While the British government struggled with issues of war and peace, Admiral Sir Archibald Berkeley Milne, the Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet, awaited orders at Malta, his principal base. In the days just before the war, he had been given no clear instructions. War came to Europe in convulsive spasms: first Austria against Serbia, then Russia against Austria, then Germany against Russia, then Germany against France, and finally Germany against Great Britain. Military and naval planning was complicated by the fact that, on any given day, no one knew which nations were in the war, which were not, and which might or might not come in tomorrow. This was especially true of any consideration involving Great Britain, which did not itself know whether it was going to war until the day it did so. Amid this confusion, Winston Churchill, wielding the power of the the Cabinet at the Admiralty, personally drafted operational telegrams to Royal Navy admirals and ships. On Thursday, July 30, he told Admiral Milne that his primary mission would be to assist the French in covering the North African troopships. But the First Lord, his fertile imagination brimming with possibilities, embellished his message with further instructions, and the result was to swamp the conventional mind of Admiral Milne. This was the message Milne received:
Your first task should be to aid the French in transportation of their African army corps by covering and if possible bringing to action individual fast German ships, particularly Goeben, which may interfere with that transportation. . . . Except in combination with the French as part of a general battle, do not at this stage be brought to action against superior forces. The speed of your squadrons is sufficient to enable you to choose your moment. You must husband your force at the outset and we shall hope later to reinforce the Mediterranean.
Later, Churchill explained that the phrases “superior forces,” “the speed of your squadrons,” and “husband your forces” were meant to guide Milne in dealing with the Austrian fleet. But Churchill also could not take his eyes away from Goeben, and he had convinced himself that its destruction and Milne’s other assignments largely overlapped. The extent to which the German battle cruiser affected his thinking was displayed in subsequent signals flowing to Milne from the Admiralty. Following the original July 30 message, Churchill signaled again on August 2: “Goeben must be shadowed by two battle cruisers.” And on August 3: “Watch on mouth of Adriatic should be maintained but Goeben is your objective. Follow her and shadow her wherever she goes, and be ready to act on declaration of war which appears probable and imminent.” Again, on August 4, when informed that the British battle cruisers Indomitable and Indefatigable had Goeben in sight: “Very good. Hold her. War imminent.”
Milne did his best to obey this stream of orders. On August 1, after receiving Churchill’s first message, he concentrated his fleet beneath the sand-colored limestone ramparts of the ancient fortress of Valletta at Malta. Early on August 2, when he received the Admiralty order saying that “Goeben must be shadowed by two battle cruisers” and the Adriatic “watched,” Milne dispatched his second in command, Rear Admiral Ernest Troubridge, with Indomitable and Indefatigable, the four armored cruisers, the light cruiser Gloucester, and eight destroyers to guard the mouth of the Adriatic. But Admiral Souchon had already left the Adriatic. On August 2, Goeben and Breslau had been seen at Taranto by the British consul, who urgently reported the sighting to the Admiralty. Suddenly, a thought troubled Churchill and his colleagues in London. Told that the two German ships had left Taranto, they decided that Souchon was headed into the Atlantic to attack British trade. To counter this threat, Admiral Troubridge’s two battle cruisers were ordered to detach from his command and proceed westward at high speed “to prevent Goeben leaving Mediterranean.” At nine o’clock that night, Indomitable and Indefatigable left, heading for Gibraltar at 22 knots.
Milne had now been assigned four tasks: he was to support the French in protecting the troop convoys in the western Mediterranean; he was to observe and bottle up the Austrians in the Adriatic; he was to find and sink Goeben wherever she was; and he was to prevent the German battle cruiser from breaking out past Gibraltar. Unfortunately, on the high seas, these objectives did not fit together with the same seamlessness they achieved in the mind of the First Lord. And the Churchillian stream of overlapping, frequently contradictory instructions was enough to bewilder a man far more astute than Admiral Milne.
Sir Archibald Berkeley Milne, known to the service as Arky-Barky, was a short, dapper fifty-nine-year-old bachelor who wore a white beard and a black mustache. He was descended from two admirals, his father and his grandfather. His own career had been fashionable; during long service on the royal yachts, he had won the friendship of the Prince and Princess of Wales, later King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra. Milne, wreathed in smiles and heavy with gold braid, was always available to pose on deck for the queen, snapping away with her Brownie camera. He shot, fished, and collected rare orchids, and he had become a rear admiral by 1903. In 1912, Winston Churchill, the new First Lord, gave pleasure to the new king, George V, by recommending the king’s friend Arky-Barky as Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet.
Learning of the appointment, Jacky Fisher erupted. Milne had served under Fisher’s archenemy, Admiral Lord Charles Beresford, and once had offered to testify against Fisher in an Admiralty proceeding. Milne, Fisher raged, was a “backstairs cad,” a “sneak,” a “serpent of the lowest type,” and “Sir Berkeley Mean who buys his Times second-hand for a penny.” Milne had won his new post through social connections, Fisher roared. Milne “went to Balmoral and crawled. . . . Winston has sacrificed the country to the court. . . . Winston, alas! (as I have had to tell him) feared for his wife the social ostracism of the Court and succumbed to [Milne’s] appointment—a wicked wrong. . . . The mischief is done. Milne, an utterly useless commander . . . is now the senior admiral afloat.” Fisher’s wrath was so great that he broke temporarily with Churchill: “I fear this must be my last communication with you. . . . I am sorry for it, but I consider you have betrayed the navy . . . and what the pressure could have been to induce you to betray your trust is beyond my comprehension. You are aware that Sir Berkeley Milne is unfitted to be the senior admiral afloat, as you have now made him. . . . I can’t believe that you foresee all the consequences. [This will be] IRREPARABLE, IRREMEDIABLE, ETERNAL!”
Milne was neither wicked nor incompetent; he was ordinary. And he was far from solely responsible for the debacle that followed. The underlying cause of his flawed strategy and faulty dispositions was Britain’s unwillingness to commit absolutely to France. French uncertainty as to Britain’s role in the coming war continued right up to the afternoon of August 4, when, after the British ultimatum had been sent to Berlin, Churchill finally received a group of French admirals at the Admiralty. There, the First Lord, employing his broadly Anglicized French, declared in a burst of good fellowship, “Use Malta as if it were Toulon [the main French naval base in the Mediterranean].” Two days later, Prince Louis concluded an agreement that gave France, in the person of Vice Admiral Augustin Boue de Lapeyrère, general direction of naval operations in the Mediterranean.
None of this helped Admiral Milne. The two admiralties might be talking, but no arrangements had been made for communication between French and British commanders at sea. At 4:00 a.m. on August 3, Admiral de Lapeyrère put to sea with the entire French Mediterranean fleet, steaming south toward Algeria to provide protection for the troop transports of the French North African army corps. His battleships and cruisers, organized in three squadrons, were in sufficient strength, he believed, to deal with Goeben and Breslau. However, to make certain that the two fast German ships did not, as Churchill feared, “break in upon the transports . . . crammed with soldiers,” de Lapeyrère postponed for several days the date of the troopships’ sailing from Africa. Admiral Milne did not know this. Ordered by Churchill to give priority to the protection of the French transports, he focused diligently on that assignment, even though the French fleet itself was there to prot
ect them and the transports themselves were not yet at sea. Not until August 2 was Milne given authority to communicate with the French. When he tried to do so, Milne could not raise the French admiral by wireless and was eventually obliged to send a light cruiser to Bizerte “in quest of his colleague,” de Lapeyrère.
Lack of communication with the French caused difficulties, but Milne’s situation was made worse by the fact that communication between his flagship and the First Lord at the Admiralty was all too rapid. This was the first naval war in which admiralties could intervene directly to control ship movements by means of cable and wireless radio. This new technology, enabling orders to be dispatched from London night and day, offered a powerful temptation to the restless First Lord. Frequently ignoring the First Sea Lord, whose proper role was the operational control of warships, Churchill began sending orders directly to admirals and ships at sea. Milne was merely the first to feel this forceful and articulate presence looming over his shoulder.
Milne guessed correctly that, after Taranto, Goeben might call at Messina, and he sent the light cruiser Chatham from Malta to investigate. Chatham passed through the strait at 7:00 a.m. on August 3, examining the anchorage. She found nothing; Goeben and Breslau had sailed six hours earlier. All through Sunday the third, the German ships steamed westward, avoiding normal shipping lanes and showing no lights at night. At 2:35 a.m. on August 4, as Souchon was nearing the Algerian coast, an unexpected signal arrived from the Naval Staff in Berlin: Souchon was to reverse course and make for Constantinople. On August 2, Germany and Turkey had signed a defensive alliance against Russia. The Turks were reluctant, however, to take the actual step into war and the German embassy in Constantinople was recommending application of pressure on the grand vizier and his Cabinet. The sight of Goeben anchored off the Golden Horn was thought likely to offer formidable persuasion.
Souchon, then approaching the climactic moment of firing live ammunition at an enemy, ignored the order. “The idea of turning about, so short a time before that moment so ardently desired by us all, before opening fire—my heart could not accept that,” he later wrote. He continued west; soon the jagged contours of the Algerian coast, tinted red by the rising sun, came into view. Slowly, Souchon approached the harbor at Philippeville, first running up the Russian flag to deceive his enemies. As he came closer, a watchman waved from the harbor lighthouse, and vendors in boats loaded with bananas, pineapples, and coconuts put out from shore. Suddenly, the Russian flag came down, the German war flag ran up, and Goeben’s 5.9-inch guns lashed out, “sowing death and panic,” in Souchon’s words. After ten minutes, during which only fifteen shells were fired, the Germans withdrew. They had hit neither troops nor troopships, but had managed to damage the railway station, blow up a magazine, and knock over the hospitable lighthouse. “Our trick succeeded brilliantly,” said a member of the crew.
It was a token bombardment, but Souchon was satisfied. The admiral now intended to obey his orders to go to Constantinople, twelve hundred miles to the east. First, however, he needed more coal, which meant a return to Messina. By midmorning, the two German ships were steaming east. A splendid Mediterranean day, with the sky arching overhead “like a giant azure bell and a gently ruffled sea, glittering to the horizon,” added to the cheerfulness of the German sailors.
Until German shells began exploding in Philippeville, Admiral Milne at Malta had no idea where Goeben was. Thirty-six hours earlier—that is, at 12:50 a.m. on August 3, just as Souchon was leaving Messina to raid the African coast—a message from the First Lord had brought Milne the instruction to find Goeben “and shadow her wherever she goes.” That evening, Indomitable and Indefatigable had been stripped away from Troubridge and ordered westward. The result, on August 3, was that the German battle cruiser, steaming west from Messina to bombard the Algerian ports, was being followed by two powerful British ships. On the morning of the fourth, after the bombardment of Philippeville, they found her.
At 10:34 a.m., Captain Francis Kennedy of Indomitable, the senior officer of the two British battle cruisers, sighted Goeben 17,000 yards ahead, coming east in his direction at 20 knots. His own speed was 22 knots, which meant that the British and German ships were rushing toward each other at an effective speed of almost 50 miles per hour. Although, because the two nations were still at peace, Goeben’s main turret guns—like his own—were trained fore and aft, Kennedy observed that the German crew—like his own—was at action stations. On opposite courses 8,000 yards apart, the warships passed one another in silence.
Officers on Goeben’s bridge had sighted the columns of smoke directly ahead, then seen them evolve into the shapes of two broad-beamed “giant grey monsters” moving toward them at high speed. Even from a distance, Souchon himself immediately recognized that these were “not French ships with a big freeboard, but English tripod mast capital ships of the Indomitable class. . . . I don’t dare to open fire as I don’t know whether England is our enemy. I am astonished that they don’t fire.” The British ships, once past Goeben, grew smaller in the German battle cruiser’s wake. Then, to their dismay, Souchon and his officers saw Indomitable and Indefatigable turning. With thick black smoke pouring from their stacks, Kennedy’s ships began to follow, 10,000 yards astern. By urgent wireless, Kennedy informed Milne, and Milne informed the Admiralty.
Souchon, aware that war might come at any moment and worried that the British ships might get the news before he did, ordered full speed. Gradually, the shadowing exercise escalated into a chase and Goeben’s speed climbed to 24 knots. In the engine rooms of the German battle cruiser, the heat became excruciating. “The overheated air affected lungs and heart,” said a crew member. “We worked in air forced down by ventilators. . . . The artificial draft roared and hissed . . . [and] drove into open furnace doors, fanning the glowing coal, and swept roaring up the smokestacks. In the engine room, there was the whir of the turbines, revolving at ever increasing speed; the whole ship trembled and quaked [and] the long grey hull shot through the glistening, foaming waters.” White spray rolling back from her bow, black smoke staining the sky for miles astern, Goeben raced eastward; slowly but perceptibly, the distance between the pursuers and their prey increased. The Indomitable class had been designed for 25 knots, and six years earlier Indomitable herself had surpassed 26 in trials; but after long overseas service, the hulls of both British battle cruisers were fouled. Their engines needed overhaul and the ships were short of wartime crew, particularly the stokers required to feed the boiler furnaces by shoveling coal. Nevertheless, for six hours, Kennedy kept station astern, determined to stay within range.
Meanwhile, even as the Admiralty was learning that Goeben had been found and that two battle cruisers were shadowing her, the British Cabinet was deciding whether to send an ultimatum to Berlin. Churchill, exultant at the news that the Goeben was in sight, sent his message “Very good. Hold her. War imminent.” But because Milne had forgotten to mention in which direction the German ships were going, Churchill wrongly assumed that Souchon was still steaming west to attack the French transports. On this basis, he sent an urgent memorandum to the prime minister and the foreign secretary: “Goeben . . . is evidently going to interfere with the French transports which are crossing today.” He asked that he be permitted to add to his signal to Milne and Kennedy the following: “If Goeben attacks French transports, you should at once engage her.” Asquith and Grey agreed, but the prime minister suggested that first the matter should be put before the Cabinet, which was about to meet. Churchill, his blood high, ignored the prime minister and sent off the authorization to attack before going to meet his fellow ministers. At the meeting, Asquith scribbled to Venetia Stanley, “Winston with all his war paint on is longing for a sea fight to sink the Goeben.”
[Between 1912 and 1915, H. H. Asquith, the British prime minister, was passionately in love with a young woman named Venetia Stanley. In August 1914, when Asquith was sixty-two and Venetia was twenty-seven, she dominated his thoughts. H
e wrote to her two or three times a day, often while Cabinet meetings were in progress around him. To Venetia, he not only expressed his intense desire for her company and approval, but he also divulged the most secret British diplomatic and military information. Curiously, the relationship always remained platonic.]
The Cabinet, however, refused to allow the Royal Navy to start sinking ships before the war had begun; at 2:05 p.m. Churchill was forced to send to Milne and Kennedy a retraction. The ultimatum to Germany had been sent and would expire at midnight, he said, and “no act of war should be committed before that hour. . . . This cancels the authorization to Indomitable and Indefatigable to engage Goeben if she attacks French transports.”
For the remainder of the afternoon, Churchill and the War Staff, waiting at the Admiralty, “suffered the tortures of Tantalus. . . . At any moment, the Goeben could have been smitten at under ten thousand yards range by sixteen 12-inch guns firing nearly treble her own weight of metal. At about five o’clock, Prince Louis observed that there was still time to sink Goeben before dark.” Churchill, bound by the Cabinet decision, was silent and sulky, “unable to utter a word. . . . We hoped to sink her the next day,” he wrote. “Where could she go? Pola seemed her only refuge. According to international law, nothing but internment awaited her elsewhere.”