To Kiel in the 'Hercules'

by Lewis R. Freeman

Commander C—— (to give his equivalent British rank) volunteered a good deal more about Jutland on this occasion, as well as of the strategy in connection with those final plans which went awry through the failure of men, but it will be best, perhaps, to let this appear in its proper sequence in a connected account of what he told, in the course of the several days we were thrown together, of the German naval problems generally, and his own experiences and observations at Horn Reef in particular.

"We were greatly disappointed when England came into the war," he said, "but hardly dismayed. We had built all our ships on the theory that it was the English fleet they were to fight against, and we felt confident that we had plans that had a good chance of ultimately proving successful. But those plans did not contemplate—either at the outset, or at any subsequent stage of the war down to the very end—a gunnery battle to a finish. The best proof of that fact is the way the guns were mounted in our capital ships, with four aft and only two forward. That meant that their rôle was to inflict what damage they could in swift attacks, and that they were expected to do their heaviest fighting while being chased back to harbour. Since the British fleet had something like a three-to-two advantage over us in modern capital ships, and about two-to-one in weight of broadside, I think you will agree that this was not only the best plan for us to follow, but practically the only one.

"I think it will hardly surprise you when I say that, up to the outbreak of the war, we knew a great deal more about your navy than you did about ours. To offset that—and of much greater importance—is the fact that your knowledge of our navy and its plans during the war was far better than ours of yours. You always seem to score in the end. But at the outset, as I have said, we were the better informed, and, among other things, we knew that we had better mines than you had, and (as I think was fully demonstrated during the first two years) we had a far better conception in advance of the possibilities of using them—both offensively and defensively—than you had. During the first two years and a half your mines turned out to be even worse than we had expected, and it is an actual fact that some of the more reckless of our U-boat commanders used to fish them up and tow them back to base to make punchbowls of. In the last twenty months you not only had two or three types of mine (one of them American, I think) that were better than anything we ever had, but you were also using them on a scale, and with an effectiveness, we had never dreamed of.

"We also thought we had a better torpedo than you had—that it would run farther, straighter, keep depth better, and do more damage when it struck. I still think we have something of the best of it on that score, though at no time was our superiority so great as we reckoned. Your torpedoes ran better than they detonated, and—especially in the first two years—a very large number of fair hits on all classes of our lighter craft were spoiled by 'duds.' This, I am sorry to say, was not reported nearly so frequently during the last year and a half.

"HERCULES," WITH THREE V-CLASS DESTROYERS IN KIEL HARBOR

"But it was on the torpedo that we counted to wear down the British margin of strength in capital ships to a point where the High Sea Fleet would have a fair chance of success in opposing it. We expected that our submarines would take a large and steady toll of any warships you endeavoured to blockade us with, and that they would even make the risk of patrol greater than you would think it worth while to take. Although we made an encouraging beginning by sinking three cruisers, we were doomed to heavy disappointment over the U-boat as a destroyer of warships. We failed to reckon on the almost complete immunity the speed of destroyers, light cruisers, battle-cruisers, and even battleships would give them from submarine attack, and we never dreamed how terrible an enemy of the U-boat the destroyer—especially after the invention of the depth-charge—would develop into. As for the use of the submarine against merchant shipping, to our eternal regret we never saw what it could do until after we had tried it. If any German had had the imagination to have realized this in advance, so that we could have had a fleet of a hundred and fifty U-boats ready to launch on an unrestricted campaign against merchant shipping the day war was declared, I think you will not deny that England would have had to surrender within two months.

"We also made the torpedo a relatively more important feature of the armament of all of our ships—from destroyers to battleships—than you did. They were to be our "last ditch" defence in the event of our being drawn into a general fleet action—just such an action, in fact, as the battle of Horn Reef was. We knew all about your gunnery up to the outbreak of the war, and the fact that the big-gun target practices were only at moderate ranges—mostly under 16,000 metres—told us that you were not expecting to engage us at greater ranges. But all the time we were meeting with good success in shooting at ranges up to, and even a good deal over, 20,000 metres, and so we felt sure of having all the best of a fight at such ranges. We knew that our 11-inch guns would greatly out-range your 12-inch (perhaps you already know that even the 8.2-inch guns of the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau out-ranged the 12-inch guns of the Invincible and Indefatigable at the Falkland battle), and we hoped they might even have the best of your 13.5's. We also knew that our ships were better built than yours to withstand the plunging fall of long-distance shots, and we felt sure that our explosive was more powerful than your lyddite. I am not sure that this proved to be the case, though there is no question that our hits generally did more harm than yours because more of them penetrated decks and armour.

"Feeling confident, then, of having the best of a long-range action, our plan was, as I have said, to use the torpedo as a 'last ditch' defence in case the English fleet tried to reduce the range to one at which it could be sure of securing a higher percentage of hits and thus making the greater weight of its broadside decisively felt. In such a contingency we planned to literally fill the sea with torpedoes, on the theory that enough of them must find their targets to damage the enemy fleet sufficiently to force it to open out the range again, and perhaps to cripple it to an extent that would open the way for us to win a decisive victory. Theoretically, this plan was quite sound, for it was based on the generally recognized fact that from three to five torpedoes—the number varying according to the range and the interval between the targets—launched one after the other at a line of ships cannot fail to hit at least one of them, providing, of course, that they all run properly.

"Well, almost the identical conditions under which we had planned and practised to run our torpedo barrage were reproduced at Horn Reef when the British battle fleet came into action near the end of the day, but it failed because the English Admiral anticipated it—probably because he knew in advance, as you always seemed to know everything we were doing or intended to do, what to expect—by turning away while still at the extreme limit of effective torpedo range. Most of our spare torpedoes went for almost nothing, so far as damage to the enemy was concerned, in that 'barrage,' and it would have gone hard with us had there been enough daylight remaining for the English fleet to have continued the action. Its superior speed would have allowed it to make the range whatever its commander desired, and—even before half of the battleships of it were firing—we were absolutely crushed by sheer weight of metal, and it would not have been long before every one of our ships would have been incapable of replying. You will see, then, that, in the sense that it postponed the brunt of the attack of the English battle fleet attack until it was too late for it to be effective, our torpedo barrage undoubtedly saved the High Sea Fleet from complete destruction.