Perrett - North Sea battleground : the war at sea 1914-1918

First Published in Great Britain in 2011 by
Pen & Sword Military
an imprint of
Pen & Sword Books Ltd
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Copyright Bryan Perrett 2011

ISBN: 978-1-84884-450-6
ePub ISBN: 9781848849884
PRC ISBN: 9781848849891

The right of Bryan Perrett to be identified as Author of this Work
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and Patents Act 1988.

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Contents

Map 1. This chart shows the major British and German naval bases within the area covered by this book. It also includes some details concerning the Battle of Jutland.

In 1914 it was fully understood by Germanys higher naval and military authorities that, despite having acquired the largest empire in the world, the civilian population of the British Isles had not experienced war at first hand since the Civil Wars of the mid-17th Century, save for brief and mainly local hostilities resulting from the Jacobite risings, an abortive French landing at Fishguard in 1797, and an equally abortive rising, with French support, in Ireland the following year. This was considered to be an area of general weakness that could be exploited with the object of eroding the British will to continue fighting.

This exploitation, it was believed, could be achieved in a number of ways. First, while a general engagement between the German High Seas Fleet and the British Grand Fleet would probably end in victory for the latter on the basis of size alone, a series of raids along the UKs East Coast would erode the confidence of the British public in the Royal Navys ability to provide the same degree of protection that existed throughout the Napoleonic Wars. This would be aggravated by the Grand Fleet having been deployed to Scapa Flow in the extreme north, leaving large areas of the east coast protected by light naval units that could easily be overwhelmed at the point of contact. Civilian casualties incurred in this kind of raid would generate a sense of unease along the coast, together with the fear of a German landing in pursuit of local objectives.

Second, air power could be deployed to generate further unease inland. Naval Zeppelin airships were already performing reconnaissance duties for the High Seas Fleet and, together with the Armys Zeppelins, these could be armed with bombs and attack wide areas of the British mainland. It was true that the weight of munitions carried by the Zeppelins was only a fraction of that carried by, say, a battle cruiser, but the sheer unpredictability of raids that inflicted death, injury and destruction across a wide area would, it was believed, further damage British morale. The only property exempted from attack was that belonging to the Royal Family, by personal order of the Kaiser. Furthermore, to provide a defence against the Zeppelins, the British authorities would have to retain at home thousands of men plus hundreds of guns and aircraft that could have been put to good use on the Western Front.

Much would depend on control of the North Sea. In this respect the British demonstrated an early superiority by carrying out a destructive raid into the Heligoland Bight, on the very doorstep of the High Seas Fleet. This resulted in several German cruisers being sunk at little cost to the Royal Navy. For their part, the Germans had to accept that naval attacks on the British mainland had to be hit-and-run affairs, conducted before the battleships and battle cruisers of the Grand Fleet could be brought south to deal with the attackers. In this respect, the Germans, little knowing that copies of their signal code books had fallen into British hands, were in for a most unpleasant surprise. Somehow, with the exception of the first raid, which simply resulted in a pointless bombardment of the Yarmouth foreshore and the loss of a German armoured cruiser in a minefield, the Royal Navy seemed to have an uncanny habit of appearing in strength whenever a raid was in progress. The raids on Scarborough, Whitby and the Hartlepools in December 1914 were at first considered to be a brilliant success, but subsequent analysis proved that they had been counterproductive. First, they involved heavy loss of civilian life although no military installations existed at Scarborough or Whitby. This wanton targeting of innocent civilians not only provided a spur to British recruiting, which was already good, but also earned the condemnation of neutral powers. Further examination revealed that thanks to a combination of poor visibility and sheer luck, the raiders escaped by the skin of their teeth. The following month a sortie to the Dogger Bank area resulted in a battle that ended with the loss of a heavy cruiser. The Kaiser was furious. It would be over a year before he sanctioned another foray by heavy units of his surface fleet and that ended in serious mine damage to one of his precious battle cruisers to little purpose.

Meanwhile, the Zeppelin air offensive had started on the night of 1920 January 1915 and gradually gathered pace throughout the year, involving naval and to a lesser extent Army airships. A small number of raids inflicted serious civilian casualties and damage, but most produced trivial results for the effort involved. The initial reaction was one of anger that the Royal Navy had permitted the raiders to get through. This was quickly followed by a realisation that there was little that the surface fleet could do to prevent Zeppelin raids and an acceptance that the Germans possessed air superiority over large areas of the North Sea. However, once initial fears of wholesale death and destruction raining from the skies proved to be unfounded, public attitudes hardened. After the North Sea bombardments the general opinion was that this sort of cowardly attack on defenceless civilians was all that could be expected from the enemy. More subtle was the change brought about by the ever-lengthening casualty lists from the front, lists that would grow longer still and leave barely a family in the land untouched. For the first time the general public felt that they were as much part of the war as the citizen soldiers fighting in the trenches, so that instead of civilian morale cracking as a result of the air attacks, it actually hardened.

The only real effect the raids had on the British war effort was the unwelcome diversion of numerous Royal Flying Corps and Royal Naval Air Service fighter squadrons to home defence, together with the creation of a substantial anti-aircraft defence organisation including early warning and ground control systems, anti-aircraft artillery batteries and searchlight units. To some extent this was made easier by the fact that the airships most favoured targets were situated in London and south-eastern England. This meant that they entered British airspace over East Anglia and, having completed their mission, left via Kent or Essex. It was easy, therefore, to construct defensive cordons across the entry and exit routes.