The Guns of August (57 page)

Drawn up in the intoxicating days of conquest in August, these war aims on which Germany set her sights were so grandiose as to be irreducible to the level of feasible compromise. On the Allied side in August, the primary war aim was expressed by Foreign Minister Sazonov to Paléologue at a tête-à-tête luncheon in St. Petersburg on August 20. “My formula is a simple one,” said Sazonov; “we must destroy German
imperialism.” They agreed that the war was one for existence and that its objects could be gained only by total victory. Rather rashly for a Czarist minister, Sazonov agreed that sweeping political changes must be made if Kaiserism was not to rise from its ashes. Poland must be restored, Belgium enlarged, Alsace-Lorraine returned to France, Schleswig-Holstein to Denmark, Hanover reconstituted, Bohemia set free from Austria-Hungary, and all of Germany’s colonies given to France, Belgium, and England.

These were the map carvings of professional statesmen. Among private people who did not know Schleswig-Holstein from Bohemia, a deep underlying recognition had grown by the time the war was twenty days old that the world was engaged by “the largest human fact since the French Revolution.” Though a tremendous catastrophe, it seemed, in August when it was still new, to contain that “enormous hope,” the hope of something better afterward, the hope of an end to war, of a chance to remake the world. Mr. Britling in Wells’ novel, who, though fictional, was representative, thought it might prove a “huge step forward in human life. It is the end of forty years of evil suspense. It is crisis and solution.” He saw “a tremendous opportunity .… We can remake the map of the world .… The world is plastic for men to do what they will with it. This is the end and the beginning of an age .…”

R
ISK WAS THE LEAST FAVORITE CONCEPT
of the British Admiralty in 1914. Her fleet was Britain’s most prized possession. It was not, as Churchill had woundingly said of the Germany Navy in 1912, a “luxury fleet”; it was a vital necessity in the exact sense of the word “vital.” The British Empire could not survive naval defeat or even loss of naval supremacy through individual ship losses. Its tasks were enormous. It had to prevent invasion of the British Isles; it had to escort the BEF safely to the Continent; it had to bring home troops from India to add to the Regular Army and replace them with Territorials; above all, it had to safeguard seaborne commerce over all the oceans of the world.

Not invasion which had been declared “impracticable” by the Committee of Imperial Defence, but “the interruption of our trade and destruction of merchant shipping” was recognized by the Admiralty as the principal danger. Two-thirds of all Britain’s food was imported. Her livelihood depended on a foreign commerce carried in British bottoms that represented 43 per cent of the world’s total merchant tonnage and carried more than half of the world’s total seaborne trade, as much as carried by all the other nations put together. A besetting fear that fast German steamers would be converted into commerce destroyers haunted the British before the war. At least forty such vessels were expected to be let loose to supplement German cruisers in preying on the precious stream
of maritime trade. British fleet units had to be spread out to protect the Suez route to Persia, India, and the Far East, the Cape route around Africa, the North Atlantic route to the United States and Canada, the Caribbean route to the West Indies, the South Atlantic and South Pacific routes to South America and Australia. The ocean crossroads where shipping lanes converged and enemy raiders were most likely to attack were the points of control.

“The whole principle of naval fighting,” Fisher said in the naval equivalent of a papal bull, “is to be free to go anywhere with every damned thing the Navy possesses.” Translated into practical terms this meant that the navy must be superior everywhere at once or wherever it was likely to encounter the enemy. With its vast commitments the British Navy had all it could do to muster superiority in home waters where a battle of equal strengths was at all costs to be avoided. The common expectation was of one great clash of capital ships in which maritime supremacy might be decided in a single action like the Russo-Japanese battle of Tsushima. Britain could not afford to risk loss of supremacy in such a battle, but the same was not true of the German Navy, which was expected to take chances. The rampant Germany of 1914 whose Kaiser had proclaimed “Germany’s future is on the water,” whose Navy Leagues had proliferated over the country and raised popular subscriptions for battleships with such slogans as “England the Foe! Perfidious Albion! The Coming War! The British Peril! England’s Plan to Fall on Us in 1911!” was credited with an aggressive spirit and a readiness to dare battle at unfavorable odds that could lead to any kind of desperate adventure.

Fear of the unknown but certainly bellicose intentions of the enemy, and particularly fear of the invisible submarine, whose lethal potential loomed more alarmingly each year, made for a highly sensitive state of British naval nerves.

Almost at the farthest point to which the Grand Fleet could sail, almost the last bleak tip of British territory, a remote outpost of the British Isles, north even of the northernmost point of the mainland, Scapa Flow, a natural shelter among the
Orkney Islands, was the place belatedly chosen for the fleet’s wartime base. At latitude 59 opposite Norway, the Flow was at the top of the North Sea, 350 miles farther north than Heligoland, where the German fleet would come out if it chose to appear, and 550 miles north of the Portsmouth-Havre crossing of the BEF. It was farther away from the German place of sortie than the Germans were from the British transports, supposing they attempted to attack them. It was a position from which the Grand Fleet could guard its own and block Germany’s lanes of seaborne commerce through the North Sea and by its presence bottle up the enemy in port or, by coming between him and his base, bring him to action if he put to sea. But it was not ready for occupancy.

Each increase in the size of ships required wider docks and harbors, and the Dreadnought program had suffered from the split personality of the Liberal government. Having allowed itself to be persuaded by the passion of Fisher and enthusiasm of Churchill to adopt the building program, the Liberals compensated for this injury to their antiwar sentiments by parsimony in paying for it. As a result, in August 1914 Scapa was not yet equipped with dry docks or fixed defenses.

The fleet, so alertly mobilized by Churchill, reached there safely by August 1 while the government was still debating whether to fight. The days after the declaration of war were, in the words of the First Lord, a period of “extreme psychological tension.” As the moment approached for the crowded troop transports to depart, some action by the enemy in the form of raids on the coast to draw off the fleet or other tactics of provocation, was hourly expected, Churchill thought that “the great naval battle might begin at any moment.”

His state of mind was fully shared by Admiral Sir John Jellicoe who, traveling north by train to Scapa Flow on August 4, opened a telegram marked “Secret” and discovered himself Commander in Chief of the Grand Fleet. It was not the appointment, which he had long expected, or any doubts of his own competence that weighed on Jellicoe. Since entering the navy in 1872 when he was twelve and a half years old and four and a half feet high, he had been accustomed to wide
recognition of his talents. Displayed on active service and in various offices at the Admiralty, they had earned the consistent, fervent, and resonant admiration of Lord Fisher who picked Jellicoe to “be Nelson … when Armageddon comes along.” The date had come and Fisher’s candidate for Nelsonhood, from the moment he arrived, felt “the greatest anxiety constantly confronting me” over the defenseless nature of the base at Scapa. Lacking land-based guns, booms and nets and fixed mine fields, it was “open to submarine and destroyer attacks.”

Jellicoe worried when German trawlers captured on August 5 were found to have carrier pigeons aboard, suspected of being informants for submarines. Fear of mines, which the Germans announced they were sowing without regard for the limits agreed upon for such devices, increased his anxiety. When one of his light cruisers rammed and sank a submarine, the U-15, on August 9 he was more disturbed than cheered, and hurriedly sent all his capital ships out of the “infected area.” Once, when inside the Flow, a gun crew suddenly opened fire on a moving object reported to be a periscope and set off a flurry of shooting and a feverish hunt by destroyers, he ordered the entire fleet of three battle squadrons out to sea where it stayed all night in fear of what even the navy’s official historian concedes “could have been a seal.” Twice the fleet was transferred to safer bases at Loch Ewe on the west coast of Scotland and Loch Swilly on the north coast of Ireland, leaving the North Sea free to the Germans had they known it—and twice brought back. If the Germans had launched a naval offensive at this time, it might have obtained startling results.

Between bouts of nerves and sudden bolts like a horse that hears the rustle of a snake, the British Navy set about its business of laying down a blockade and patrolling the North Sea in a ceaseless watch for the appearance of the enemy. With a battle strength of 24 dreadnoughts and a knowledge that the Germans had 16 to 19, the British could count on a firm margin of superiority, and in the next class of battleships believed themselves “markedly superior to the next eight Germans.”
But a heavy sense of all that depended on the issue hung over them.

During the week of the passage of the transports, “the Germans have the strongest incentives to action,” Churchill warned Jellicoe on August 8. Not so much as a torpedo boat was sighted. Nothing stirred. The enemy’s inactivity heightened the tension. On the far-flung oceans his individual warships still at large, the
Goeben
and
Breslau
in the Mediterranean, the
Dresden
and
Karlsruhe
in the Atlantic, the
Scharnhorst, Gneisenau,
and
Emden
of von Spee’s squadron in the Pacific were making bold raids or bolder escapes, but the High Seas Fleet, lurking motionless behind Heligoland, seemed to presage something more sinister.

“Extraordinary silence and inertia of the enemy may be prelude to serious enterprises … possibly a landing this week on a large scale,” Churchill warned fleet commanders on August 12. He suggested that the Grand Fleet move down nearer to the “theatre of decisive action.” Jellicoe, however, continued his remote patrol in the gray waste of waters between the top of Scotland and Norway, and only once, on August 16, when the transport of the BEF was at its height, ventured below latitude 56. The transports made 137 separate crossings of the Channel from August 14 to 18, while all that time the whole of the Grand Fleet, with its attendant squadrons and flotillas, patrolled in taut expectancy, watching for the white wake of a torpedo, listening for the wireless signal that would say the German fleet had come out upon the seas.

Grand Admiral von Tirpitz, the Fisher of Germany, the father and builder and soul of the German Fleet, “eternal Tirpitz” with his forked white beard like Neptune’s who at sixty-five had served continuously as Secretary of the Navy since 1897, longer in one post than any minister since Bismarck, was not allowed to know the war plan for the weapon he had forged. It was “kept secret by the Naval Staff even from me.” On July 30 when the operational orders were shown to him he discovered the secret: there was no plan. The navy, whose existence
had been a chief factor in bringing on the war, had no active role designed for it when war came.

If the Kaiser had confined his reading to
The Golden Age,
Kenneth Grahame’s dreamlike story of English boyhood in a world of cold adults, which he kept on the bed-table of his yacht, it is possible there might have been no world war. He was eclectic, however, and read an American book that appeared in 1890 with the same impact in its realm as the
Origin of Species
or
Das Kapital
in theirs. In
The Influence of Sea Power on History
Admiral Mahan demonstrated that he who controls communications by sea controls his fate; the master of the seas is master of the situation. Instantly an immense vision opened before the impressionable Wilhelm: Germany must be a major power upon the oceans as upon land. The naval building program began, and although it could not overtake England at once, pursued with German intensity it threatened to do so eventually. It challenged the maritime supremacy upon which Britain depended and knowingly created the likelihood of British enmity in war and consequently the use against Germany of Britain’s chief weapon, blockade.

As a land power Germany could have fought any possible combination of continental powers without interruption of her seaborne supplies as long as Britain, the world’s greatest merchant carrier, remained neutral. In that sense Germany would have been a stronger power without a navy than with one. Bismarck had disapproved of adulterating power on land by a maritime adventure that would add an enemy upon the sea. Wilhelm would not listen. He was bewitched by Mahan and tangled in the private jealousies of his love and hate for seafaring England which came to an annual peak during the yacht regattas of Cowes week. He saw the navy as his knife to cut through Encirclement. He insisted alternately that hostility to England was the last thing he had in mind and that “a larger fleet will bring the English to their senses through sheer fright.” They would then “submit to the inevitable and we shall become the best friends in the world.” In vain his ambassadors to England cautioned against the doubtful logic
of this policy. In vain Haldane came to Berlin and Churchill warned that the fleet was an Alsace-Lorraine in Anglo-German relations. Proposals for a fixed ratio or a naval holiday were rejected.