For three hours the two clumsy and heavily armored warships traded fire, salvo after salvo ricocheting from the iron plates, an air of smoke-filled and noisy bewilderment everywhere, crowds onshore watching in horrified amazement, and in the end, after a whole day of fighting, with neither commander inflicting fatal damage on the other. Both ships withdrew, each corps of bridge officers supposing they had won the fight, but neither side having achieved their intended goal. The Virginia was scuttled inside the Roads some weeks later, and toward the end of the year Monitor, under tow out at sea, took on water and sank off Cape Hatteras. Yet despite the individual fortunes of the vessels involved, the Battle of Hampton Roads, fought at the very site of what has now become the greatest naval base in the world, changed the face of Atlantic warfare—and in time, the face of maritime warfare generally—forever.
From the moment of that battle—news of which spread around the world with surprising speed, considering that a reliable transatlantic telegraph cable had yet to be completed—no major Western navy would build an important sailing warship out of wood again. Iron, steam, engines, coal, oil, trunnions, swivels—these were the new vocabulary of late-nineteenth-century naval warfare. Topgallants and Turk’s heads, powder monkeys and marlinspikes and mainsails were words and notions that faded swiftly into memory.
Inventions that had eluded the mind of man through much of the age of sail now started to seep into common use: less than forty years after Hampton Roads came the marvels of wireless, which allowed ships to talk to one another and to their owners or their directors; forty years later still, there was radar, which allowed ships to see one another, or the land which they wanted either to avoid or to reach; then there was sonar, which permitted a mariner to know how far the ocean’s bottom was beneath him; and the making of submarines, which changed every rule of maritime warfare. These and a thousand other piece of wizardry turned the oceans, and the Atlantic in particular, into a very different arena for the conduct of war. Ships that in the sailing age could find and engage one another only with frustrating infrequency now could arrange to rendezvous—whether for reasons peaceful or belligerent scarcely matters—and with accuracy, regularity, and reliability. Warfare that had become more tactically organized now became more geographically directed; and when these developments were supplemented by the creation of weapons of great power and by a new generation of ships of great strength, and with vessels ordered to ranges of unimaginable scale and at speeds hitherto unthinkable, so the stain of warfare spread, cable by cable, fathom by fathom, until it encompassed the entire ocean.
And stain of warfare it was: Trafalgar had been a bloodbath, a massacre of wanton ship-killing and man-killing, and no battle that followed would be much less brutal. Decorum was at an end. Naval warfare was henceforward to be a truly horrible business, and though all the evidence of death sunk into the ocean, it was every bit as foul and fierce as the great land battles that were so notorious for their ghastliness. If Trafalgar was the last great Atlantic battle of the wooden ships, the Battle of Jutland, which was fought over two days in the early summer of 1916, was truly the first great Atlantic battle of vessels forged from steel. It was also the first Atlantic battle that employed guns designed to hurl explosive projectile shells—not merely the sail-slicing, spar-smashing balls of iron fired from the muzzle-loading black cannon that navies had used for centuries. Wooden-ship commanders had in past years come to some kind of unspoken accord neither to fuse nor to use exploding shells (since both were likely to set wooden ships ablaze, your own as often as your foes’); but post-Merrimack sailors, fighting aboard ships made of nonflammable metal, could do as they wished with high-explosive devices, could tinker with them on deck, could use immense rifled artillery pieces to lob these terrifying fast-spinning devices three miles across the water or more, to scourge and savage an enemy.
Naval visionaries soon realized that steel ships would at last offer floating platforms to the same kind of artillerymen who had for years been using rifled shell-firing guns on land. At a stroke the world’s new navies could become every bit as modern as the world’s land armies—but with just one difference: the ships, which were obliged to carry their own highly explosive ammunition with them in their magazines, had to be absolutely sure to protect them against hostile gunfire—for one well-placed shell in a magazine could destroy a ship in seconds, ripping her apart and sending her to the bottom. Armor, and lots of it—a belt of twelve-inch-thick steel plates weighing a quarter of a ton for each square foot enwrapped a battleship’s midsection—had to be applied; and vastly powerful new steam turbine engines had to be created to move this ponderous metal edifice swiftly across the seas.
All of this modernization was the brainchild of the then First Sea Lord, the remarkably ugly, autocratic, dance-obsessed,52 and much-loved Ceylon-born martinet Admiral Jacky Fisher—a man who first entered a navy of elegant wooden-walled sailing vessels, and who left behind him the biggest and most modern fleet of steam-powered iron ships then ever assembled. By the time of the outbreak of the Great War, Fisher’s new navy was a fighting force created in and for the Atlantic, and it gave Britain for the next half century near-total mastery of all the world’s seas.
Enormous bases, with quays and piers and cranes, graving docks and fuel bunkers, ammunition and stores, were constructed all around the British coasts and on the fringes of the world’s oceans. Though the Indian Ocean was nominally supervised from Trincomalee and the Pacific from Hong Kong and Sydney, the Atlantic was deemed most vital, and it was accordingly policed by squadrons of capital ships and their escorting flotillas based at naval headquarters in Bermuda, Jamaica, and Trinidad in the west, the Falkland Islands in the south, and Freetown, Simonstown, and Gibraltar in the east. Britain, from which the affairs of the North Atlantic were policed, was herself draped in an immense chain-mail curtain of naval protection: destroyers patrolled the western approaches, battleships cruised the North Sea and the deep waters off Ireland, enormous guns were forever trained over the narrow choke point of the Channel. Under Admiral Fisher’s explicit instruction, what was called the Grand Fleet was moved north, close to where the ever-expanding German navy might one day try to venture from her Baltic and North Sea bases. The ships were to be based at a sheltered lagoon—Scapa Flow—in the midst of the Orkneys, a roadstead protected from the Atlantic gales and the sub-Arctic blizzards by furze-covered sandstone islands, with waters shallow enough to provide a secure anchorage, and of an area large enough to accommodate the mammoth assembly of hardware—almost forty modern capital ships, which together with flotillas of destroyers and frigates made up the biggest and strongest military force then known in the world.
This fleet was untested, however. Napoléon’s defeat and death (on the mid-Atlantic island of St. Helena) was followed by a century of near peace in which scarcely any warships ever fired a shot in anger, nor did any British admirals stage any kind of major battle at sea. The first true test of these men and of their dreadnoughts, as the most gigantic of Fisher’s huge vessels came to be known—named so simply, for what could possibly cause so mighty a craft ever to be afraid—came in the cold early summer waters of the North Sea, eighty miles off the western entrance to the Baltic between Norway and Denmark, the Skaggerak.
The Battle of Jutland, the greatest confrontation ever between two fleets of steel battleships—more than 250 enormous ships were engaged—started on May 31, 1916, and brought together the German High Seas Fleet and the Royal Navy’s Grand Fleet. Twenty-five ships were lost and eight thousand men died, but the results, in strategic terms, were indecisive, with the Royal Navy still able to claim mastery of the eastern Atlantic.
The two fleets—the British Grand Fleet dispatched eastbound from Scapa Flow and the German High Seas Fleet steaming north from Wilhelmshaven, and each with battle-cruiser advance squadrons steaming before them—inflicted the most terrible punishment on one another, with ship after ship pummeled into submission by exploding shells, many sunk or exp
loded, and thousands of men killed in the most horrific circumstances. Two hundred and fifty steel ships fought with each other—twenty-eight British battleships, sixteen on the German side, and a huge number of auxiliaries. Both sides were astonished to lose capital ships that had been regarded—like the White Star liner Titanic four years before—as unsinkable and undefeatable. In the first hours of the battle, the British lost the Queen Mary and the Indefatigable, and later the Invincible, blown to smithereens when the flash from a German shell enveloped her magazine: all were immense battle cruisers. The Germans lost 62,000 tons of shipping during the two days of the conflict, and the British almost twice as much, 115,000 tons. Six thousand British sailors died, two thousand on the German side. Numerically it looked very much as though the Kaiser’s navy had won.
And all of this was in spite of the Royal Navy’s adroit success in crossing the German “T”—a performance of that classic naval maneuver that suddenly had German admirals seeing across their bows the entire Grand Fleet, with the British twelve- and fifteen-inch guns all trained to shoot broadsides that could decimate the Germans at will.
Yet the German fleet was not to be broken—a catalog of errors, signaling mistakes, poor gunnery, and bad ship design prevented the British from landing the knockout blow their commanders wanted. And despite all the carnage and loss, when the two fleets broke off the Jutland engagement and made it back home,53 the cool reckoning suggested only one thing: that submarines, torpedoes, and aircraft would be the dominant ocean instruments of war for the remaining thirty months of fighting. Big-ticket naval engagements, in which admirals of the old school tried to impose Trafalgar-like battle tactics on the new world of high-technology navies, would be short-lived indeed. The great naval encounters of the next war, the Second World War, would largely be fought by aircraft from carriers. Two years later the entire German High Seas Fleet surrendered—thanks not to any direct consequence of the encounter at Jutland, but in essence because the war came to an end both as the result of an allied naval blockade of the German ports, which brought the Kaiser’s economy to its knees, and because the German army collapsed on the Western Front. The Kaiser’s ships were all interned in the Orkneys, behind the same booms of Scapa Flow from which the British Grand Fleet had sailed for Jutland. Seventy-four ships were imprisoned there after the 1918 armistice, with bored and humiliated German skeleton crews manning them, all their guns spiked, all their ammunition confiscated. All of them awaited the outcome of the slow-moving peace negotiations in Versailles.
But then on June 21, 1919, a prearranged secret radio signal, which in essence said simply “Paragraph Eleven—Confirm,” was flashed to all of the waiting German ships—and, obeying long-established emergency orders that would be implemented on receipt of this cryptic note, the captains of the anchored warships immediately scuttled every last one of their ships, by opening seacocks, smashing pipes, gouging holes in the hulls, and allowing fifty-two of the ships to slip slowly down into the shallow waters of the lagoon before the British—most of whose ships were away at sea on exercise—could stop them.
The British fumed—they had wanted to divide up the surrendered fleet among other navies—and did what they could to punish the miscreant German officers. But in the end the provisions of Versailles allowed the Germans to go home; and in time some of the larger vessels were raised and sold for scrap, the money going to the British Treasury. (Many of the hulls remain—and high-quality German steel salvaged from some of the remaining wrecks is occasionally brought to the surface today, much prized for certain very delicate scientific experiments, since it was fashioned, forged, and cut long before the spread of radioactive contamination, which has affected most metals that have been made since Hiroshima.)
Naval commanders may have learned as many tactical lessons from Jutland as their predecessors did from Trafalgar more than a century before, but these lessons paled when set against one reality that was little understood at the time but is all too well realized today. And that is that all naval fleets were from the late nineteenth century onward to be made almost entirely of steel—and Britain, despite the vastness of her imperial possessions and the industriousness of her people and the sophistication of her factories and foundries, had less steel than the Germans, and in just a few years the Americans would have much more than the Germans. In the future, whoever had the greatest access to high-quality steel would eventually have the wherewithal to build the greatest navy in the world—which the United States soon and most definitely managed to do. That, and the eventual deployment of different and infinitely more potent kinds of naval weaponry—and kinds of weaponry that were no longer exclusively wedded to traveling on the surface of the sea, but could weave their way beneath the water, or fly thousands of feet above it—was what Jutland has come to signal to the admirals of today.
It would perhaps be invidious to remark that just as the Great War had ended with a famous episode of German naval scuttling, so the Second World War began with another—a scuttling that also involved a German capital ship, and which also occurred in the Atlantic, although in this case the South Atlantic. The ship was the pocket battleship Graf Spee, and the event occurred outside the port of Montevideo in Uruguay, at the widest part of the mouth of the River Plate.
The ship, a sleekly villainous-looking Nazi surface raider, was part of Hitler’s plan to restore Germany’s navy to its former glory—but it had been built as a cruiser, since the Versailles Treaty prevented the Germans from constructing anything larger. She was very fast, and had been armed with an arsenal more suited to a battleship—including eleven-inch guns. She left Wilhelmshaven in August 1939. Her commander, a Captain Langsdorff, had sealed orders to attack all Allied-flagged civilian vessels in the Atlantic once war had been declared.
When the British prime minister made that formal declaration on September 3, Graf Spee had already broken out into the North Atlantic, steamed north of the Faroes, turned sharply south, and was well into the calms of the Sargasso Sea, a thousand miles west of the Cape Verde Islands. As soon as Germany was formally at war, Langsdorff ordered his guns unsheathed and began a rigorous program of commerce raiding, attacking every merchantman he came across.
Grain carriers, frozen meat carriers, fuel tankers, it made no difference—the Graf Spee went after everything she found in the South Atlantic, successfully notching up a kill every three or four days, causing major consternation up in London and paying no heed at all to the American zone of neutrality that President Franklin Roosevelt had established to protect Allied merchant ships sailing within a thousand miles of the shores of either North or South America.
But then, early in December, the deadly little battleship encountered three smaller Royal Navy vessels that had been ordered to scour the seas in a frantic hunt for her. They were the cruisers Ajax, Exeter, and Achilles, and when they met, and despite being massively outgunned and outranged, they joined battle with the German ship with the madcap enthusiasm and imprudent tenacity of terriers. It did not take long for Exeter to be so badly damaged that she was forced to retire, and although Ajax and Achilles suffered major damage, too, a lucky shell strike from Exeter’s eight-inch guns on the Graf Spee’s midsection hugely reduced her fuel-processing system, leaving her with limited fuel and (though no one except Langsdorff knew this at the time) a consequently doomed future. The stricken German ship slowly limped into the neutral safety of Uruguayan territorial waters, and up to an anchorage in Montevideo port—her officers knowing only too well that under the neutrality terms of the Hague Convention she had only seventy-two hours to effect repairs.
Huge public interest was aroused by the ship’s steadily ticking fate, particularly while British naval reinforcements were gathering—or were believed to be gathering: many clever ruses were being played—in the ocean beyond. It was gripping stuff. In London, Harold Nicolson, the politician and diarist, wrote as follows for his entry of the December 17:
After dinner we listen to the news. It is dramat
ic. The Graf Spee must either be interned or leave Montevideo by 9.30. The news is at 9. At about 9.10pm they put in a stop-press message to the effect that the Graf Spee is weighing anchor and has landed some 250 of her crew at Montevideo. As I type these words she may be steaming to destruction (for out there, it is 6.30, and still light). She may creep through territorial waters until darkness comes and make a dash. She may assault her waiting enemies. She may sink some of our ships. . . .
The Graf Spee did leave port just before the deadline—but she did none of things Nicolson imagined. She steamed slowly out across the territorial limit, trailed by a small tug. Then, four miles from shore and still within sight of the vast crowds on the Montevideo waterfront, her crews exploded three almighty demolition charges inside her. These set her furiously ablaze and, at risk of widespread public ignominy in Germany and Hitler’s private fury, they slowly and painfully sank her, in full view of the astonished mobs and to her equally astonished and relieved enemy. Captain Langsdorff, one of the more honorable of German naval officers at the time, was eventually taken off the burning ship, put in to port in Argentina, and two days later killed himself with a single shot to the head.
Burned and listing, the German commerce raider Admiral Graf Spee sinks outside Montevideo harbor on December 17, 1939, after being scuttled by her crew. Neutral Uruguay demanded she leave port before she was fully seaworthy—prompting her captain to set demolition charges and send the pride of the Nazi fleet to the bottom.