180 mines, two of which sank the cruiser HMS
Amphion
the next day with the loss of 151 men. The Royal Navy soon rounded up several German merchantmen in the Atlantic as the Tenth Cruiser Squadron became the Northern Patrol, covering the area between Scotland and Norway round the Shetland Islands (in November the cruisers were replaced by 18 auxiliary cruisers taken up from the Merchant Navy and armed with old guns). On 9 August the light cruiser
Birmingham
caught the
U15
repairing her engines on the surface in the North Sea, rammed and sank it with the loss of all hands – the first victory of a surface ship against a submarine and a rare event for many a long month.

Despite the pre-war concentration of resources on the Grand Fleet in the North Sea, the Royal Navy still possessed a profusion of ships round the
globe, starting with the Mediterranean Fleet, modern enough for its role except for Troubridge's white-elephant heavy cruisers. And despite the purge of outdated ships and the rapid construction of new ones during Admiral Fisher's original term as First Sea Lord (1904–10), there were far too many inadequate vessels, such as most of Admiral Cradock's South American Squadron, so comprehensively beaten by Graf Spee's cruisers at the Battle of Coronel on 1 November 1914. Many old cruisers in particular remained in service, trying to cover the commitments of a Royal Navy globally overstretched, despite the unprecedented strategic understandings with Japan and France. Naval technology had been advancing so rapidly for decades and over the turn of the century that warships had an extraordinarily brief front-line life of just a few years: steam power, steel armour, turbines, wireless, bigger and bigger breech-loading guns, fire-direction, rangefinders, torpedoes, mines, seaplanes and submarines …

The worst possible demonstration of the vulnerability of older ships came on 22 September 1914, when the primitive, paraffin-powered German submarine
U9
(Lieutenant-Commander Otto Weddigen, IGN, the world's first submarine ‘ace') sank the 14-year-old cruisers
Aboukir, Hogue
and
Cressy,
12,000 tonnes each, in 95 minutes off the northern Dutch coast. More than 1,450 sailors drowned; fewer than 900 survived. This terrible feat remains unequalled in the short but immensely destructive history of submarine warfare: three large warships sunk by a single boat in an hour and a half. Only four days earlier Churchill, warned of the weakness of this ‘live-bait squadron' by staff officers during a visit to the Grand Fleet, had ordered First Sea Lord Battenberg to call a halt to such patrols. Even so, on 15 October Weddigen delivered a bleak postscript by sinking the even older cruiser
Hawke
off north-east Scotland with the loss of 525 sailors; just 21 survived. But two days later four German destroyers on a mine-laying mission were sunk by a light cruiser and her four British destroyers, off the Dutch-Frisian island of Texel.

Off the south Norwegian coast on 20 October the
U17
became the first submarine to sink a merchant ship, the British SS
Glitra
: halted by a shot across her bows, she was boarded and scuttled by the Germans. They let the crew get into their lifeboats and even gave them a tow towards land in a display of chivalry worthy of the legendary
Emden
, detached by Graf Spee earlier to cause havoc in the Indian Ocean (see below). Such courtesy would not last long. The early U-boat successes, and mounting fear of mines, prompted Jellicoe, Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Fleet, temporarily to evacuate his poorly protected main base at Scapa Flow and move
his ships first to Loch Ewe on the west coast of Scotland and then to Lough Swilly on the north coast of Ireland. The Grand Fleet was in effect homeless as it succumbed to the new affliction of ‘periscopitis', or sighting submarines (and sometimes firing heavily at them) where there was none. Beyond the gun and the ancient naval tactic of ramming there was as yet nothing available to surface warships with which to sink or disable a submarine, and the gun was effective only if the submarine was on the surface. Then on 27 October the modern battleship
Audacious
hit a German mine 25 miles out to sea from the lough. Despite the best efforts of the passing British liner
Olympic,
then the largest in the world, to tow her to safety, she sank eight hours later; all but one of the crew were rescued from the first dreadnought ever to succumb to enemy action. The loss was covered up until
Olympic
passengers gave their photographs to an American newspaper two weeks later. On the last day of October the
U27
sank the seaplane-carrier HMS
Hermes
just eight miles north-west of Calais, a bold stroke indeed in the strongly guarded ‘English' Channel.

On 13 August, Graf Spee, bound for the Pacific after abandoning his doomed base at Tsingtao, north-west China (under threat from the Japanese fleet), had detached from his squadron the light cruiser
Emden
(Captain Karl von Müller, IGN) to attack commerce in the eastern Indian Ocean. Entering it on 8 September after a long evasion through the East Indies, the
Emden
in barely two months sank or captured 22 ships, shelled Madras, raided Penang sinking two small warships – and generated a stream of favourable propaganda for the German cause. The enemy, even Churchill himself, publicly acknowledged Müller's skill and chivalry towards his civilian and merchant-seamen victims. The failure of more than 70 ships of the Royal Navy and its Japanese, Russian and French naval allies to catch him caused prolonged embarrassment to the Allies. In the end it was an Australian light cruiser, HMAS
Sydney,
that shelled the graceful
Emden
to pieces with her heavier guns and forced the blazing wreck aground in the Turks and Caicos Islands on 9 November. It was the first battle in the history of the new Royal Australian Navy.

Another German light cruiser, SMS
Königsberg
, caused chaos on the western side of the Indian Ocean, sinking several merchant ships and a British cruiser before taking refuge in the Rufiji River in east Africa. A third, the
Karlsruhe
, and a fourth, the
Dresden
, briefly cut a swathe through British merchant shipping in the Atlantic before the former mysteriously blew up and the latter rejoined Spee for the battle off Coronel. A handful of auxiliary cruisers (converted liners with strengthened decks and fitted with
guns), such as the
Kormoran
in the Pacific and the
Prinz Eitel Friedrich
in the Atlantic, caused discomfiture to the world's mightiest navy in the opening weeks and months of the war at sea.

One brief burst of light in the early gloom came on 28 August, when an overwhelmingly superior British group of destroyers and light cruisers from the Harwich Force, backed by Beatty's battlecruisers, sank three German light cruisers and a fleet destroyer, damaging others, without loss and only limited damage, in the Battle of the Heligoland Bight; the German battlecruisers set out too late to intervene. But faulty signalling (always Beatty's Achilles' heel) and unintelligent use of intelligence marred this morale-boosting but insignificant victory. British submarines too managed, albeit to a lesser degree than their German rivals, to hurt the enemy, notably when three of them stole into the Baltic to operate from Russian bases.

The other enormous advantage gained by the Royal Navy, second only to the well-timed move to Scapa, arrived at the Admiralty on 13 October – in the shape of the entire main signal book of the Imperial German Navy. This most closely guarded secret of the war at sea came courtesy of Britain's Russian allies, who had found it clasped in the arms of a dead German warrant officer, floating in the Baltic after the Russian Navy had trapped the light cruiser
Magdeburg
in the Gulf of Finland and driven her aground on 26 August before shelling her. The Russians offered it to the British, who gratefully sent a cruiser to collect it on 10 October. The book was the foundation of an invaluable intelligence operation conducted from Room 40 in the Admiralty's Old Building for the duration of the war, foreshadowing the better-known assault on German codes and ciphers at Bletchley Park in the Second World War. But such a coup could hardly be made public.

By the end of October 1914, therefore, the Royal Navy apparently had only a few small successes to show against a depressingly long list of setbacks: the escape of the
Goeben
, the three ‘Cressys' and other losses to the apparently uncatchable U-boats, the fall of Antwerp, the
Emden
and other detached German cruisers, the
Audacious,
the
Hermes …
The fleet's greatest success of this period was and is seldom mentioned: the entirely safe transportation of the BEF across the Channel along with its supplies and reinforcements. This continued throughout the war; not one soldier was lost to enemy action on the cross-Channel route, even when U-boats and light craft were operating from the Belgian ports. At the beginning of ‘First Ypres' a British naval flotilla under Rear-Admiral Hood made a
valuable contribution by shelling German targets from offshore with the heavy guns of two cruisers, three monitors (floating gun batteries) and four destroyers. Tethered balloons with observers aboard were used to spot the fall of shot.

While Churchill was frustrated and depressed by the lack of major action at sea and of good news from the navy, the nation was disappointed and the press increasingly critical of the fleet and its political chief. He was accused of interference in operational detail and of not listening to the experts at the Admiralty. Battenberg almost resigned over Churchill's intervention at Antwerp; the First Lord meanwhile in the last days of October was touting the idea of replacing the excessively Germanic First Sea Lord with the 74-year-old Lord Fisher. King George V did not like or trust Fisher and did not want the mercurial but vastly experienced old sailor to make a comeback at the expense of his royal cousin; Churchill himself was apparently prepared to resign over the issue until Asquith, the Prime Minister, persuaded all parties to accept the change at the head of the Royal Navy on 29 October – just three days before what was in psychological terms the worst naval disaster of them all: the destruction by Graf Spee of Cradock's squadron.

Unusual vigour was shown by the Admiralty in investigating the
Goeben
fiasco. Preliminary enquiries began within a week of Souchon's escape. It has to be remembered that there was no clue to his further intentions at this stage. As far as the Royal Navy was concerned, the Germans in the end had made for the only refuge available to them; an attempt to get home would have been suicidal, and Austria was not yet at war with Britain and France, so was unlikely to intervene to help Souchon (this assessment, as we saw, was entirely correct). The only apparent result was initially seen as positive for the Entente: with the Italians neutral and the Germans locked away in the Sea of Marmara, the only naval enemy left in the Mediterranean was the Austrian fleet in the Adriatic, a real but surely containable threat. It included 2 dreadnoughts (with 2 more on the stocks), 6 pre-dreadnought and 8 more antiquated battleships, 4 modern light cruisers, 6 old armoured cruisers, 21 mostly recent destroyers and a small but high-quality submarine arm of a dozen boats, soon to be reinforced.

None the less, Milne's lacklustre, not to say inept, performance and Troubridge's failure to engage the Germans were matters of profound shame in the Royal Navy. The general feeling in the not altogether silent service was that the two German ships could, and should, have been
caught and sunk. ‘To think that it is to the Navy to provide the first and only instance of failure. God, it makes me sick', Vice-Admiral Sir David Beatty, then commanding the battlecruiser force in the Grand Fleet, wrote to his wife on the
Goeben
affair. Fisher, all his warnings about Milne vindicated, was apoplectic but far from speechless. ‘Sir Berkeley Goeben' had been due to take over the Nore command on the Thames estuary (a demotion) but the outbreak of war supervened; when he finally laid down his Mediterranean post he never got another. Having handed over to Carden on 17 August 1914, he sailed to Plymouth in the
Inflexible.
He defended his actions and decisions in a series of letters to the Admiralty. So did Troubridge, also by the end of August. An important difference between the former commander-in-chief and his erstwhile second-in-command concerned the two battlecruisers,
Indomitable
and
Indefatigable,
temporarily assigned by Milne to Troubridge on the very eve of war. In effect, the latter said he changed his mind about attacking the
Goeben
when he belatedly realised they would not be available to him after they had been detached on 3 August; Milne said he had never promised to return them. Milne's defence at the court of inquiry, convened to determine whether there should be a trial by court martial, was jesuitical and self-serving, while Troubridge's was emotional and disorganised.

Prince Louis Battenberg, still First Sea Lord at this time (he was hounded out of office two months later), read the two admirals' exculpations and concluded that while Milne had acted more or less correctly with one or two exceptions, Troubridge was definitely and seriously at fault: ‘He failed to carry out his clear duty … to attack the enemy … Not one of [Troubridge's] excuses can be accepted for one moment … The escape of the
Goeben
must ever remain a shameful episode …' And, Battenberg concluded, the flag officer responsible should never command at sea again. Troubridge, like Milne, never did; he had been elected scapegoat, not only for Milne but also for the appalling inefficiencies at the Admiralty itself. While Milne could hardly be condemned without reference to the Admiralty's major contributions to the fiasco, Troubridge apparently could. His main defence was that the
Goeben
, with her long-range, 28-centimetre guns and high speed, was a force superior to his four lumbering armoured cruisers in the prevailing conditions, and he, like Milne, had been under orders not to engage a superior force.