The King's Ships Were at Sea: The War in the North Sea, August 1914 to February 1915

by James Goldrick

The first six months of naval operations during World War I are significant for what they reveal of initial British and German reactions to the challenge of war. Furthermore, those months represent the beginning of modern naval warfare. Until this study by James Goldrick, however, no book has offered a thoroughly detailed and balanced examination of the period. Unlike official histories that often present a stilted, biased viewpoint, The Kings Ships Were at Sea provides an engrossing and objective account of the action from both sides. Unlike popular histories that focus merely on the major battles, this book takes a close look at the day-to-day events that brought about the principal encounters. Such an approach is doubly beneficial. First, it allows us to see the major battles in their context and forces us to realize that they were not chance encounters with inevitable results, as some would lead us to believe. Second, it exposes the defects on both sides.

In an intelligent and ingenious way, Goldrick points out the deficiencies in each navy-not only in material, strategy, and tactics, but in communications and personnel. Above all, he demonstrates the degree to which each organization was able to recognize its own shortcomings and mistakes and to remedy them. At the same time, the author does not neglect those "maneuvers well executed." He points to officers on both sides who displayed great skill and strength. We learn, for example, about the captain of the HMS Indomitable at Dogger Bank, who ignored his admiral's orders when they did not fit the tactical picture, and the German admiral, who, during the same action, kept his nerve in the face of disaster and refused to let the remainder of his scouting group go the way of the SMS Blucher. In addition, we gain new insights into leading personalities such as First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill and Admiral Prince Louis of Battenberg, whose strengths and weaknesses are clarified.

An important feature of the book is its analysis of the impact of new technology on the conduct of operations. In 1914, submarines came into their own as weapons systems, aircraft began to play an effective role, and surface action, conducted at high speed and in poor weather, was largely under the control of the wireless. In January 1915, the first truly long range, big-gun engagement took place. And the question explored here of how well both the British and German commanders operated in such a vastly new environment has significant contemporary relevance. This book provides a case study in the adjustment of naval forces to new technological developments and clearly offers lessons we need to learn today.

Genres: History, World War I, Naval History, War, Military Fiction

356 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 1984

About the author

James Goldrick is a retired two-star rear admiral in the Royal Australian Navy who held several seagoing commands and later led the Australian Defence Force Academy, Australia’s Border Protection Command, and the Australian Defence College.

Reviews

[Dimitri · Rating 4 out of 5]

Before Jutland, the King’s ships were at sea and there was many a thing wrong with them. The professional eye of Rear-Admiral James Goldrick offers an arcane analysis of the Grand Fleet’s deficiencies as revealed during the first 6 months of the war. On the surface, the Royal Navy justly deserved its reputation of invincibility. Not only was it numerically stronger in capital ships, it also boasted the greatest number of Dreadnoughts that combined the speed of a cruiser with the unprecedented firepower of a 12-inch broadside.

The war could yet be lost in an afternoon. Since their main enemy, the German Hochseeflotte , could not hope to achieve parity, much less superiority, it opted for a strategy of mutual assured destruction. The problem, as the nuclear age has shown, is that mutual destruction tends to be applied mutually. Both sides strived for an encounter where the advance guard would pin down its opponent until the main force could close in and annihilate it.

Operationally, this was similar to the massive battle which was grinding down along the frontiers of France, albeit with one crucial difference. The naval version gave a prominent role to a shadowy kind of skirmishers, lurking inconspicuously in advance of the main body. While a modern battleship was all-steel and heavily armoured to withstand the impact of explosive shell that literally weighted a ton and survive to sail another day, it was not immune to the principles of Archimedes A single penetration of the hull under the waterline could sink it as easily as a wooden ship of the line. That is why a screen of torpedo boats and submarines – and their natural enemy, the destroyers - accompanied the battleship squadrons, to tilt the balance even before the broadsides could be brought to bear.

Both weapons saw the light around 1900. The torpedo had evolved from a mine into a self-propelled weapon with a reach of several thousand yards. The diesel-powered submarine had a handful of pre-industrial precedents, but had made its debut in battle as recently as the Russo-Japanese war of 1905. Their capabilities were therefor poorly understood. It was clear that the days of the close blockade were numbered when harbours were defended by these new vessels, but how would they perform in open waters? They were not truly submersibles, since the limited power of their batteries forced them to stay on the surface most of the time and only dive for attack.

The net result was a submarine paranoia which runs through the book like a comic relief through a soap opera. Destroyers would engage phantom submarines after a cruiser hit an errant mine; even solitary foam-capped waves were mistaken for the predator eye of a periscope. Goldcirk anchors the rest of the story firmly within the technology and doctrine of the pre-war Navy.

The celebrated one-volume treatments of the First World War by Keegan & Strachan paint a rosy, almost inspirational picture of the service. It goes something like this. The Armies turned a blind eye to the obsolescence of cavalry and the bayonet and neglected the value of the airplane; as Foch infamously declared, it was only good for sport. By no fault of their own, communications remained stuck on a 19th century level thanks to the cumbersome radio apparatus. By contrast, the navies of the Great Powers were unhindered by misplaced nostalgia. Sailing ships swiftly gave way to ironclads fired by coal and oil. Broadsides by 32-pdr muzzle-loaders with an effective range of a few hundred meters were replaced by breech-loading turrets which could hit a ship miles away. There was sufficient room to accommodate wireless, abolishing the reliance on visual signals.
The reality was less crystal. The most modern compass could completely prevent the all-age guesswork about one’s position on the open sea, even less so in relation to both friend and foe. The effective range of wireless on smaller ships was often insufficient for the flagship to maintain effective control over the line of battle. The continuously belching smoke obscured the traditional flag signals. When it conspired with humid weather to form smog banks, the oily fumes even affected battle.

This was only the most visible of the problems inherent to the age of coal-burning fleets, which would not fully evolve into oil until after the war. Goldrick presents us with some of his most graphic excerpts on this subject, since the men who lived through the transition claimed themselves that people who hadn’t, couldn’t fully imagine the amount of effort required to feed the fire. Even during peacetime manoeuvers, the top speed of the newest capital ships was seldom achieved because of the frightfully high (and thus expensive) consumption rate of the furnaces. The backbreaking labour was continuous and a ship’s de facto cruising speed depended more than anything on easy-to-access coal bunkers. Consequently, the cruising speed of a squadron was dictated by the best effort of its elder pre-Dreadnought capital ships to catch up. The inferior quality of German coal restricted their operative range as a fleet largely to the Heligoland Bight.

Artillery had always been an exact science and naval gunnery in ‘14-‘18 was, despite the development of primitive targeting computers, no less challenging than in the age of sail. Even a 4000 m² ship with a towering superstructure made for an elusive prey while in motion at 10 to 20km distance (beyond pre-war estimates), with its own muzzle flashes the only colourful spot amidst the dull waters and smoke. The number of hits versus expended shells was drastically low, with the misses throwing up curtains of water around the target. On the other hand, when a 12-inch battery found its mark, it could sink a ship within minutes if the crew was lucky enough to score a square hit in the ammo stock. Each country had its own procedures regarding the loading and stocking ammunition from hold to turret, but captains on both sides had to watch helplessly as the next ship (or their own!) vanished in one gigantic explosion.

A final common defect that plagued both the vessels and the crews was as old as war itself. Prussia, with its relatively short Baltic shoreline, had no naval tradition to speak of. The manpower demands of the Kaiserliche Marine were far larger than the number of fishermen etc. who could leaven it with some sea legs. Great Britain had a proud naval tradition, but it had been sitting on the docks for almost a century. Certainly, the Royal Navy had dispatched a field Army to the Crimea and patrolled the shipping lines of the Empire, but it hadn’t operated as a concentrated force in a single theatre of war or maintained a blockade at any distance since the original “Great War” of 1792-1815. The annual peacetime maneuvers were conducted in the mild climate of the azure Mediterranean at low speeds.

These were peacetime navies about to get their first taste of war. The High Commands had no clear idea of the wear and tear that continuous patrols in the foggy greys of the North Sea entailed. The engineers had never driven the engines to the limit for hours on end in a feverish attempt to close the range on a fleeing flag. The crew had never stood by the guns as the walls vibrated with the thunder of impacting shells and the air was thick with the taste of cordite.

Apart from shared constraints by the limits of technology, the Grand Fleet and the Hochseeflotte each had worries of their own. To various extents, they each managed to corroborate the other side’s additional problems. So it goes, as Vonnegut would say. The wealth of sources produced by both sides (mostly post-Jutland), with the interwar German accounts often translated into English, enables us to regularly switch bridges in this balanced account.

The British had a long eastern coastline to protect and wide shipping lanes to patrol as part of their distant blockade. The Germans organized a few sorties against seaside towns, inflicting upon the civilian population the terror of the bombardment of Alexandria (1882) where Jellicoe had served as a young officer.

The existing anchorages for the Grand Fleet squadrons were not only too widely dispersed to timely intercept these raids; they also made it difficult to assemble the fleet for large-scale attacks. Scapa Flow emerged as the solution, but its growth was marked by poor infrastructure, groundings, collisions and a few dastardly U-boat intrusions. The Germans were at an advantage here, with their fleet centered on Wilhelmshaven (to this day it functions as the main naval base and only deep-water port of the Bundesrepublik ).

The shipping lanes which interconnected the vital resources of the Empire, including 50% of the food consumption of the Home Isles and many raw materials for the armaments industry, needed protection. The Germans were able, to In accordance with pre-war strategy, German surface raiding, most famously by the runaway Far East Squadron under Admiral Von Spee, stopped the Royal Navy from concentrating its assets in the North Sea Theater. The dispatching of cruisers to hunt the poachers was partly alleviated by units from the Mediterranean, where the allied French Navy took up the watch.

So far, nothing you can’t hear from Robert K. Massie. Largely. But Goldrick, as befits an Australian, looks out at all sides of the globe. One story of interest not often told concerns neutral Sweden. It played an uneasy game with its minefields, occasionally relaxing the traffic regulations. Why Sweden ?

A distinct flavour comes from the subtitle of the book “the war in Northern European waters” Waterzz as in plural; Goldrick generously includes the operations in the Baltic, with recent gems such as To Crown the Waves (2013) to help with the Russian side of things, since apart from a few submarines the Royal Navy played no part in this theatre. The Russian Imperial Navy was just starting to pull itself together after the near-fatal twin defeats of Port Arthur and Tsushima, but the psychological scars still ran deep. For one “fleet in being” was a principle adhered to in the extreme when it come to the precious new Dreadnoughts. For another, the prospect of a surprise torpedo attack on Kronstadt reinforced a defensive posture, with liberal use of minefields (which, like on the other side of Denmark, occasionally sank friendly vessels). Ironically, Germany was always on the lookout for an amphibious assault on the Baltic coast that could, in the larger scheme of things, cut off the flow between the twin land fronts and the hinterland. As things stood, the Baltic Islands became a center of contention (and the site of a successful German occupation in 1917).

Scouting is a small but highly intriguing subject of comparison: the British used their cruisers as the hunting dogs of tradition next to the first proto-aircraft carriers whose seaplanes were the eyes of the future. The Germans put more effort into their Zeppelins* and preferred to deploy submarines as an early warning system when they were not busy bending the established rules of ‘civilized’ naval warfare by indiscriminately attacking neutral shipping in the War Zone around the Home Isles, until the German ambassador in Washington faced an irate Woodrow Wilson over the sinking of the RMS Lusitania . Dawn bombardments and Zeppelin raids on towns along the East Coast likewise infuriated the British press, pressuring the Grand Fleet into action. A few minor sorties towards Wilhemshaven can be traced back exclusively to this dimension of the total war that was taking shape between the sobbing ruins of civilian targets, but at no point did political pressure launch the military into a turbine-propelled Balaclava.

The battles at Heligoland Bight and the Dogger Bank showed foremost that the ‘piecemeal’ strategy didn’t work out for either side. The elements of the Grand Fleet were (initially) too dispersed to concentrate in time, while the German High Command was too cautious, with the mercurial anxieties of the Kaiser looming over every cancelled sortie in strength. Both sides showed a tendency to increase the minimum size of the sortie force. In the parlance of World War II, a flock of “carrier battle groups” centered around Dreadnought battleships could not easily be cut into motti like Soviet infantry battalions during the Winter War.

Although the main duel between Sheer and Jellicoe still lay over a year in the future at the end, there was too little time to correct these defects, creating a draw at Jutland that we’ll continue to dissect for another century. It is impossible to understand this hotly debated clash without knowledge of how the opposing fleets came into being or how the experience of 1914-15 shaped their commanders. Many respectable works on Jutland will provide this background information in abridged format, but Goldrick twists our head around to see the events ‘prior’ in the contemporary fashion, with pre-war assertions slowly unraveling and every sighting of the sleek Kaiserliche Marine as THE long-awaited opportunity to wreck it into state of irreversible harmlessness.

Overall, this is a worthwhile revision of 1984's The King's Ships Were at Sea...it just DRAGS in the middle because, let's face it, there's not a whole lot of salvoes going on...

*Angus Konstam in his book on Jutland touches upon a wireless monitoring system in South-East England that could deduct the movements of German flotillas based on the intensity of their radio traffic, in a way that is reminiscent of the Chain Home system that traditionally is credited with victory in the Battle of Britain. See also Battlebags and Naval Aviation

Works cited:
The King's Ships Were at Sea: The War in the North Sea, August 1914-February 1915(no cover) byJames Goldrisk (no photo)
by John Keegan
by Hew Strachan
& by Robert K. Massie.
byVincent P. O'Hara (no photo)
British Airships of the First World War an Illustrated History by Ces Mowthorpe(no photo)
by R.D. Layman (no photo).
by Angus Konstam

[Gary · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best military history books I've read in quite some time. The author did an excellent job in presenting the different issues the navies faced before the war, as well as during the early months of the war. Popular attention may go to big ship actions, but often simple minelaying operations may have even more relevance, and this book does a good job of showing it. I only wish he'd done a similar volume for the things after Jutland.

[Dave · Rating 5 out of 5]

Phenomenal – an operational history of the naval war in the English Channel, North Sea and Baltic Sea from August 1914 through to the end of January 1915. As well as the actions themselves, it covers the personalities involved and provides valuable insight into the challenges of command and communication in fleets that had undergone radical technological change in the years leading up to the First World War. The book is clearly written by someone who has both a thorough academic and intuitive understanding of the subject.

The standard of writing is very high – it is engaging and interesting without dropping into ‘dramatics’, and the structure of the book itself takes readers through a range of complex topics, events and issues in an easy and intuitive fashion. The standard of editing is very high – I only spotted on slip in the 300+ pages of text of the main body of the book, which is almost unheard of these days.

The standard of the research is also excellent – there’s an 18-page bibliography, which includes a number of unpublished dissertations and private papers, as well as official documents, journal articles and books. There are also 43 pages of notes, which are primarily for referencing, but also include some further information where appropriate. There is a thorough index, a list of illustrations (these aren’t the focus of the work – the images are well-chosen, but are relatively small) and track charts for the actions (which are larger, taking up a whole page), as well as a number of maps.

Importantly, in the conclusion, the book relates the history of the early stages of the northern European naval conflict of World War One to contemporary naval challenges, highlighting the clear relevance of history to getting better results in the present and future.

All in all, it’s an excellent book, and sets a high standard for similar works to be benchmarked against. It might be a little challenging if it was the first book on naval history someone had read (as there are a number of naval/maritime terms used that aren’t explained in the book), but if someone wanted to get a good understanding of the first seven months of the First World War at sea in the North Sea, Channel and Baltic, I’d be very surprised if there was a better source available.

[Rich · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty dense at times, and the battle maps were hard to follow, but overall an interesting read. Really interesting to think about modern weapons without GPS, and submarines without sonar.

[Lawrence · Rating 4 out of 5]

Before Jutland is a definitive study of the naval engagements in northern European waters in 1914–15 when the German High Sea Fleet faced the Grand Fleet in the North Sea and the Russian Fleet in the Baltic. Author James Goldrick reexamines one of the key periods of naval operations in the First World War, arguing that a focus on the campaign on the western front conceals the reality that the Great War was also a maritime conflict. Combining new historical information from primary sources with a comprehensive analysis of the operational issues, this book is an extensive revision of The King’s Ships Were at Sea, Goldrick’s earlier work on this naval campaign. In all, Before Jutland shows not only what happened, but how the various navies evolved to meet the challenges that they faced during the Great War and whether or not that evolution was successful.

[Harmon Ward · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have finished the book and am currently reading it again, with a sharpie and pen in hand. The book contains so much detail I want to note the points I missed earlier.