"The Coal Black Sea – How a Shocking 1914 Naval ..." Topic

…Disaster Nearly Sank Winston Churchill

"JUST SIX WEEKS into the First World War, three British armoured cruisers, HMS Hogue, Aboukir and Cressy, patrolling in the southern North Sea, were sunk by a single German U-boat.

The defeat made front page news across Europe. It was the biggest story from the war to date; it shocked the British public; established the submarine as a major naval threat; threatened wartime morale and undermined confidence in the supposedly invincible Royal Navy. It also handed a priceless propaganda coup to Germany.

Forced to abandon ship, men desperately clung on to pieces of driftwood battling hyperthermia, as the frigid North Sea was turned inky black by the coal released from the ship's bunkers. The incident claimed the lives of 1,459 men and boys, some as young as 15 years old. The death toll was higher than that at the Battle of Trafalgar or the sinking of the RMS Lusitania…"

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Armand

Old but sizable ships – 12,000t, 6-in side armor, 3-in decks, 2 x 9.2-in main battery, 21 kts when new. But designed and built with no torpedo protection and poor sub-division; basically designed before torpedoes had matured into any sort of real threat.

Very risky choice of patrol area in the North Sea as well as quite inappropriate patrol tactics (patrol speed IIRC was single digit knots). Their loss served as quite a dramatic wake-up call to the modern submarine threat circa 1914.

B

Thanks.

Armand

Churchill is not the only party the historians implicate in this one, although his prominence as an actor always helps to generate attention and sell books. Admiral Sturdee was fingered by Fisher (who disliked him anyway), and perhaps more fairly by Marder, as was the squadron commander, Admiral Christian, who had considered the patrol so routine that he stayed in port when his flagship had mechanical problems.

In defense of both men, it's a lot to expect a man in his early fifties to rapidly assimilate the impact of very recent technical changes; as recently as the Russo-Japanese War, after all, the torpedo was still a very short range weapon and the submarine's potential was doubtful until demonstrated..

Christian in particular is a man about whom I know little, but who drew the complex and difficult tasks of organizing the landings at ANZAC and Suvla after his stint as a cruiser commander. His account of these would be interesting to read, but unfortunately, if he left one, I have never found it. He gets periodic mentions in accounts of the Gallipoli campaign, but always brief ones, too brief to draw much of a conclusion. Perhaps some day HMSO will get around to publishing the testimony before the Dardanelles Commission.

The early steel warships had short service lives. The pace of technological change generally made them obsolescent within ten years. Dreadnought (perhaps the most startling example) had already been detached from the Grand Fleet at the time of Jutland.

With the pre-dreadnoughts, machinery was probably a major contributing factor. The boilers and reciprocating engines showed their wear badly, and you can find lots of instances of the tactical impact of this recorded (although probably mostly anecdata) in the 1914 "Jane's" reprint: "machinery old and no longer steams well, cannot any longer make her designed speed," etc.

The pace of technological change

Exactly.

It becomes even sadder when the ships provided to Admiral Cradock to deal with Von Spee are considered -

Good Hope
14,100t – launched 1901 – 2 x 9.2in + 16 x 6in – 6in belt

Monmouth
9,800t – launched 1901 – 14 x 6in – 4in belt

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By comparison -

Scharnhorst and Gneisenau
12,800t – launched 1906 – 8 x 8.2in + 6 x 5.9in – 6in belt

B

Thanks also…

Armand