Castles of Steel (61 page)

Overall, Churchill found these discussions “wearing,” but, counseled by Fisher, he never considered making a change in command. “No one can blame the Commander-in-Chief for endeavouring to keep his command up to the highest level of strength,” he wrote of Jellicoe after the war. “I always tried to sustain him in every possible way. He bore with constancy the many troubles and perplexities of the early months. . . . Even when I did not share his outlook, I sympathised with his trials.”

If Jellicoe objected to the Admiralty taking three battle cruisers from the North Sea to deal with Spee, and stripping away Grand Fleet destroyers to meet other needs, he was certainly not mollified when Churchill began sending him “battleships” and “battle cruisers” that he had not asked for and did not want. These were not real warships, but dummies—old merchant ships transformed into likenesses of dreadnoughts, intended to deceive the enemy as to where the real battleships and battle cruisers might be. The idea—to create a make-believe battle squadron that could pass itself off at sea as real—was entirely Churchill’s. On October 21, he wrote to Prince Louis, then still First Sea Lord:

It is necessary to construct without delay a dummy fleet; ten merchant vessels . . . mocked up to represent battleships. . . . The actual size need not correspond exactly, as it is notoriously difficult to judge the size of vessels at sea, and frequently even destroyers are mistaken for cruisers. We are bearing in mind particularly aerial and periscope observations where deception is much more easy. It is not necessary that the structures be strong enough to stand rough weather. Very little metal would be required and practically the whole work should be executed in wood and canvas. . . . Even when the enemy knows we have such a fleet . . . he will always be in doubt as to which is the real and which is the dummy fleet. . . .

The matter is urgent. . . . The utmost secrecy must be observed and special measures must be taken to banish all foreigners from the districts where the mocking up is being done. I should hope to receive the list of ships which are selected for conversion tomorrow. . . . I should expect in a fortnight, or at the outside in three weeks, that ten vessels will actually be at our disposal.

Admiral Sir Percy Scott, the famous gunnery expert, was called from retirement to supervise this structural chicanery and, before the end of the month, steamships were commandeered and brought to the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast. The first ten vessels selected were elderly liners, the oldest being thirty-four years old. To determine how each transformation was to be accomplished, an Admiralty draftsman made a tracing of the steamer and placed it over a battleship design on the same scale. “The next day,” according to Scott, “Messrs. Harland & Wolff had about two thousand men cutting . . . fine merchant ships to pieces.” Within a week, wood and canvas structures were reproducing guns, turrets, boats, tripod masts, and bridges. Because a liner rises higher out of the water than a battleship, the merchantmen were filled with thousands of tons of ballast to push the hulls lower. The shapes of bows and sterns were altered. False funnels were added and were equipped with fireplaces to burn combustible materials that would emit thick clouds of smoke. Navy anchors were made of wood or were simply painted on the bows. Once these vessels were ready, they came under the command of Captain H. J. Haddock of the White Star Line, now himself transformed into a commodore in the Royal Navy Reserve. Only two weeks before, Haddock had been master of the 52,000-ton transatlantic liner
Olympic;
his seamanship in the attempt to tow the sinking dreadnought
Audacious
had attracted the admiring attention of the Admiralty.

Only five weeks after Scott took charge, the first dummies put to sea. On December 7, the Grand Fleet at Scapa Flow looked on with amusement as two 7,000-ton dummies, the thirty-two-year-old former
City of Oxford
and the twenty-seven-year-old former
Michigan,
masquerading as 25,000-ton
St. Vincent
–class dreadnoughts, arrived in the anchorage. Other dummies followed. As they came in—
Montezuma, Ruthenia, Tyrolia, Oruba, Mount Royal, Montcalm, Perthshire
—they were officially referred to by their warship names—
“Iron Duke,” “King George V,” “Orion,” “Marlborough,”
and
“Vanguard.”
No one was fooled. Real battleship squadrons were usually made up of generally homogeneous ships. But when the dummies came together, some were twice the size of the others. Their speeds varied greatly. Some could make 15 knots, others 10, others only 7, and, as a squadron’s speed must be that of the slowest member, 7 knots became the speed at which the dummies could steam together. A 7-knot squadron could not operate with the 20-knot Grand Fleet. “The ships,” said Jellicoe, “could not accompany the fleet to sea and it was very difficult to find a use for them in home waters.” The suggestion that they be used as bait was rejected. An encounter with the enemy would have led to massacre.

Despite Churchill’s insistence on secrecy, the existence of the dummy squadron quickly became known in Germany, prompting the German Naval Staff to wonder about its purpose. Toward the middle of January 1915, Ingenohl convinced himself that a British naval offensive was imminent and that the dummy warships were part of a plan for running block ships into Hel-igoland Bight and sinking them in the mouths of the Elbe, the Weser, and the Jade. This idea had not occurred at the Admiralty.

Finding no way to use them, the Admiralty sent the finished dummies from Scapa Flow to Loch Ewe where, as new units were commissioned, Commodore Haddock’s collection continued to grow. Four more steamers were commandeered and turned into battle cruisers:
“Queen Mary”
(formerly
Cevic
),
“Tiger”
(formerly
Merion
),
“Indomitable”
(formerly
Manipur
), and
“Invincible”
(formerly
Patrician
). By January, fourteen imitation battle-ships and battle cruisers were ready for sea, still without purpose, but absorbing the services of a number of valuable officers and seamen. At the end of April, the dummy
Queen Mary
was sent to patrol off New York City as a message to the German liners interned in the harbor that, if they violated their internment and tried to break out, a British battle cruiser was waiting to gobble them up. The assault on the Dardanelles suggested another use; the dummy battle cruisers
Indomitable
and
Tiger
departed Loch Ewe on February 19. To avoid being seen, they passed through the Strait of Gibraltar at midnight, and they were forbidden to enter the harbors of Gibraltar or Malta where they could be studied close up. The dummy
Invincible
followed six weeks later. Churchill hoped that by sending them to the Mediterranean, where they might be seen at a distance, they might “mislead the Germans as to the margin of British strength in home waters” and tempt the enemy to come out and do battle in the North Sea. The Turks did misidentify the dummy
Tiger
and reported her to a German submarine. On May 30, she was hit and sunk by torpedo and four British seamen drowned. A British midshipman with the Dardanelles fleet found grim humor in the event, imagining the U-boat captain “astonished to see the surviving crew clinging to the floating wooden turrets.”

Thereafter, the curtain came down on the theatrical. Once Churchill left the Admiralty, the dummy fleet, which had cost Britain £1 million and four lives and Germany a single torpedo, quickly disappeared. One dummy, representing
Orion,
was temporarily retained and, in August 1915, she was sent from Scapa to Rosyth with a heavy list to suggest a disabled battleship going south for repairs. Escorted by destroyers, she hoped to attract German submarines, which the destroyers would then sink. The effort failed. Eventually, all of the dummy dreadnoughts were returned to reality and reverted to mundane roles as oilers, water ships, block ships, a torpedo depot ship, and a troop transport.

CHAPTER 17
The Yarmouth Raid and Room 40

At dawn, HMS
Halcyon,
a small, twenty-year-old minesweeping gunboat, nosed out of the port of Yarmouth into the drifting mist off the Norfolk coast to take up her daily duty: hunting for drifting mines in the coastal shipping channel. Two elderly destroyers,
Lively
and
Leopard,
followed
Halcyon
to begin their own routine offshore patrols. It was November 3, 1914, and these three ships along with four other old destroyers constituted Yarmouth’s defense. There were no land fortifications. Before the war, a territorial battery of mobile 6-inch guns had been stationed nearby, but when the army had gone to France, the guns went too. Since the sinking of the three
Bacchante
s on the Broad Fourteens, no heavy ships were anywhere nearer than the old predreadnoughts at Sheerness, a hundred miles away. Beatty’s fast battle cruisers were 300 miles to the north, at Cromarty, and most of Jellicoe’s battleships were twice that distance away, at Lough Swilly in northern Ireland.

In the early light,
Halcyon
made her way northeast through calm water toward the Cross Sand light vessel.
Lively
and
Leopard
were two miles astern. Suddenly, two unknown ships, both four-funneled light cruisers, appeared five miles to the north.
Halcyon
signaled a challenge. This was greeted with nearby splashes from shells fired by small-caliber naval guns, followed by towering waterspouts created by 11-inch shells. In the mist,
Halcyon
could not make out the identity of her assailants, but in fact she was confronting three German battle cruisers, a large armored cruiser, and four light cruisers. Rear Admiral Franz Hipper and the battle cruiser squadron of the High Seas Fleet were conducting the German navy’s first major offensive into British home waters.

One month earlier, on October 3, Admiral von Pohl, Chief of the Naval Staff, and Admiral von Ingenohl, Commander-in-Chief of the High Seas Fleet, had met on board
Friedrich der Grosse
to discuss the kaiser’s decision to keep the fleet on the defensive in the North Sea. The imperial decision, however, did not preclude offensive minelaying off the British coast; the first result was an effort on October 17 by four German destroyers to lay mines off the Thames. When all four destroyers were sunk before laying a single mine, Ingenohl decided to retaliate, taking advantage of William’s ruling that “the battle fleet must avoid heavy losses, but there is nothing to be said against the battle cruisers trying to damage the enemy.” If they were fortunate, battle cruiser raids would draw units of the Grand Fleet south onto German-laid minefields and across a line of U-boats. Besides, attacks on English coastal towns promised a strong morale effect: positive in Germany, negative in Britain. Hipper was eager to undertake the mission.

Final authorization for a raid on the Norfolk coast came on October 29. Light cruisers were assigned to lay mines off Yarmouth and Lowestoft in order to disrupt coastal shipping lanes and fishing traffic while Hipper’s battle cruisers bombarded Yarmouth. Typically cautious, Ingenohl had not admitted to the kaiser that a bombardment was planned; in his telegram requesting permission for the raid, he merely mentioned that battle cruisers would “escort the [mine-laying] cruisers.”

At 4:30 on the afternoon of November 2, Hipper’s flagship,
Seydlitz,
along with
Moltke, Von der Tann,
and
Blücher,
departed the Jade with four light cruisers,
Strassburg, Graudenz, Kolberg,
and
Stralsund;
the latter was to lay the mines. At 6:00 p.m., two dreadnought battle squadrons of the High Seas Fleet followed them into the Bight to provide support. The battle cruisers swung north in an arc past Heligoland to avoid patrolling British submarines and then, out in the North Sea, Hipper altered course to the west and increased speed to 18 knots. On the bridge of
Seydlitz,
the admiral’s excitement was obvious; for the first time in the war, a major German naval force was about to enter enemy waters. Not much concerned about British surface opposition because he expected to surprise the enemy, he worried mainly about mines. “I don’t want to go to the bottom so ingloriously,” he said. “To run on mines and sink off the English coast is hardly what I’m out for!” At midnight, the advancing squadron encountered clusters of fishing trawlers. Hipper feared that some might have wireless sets that could be used to report his presence and he tried to avoid them, but the small vessels were too numerous.

Approaching England in darkness at high speed, Hipper’s captains found themselves uncertain of their exact position. (At the outbreak of war, the British Admiralty had removed most North Sea navigation buoys and lights.) Then, at 6:30 a.m.,
Seydlitz
spotted a buoy marked “Smith’s Knoll Watch.” Now that he knew where he was, Hipper steamed south across Yarmouth Bay, preparing to bombard the town. Almost immediately, however, the Germans noticed a small warship five miles away on the port beam and
Strassburg
and
Graudenz
quickly opened fire. Hipper, afraid that the two light cruisers were too close to the British minefields, ordered them to cease and instructed
Seydlitz
alone to fire from a distance on the little
Halcyon.
Nevertheless, the other German battle cruisers immediately joined in. The eagerness of the German gun crews was responsible: this was their first sight of an enemy vessel in wartime. The result was that so many large shell splashes smothered the small target that accurate spotting was impossible. Drenched and lucky,
Halcyon
escaped.

When the German guns began firing, the destroyer
Lively
hurried up and, seeing
Halcyon
’s acute danger, laid down a smoke screen between her and the enemy. For a quarter of an hour, the two small ships were under heavy fire.
Halcyon
was struck on the bridge, her radio room was damaged, and three men were wounded;
Lively
was not hit. At 7:40 a.m., Hipper realized that he was wasting time fighting these small ships and that a further pursuit to the south would take his force into a known minefield. He ceased fire and turned his battle cruisers back to sea. As they departed, the battle cruisers flung a few scattered shells toward Yarmouth, but the projectiles hit only the beach. Meanwhile as the light improved,
Stralsund
finished laying a line of mines five miles long in the Smith’s Knoll passage.