Castles of Steel (30 page)

Although no preparations had been made before the war to develop Scapa Flow as a permanent base, the harbor had served for many years as a summer exercise ground for the Home Fleet. Every year, from April until October, naval vessels appeared in and around the Orkneys. In 1909, when Fisher was First Sea Lord, use of Scapa Flow became extensive. In April of that year, eighty-two warships, led by the new
Dreadnought
and including thirty-seven other battleships and cruisers and forty-four destroyers, sailed into the Flow through Hoxa Sound. A few weeks later, in June, eight battleships, seven cruisers, and twenty-seven destroyers returned to the harbor. The national press began to speculate that Scapa Flow was to become a permanent first-class naval base and the Liberal government was pressed to embark on this project, but the new First Sea Lord, Sir Arthur Wilson, was unenthusiastic. Nevertheless, the fleet continued to appear. In 1910, ninety warships, commanded by Prince Louis of Battenberg and including battleships and battle cruisers, cruisers, and destroyers, used the base from August through September. In 1911, destroyer flotillas exercised in and around the Flow, and in October battleships came to train in night firing.

Up to this point, the enormous harbor had been equipped with only token protection against surface attack: four small, mobile guns were manned by local Territorial Army artillerymen whose civilian occupations often made them unavailable. “The great majority of the men are unable to attend camp owing to the fact that the training season coincides with the season of herring fishing upon which their livelihood depends,” explained a report to the War Office. In 1912, the Admiralty considered stationing a permanent garrison of 250 marines at Scapa Flow to prevent a coup de main, but nothing was done. Instead, during maneuvers that year, a force of 350 Royal Marines and Royal Artillerymen was landed. The troops spent a week on one of the islands and then were reembarked. In 1913, proposals were made to install twenty-two permanent guns and a number of searchlights in concrete emplacements. Nothing was done. In November 1913, Churchill announced that Cromarty had been chosen as a major base over Scapa Flow. “Having to choose between the two,” Churchill informed Battenberg, “we deliberately chose Cromarty as the vital place to be fortified.” And now that this decision was made, Churchill told the First Sea Lord, he wanted no further debate over the relative merits of the two bases: “The Admiralty have been so frequently charged with changeableness in its views that the greatest care must be taken to avoid any [further] accusation. . . . Unjust disparagement of Cromarty would have the worst effects. . . . It ought to be possible to make the case for some light armament for Scapa Flow without reflecting on Admiralty policy regarding Cromarty.” Nine months later when the war began, therefore, Jellicoe and the Grand Fleet confronted this situation: the work at Rosyth, officially described as the fleet’s principal North Sea base, was still unfinished; at Cromarty, the only entrance to the base was comparatively narrow and well defended by gun emplacements, but there were no obstructions against submarines; and Scapa Flow remained naked.

On July 29, 1914, as the British fleet sailed north from Portland, the Orkney Territorials were called out and small groups of men drawn from the Ork-ney Royal Garrison Artillery made their way to their war stations. Normally, these guard parties consisted of ten men, but the detachment at Rackwick in Hoy numbered twenty, for this was where the all-important telegraphic cable from the Admiralty in London emerged from the Pentland Firth and came ashore. Colliers and tankers had been arriving for several days; the first warships to arrive in the Flow were destroyers of the 4th Flotilla, which had been patrolling the Irish Sea during the Home Rule crisis. The arrival of the dreadnought fleet on July 31 was largely hidden by a summer fog, but for hours battleships, cruisers, and destroyers slipped quietly through Hoxa Sound; that night, over a hundred warships lay in the Flow.

From the first day of August, the great fleet lay at anchor, stretched out in lines off Scapa Pier on the north side of the Flow. The Grand Fleet itself then numbered ninety-six ships, including three battle squadrons comprising in all twenty-one dreadnoughts, eight predreadnoughts, and four battle cruisers. Attached were eight armored cruisers, four light cruisers, nine other cruisers, and forty-two destroyers. On arrival, the ships finished clearing for war. Wooden fittings and anything else likely to burn were wrenched away and taken ashore or dumped over the side. Soon, the shores of the Flow were strewn with mahogany and teak fittings while boats piled high with chests of drawers, chairs, and an occasional wardroom piano made their way to the pier. Surplus ships’ boats were sent ashore and hauled up on the beaches while elegant steam pinnaces, gleaming with brass brightly polished for the naval review only the previous week, were permanently moored in sheltered bays.

The first official indication that the Flow had achieved the status of a war harbor came on August 2 with the posting of notices that harbor navigation lights might soon be extinguished. The remainder of the Orkney Territorials were called out on August 2 to join marines from the ships preparing emergency gun positions. Shadows of an enemy presence flickered with the news that the German liner
Prinz Friedrich Wilhelm
with 500 passengers had been anchored in Kirkwell Bay only eight days before war began. The German cruise ship
Kronprinzessin Cecilie,
a regular visitor to the Orkneys in prewar days, was reported to have passed through Stronsay Firth only twenty-four hours before the expiration of the British ultimatum. And then on August 5, the first day of war, the first German prisoners were landed at Scapa pier. They were thirteen unlucky members of a fishing-boat crew caught at sea by the coming of the war.

Inside the anchorage, a small fleet headquarters was established at Scapa Bay on the northeastern shore of the Flow. This consisted of a few auxiliary vessels, mostly drifters (small fishing boats), and two seagoing repair ships,
Cyclops
and
Assistance,
anchored off Scapa pier.
Cyclops
was connected to a shore telegraph cable that ran to Kirkwell Post Office, thence across the Pentland Firth to Scotland, London, and the Admiralty. Because the harbor was essentially undefended, Jellicoe’s predecessor, Sir George Callaghan, did what he could to improvise. Field artillery pieces and Royal Marines were landed from the fleet and small guns were mounted at entrances to the anchorages. There were, however, no searchlights, so the artillery was of little value at night and the guns’ caliber was too small to be effective even against unarmored ships. In addition, Callaghan stationed destroyers and light cruisers at the main harbor entrances and set patrols at sea to the east of Pentland Firth.

These emergency measures were designed to guard against the threat that, in the first days, most worried Callaghan and, subsequently, Jellicoe: a surprise attack on the anchored British fleet by German destroyers. “I often wondered,” Jellicoe said later, “why the Germans did not make greater efforts to reduce our strength in capital ships by destroyer . . . attacks on our bases in those early days. . . . In August 1914, Germany had ninety-six destroyers . . . with a speed of at least thirty knots. . . . They could not have put them to better use than in an attack on Scapa Flow.” But German destroyers did not come, perhaps because of the risk of interception by a superior force during the 900-mile round-trip passage across the North Sea. Another reason, however, was that the German Naval Staff, with its professional approach to war, never imagined that their powerful maritime enemy could have left the defense of its primary wartime base to nothing more than rocks, tides, and weather. This was Jellicoe’s view. “I can only imagine that the Germans credited us with possessing harbor defenses and obstructions which were non-existent,” he said. “It may have seemed impossible to the German mind that we should place our fleet, on which the empire depended for its very existence, in . . . [this] position.”

Nor, in turn, did the British ever attack German harbors. Jellicoe later explained that when the war began Britain was critically short of the fast, modern destroyers and submarines needed to carry out such an operation. In the autumn of 1914, Britain had in home waters only seventy-six destroyers; of these, forty were allotted to the Grand Fleet, where they were desperately overworked; the remaining thirty-six were based at Harwich. Britain’s older destroyers, although numerous, had limited fuel capacity and were used only for patrolling outside east coast harbors or in the Straits of Dover. Jellicoe and the Admiralty, aware of the powerful modern artillery and extensive minefields that defended the German naval bases, decided that to throw Britain’s limited modern destroyer force against these defenses would have been grossly irresponsible. Jellicoe also argued against a submarine effort to penetrate the German bases. Owing to the shallowness of German rivers, British submarines could not enter in a submerged condition. “It appeared to me,” Jellicoe concluded, “that an attack on their ships in harbor would meet with no success and that we could not afford to expend any of our exceedingly limited number of destroyers or submarines in making an attack . . . [probably] foredoomed to failure.”

Despite this assessment, Jellicoe soon realized that a far greater danger than German destroyers menaced his fleet when it lay at anchor: German submarines. Before the war, no one had imagined that such a thing was possible. Because British submarines had never been able to remain at sea long enough to reach Heligoland from Scapa Flow, the Admiralty had been convinced that Scapa was beyond the range of U-boats from Germany. This belief was short-lived: the ramming of
U-15
by
Birmingham
off Fair Island in the first week of the war gave Jellicoe early evidence that German submarines were already operating in the northern North Sea. Even so, the Admiralty at first did not believe the submarines were coming from Germany; instead, it imagined that the Germans must have a secret base somewhere on the coast of Norway.

Distance was expected to provide an outer shield for Scapa Flow, but the main defense of the anchorage was believed to have been generously provided by other elements of nature. There were simply too many natural obstacles—tides, currents, rocks—to permit navigation by a submerged submarine. The approaches to Hoxa Sound, the only wide and deep entrance, lay through the Pentland Firth, a race of fiercely turbulent tidal streams flowing around the northern tip of Scotland at a rate of 8 to 10 knots. Churchill accepted the conventional belief that these factors made the Flow impenetrable: “No one, we believed, could take a submarine submerged through the intricate and swirling channels.” Jellicoe, on the other hand, believed that a submarine “could master the currents by proceeding on the surface at night, or submerged with a periscope showing by day,” especially if the effort was made at slack water. Experienced British submarine offi-cers shared Jellicoe’s opinion and believed that passage through the lesser channels would be difficult, but that the main Hoxa Channel, if otherwise undefended, could be penetrated by a determined submarine commander.

On Monday, September 1, Jellicoe’s fears appeared to have been realized: a submarine was reported
inside
Scapa Flow. The episode, which came to be known as the First Battle of Scapa Flow, began on a quiet evening when the anchorage was shrouded in rain showers and driving mist. Twelve dreadnoughts, armored and light cruisers, and the 4th Destroyer Flotilla were anchored off Scapa pier engaged in coaling, taking on stores and ammunition, and cleaning boilers. Those battleships equipped with antitorpedo nets had spread them out. About 6:00 p.m., as dusk was deepening, the light cruiser
Falmouth,
anchored near the northeastern entrance to the Flow, suddenly opened fire on what she reported as a submarine periscope. Other “sightings” followed: the dreadnought
Vanguard
fired on an object reported as a periscope; a destroyer on patrol near the Hoxa entrance opened fire; the armored cruiser
Drake
signaled that she had sighted a submarine. Who knew what had been seen? The sky was darkening in rain and mist and the eyes of the lookouts were reddened by strain. Jellicoe, taking no chances, ordered the fleet to raise steam and “prepare for torpedo attack.” The light cruisers and destroyers weighed anchor and began signaling and racing about. More guns boomed as ships fired at new “sightings,” and shells landed and exploded on farms and fields on the surrounding islands. Picket boats, trawlers, and other small craft cruised up and down the lines of big ships to confuse the “submarine,” to force it to keep its periscope down, and, if it was sighted, to ram it. Searchlights played back and forth across the water. Colliers and store ships were ordered alongside battleships lacking antitorpedo nets to take the blows of attacking torpedoes. By 9:30 p.m., with black funnel smoke adding to the thickening murk, the dreadnoughts began to feel their way out to the Pentland Firth. It required seamanship, with no navigational lights and visibility dropping at times to less than a hundred yards. Nevertheless, by 11:00 p.m. the fleet had cleared not only the Flow but the Pentland Firth, and the admiral could breathe more easily. By midnight, the vast anchorage was empty except for
Cyclops
with her vital telephone line and the destroyers left behind thrashing the Flow in search of a U-boat.

Later, Jellicoe reported of this “battle”: “No trace of a submarine was discovered and subsequent investigation showed that the alarm may have been false, the evidence not being conclusive either way.” The Commander-in-Chief maintained, however, that the only possible action when such an alarm was raised was to take the fleet to sea despite the dangers of haste, fog, or stormy weather. The incident also convinced Jellicoe that “the fleet could not remain at a base that was so open to this form of attack as Scapa Flow.” From that moment on, the insecurity of his naval bases haunted Jellicoe; on any night, he feared, submarines might come into the anchorage and send his fleet to the bottom. Feeding his nightmare was the torpedoing of
Pathfinder
on September 5 off the entrance to the Firth of Forth, and the dramatic loss of the three
Bacchante
s on September 22. “I long for a submarine defense at Scapa,” he wrote to Churchill on September 30. “It would give such a feeling of confidence. I can’t sleep half so well inside as when outside, mainly because I feel we are risking such a mass of valuable ships in a place where, if a submarine did get in, she practically has the British dreadnought fleet at her mercy up to the number of her torpedoes.”