Flashback: The First World War

This programme contains scenes that some viewers may find upsetting.

In August 1914,

the two greatest navies in the world made ready for war.

Now the Royal Navy will settle the question of the German fleet,

and if they do not come out and fight,

they will be dug out like rats from a hole.

But the two fleets rarely met.

Instead, a new kind of war evolved, more stealthy, more cruel.

A war not against battleships, but people.

The world's capital ships in 1914 were the products of a cold war.

Britain's HMS Dreadnought had set the benchmark -

heavy armour, big guns, fast.

Dreadnoughts were bargaining chips in a great naval poker game.

Germany had 13, and seven building.

Austria-Hungary, three, America, ten,

Britain, 20.

They kept the peace, but then the cold war turned hot.

Britain and Germany were the main opponents,

staring each other down across the North Sea.

The longer they looked at the map, the more obvious their problems.

Germany's ships couldn't get clear of the North Sea.

To the south, the Channel, blocked by mines and the Dover Patrol.

To the north, the British Grand Fleet at Scapa Flow.

But Britain couldn't get at the German fleet

unless it came out from its heavily protected bases.

And if they actually met in the North Sea,

the result could be catastrophic.

The sight everyone feared.

Austro-Hungarian battleship the Istvan,

sunk late in the war by a tiny Italian torpedo boat.

In 1914, the German navy believed torpedoes and submarines

might tip the balance their way.

A hit-and-run war with little history and no rules.

Jackie Fisher, Britain's sharpest admiral, predicted radical change.

The use of submarines has convinced us

that in wartime, nothing can stand against them.

The submarine is the coming war vessel for sea fighting.

It means the whole foundation of our naval strategy has broken down.

Two days into the war,

Germany unleashed ten U-boats into the North Sea

to hunt down the British fleet.

One of them, U21, made her way to the Firth of Forth,

where the British cruiser HMS Pathfinder

was leaving Rosyth naval base.

U21 sunk her with a single torpedo.

Within a fortnight, the Germans had more good news.

This 1927 film celebrates the voyage of Captain Weddigen and the U9.

Through my prismatic glasses,

I noticed a small masthead come into view near the Maas lightship.

It looked like a mast of a warship.

Could it be the first sight of the enemy we were to have in the war?

The U9 had found the British cruisers Hogue, Aboukir and Cressy

on patrol off the Dutch coast.

Practically obsolete, they were nicknamed the Live-Bait Squadron.

Captain Weddigen seized his chance.

Fired torpedo at 500m.

Target was middle ship in a three-ship formation.

31 seconds later, the torpedo struck Aboukir.

On board was Kit Musgrave.

We were woken by a terrific crash.

The ship shook and all the crockery in the pantry fell.

Cressy and Hogue arrived and let down their boats.

Then Aboukir went down and we slid down her side into the water.

Musgrave jumped into the North Sea

and became the only man in the war to be sunk on three ships

within one hour.

I swam to the Hogue and was going on board

when she was struck and sank in three minutes.

I then swam to the Cressy and was hauled up the side,

but she was struck also and we sank.

Georg von Muller was chief of Germany's Imperial Naval Cabinet.

On our return from the morning ride,

the first news of the successful torpedo attack by the U9

on three English cruisers.

We are all delighted and the Kaiser is in seventh heaven.

The British were appalled.

First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill got the blame.

Over 1,400 men, many of them cadets,

had died in a single submarine attack.

Winston's War Babies, they were called.

British submarine lieutenant Ronald Trevor wrote to his parents.

The news tonight is sad,

but what we submariners have been expecting for weeks.

The commodore has repeatedly warned the Admiralty

that those ships ought not to patrol the North Sea.

What happened is what we predicted -

ships standby to rescue the sinking one's crew,

then the submarine gets two sitting shots.

Commander-in-chief of the British Grand Fleet

was Admiral John Jellicoe.

He'd joined the navy in 1874 as a midshipman.

ADMIRAL IS PIPED ABOARD

Known as Silent Jack, he was experienced, capable and cautious.

He ended patrols off the German coast,

confining his most valuable ships to Scapa Flow and Rosyth,

the limits of the U-boats' range.

He warned the Admiralty.

The Germans rely to a great extent on submarines, mines and torpedoes,

and they possess a superiority over us in these particular directions.

Germany's forward submarine base was on the island of Heligoland.

The U-boats were ordered to sweep the North Sea.

But the British had gone.

On 16th December 1914, hoping to lure the British out,

five German warships steamed across the North Sea.

At seven in the morning, they opened fire on Scarborough and Hartlepool.

There was a terrific crash, we thought it must be thunder.

When another crash came, we rushed to the window and saw smoke

and cried "It's the Germans!"

Two wee girls hung on to me and said "Are the Germans going to kill us?"

122 people died in the attack.

It was the first time enemy warships

had killed anyone on the British mainland in over a century.

Jellicoe, too, had thought about attacking the enemy's homeland,

not with a hit-and-miss naval bombardment,

but a blockade, tight as a drum, and lethal.

What we have to do is starve and cripple Germany.

The destruction of the German fleet is a means to an end,

and not an end in itself.

Here was a use for those huge battleships,

as sentinels sealing the exits from the North Sea,

stopping Germany's fleet getting out and food and war supplies getting in.

The North Sea would become no-man's-land - a dead sea.

Jellicoe was helped by an invention

more important than Dreadnoughts or even submarines - wireless.

MORSE-CODE SIGNAL

Every day, every German ship radioed its position

back to fleet headquarters at Wilhelmshaven.

MORSE CODE SIGNAL CONTINUES

Over the North Sea, in the coastguard station at Hunstanton, Norfolk,

British Naval Intelligence was listening.

The German messages were passed on to code breakers

in one of Britain's most secret departments -

Room 40, deep in the heart of the Admiralty Old Building.

According to one of their officers, the men in Room 40 were a mixed bag.

They knew literary German fluently and they could be relied on,

but of cryptography, of naval German,

of the habits of war vessels of any nationality, they knew not a jot.

Some, like Dillwyn Knox,

would help crack the German Enigma code in the Second World War.

But in 1914, they desperately needed some clues.

The break came in the Baltic Sea,

where a German cruiser, the Magdeburg, was captured by Russians.

On board, they found one of the war's most valuable documents

and passed it on to their British allies.

This is the Magdeburg's code book.

It allowed the men in Room 40

to read nearly everything the German navy was planning.

"Oh, well," the Kaiser said, on learning of the Magdeburg's capture,

"sparks are bound to fly at a time like this."

But the Kaiser had no idea his enemies had his code book,

no idea of the immense advantage they now possessed.

Britain's sea strategy in the First World War was simple -

to isolate and starve her enemies.

At Scapa Flow and Rosyth to the north,

at Dover and Harwich to the south,

the Royal Navy closed the North Sea to German ships.

The blockade was a brutal vision,

brainchild of Maurice Hankey of the Committee of Imperial Defence.

My belief in sea power amounted almost to a religion.

The Germans, like Napoleon, might overrun the Continent.

This might prolong the war,

but the final issue would be decided by economic pressure.

The Director of Naval Intelligence agreed.

Grass would sooner or later grow in the streets of Hamburg

and widespread death and ruin would soon be inflicted.

Germany began the war with a merchant fleet of nearly four million tons.

Within months, she lost a quarter of her ships,

seized in harbours or caught making a dash

into the no-man's-land of the North Sea.

Lloyd's of London kept a log of every vessel sunk.

Their records show that on one day alone, 8th August 1914,

Germany lost 41 ships.

Neutral countries - Holland, Denmark, Sweden - were not spared.

Germany depended on ports like Rotterdam for grain and raw materials

so Britain forced neutral ships to submit to the blockade.

Starting with Holland, the British pressured companies to declare goods.

In every country, she built up a network of agents.

They tracked ships coming and going, who was sending what, where.

Any ship could be stopped.

Any found with banned supplies for Germany had its cargo seized.

Within weeks, the German government started to ration food.

Caroline Ethel Cooper was an Australian stranded in Leipzig.

Every week, she wrote to her sister in Adelaide.

Dear Emmie, the government's seized the bread, flour and meal supply.

We're allowed four pounds of bread and one pound of flour at a time.

Now the war against neutral ships and food supply has begun,

prices rise every week.

Sailors like Richard Stumpf were stuck in harbour,

frustrated and hungry.

2nd April 1916.

We spend our time worrying about our bellies.

Even the officers are embittered and dissatisfied.

To end Germany's isolation, her navy came up with a revolutionary plan -

an unarmed submarine over 200 feet long,

that could carry a cargo of 1,000 tons.

In June 1916, the Deutschland set out for America,

the first time a submarine had tried to cross the Atlantic.

Because of wet weather and high seas,

the hatches were closed

and diesel engines pumped hot, humid air through the boat.