Castles of Steel (11 page)

Troubridge: “You know, sir, that I consider a battle cruiser a superior force to a cruiser squadron, unless they can get within range of her.”

Milne: “That question won’t arise as you will have
Indomitable
and
Indefatigable
with you.”

When Troubridge sailed that evening, of course,
Indomitable
and
Indefatigable
sailed with him. But on the following day, on Admiralty orders, Milne had stripped away the two battle cruisers and sent them charging toward Gibraltar, leaving Troubridge with only his armored cruisers. The Court of Inquiry had expressed regret that Troubridge had not made it clear to Milne that “he had no intention to engage
Goeben
in open water in daylight with his squadron unless supported by a battle cruiser.” In fact, Troubridge had done so repeatedly.

Troubridge also claimed that at the same Malta interview, Milne had conceded that the man on the spot must be the final arbiter as to what constituted a “superior enemy” (in court, Milne reluctantly conceded that he had said this). Once the battle cruisers were taken away, Troubridge contended, his squadron was obviously inferior in gun power and speed: his armored cruisers had never registered hits at over 8,000 yards; their best speed in company was 17 knots. These factors left him—as the man on the spot—in no doubt that
Goeben
constituted a superior force, which he was forbidden to engage. “All I could gain [by engaging],” he said, “would be the reputation of having attempted something which, though predestined to be ineffective, would be indicative of the boldness of our spirit. I felt that more than that was expected of an admiral entrusted by Their Lordships with great responsibilities.”

Milne, who was present throughout the Troubridge proceedings, was consistently hostile to his former subordinate. Addressing the Court of Inquiry, Milne had declared that he had expected Troubridge to fight
Goeben
and that in such an action it would have been difficult for
Goeben
to engage four ships at once; in practice, most single ships had all they could do to aim and fire at two enemy ships. For this reason, Milne said, he did not approve of Admiral Troubridge’s abandonment of the chase. Troubridge, regarding Milne, limited himself to expressing his “deep conviction . . . that
Goeben
had no right to be escaping at all and that if she had been sealed up in the Strait of Messina by the battle cruisers, as I thought she ought to have been, she would never have escaped.”

Ultimately, the judgment of the court-martial, like Troubridge’s decision in the early hours of August 7, came down to a calculation of the relative strength of four armored cruisers as against one battle cruiser. Troubridge claimed that his first decision to attack was “a desperate one” made in the face of clear orders by his immediate superior
not
to engage “a superior force.” “But I made it and for a time I stuck with it,” he said. “Gradually, however, it forced itself more and more upon my mind that though my decision might be natural, might be heroic, it was certainly wrong and certainly in the teeth of my orders. . . . It was at this psychological moment . . . that my Flag Captain came back to me. . . . It was his duty . . . and, as a matter of fact, I did in reality completely agree with [him]. After he left me I thought it over a little further and then I made my decision.”

Many British naval officers simply did not agree with Troubridge that in daylight
Goeben
constituted a force superior to his four armored cruisers. Battenberg emphatically declared that the twenty-two British 9.2-inch guns and fourteen 7.5-inch guns would have nullified and overpowered
Goeben
’s ten 11-inch guns. The Admiralty prosecutor argued that Troubridge had “assumed too readily” that all was well with
Goeben;
that she could steam at full speed and had plenty of coal and no worry about using up her ammunition. Churchill declared after the war that “the limited ammunition of
Goeben
would have had to have been wonderfully employed to have sunk all four British armored cruisers one after another at this long range.” Churchill also pointed out that at the Battle of the Falkland Islands a few months later,
two
British battle cruisers were to use up nearly three-quarters of their ammunition sinking only
two
German armored cruisers.

Captain Fawcett Wray of
Defence
supported Troubridge, restating the opinion he had expressed to the admiral in his ship’s chart room: “Up to the range of sixteen thousand yards,
Goeben
must be a superior force to one
Defence
or four
Defences. . . .
For four ships to try to attack her is . . . impossible because you could not get . . . [within] sixteen thousand yards unless she wanted you to, but if you did get within sixteen thousand or twenty thousand yards . . . it . . . [would be] suicidal.”

Oddly, the court-martial devoted no time to a consideration of comparative armor. Nor had Troubridge apparently ever asked himself whether his cruisers’ 9.2-inch or 7.5-inch shells would penetrate
Goeben
’s heavy 11-inch armor. An answer was provided at Jutland, when the German battle cruiser
Seydlitz,
similar in construction to
Goeben,
survived twenty-two hits from 12-inch, 13.5-inch, and 15-inch British shells, each with many times the penetrating and destructive power of Troubridge’s 9.2-inch shells. Nor did Troubridge’s defenders mention the vulnerability of his own thinly armored ships to 11-inch shellfire. Jutland made it painfully clear that armored cruisers were spectacularly vulnerable to heavy shells fired by battleships or battle cruisers; that day, four of the ships that had pursued the
Goeben
—the battle cruiser
Indefatigable
and the armored cruisers
Defence, Black Prince,
and
Warrior
—blew up and sank because heavy German shells penetrated their inadequate armor.

The verdict of the court-martial was handed down on November 9. The court accepted Troubridge’s judgment that, under the circumstances of weather, time, and position at the time the two sides would have met—6:00 a.m. in full daylight on the open sea—
Goeben
constituted a “superior force.” The court acknowledged that Troubridge’s instructions, passed to him from the Admiralty by Milne and repeated to him again by Milne, ordered him not to engage a “superior force.” Admiral Troubridge, therefore, was “fully and honourably” acquitted.

In the larger sense, however, neither Milne nor Troubridge ever received full acquittal. Troubridge afterward was given various commands on shore, but he never again served at sea. Milne remained on half pay for the rest of the war. Fisher continued to blame the “serpent” Milne for
Goeben
’s escape. “Personally, I should have shot Sir Berkeley Milne,” Fisher wrote to a friend. He changed the prewar “Sir Berkeley Mean” to “Sir Berkeley Goeben,” adding that “this most disastrous event . . . [a] lamentable blow to British naval prestige, would never have occurred had Sir B. Milne had been off Messina with the three battle cruisers . . . as if international law mattered a damn.” Many historians agreed that Milne’s failure to blockade Messina was the key. When Sir Julian Corbett, the official navy historian, criticized Milne for not guarding both entrances to the Straits of Messina with his battle cruisers, Milne raged at the presumption of “an amateur on shore” daring to criticize a senior naval officer. Arthur Marder, the American naval historian, closed his account of the episode by citing Milne’s remark “They pay me to be an admiral. They don’t pay me to think.”

Within the navy, the court-martial left a basic issue unresolved: when an officer finds himself confronting a possibly superior force, should he ignore the odds, summon raw courage, and attack, or should he retreat and await a better day? Nelson’s dictum “No captain can do very wrong if he places his ship alongside that of an enemy” had become holy writ in the Royal Navy, but Nelson had said it at Trafalgar, when his fleet of sailing ships had physical parity and psychological superiority over the enemy. In the modern era, no British destroyer captain was expected to invoke Nelson and lay his ship alongside—or even singlehandedly attack—a German dreadnought. The navy expected the exercise of judgment along with a display of courage; this was the verdict and lesson of the Troubridge court-martial. And, in fact, the subsequent battles of Coronel, the Falkland Islands, and Jutland strongly supported Troubridge’s belief that bigger ships firing heavier guns could destroy smaller, weaker ships with relative ease, especially when the smaller ships could not—or did not choose to—run away.

Nevertheless, the Troubridge court-martial left a bad taste in the mouths of British sailors for many years. Twenty-five years later in the South Atlantic, a situation arose somewhat similar to the one faced by Troubridge. In December 1939, early in World War II, the German pocket battleship
Graf Spee,
a formidable ship armed with six 11-inch and eight 5.9-inch guns, encountered three smaller British cruisers, which among them carried six 8-inch and sixteen 6-inch guns. The British commodore Henry Harwood did not hesitate to engage.
Graf Spee,
concentrating her heavy gunfire on the largest British ship, the heavy cruiser
Exeter,
put this enemy out of action, but she did not seriously harm or shake off the two light cruisers,
Ajax
and
Achilles,
which continued to pepper her with gunfire and threaten her with torpedoes. After an all-day battle, the damaged
Graf Spee
retreated into the neutral harbor of Montevideo, Uruguay, claiming the legal seventy-two-hour respite to make repairs. During this span, the two small British cruisers waited outside territorial waters while British reinforcements, including a battle cruiser and an aircraft carrier, hurried toward the scene. In the end,
Graf Spee
emerged, steamed into shallow offshore water, and scuttled herself. Then her captain, Hans Langsdorff, went to a hotel room and shot himself. In the aftermath, Britain’s First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Dudley Pound, wrote to Harwood, “Even if all our ships had been sunk you would have done the right thing. . . . Your action has reversed the finding of the Troubridge court martial and shows how wrong it was.”

CHAPTER 3
Jellicoe

John Rushworth Jellicoe, Winston Churchill once said, was “the only man on either side who could lose the war in an afternoon.” In appearance, the new Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Fleet seemed an implausible bearer of this immense responsibility. A small, quiet man, fifty-five years old when he took command in 1914, Jellicoe had never been known to raise his voice. Those in the navy who knew him said that this was because he never had to; John Jellicoe was obeyed instinctively. From a distance, he looked nondescript. He was only five and a half feet tall.

[This is not as short as it may sound today. Like Jellicoe, King George V was five foot six; Winston Churchill was five foot six and a half, and Jellicoe’s famous colleague Admiral David Beatty was five foot seven.]

His brown eyes were set deep in a wrinkled, weathered face. His prominent nose, jutting from under a small, old-fashioned navy cap, made his profile distinctive, but far from handsome. Then, coming closer, people saw the feature that distinguished John Jellicoe: the light in his eyes, which simultaneously shone with bright intelligence and radiated patience, calm, and kindliness.

Jellicoe commanded the Grand Fleet in August 1914 because Jacky Fisher had insisted that no one else would do. Over many years, Fisher, the irrepressible founder of the modern Royal Navy, rushing through life from one volcanic controversy to the next, had steered this, his most promising protégé, from one assignment to the next, each leading to Fisher’s eventual goal: to have Jellicoe in command of the British fleet when war with Germany began. “Jellicoe to be Admiralissimo on October 21, 1914, when the battle of Armageddon comes along,” Fisher wrote in 1911. A year later, he added, “If war comes before 1914, Jellicoe will be Nelson at the Battle of St. Vincent [where Nelson served brilliantly under Admiral Sir John Jervis]. If it comes in 1914, Jellicoe will be Nelson at Trafalgar.” Now Admiralissimo of the armada Fisher had built, Jellicoe was ready. Twenty-two months of skirmishing would follow and then, on May 31, 1916, he would lead the most powerful British fleet ever sent to sea into the climactic naval battle of the war, the greatest clash of armored ships the world had ever seen.

Jellicoe’s strength was his thorough professionalism, his cool, analytical mind, and his iron self-control. He was neat, polite, and methodical. He believed in naval traditions, procedures, and decorum, among which were loyalty, scrupulous fairness, and genuine concern for the personal affairs of his officers and men. The fleet responded to Jellicoe’s transparent sincerity and obvious selflessness by giving him unreserved affection and trust. He was, said one of his Grand Fleet captains, “our beloved Commander-in-Chief, the finest character that ever was.”

Jellicoe’s professional experience and powers of concentration and organization were exceptional. He brought to his command an almost unparalleled technical knowledge and a lifelong, deeply ingrained confidence in himself. Beyond this, Jellicoe possessed something else rare among the hundreds of conventional officers on the Navy List: he had an original mind. It was not the mind of a dreamer and genius like Fisher, whose ideas ranged across the whole spectrum of naval affairs. Jellicoe’s was the practical, realistic mind of an engineer. Fisher asked Why? and Why not? Jellicoe asked How? and How much? When he found the answers, he understood, better than anyone else in the British navy, the difficulties the navy faced. He was aware of the technical achievements and rapid progress of the German navy. He knew that German ships were superior in armor protection and that German shells, torpedoes, and mines were more reliable than British. He was familiar with German skill in gunnery, in which he was himself an expert. As he warned Churchill on the eve of war, it was highly dangerous to assume, as Churchill did, that British ships were superior to German as fighting machines.