32 Notes for WWI research: Louis Sheehan

32  Notes for WWI research: Louis Sheehan

In this way Admirals Hood and Arbuthnot and many a gallant sailor, long to be remembered, went down with their ships, though, despite all risks, when the run of the battle permitted, rescues were attempted and often with success. A typical example of this was the action of the destroyer Defender, under Lieutenant-Commander Laurence R. Palmer, who, herself having been severely damaged by a 12-inch shell in her foremost boiler, struggled to the assistance of the Onslow, under Lieutenant-Commander J. C. Tovey, who had been rendered helpless by an enemy shell.

This latter destroyer, having sighted a light cruiser about to attack the Lion with torpedoes, had at once assailed her with the utmost spirit, closing to within a range of a little over a mile, and firing no less than fifty-eight rounds at her. She had then proceeded to attack some enemy battle-cruisers, and had already fired one of her torpedoes, when she was struck by a shell; and her commander, thinking his torpedoes all gone, had then ordered her retirement. Learning, however, that he still had three torpedoes left, he again attacked and torpedoed the light cruiser, with which he had been previously engaged, sighted some more battleships and loosed the rest of his torpedoes, before his vessel gave out and came to a standstill. It was while thus drifting helplessly, and with shells plunging all about her, that the Defender, whose own speed had been reduced to about ten knots, came alongside and took her in tow. Twice during the night, owing to the rising sea, the tow between these two heroic cripples became parted, {197}and twice it was made good, the two journeying together till the afternoon of the following day. Lastly must be mentioned the Abdiel, which, under the command of Captain Berwick Curtis, had been ordered by Admiral Jellicoe to lay mines behind the retreating Germans. This her great speed—40 knots an hour—and the gallantry of all on board enabled her to do, the flying enemy sustaining several casualties as the result of her enterprise and skill.

So ended the Battle of Jutland, as regarded the sea, the most gigantic that the world had known—for, when the next day dawned, June 1st, a day already glorious in British annals, it was to find the enemy gone and Admiral Jellicoe in unchallenged possession of the field. Breaking through mists, well-nigh as dense as those in which it had set, the sun rose and with it the hopes of the British admirals that the work of the night might be completed. Those hopes, alas, remained unfulfilled, for, when the fog cleared and the sea lay revealed, it became apparent that the enemy had fled, broken and dispirited, under the cover of darkness, and was in no mood to rejoin the battle that he was already proclaiming as a German victory.

Four hundred miles from its bases—in enemy waters, close to his very harbours—the Grand Fleet waited till eleven in the morning before reluctantly sailing for home. And it was this fact, in itself a proof of triumph, that was partly accountable for the immediate sequel. For there now followed, thanks to the precipitate German flight, and the enemy's neighbourhood to his bases; to the world's {198}unfamiliarity, after nearly a century, with the cost and criterion of naval success; and to the prompt and wholly unscrupulous use by the German Government of its wireless press agencies—an almost world-wide belief that the British Fleet had met with disaster.

With the Grand Fleet still at sea off its own coast, Germany flooded the world with the following statement: "During an enterprise directed toward the North, our High Seas Fleet, on Wednesday last, met a considerably superior main portion of the British Battle Fleet. In the course of the afternoon, between the Skager Rack and the Horn Reef, a number of severe and, for us, successful engagements developed and continued all night. In these engagements, as far as is at present ascertained, we destroyed the great battleship Warspite, the battle-cruisers Queen Mary and Indefatigable, two armoured cruisers of the Achilles class, one small cruiser, and the new destroyer leaders Turbulent, Nestor, and Alcester. According to trustworthy evidence, a great number of British battleships suffered heavy damage from the artillery of our vessels and the attacks of our torpedo-boat flotillas, during the day battle and during the night. Among others, the great battleship Marlborough was hit by a torpedo, as is confirmed by the statements of prisoners. A portion of the crews of the British vessels that were sunk were picked up by our vessels. On our side the small cruiser Wiesbaden was sunk by the enemy's artillery in the course of the day battle, and, during the night, the Pommern by a torpedo. Regarding the fate of theFrauenlob, which is missing, and some torpedo-boats, which {199}have not returned up to the present, nothing is known. The High Seas Fleet returned to its harbour in the course of to-day."

This was the German version, by twenty-four hours the first in the field; and a certain kind of triumph undoubtedly followed it. In every neutral country, including America, heavily captioned newspaper articles proclaimed a British defeat—an impression hardly dissipated by the candour and caution of the first British official report. That our losses were heavy could not, of course, be denied, and they were instantly and frankly confessed. Six cruisers, including three battle-cruisers, and eight destroyers had paid the price of admiralty; while, on the other hand, the German losses were only grudgingly announced as it became impossible to conceal them. How heavy they were and how profound was the loss of moral that followed the Jutland defeat was only later to become manifest, though a good deal might have been guessed from the foregoing message. Further evidence, too, might have been deduced from the hurried visit of the Kaiser to Wilhelmshaven, and the almost hysterical exaggeration of his address to his broken fleet. There he assured them that "the gigantic fleet of Albion, ruler of the seas, which, since Trafalgar, for a hundred years, had imposed on the whole world a bond of sea tyranny," had "come out into the field," and had been beaten; that "a great hammer blow" had been struck; and that the "nimbus of British world supremacy had disappeared."

Such were the Kaiser's words, breathed into the {200}ear of the world to conceal the result of Jutland, if this might be done; and hardly was the armistice signed before they were openly given the lie by one of Germany's leading authorities. After the Battle of Jutland, said Captain Persius, so shattering had been its results for the German navy, it had at once become clear to all thinking men that no second engagement must be risked; and, even at the time, it soon began to be suspected by the rest of the world that this was the truth. As for the Grand Fleet itself it was content to wait. It knew that it had won, and it had long learned patience. Let the Kaiser harangue. To-morrow would come, and, with to-morrow, the truth would out. Meanwhile it rode the seas on its accustomed ways, while, behind its shield, and beneath its pressure, the armies of freedom poured into Europe, and the strength of Germany continued to crumble.

{201}

CHAPTER IX

THE DOVER PATROL

The kings and the presidents go their ways,
Their armies march behind them,
But where would they be,
Said the man from the sea,
Without us Jacks to mind them?

It is seldom possible, during the course of a war, to appraise the ultimate value of any single action; and it was only by slow degrees, as we have suggested, that the results of Jutland were to become visible. Not until the very end was it fully to appear that the enemy's capital surface ships had been so hammered and cowed as to have freed the seas of them with a finality equalled by no other naval fight in history. Presently, as we shall show, that proved to be the case; and, from now onward, he relied upon his submarines—it was early in 1917 that these reached their high-water mark of mercantile destruction—and occasional tip-and-run raids on the part of his destroyers based upon Zeebrugge and Ostend.

With regard to the submarine campaign, this was the most serious menace the Admiralty had been required to face; and it was to take charge of the grave situation, created by its initial success, that Sir John Jellicoe, to the sorrow of the Fleet and with {202}much personal regret, was called to the Admiralty as First Sea Lord in succession to Sir Henry Jackson.

This able officer had succeeded Lord Fisher on the latter's resignation in May, 1915—when the Gallipoli campaign had seemed to him finally to have made an end of his alternative policy—Mr. Balfour having become First Lord in the Coalition Government formed at the same time. In Admiral Beatty, however, both the navy and the nation felt that the Grand Fleet would be in capable hands—the changes taking place after friendly discussion between the officers concerned, in the Iron Duke—and Sir John Jellicoe returned to Whitehall to deal with as perilous a crisis as had ever faced the empire.

What had in fact happened was that, under the stimulus of war, both scientific research and achievement had advanced, as regarded the submarine, with unprecedented strides. From a range of scores to a range of hundreds and even thousands of miles, they had become effective. They had begun to attain a speed that put them on superior terms to the vast bulk of mercantile steamers; and they already carried guns that, before the war, it would have been thought impossible to mount, and that were in fact heavier than those carried by the earlier German destroyers. Nor had the measures of defence as yet overtaken those of destruction in the race for stability. The methods that, to a great extent, had been successful in dealing with the smaller submarines had become obsolete; and the devising of others, their practical application, and the safeguarding, in the meantime, of our mercantile marine—more than half a million {203}tons of mercantile shipping were, at this time, being sunk every month—were problems upon whose solution depended not only the victory of the Allied cause, but the actual physical existence of the people upon these islands.

Of the means ultimately adopted, of which it may at once be said that none was in itself a complete solution, it would be impossible, in the present volume, to give more than the briefest details. The plotting out of minefields for which 100,000 mines, of an improved type, were ordered by Admiral Jellicoe, and of which the most extensive was designed to stretch from the north of Scotland to the waters of Norway; the construction and employment on a vast scale of speedy patrol vessels of all descriptions; the regular use of aircraft, both for observation and the dropping of depth-charges; and the development of the convoy system with destroyer escorts, as the increase in the production of the latter justified this—it was rather to a combination of all these methods, and the skill and adaptability of the men employing them, that the ascendency over this new weapon was slowly regained. Of one particular means, however, namely the employment of lure ships—armed vessels, variously disguised—no record of our naval activities from the personal standpoint could omit some account; and of the amazing courage and ingenuity with which the Q ships, as they were called, were handled, let the following couple of examples, chosen at random, sufficiently indicate.

Powerfully armed, but with a false screen disguising the extent of her armament, the apparently easy {204}prey, H. M. S. Prize, a topsail schooner of 200 tons, was sighted, on April 30, 1917, by a prowling submarine. This opened fire at about three miles range, and, according to plan, Lieutenant W. E. Sanders ordered some of his crew, as though in a panic, to lower a boat and push off. Meanwhile the ship's head was put into the wind, and the gun crews lay flat on the deck to conceal themselves. Still shelling the schooner and inflicting numerous casualties—borne in silence as part of the game—the submarine approached to within seventy yards, apparently satisfied that she had been definitely abandoned. That was Lieutenant Sanders' chance, and he made the fullest use of it. Running up the White Ensign, the screens were dropped, and every available gun opened fire. The submarine's conning-tower was blown to pieces, as was her forward gun, all of the crew of the latter being destroyed; while a machine-gun on the Prize raked her deck. In less than five minutes she was on fire and sinking in a cloud of smoke, her captain and one of her men being picked up and brought aboard the Prize as prisoners. The Prize herself, however, was now sinking fast; and it was only by the most strenuous efforts of all aboard that the holes in her were plugged and she was kept afloat till, two days later, she was