Castles of Steel by Robert K. Massie
Fisher accepted Churchill’s decision and, from retirement, pressed the new First Lord: “Aviation supersedes small cruisers and intelligence vessels. You told me you would push aviation. You were right.” In fact, Churchill needed no urging. Entranced by these new flying machines and despite appeals from his wife, his friends, and his cousin the Duke of Marlborough—the duke declared that his new fancy was undignified as well as dangerous—Churchill, at thirty-eight, took flying lessons and was ready to solo when his instructor was killed. With that, the First Lord ruefully abandoned the air. Nevertheless, he continued vigorously to promote airplanes, both as scouts for the fleet and as defensive weapons “for the protection of our naval harbors, oil tanks, and vulnerable points.” He acquired for the navy land-based airplanes, with wheels, and sea-based hydro-airplanes—“or seaplanes as I christened them, for short”—with floats. In 1912, a wheeled navy airplane took off from a platform on the deck of the predreadnought battleship Hibernia while the ship was under way; subsequently, the plane landed on shore. In 1913, the old light cruiser Hermes was refitted to carry two seaplanes. At the outbreak of the war, Churchill announced, “I had fifty efficient naval machines, or about one third the number in possession of the army.” By September 3, with the German army on the Marne, all 150 of the British army’s aircraft had been sent to France. At a Cabinet meeting that day, Kitchener privately asked Churchill whether the navy could assume responsibility for the aerial defense of Great Britain. Churchill instantly agreed.
The weeks that followed made clear the division in Churchill’s mind between his disdain for rigid airships as useful components of the Royal Navy and his fear of German zeppelins as deadly, bomb-carrying raiders able to sow destruction over the British Isles. The zeppelin nightmare had first horrified England in 1910, and every year magnified it. Psychologically, there was cause: from the ground, a zeppelin, the size of a dreadnought in the sky, making its serene, unchallenged progress through the heavens, created an impression of implacable power. Sensationalist stories appeared describing enemy flying battleships, each with a heavy cargo of bombs, cruising the night skies over naked, defenseless England. During the winter of 1912 and 1913, “airships on nocturnal missions of frightening import” were “witnessed” far and wide over the British Isles; over London, Sheerness, Portland, Dover, Liverpool, and Cardiff. Alarm spread beyond the tabloids; Colonel Charles A’Court Repington, the military correspondent of The Times, predicted attacks by fleets of German airships on British arsenals, dockyards, and industrial centers. Repington was not alone; Churchill as First Lord warned the Committee on Imperial Defence in December 1912 that “our dockyards, machine shops, magazines and ships lying in basins are absolutely defenseless against this form of attack.”
On the second day of the war, a zeppelin actually attacked a city. Furious that stubborn resistance by the Belgian forts at Liège was upsetting the timetable of the Schlieffen Plan, German officers warned that if the invaders were not permitted to pass, zeppelins would destroy the city. The Belgians refused and on August 6, the zeppelin L-Z arrived overhead. Thirteen bombs dropped; nine civilians died. On August 24 and September 2, zeppelins bombed Antwerp and more civilians were killed.
Suddenly, the menace to England became real. London lay within range of the zeppelin sheds at Cologne and Düsseldorf. German airships might bomb the Houses of Parliament, Buckingham Palace, the Admiralty—or, worse, the oil tanks, power houses, lock gates, and magazines at Chatham, Woolwich, or Portsmouth. Churchill, now responsible for the air defense of Great Britain, knew he could not prevent this; he had no antiaircraft guns, no searchlights, no fighter aircraft. Eventually, as the war continued, Churchill’s early belief was vindicated that “airplanes were the only means by which the zeppelin menace was destroyed. However,” he said, “we were not in a position at the beginning of the war to produce effective results. Airplane engines were not powerful enough to reach the great heights needed for the attack of zeppelins in the short time available. Night flying had only just been born. . . . But it was no use sitting down and waiting a year [for defensive measures to be ready. For the moment] only offensive action could help us.”
Churchill understood that although at first German zeppelins were immune in the air, this immunity deserted them on the ground. It was here that Churchill proposed to hit them, “by bombing from airplanes, the zeppelin sheds wherever these gigantic structures could be found. . . . In order to strike at the zeppelin sheds in Germany, it was necessary to start from as near the enemy’s line as possible.” Already on September 12, Churchill had called for stationing “the largest possible force of naval aeroplanes at Calais or Dunkirk.” On September 22, four ground-based Royal Naval Air Service planes, flying from Antwerp, attacked zeppelin sheds in Düsseldorf and Cologne on the Rhine. One pilot located the target, but his bombs missed. On October 8, a British naval airplane destroyed a zeppelin in its shed at Düsseldorf. On November 21, four navy planes flying from Belfort in eastern France attacked the zeppelin construction works at Friedrichshafen, on Lake Constance. They did no damage.
There were zeppelin sheds at the German naval airship bases at Cuxhaven and Hamburg. They were beyond the range of British land-based airplanes flying from Britain, France, or Belgium, but they were not beyond the reach of air attack from the North Sea. But how might such an attack be mounted? By 1914, airplanes had taken off from ships but no plane with wheels had landed back on board a ship. Accordingly, unless air attacks from the sea on the zeppelin sheds were to be one-way missions, the planes used must be seaplanes and they must be carried most of the way to the target by ships that could recover them after the raid and bring them home. Excited by this concept, Churchill commandeered four cross-Channel passenger steamers and sent them to shipyards for alterations. (Hermes had been abandoned as being too old and slow.) Each of these new carriers—Empress, Riviera, Campania, and Engadine—was designed to embark three seaplanes, one forward and two aft. Long booms were installed to lift the fragile aircraft out over the side of the ship and place them in the water. Steel hangars erected on the stern decks provided shelter for the seaplanes from wind and sea. The aircraft themselves were single-engine biplanes made for the Admiralty by Short Brothers, Ltd.—Type 74s, Folders, and Type 135s—all of them with floats, two seats, and wings that folded back in order to fit the ungainly machines onto the steamers’ decks. The planes’ maximum speed was 78 miles an hour; the distance they could fly, fully fueled, was between 300 and 400 miles. Each plane could carry, in a rack between its floats, three nineteen-pound bombs, to be released by pulling a wire in the cockpit. A single bomb, the British believed, plunging through the roof of a zeppelin shed and bursting anywhere near the thousands of cubic feet of flammable hydrogen contained in a zeppelin, should suffice. By the end of August, three of the newly created seaplane carriers had been commissioned and sent to Harwich.
The First Lord’s eagerness to attack the Cuxhaven zeppelin base was thoroughly shared by the two Harwich commodores, Tyrwhitt and Keyes. On October 22, Tyrwhitt came to the Admiralty. “[I] arrived at 5 p.m. and was taken at once to the Holy of Holies where Prince Louis, Winston, and Sturdee were, and a long discussion followed. I produced my little plan (or rather, Roger Keyes’ plan) and got through it right away. . . . They kept me a long time and suddenly in walked the Prince of Wales.”
[Later King Edward VIII; subsequently, the Duke of Windsor.]
The plan was for six seaplanes to be embarked on Engadine and Riviera. The two seaplane carriers would be escorted into the Heligoland Bight by Tyrwhitt’s light cruisers and destroyers, and the force would wait while the seaplanes attacked the airship base at Cuxhaven and returned to be picked up.
The raid was scheduled for October 25. A smooth sea was essential for the seaplanes to take off from open water; at dawn on October 24, when the two carriers and their escort sailed from Harwich, the sea was calm. But a heavy rain fell during the passage across the North Sea and when, at first light on the twent
Tyrwhitt was disappointed, but, returning to the Admiralty, he found Churchill still enthusiastic. “I got considerable butter over my part in the proceedings,” the commodore wrote to his wife. “We are going to try again and I can’t help thinking we shall succeed this time.” The next attempt came on November 23. This time Jellicoe brought the Grand Fleet into the middle of the North Sea to support the carriers, but the operation was canceled by the Admiralty before the seaplanes were lifted onto the water. Explanations for this differ: Churchill blamed poor weather; Jellicoe declared that “the enemy had a force present in the Bight which would be too strong for our detached vessels.” Tyrwhitt was disgusted.
Churchill did not give up. On December 21, five days after the Scarborough Raid, Keyes and Tyrwhitt were told to try a third time. On Decem-ber 23, the weather forecast was promising and the Admiralty ordered the raid to be carried out at dawn on Christmas Day. Three seaplane carriers, Engadine, Riviera, and Empress, escorted by the light cruisers Arethusa, Undaunted, and Aurora and by eight destroyers, were to sail from Harwich for the Heligoland Bight. The force would be small because Tyrwhitt believed it would be easier for a few ships to penetrate the Bight undiscovered. Keyes sent out eleven submarines, positioning some around the launch point, others at the recovery position, still others off the German river mouths to intercept the High Seas Fleet should it emerge. Around the British submarines’ conning towers was painted a red and white checkerboard stripe to aid in recognition by British aviators who might need to land short of the carriers. Engadine, Riviera, and Empress would be escorted to a point fifteen miles north of Heligoland, where the seaplanes would be hoisted onto the water. After attacking the zeppelin base, the pilots were to reconnoiter the German fleet anchorages at Cuxhaven and Wilhelmshaven, noting the warships pres-ent, then fly west along the German coast to the island of Norderney; there they would turn north to rejoin the carriers, which would be waiting twenty miles offshore. Again, Jellicoe would bring the Grand Fleet into the middle of the North Sea. In this way, notes R. D. Layman, a leading contemporary historian of the Cuxhaven Raid, 150 British warships were to be employed “to deliver to the German mainland exactly eighty-one and one half pounds of explosives. This was the combined weight of the bursting charges in the twenty-seven bombs to be carried by the seaplanes.”
Hoping for surprise, Tyrwhitt sailed from Harwich at 5:00 a.m. on the day before Christmas without preliminary warning to anyone, leaving “stewards who had been landed . . . to obtain extras for Christmas Day . . . on the quay frantically waving turkeys and geese” at their departing ships. Entering the Bight at 4:30 on Christmas morning, they observed four small German patrol vessels. Soon after, Arethusa intercepted urgent German wireless traffic to and from Heligoland. Still two hours from the launching position, Tyrwhitt considered turning back; if enemy ships were on patrol in the Bight and if his force went forward and launched its seaplanes, the carriers would risk being discovered and sunk before their aircraft could be recovered. Nevertheless, unwilling to have come so far only to give up again, Tyrwhitt went forward.
Half an hour before dawn, the British ships reached their launch position and stopped their engines. The three carriers each hoisted three seaplanes onto a calm sea. The weather was cold and there was a breeze from the east, but the growing light revealed high visibility and no hint of fog; this was ideal flying weather. The planes were fueled for three hours’ flight. At 6:30 a.m., nine seaplanes were in the water, unfolding their wings and starting their engines. At 6:59 a.m., Tyrwhitt on Arethusa hoisted the signal for takeoff. Two planes suffering engine failure remained on the water and were hoisted back aboard the carriers. The lightness of the breeze forced the others into extended takeoff runs, but eventually, seven British seaplanes lifted into the air, passed Heligoland, and headed southeast toward Cuxhaven. Tyrwhitt signaled his ships to turn west and steam for the recovery position off Norderney.
The target for the seven attacking seaplanes was the Nordholz airship base, set amid fruit orchards eight miles south of the port of Cuxhaven. The base, which in October 1914 had become the headquarters of the German Naval Airship Division, consisted of a single huge shed containing two side-by-side hangars, each 597 feet long, each the home of one zeppelin. The twin-hangar structure itself was a technological marvel: the entire 4,000-ton mass, says Layman, was “mounted on a giant turntable that could swing it into any prevailing wind, a crucial consideration in the operation of airships for a wind blowing . . . across a hangar’s mouth . . . could keep a ship immobilized inside for hours or even days.” Another naval airship base existed near Hamburg; between them, the two bases housed all four of the German navy zeppelins then available for North Sea operations. The four airships, all constructed in 1914, were identical: 518 feet long, lifted by 794,000 cubic feet of hydrogen, powered by three motors that could drive the ship at 50 miles an hour. Each had a crew of twenty-four and a possible bomb load of several hundred pounds.
In good weather, the British pilots easily would have seen their target. From the air on a clear day, the high walls of the huge airship hangar were visible a dozen miles away and would have been recognized by the British aviators as they passed over Cuxhaven. But the weather, so clear and bright at sea, had deteriorated during the hour it took the planes to reach the German coast. As the sun rose higher, the fringe of the coastline and the river mouths remained visible, but over the inland plain, a heavy blanket of gray fog covered villages, farms, and fields. From time to time, the fog shifted, thinned, and even gave way to small patches of blue sky—at the Nordholz base at 6:30 a.m., the zeppelin L-6 had no difficulty lifting off for patrol.
When they arrived, the British pilots and observers looked down into “a thick ground fog drifting in masses . . . which blotted out everything except what was lying immediately under the machine.” One aviator descended to an altitude of 150 feet and still could not see the ground. Another set his course by a line of railway tracks and passed over villages, farms, and plowed fields. Eventually, the tracks led him to the Jade estuary where he flew over seven light cruisers, many destroyers, and a battle cruiser, all of which vigorously fired at him. Another pilot dropped his three bombs on sheds that he thought might constitute a seaplane base. One bomb scored a hit, but the sheds subsequently turned out to be structures for drying fish. Of the seven seaplanes that had taken off, only one reached the Nordholz zeppelin base. Its crew had been mistakenly briefed that the base was farther to the south and, because dense fog obscured the immense airship hangar, they failed to recognize it and contented themselves with bombing two antiaircraft guns. Only two of the seaplanes came close to harming the enemy. One dropped three bombs near the light cruisers Stralsund and Graudenz; the closest fell into the water 200 yards from Graudenz. Another seaplane, her engine misfiring, gave up the search for the zeppelin base, turned back, and, passing low over the Schillig roads, caused consternation among the crews of the warships anchored there. All of the ships opened fire on the small plane and some attempted to get under way.
[A long-perpetuated myth was that in the confusion caused by the appearance of British seaplanes over the Jade, the battle cruiser Von der Tann collided with another vessel and was severely damaged. This, supposedly, was the reason that Von der Tann was not present a month later at the Battle of Dogger Bank. Actually, during that battle, Von der Tann was in dry dock undergoing routine maintenance.]
The seaplane was hit, but the observer, Lieutenant Erskine Childers, a Royal Navy reserve officer now on active duty and the author of the popular thriller The Riddle of the Sands, managed to perform his mission. Childers was an expert on the German North Sea coast and rive
By 9:30 a.m., the raid was over. The British seaplanes had done no military harm. Ten bombs had been dropped on woods, fields, sheds, water, and sand. Six of the seven seaplanes, flying separately, had reached Norderney and were heading out to sea to find the carriers. Their fuel tanks were almost empty.
As British seaplanes flew this way and that over German farms, fishing sheds, and naval anchorages, and while Tyrwhitt’s force was steering for the recovery position, the German surface fleet remained at anchor. This was fortunate for the attackers. Once it became clear to scouting German patrol vessels, airships, and seaplanes that there were no dreadnoughts supporting Tyrwhitt’s little force in the Bight, even a few German light cruisers would have sufficed to overpower the unarmed and unarmored seaplane carriers. Tyrwhitt’s ships enjoyed this lucky exemption from surface attack because of a misunderstanding on the part of the German Naval Staff. The Germans had been expecting an attack on the Bight, not from the air, but on the surface. The British Admiralty had been collecting merchant vessels to convert into masquerade battleships and battle cruisers—the dummy fleet. Word of this collection process had reached Berlin. The German Naval Staff, however, did not know its purpose and believed that the assembled ships were to be brought in and sunk in the North Sea river and estuary channels, in order to block egress by the High Seas Fleet. They assumed that the raid, when it came, would be escorted by the Grand Fleet. On December 24, the Naval Staff received “dependable information” that the British were coming on Christmas Day. Expecting that the attack would be delivered by a massive British force that could be challenged only by the entire High Seas Fleet and mindful of the kaiser’s injunction that the battleships must not be risked, Ingenohl assigned the defense of the Bight on Christmas Day to U-boats and airships only. Even when reports from patrolling submarines and zeppelins indicated that the attacking British force was small, Ingenohl’s caution remained unshakable; Tyrwhitt’s ships, he assumed, were the vanguard of a larger British force. As a result, no German surface warship moved. Four battle cruisers, Seydlitz, Moltke, Derfflinger, and Von der Tann, were in Schillig roads, torpedo nets retracted, ready to proceed to sea, but the signal never came. At 10:00 a.m., they were ordered to reextend their torpedo nets. By then, in any case, it was too late; a thick fog had spread over the estuaries. Germany’s superior surface strength was useless.