The Last Days of the High Seas Fleet

From Mutiny to Scapa Flow

Nicholas C. Jellicoe

• Publisher: Seaforth Publishing
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781526754585
• eBook ISBN: 9781526754592
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

"Much fresh material . . . an excellent historical narrative of the events leading up to the Great Scuttle, the terrible day itself and its aftermath." — Warships: International Fleet Review
 
On June 21, 1919, the ships of the German High Seas Fleet—interned at Scapa Flow since the Armistice—began to founder, taking their British custodians completely by surprise. In breach of agreed terms, the fleet dramatically scuttled itself, in a well-planned operation that consigned nearly half a million tons, and 54 of 72 ships, to the bottom of the sheltered anchorage in a gesture of Wagnerian proportions.
 
This much is well-known, but more than a century after the "Grand Scuttle" many questions remain. Was von Reuter, the fleet's commander, acting under orders or was it his own initiative? Why was June 21 chosen? Did the British connive in or even encourage the action? Could more have been done to save the ships? Was it legally justified? And what were the international ramifications?
 
This new book analyzes all these issues, beginning with the fleet mutiny in the last months of the war that precipitated a social revolution in Germany and the eventual collapse of the will to fight. The Armistice terms imposed the humiliation of virtual surrender on the High Seas Fleet, and the conditions under which it was interned are described in detail. Meanwhile the victorious Allies wrangled over the fate of the ships, an issue that threatened the whole peace process. Using much new material from German sources and a host of eyewitness testimonies, the circumstances of the scuttling itself are meticulously reconstructed, while the aftermath for all parties is clearly laid out. The story concludes with "the biggest salvage operation in history" and a chapter on the significance of the scuttling to the postwar balance of naval power. This is an important reassessment of the last great action of the First World War.

1

GERMANY AND ITS NAVY

MANY OF THE great ships that ended their lives so ignominiously in the cold, grey waters of Scapa Flow in June 1919 belonged, generationally speaking, to an adolescent navy. A few had been in service less than three years. Only two decades before, these steel leviathans had merely been the proverbial ‘twinkle in the eye’ of their creator, Alfred von Tirpitz, and the German Emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II.

Today, the fundamental role that the new German Navy played in leading the two strongest European nations to war has been largely forgotten. The new navy had threatened the stability of early twentieth-century Europe. The wealth of Europe’s two leading economies had been poured into steel. The Anglo–German naval arms race would be the first great arms race of the new century.

In the early years, however, ‘the German Imperial Navy was subordinated to the land-based military strategy of the German Army’. The navy’s task was mostly mere coastal defence.2 In Norman Friedman’s description, ‘Germany was an army with a country attached’.3 Germany was a land power on the European continent and its army’s position was paramount: ‘That the German unification was based on six years of success on the battlefield earned enormous admiration and prestige for the army leadership, not only in Prussia but among a large section of the German population.’4

Despite the intervening years of Germany’s first great navy, the creation of its second Navy, the Kriegsmarine, with its association to legendary names like Bismarck, Scharnhorst and Tirpitz, this orientation to the land never changed. It should hardly be surprising, then, to learn that the first two significant commanders of its Navy were both army officers. Albrecht von Stosch pushed the nascent Navy into profound modernisation immediately after the end of the Franco–Prussian war in 1872. He created a new naval academy in Kiel and founded two new corps, indicative of the new industrial times: the Machine Engineer Corps and the Torpedo Engineer Corps. Before he left office in 1873, he had embarked his navy on a ten-year building programme that his successor, Leo von Caprivi, continued.*

Caprivi maintained the navy’s focus on the torpedo and introduced the first torpedo division in Wilhelmshaven in October 1897 and then a second in Kiel. He is also credited with the foresight of initiating the work on the Kiel Canal, completed ten years later, in 1895, though the story of the canal has been somewhat mythologised. It was just as much commercial pressure that led to its rebuilding and rerouting, rather than only a case of innovative and far-sighted naval planning.

When Kaiser Wilhelm came to the throne, the Germany he inherited was changing rapidly. Its economy was taking off and its economic muscle was starting to be felt overseas. With growth came demand for raw materials and markets. Wilhelm felt it was high time for Germany, like the other great European nations, to have its ‘place in the sun’. ‘He was convinced of the relationship between naval power and world power, which was the prerequisite of national prestige, economic wealth and social stability.’5

In 1889, Wilhelm reorganised the navy’s management. The old imperial Admiralty was dissolved and in its place two new agencies created. The Oberkommando der Marine, would report directly to him on operational matters. The second, the Reichsmarineamt (the Imperial Navy Office or RMA), the more administrative office, was led by a Secretary of State for the Navy and then shared answerability between both the emperor and the chancellor. Differences of opinion and policy quickly developed into a strong rivalry between the two organisations.

Two years later, Wilhelm met a young naval officer, Alfred Tirpitz. The Kaiser was facing constant frustrations over the navy’s development. The chief of the admiralty, Count Alexander Monts, was of the old school. Wilhelm asked Tirpitz, whose torpedo boats Monts regarded as ‘mere show’†, for his opinion and was immediately impressed by the latter’s fluency and strength of conviction.

Wilhelm wanted to build a cruiser fleet as an instrument that would not only carry Germany’s flag around the world, but could also counter British dominance of world trade. Increasingly, he felt that Britain was thwarting Germany’s ambitions, limiting her potential, ‘The Germans, and especially the leading personalities, had the feeling that Britain was in the way of the developing German Empire.’6

The naval reviews at Spithead were more than just the pomp and ceremony of polished decks, shining brass and massed bands; they were designed to send the very powerful and intimidating message that Britain’s maritime dominance was there to stay. And anyone challenging that would do so at their own peril. But what neither Wilhelm nor Friedrich von Hollman, the head of the Imperial Navy Office, seemed to have grasped was that it was almost impossible to pursue a global naval presence without the accompanying infrastructure of coaling, supply stations and docks.* Germany’s total lack of any of these would prove to be a critical weakness.

It only needed a small, nevertheless fundamental shift from thinking about trade and the bettering of German citizens’ welfare, to thinking about the power that protected that trade from rivals. Britain’s maritime supremacy had done just that and Germany’s increased economic ambitions set the two on a collision course.

Tirpitz’s ideas could not have been further from Hollmann’s thinking. In one of his most important writings, the so-called Service Memorandum (Dienstschrift IX) penned in 1894, he argued that ‘a state which has sea interests or – what is equivalent – world interests must be able to represent them and to make its power felt beyond territorial waters. National world trade, world industry, and to a certain extent, high seas fisheries, world transportation, and colonies are impossible without a fleet capable of taking the offensive.’7

Tirpitz not only seemed now to accept the inevitability of the emerging conflict of interests with Great Britain (which, at this stage, the High Command did not envisage), he wanted to put a larger challenge on the table. He instinctively felt that, as Mahan had written, Germany needed a battle fleet. The Dienstschrift recommended a battle fleet of two squadrons, each made up of eight battleships. Furthermore, this fleet’s purpose was not defensive. Quite the opposite. In one section of the Dienstschrift entitled ‘The Natural Purpose of a Fleet is the Strategic Offensive’, he wrote: ‘Those who consistently advocate the defensive often base their argument on the premise that the offensive enemy will present himself to do the decisive battle wherever that might suit us.’8

He believed that the purpose of the new fleet was the annihilation of the enemy, nothing less. It sounded very much like Nelson who, on the eve of Trafalgar, told his officers, ‘I don’t want victory. I want annihilation.’

Hollmann had supported the ideas of the Jeune École. Like them, he believed that second-tier naval powers could use the likes of cruisers, submarines and torpedo boats to challenge a leading naval power like Great Britain.* Tirpitz, the chief of staff to the High Command, didn’t share these views. Gradually, the Kaiser came closer to sharing Tirpitz’s views, focusing on the need for a fundamentally different expression of naval strength: ‘Only he who dominates the sea can effectively reach his enemy and maintain, undisturbed by him, the freedom of military operations.’9

Wilhelm needed a long-term strategy to exploit Britain’s diplomatic weaknesses while the instrument to challenge the former’s maritime dominance was still being built in great secrecy. For that task, Wilhelm would rely on two men. One, Bernard von Bülow would, as Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, steer Germany through the shifting sands of politics, diplomacy and alliance while Tirpitz built the navy that would liberate Germany from Britain’s maritime shackles.

When, yet again, Hollmann failed to persuade the Reichstag to support his new naval vision, Wilhelm turned to Tirpitz. On 31 March 1897 Tirpitz received the Kaiser’s telegram asking him to head up the Imperial Navy Office, opening the so-called Ära Tirpitz. He would remain the Navy’s State Secretary until March 1916.

If Germany embarked on this path, however, there would inevitably be a period during which she would be in extreme danger. The navy that she was building would be seen as a threat long before it was powerful enough to actually deliver.

With the passing of the so-called First Navy Law, ‘aimed at emancipating the fiscal foundation of the Imperial Navy from the budgetary control of the Reichstag’, Tirpitz laid the cornerstone of the new Navy in 1897.10 The Fleet that he would build would be one suited for ‘home-water’, North Sea operations rather than for far-flung colonial expansion and support. The weight savings benefits from building smaller-range ships could be directly transferred to heavier armour and a wider beam, providing his ships with both more stable and better protected gunnery platforms. As far as armament was concerned, rather than compete on gunnery calibre, Tirpitz’s focus would be on the gun’s muzzle velocity and the design of munitions. His preference would pay handsome dividends.

Tirpitz’s goal was to build a fleet that, by 1905, would consist of nineteen battleships and forty-six cruisers. Based on a seven-year construction programme, and knowing that eight older battleships would still be operational, he needed eleven new ships, two ships in each of the first two years, one in the third, and so on (the schedule is often presented as 2:2:1:2:1:1:2). The task was huge, not least because a naval construction and armaments infrastructure hardly existed in Germany.

Tirpitz wanted a fleet that would represent enough of a threat to the Royal Navy by its mere existence. All the so-called ‘fleet in being’ threat had to accomplish was to tie up British resources, manpower and focus, not necessarily threaten the Royal Navy’s existence. At this point, it was positioned as a defensive fleet.

The threat to Britain’s maritime supremacy did not necessarily come from just one rival naval power alone. Hence, the British started to use a new metric to measure her navy against other naval adversarial threats: the ‘two-power standard’. The British position of superiority was henceforth to be measured against the strength of the next two foreign fleets combined, while looking to add a margin of at least 10 per cent advantage over this combined, two-navy threat. From the German side, Tirpitz saw this threat as part of what he called his ‘risk theory’ (Risikotheorie). Britain would not risk a conflict with the fleet of one of its two next rival naval powers if, weakened by an engagement with one, it would find itself at risk from the other.

Tirpitz’s concept was workable when tensions between Britain and Germany’s potential naval partners, either the French or the Russians, ran high. With the signing of the Entente Cordiale in 1904...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Germany and its Navy
• 2 The War’s Closing Days
• 3 Armistice
• 4 On to Internment – Rosyth
• 5 On to Internment – Scapa Flow
• 6 Dividing the Spoils at Versailles
• 7 Planning ‘Der Tag’. Saving the Navy’s Honour
• 8 Midsummer Madness
• 9 Captivity and Repatriation
• 10 Scapa – At the Centre of World Attention
• 11 Rebalancing Sea Power – Scapa to Washington
• 12 The Greatest Salvage in History
• 13 Scapa Flow in History and Today
• Bibliography & Notes
• Appendices
• References
• Plate section