Castles of Steel (6 page)

CHAPTER 2
“
Goeben
Is Your Objective”

While Britain decided whether to go to war, France, which had no choice, prepared for the German blow. General Joseph Joffre, commanding the armies of France, urgently required the presence at the front of the XIX Army Corps, totaling 80,000 men. On the eve of war, these men were in North Africa and it became the imperative task of the French Mediterranean fleet to convoy them across the sea to Marseilles. To escort the troopships, one French dreadnought, six predreadnoughts, six armored cruisers, and twenty-four destroyers were available. Two other new French dreadnoughts, which might better have served France in the Mediterranean that month, were far away to the north on a mission of national
gloire,
escorting the president of the Republic on a state visit to St. Petersburg. Their absence created a potential danger: if the prewar Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria, and Italy held firm, the combined fleets of these three powers would be superior to the French Mediterranean fleet and the safe passage of the XIX Corps would be in jeopardy.

The war plan of the Triple Alliance called for the three fleets to assemble on the outbreak of hostilities at the port of Messina in Sicily. From there, they were to steam out and wrest control of the Mediterranean from France. By August 1914, the Austrian navy, based at Pola, at the head of the Adriatic, possessed two dreadnoughts, along with three older battleships and a handful of cruisers and destroyers. The Italian fleet also had three new dreadnoughts, but only one was ready for war. Germany, with no naval base of its own in the Mediterranean, maintained just two warships in the inland sea. One of these, however, was the battle cruiser
Goeben,
a ruggedly constructed vessel of 23,000 tons whose ten 11-inch guns and design speed of 28 knots made her the most powerful fast warship in the Mediterranean. The other German vessel was
Breslau,
a new light cruiser of 4,500 tons, with a speed of 27 knots and twelve 4.1-inch guns.
Goeben
worried Britain’s First Lord, who had no doubt that war was coming and that Britain would become involved.
Goeben,
Churchill grimly predicted, “would easily be able to avoid the French . . . [battleships] and brushing aside or outstripping their cruisers, break in upon the transports and sink one after another of these vessels crammed with soldiers.”

To bar the passage of the French troopships was one of the purposes for which
Goeben
had been sent to the Mediterranean in 1912. A second mission, especially congenial to the kaiser, was to remind the people of the Mediterranean of the glory and long arm of the German emperor. When the big gray ship arrived in the Mediterranean, her ten 11-inch guns jutting from five turrets, her twelve 6-inch guns bristling from casements, her plain wardroom, with neither sofas, nor armchairs, nor pictures on the walls—all suggested a ship ready for war. But in reality, by the summer of 1914,
Goeben
was below peak efficiency. Two years of constant steaming without dry-docking had taken a toll. The ship’s bottom was fouled and her engines were plagued by worn-out, leaking boiler tubes, which reduced steam pressure and, therefore, speed. Even so, the two German ships constituted a formidable force. Their commander, Rear Admiral Wilhelm Souchon, was a short, dark-haired man, fifty years old, who sometimes wore and sometimes shaved off a thick black mustache. Of French Huguenot ancestry and, like many officers in the Imperial Navy, lacking the ennobling “von,” he appeared on first acquaintance a curious kind of sea dog. “A droop-jawed, determined little man in an ill-fitting frock coat, looking more like a parson than an admiral”: so an American diplomat in Constantinople described him.

Souchon and
Goeben
were visiting Haifa, in the eastern Mediterra-nean, when the the news of Sarajevo arrived. The assassination, the admiral knew, would agitate Europe; this quickly led him to worry about
Goeben
’s leaking boiler tubes. He telegraphed Berlin, asking that new tubes be sent to the Austrian base at Pola, then sailed from Haifa for the Adriatic. The ship arrived on July 10; for the next eighteen days, the crew worked to locate and replace defective tubes. The work was done while the sun burned down from a cloudless sky, creating almost unbearable heat inside the steel hull. The battle cruiser had twenty-four boilers; from them, 4,000 defective tubes had to be extracted and replaced. The work was still unfinished when a signal from Berlin warned that war was imminent.

While the crew cheered the news, waved their caps, and tapped their feet to marching music by the ship’s band, Souchon pondered his next move. Neither Austria nor Italy seemed ready for naval war, and Souchon rejected the thought of remaining in the Adriatic, subordinate to an Austrian admiral not inclined to fight Britain and France. Assuming that he was alone in the Mediterranean, Souchon considered steaming west, inflicting what damage he could on the French troop transports, then forcing his way past Gibraltar and into the Atlantic to attack Allied trade. If he could make it to the North Sea, he knew that Admiral Franz Hipper, commander of the High Seas Fleet battle cruiser force, would welcome his powerful ship. But the uncertain condition of
Goeben
’s boilers prohibited the sustained high speed that this move would require. By July 29, Souchon had made up his mind. Leaving Pola,
Goeben
sailed down the Adriatic, and on August 1—the day Germany declared war on Russia—anchored off Brindisi, on the heel of Italy. There,
Breslau
joined her. Souchon’s ships needed coal, but the Italians refused to bring colliers alongside, saying that the sea was too rough. Souchon accurately interpreted these excuses as evidence that Italy was about to renounce the Triple Alliance. He moved on to Taranto and then, his need for coal now acute, to Messina, in Sicily, where he could rendezvous with German merchant ships from which coal could be commandeered. During the morning,
Goeben
and
Breslau
steamed past the rugged cliffs of the Calabrian coast, jagged against the intense blue of the sky. At noon, they passed beneath the volcano of Mount Etna, its perpetual plume of smoke issuing from the summit. By midafternoon, they had anchored in Messina harbor, where the German East Africa Line passenger steamer
General,
bound for Dar es Salaam, and a number of other German merchant ships awaited them.

On the day Souchon reached Messina, Italy declared her neutrality. Austria-Hungary had declared war on Serbia on July 28 without consulting Rome, and it did not take the Italians long to remember that they had agreed to join in the Triple Alliance as a strictly defensive arrangement. The Italian government’s decision had the wholehearted support of the Italian navy; the Italian Naval Staff repeatedly had warned that the fleet could not protect Italy’s long coastline and seaboard cities from the French and British fleets. The news, justified or not, was a blow for Souchon. Italy’s neutrality eliminated the Triple Alliance, the naval assembly at Messina, and the prospect of any support for
Goeben
and
Breslau.

The Italians at Messina were prompt to implement their new neutrality. Again, Souchon was refused coal. “Shameless” and “treachery” were Souchon’s words. He added defiantly, “We did not plead much. We simply helped ourselves.” His method was to order alongside all German ships in the harbor and then, “in the twinkling of an eye,” use axes and crowbars to destroy everything—decks, bulkheads, cabins, passageways—that obstructed the removal of their coal. This procedure produced two thousand tons—of poor quality, but it was better than none. Souchon also requisitioned
General
herself for use as an auxiliary naval tender.

Knowing that war was imminent, but lacking orders from Berlin, Souchon decided to position his ships to deliver the first blow. At midnight on August 2, he secretly weighed anchor and left Messina by the northern exit, which led to the Algerian coast. He hoped to catch the French troopships at sea; if not, he could at least attack the embarkation ports of the XIX Corps and make “the African coast . . . echo to the thunder of German guns.” The port of Bône was assigned to
Breslau,
the harbor of Philippeville to
Goeben.
Steaming west, Souchon learned the next day from his wireless that Germany was at war with France.

In August 1914, three dreadnought battle cruisers—
Inflexible, Indomitable,
and
Indefatigable
—were the core of the British Mediterranean Fleet. These early ships of Jacky Fisher’s revolutionary fast dreadnought design averaged 18,000 tons and a speed of 25 knots. They were inferior to Vice Admiral Sir David Beatty’s more modern British battle cruisers in the North Sea; they were also 5,000 tons lighter and several knots slower than
Goeben.
But with eight 12-inch guns apiece to the German ship’s ten 11-inchers, they were more heavily armed. And there were three of them, making the margin of battle cruiser heavy guns in the Mediterranean twenty-four British against ten German. Wishing to enhance this margin, on July 28 Churchill had suggested sending a fourth older battle cruiser,
New Zealand,
from the North Sea, but Prince Louis had refused to further diminish Beatty’s strength. The British Mediterranean Fleet also included four large armored cruisers—
Defence, Warrior, Black Prince,
and
Duke of Edinburgh
—all relatively new but already obsolete, made so intentionally by Fisher, who had decreed that in wartime, his faster, more powerful battle cruisers would gobble up armored cruisers “like an armadillo let loose on an ant-hill.” Four modern British light cruisers and a flotilla of sixteen destroyers made up the balance of the Mediterranean Fleet.

While the British government struggled with issues of war and peace, Admiral Sir Archibald Berkeley Milne, the Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet, awaited orders at Malta, his principal base. In the days just before the war, he had been given no clear instructions. War came to Europe in convulsive spasms: first Austria against Serbia, then Russia against Austria, then Germany against Russia, then Germany against France, and finally Germany against Great Britain. Military and naval planning was complicated by the fact that, on any given day, no one knew which nations were in the war, which were not, and which might or might not come in tomorrow. This was especially true of any consideration involving Great Britain, which did not itself know whether it was going to war until the day it did so. Amid this confusion, Winston Churchill, wielding the power of the the Cabinet at the Admiralty, personally drafted operational telegrams to Royal Navy admirals and ships. On Thursday, July 30, he told Admiral Milne that his primary mission would be to assist the French in covering the North African troopships. But the First Lord, his fertile imagination brimming with possibilities, embellished his message with further instructions, and the result was to swamp the conventional mind of Admiral Milne. This was the message Milne received:

Your first task should be to aid the French in transportation of their African army corps by covering and if possible bringing to action individual fast German ships, particularly
Goeben,
which may interfere with that transportation. . . . Except in combination with the French as part of a general battle, do not at this stage be brought to action against superior forces. The speed of your squadrons is sufficient to enable you to choose your moment. You must husband your force at the outset and we shall hope later to reinforce the Mediterranean.

Later, Churchill explained that the phrases “superior forces,” “the speed of your squadrons,” and “husband your forces” were meant to guide Milne in dealing with the Austrian fleet. But Churchill also could not take his eyes away from
Goeben,
and he had convinced himself that its destruction and Milne’s other assignments largely overlapped. The extent to which the German battle cruiser affected his thinking was displayed in subsequent signals flowing to Milne from the Admiralty. Following the original July 30 message, Churchill signaled again on August 2: “
Goeben
must be shadowed by two battle cruisers.” And on August 3: “Watch on mouth of Adriatic should be maintained but
Goeben
is your objective. Follow her and shadow her wherever she goes, and be ready to act on declaration of war which appears probable and imminent.” Again, on August 4, when informed that the British battle cruisers
Indomitable
and
Indefatigable
had
Goeben
in sight: “Very good. Hold her. War imminent.”

Milne did his best to obey this stream of orders. On August 1, after receiving Churchill’s first message, he concentrated his fleet beneath the sand-colored limestone ramparts of the ancient fortress of Valletta at Malta. Early on August 2, when he received the Admiralty order saying that “
Goeben
must be shadowed by two battle cruisers” and the Adriatic “watched,” Milne dispatched his second in command, Rear Admiral Ernest Troubridge, with
Indomitable
and
Indefatigable,
the four armored cruisers, the light cruiser
Gloucester,
and eight destroyers to guard the mouth of the Adriatic. But Admiral Souchon had already left the Adriatic. On August 2,
Goeben
and
Breslau
had been seen at Taranto by the British consul, who urgently reported the sighting to the Admiralty. Suddenly, a thought troubled Churchill and his colleagues in London. Told that the two German ships had left Taranto, they decided that Souchon was headed into the Atlantic to attack British trade. To counter this threat, Admiral Troubridge’s two battle cruisers were ordered to detach from his command and proceed westward at high speed “to prevent
Goeben
leaving Mediterranean.” At nine o’clock that night,
Indomitable
and
Indefatigable
left, heading for Gibraltar at 22 knots.

Milne had now been assigned four tasks: he was to support the French in protecting the troop convoys in the western Mediterranean; he was to observe and bottle up the Austrians in the Adriatic; he was to find and sink
Goeben
wherever she was; and he was to prevent the German battle cruiser from breaking out past Gibraltar. Unfortunately, on the high seas, these objectives did not fit together with the same seamlessness they achieved in the mind of the First Lord. And the Churchillian stream of overlapping, frequently contradictory instructions was enough to bewilder a man far more astute than Admiral Milne.