Table Of Content2
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Naval Institute Press
291 Wood Road
Annapolis, MD 21402
© 2017 by Vincent O’Hara and Leonard Heinz
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: O’Hara, Vincent P., 1951- author. | Heinz, Leonard R., co-author.
Title: Clash of fleets: naval battles of the Great War, 1914-18 / Vincent P. O’Hara and Leonard R.
Heinz.
Description: Annapolis, Maryland: Naval Institute Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016054316 | ISBN 9781682470190 (eBooks)
Subjects: LCSH: World War, 1914-1918—Naval operations. | BISAC: HISTORY Military / Naval. |
HISTORY / Military / World War I.
Classification: LCC D580 .O35 2017 | DDC 940.4/5—dc23 LC record
available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016054316
Print editions meet the requirements of ANSI/NISO z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).
25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
First printing
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Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1 The Fleets
Chapter 2 1914: Trial by Fire
Chapter 3 1915: No End in Sight
Chapter 4 1916: In Search of a Solution
Chapter 5 1917: The Struggle Continues
Chapter 6 1918: Winding Down
Chapter 7 Summing Up
Appendix I Ship Specifications
Appendix II Conversions and Abbreviations
Appendix III Les Petit Combats
Notes
Bibliography
Index
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Illustrations
Photos
British battlecruiser Princess Royal
Russian armored cruiser Admiral Makarov
Italian scout cruiser (esploratore) Nino Bixio
British Tribal-class destroyer Viking steaming at full speed
Commodore Reginald Tyrwhitt
British scout cruiser Amphion
German light cruiser Magdeburg hard aground off Odensholm Island
Damage suffered by the Russian predreadnought Evstafii
Vice Admiral Maximilian Spee
Vice Admiral David Beatty
German cruiser minelayer Albatross beached off Gotland
Large Russian destroyer Novik
British light cruiser Dublin sailing past the Italian predreadnought
Benedetto Brin at Brindisi
French destroyer Bisson
Admiral Reinhard Scheer
Minecraft being hidden by a smokescreen
German destroyer V150
Austro-Hungarian destroyer Tátra
Italian torpedo boat 22OS
German trawler Fritz Reuter
Russian predreadnought Slava sinking in Moon Sound
Austro-Hungarian scout cruiser Helgoland
Modern Italian “three stacker” destroyer Impavido
German M-type minesweepers in line abreast
British 1st Light Cruiser Squadron
Captain Miklós Horthy
Maps
1.1 Europe at War
2.1 North Sea
2.2 Battle of Heligoland Bight: 28 August 1914
2.3 Scarborough Raid: 16 December 1914
2.4 Baltic Sea
2.5 Black Sea
2.6 Battle of Cape Sarych: 18 November 1914
2.7 Oceanic Waters
2.8 Battle of Coronel: 1 November 1914
2.9 Battle of the Falklands: 8 December 1914
3.1 Battle of Dogger Bank: 24 January 1915
3.2 Battle of Gotland: 2 July 1915
3.3 Battle of Kiuno Island: 19 August 1915
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3.4 Attacks on Ottoman “Coal” Coast: 1914–1916
3.5 Aegean and the Dardanelles
3.6 Adriatic Sea
3.7 Bombardment of Italian Coast: 24 May 1915
3.8 Battle of Durazzo: 29 December 1915
4.1 Flanders Coast: 1916
4.2 Battle in the Dover Strait: 27 October 1916
4.3 Convoy Attacks: June 1916
5.1 Second Battle of Heligoland Bight: 17 November 1917
5.2 Baltic Islands
5.3 Battle of Otranto Strait: 15 May 1917
6.1 Battle of Imbros: 20 January 1918
Figure
1.1 Fire Control and Formations
Tables
2.1 Forces Deployed in the North Sea and Atlantic Coast of France
and the UK
2.2 Forces Deployed in the Baltic, 1 August 1914
2.3 Forces in the Mediterranean and Black Sea, 1 August 1914
2.4 Battle of the Falklands: Ammunition Expenditure
7.1 Basic Demographics of Surface Actions
7.2 Surface Actions in Context—Three Wars
7.3 Fight or Flee
7.4 Royal Navy Force Ratios
7.5 Imperial Russian Navy Force Ratios
7.6 Regia Marina Force Ratios
7.7 Marine Nationale Force Ratios
7.8 Coalition Action Force Ratios
7.9 Kaiserliche Marine Force Ratios
7.10 K.u.K. Kriegsmarine Force Ratios
7.11 Osmanli Donanmasi Force Ratios
A3.1 Petit Combats Not Further Described
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Acknowledgments
T
he authors wish to thank Stephen McLaughlin, who generously
provided comments, translations, and much valuable information
regarding the Imperial Russian Navy. Enrico Cernuschi and Michael Yaklich gave
unstintingly of their time in reading and reviewing the manuscript. John Roberts
and James Goldrick graciously shared source information; John Brooks reviewed
points relating to fire control; Sergei Vinogradov provided information from his
research on the Russian navy; Cernuschi, Roberts, Vinogradov, and Peter Schenk
also allowed the reproduction of photographs from their collections. Rick Russell
and Tom Cutler of the Naval Institute Press supported this project and brought it
to print. The authors would also like to acknowledge the many organizations and
individuals involved in the digitization and online publication of source material.
They have created a treasure trove of relevant documents. Irrespective of the
many people whose input helped improve this book, the authors are solely
responsible for the content and any errors that may occur.
Finally, and most importantly, the authors would like to acknowledge the
support of their families, which is the true foundation of any project of this sort:
for O’Hara, his son Vincent and daughter Yunuen and most especially his wife
Maria; for Heinz, his wife Meg, son David, daughter Julia, and granddaughter
Maggie, who thought there should be pirates.
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Introduction
Deprived of [seaborne trade] Great Britain could neither maintain her industries,
nor equip her armies, nor feed her people.
—CHARLES E. FAYLE
A
Google image search of World War I brings up picture after picture
of trenches, machine guns, gas masks, primitive tanks, and the
occasional biplane. Warships are conspicuously absent. These pictures reflect the
collective memory of the Great War a century later. They are accurate in
showing that the vast majority of deaths occurred on land but disguise the fact
that events at sea played a crucial role in determining the victor.
World War I was so deadly and so long a stalemate because, in part, it was
the first total war of the industrial age. The ingredients of the victory won by the
Entente powers in 1918 proved to be technology, resources, and stamina—not,
as expected in 1914, the best-trained divisions or the most efficient mobilization
plan. Because no nation had all the resources necessary to fight a modern total
war it was largely on the seas that the required coal, iron ore, phosphates, and
foodstuffs arrived. The Entente powers, especially the United Kingdom, clearly
relied upon maritime communications to maintain their economies but even the
Ottoman Empire, for example, required sea transportation to meet its energy
needs, and Germany needed it to get the iron ore for its war industries. Had the
Entente powers lost control of the seas, their supply of resources would have
been imperiled and their ability to fight on would have quickly faded. The Central
Powers survived longer without sea control (although Germany controlled the
Baltic Sea to the very end), but the Entente’s oceanic naval blockade ultimately
wreaked great privation in Germany and caused starvation in the Austro-
Hungarian and Ottoman Empires. Germany’s best chance of victory was to
defeat the United Kingdom, but this could only be done at sea—most effectively
by imposing a counter-blockade. The German navy’s attempt to do this via
unrestricted submarine warfare inflicted hardship and panic but ultimately
backfired when it provoked the United States to declare war. This, and the
Entente’s defeat of the submarine offensive, tipped the balance and ultimately
doomed the Central Powers.
Clash of Fleets is a naval history of the Great War. It focuses on naval surface
combat as the frame of its narrative and the instrument of its analysis. Naval
surface combat commonly evokes an image of battleships proceeding
majestically in column with massive guns roaring in great gouts of smoke and fire
—and it could be like this, but not very often. Clash of Fleets details 144 naval
engagements fought between major surface warships engaged mostly in the
mundane but vital tasks that sustain sea power like patrol, escort, mine warfare,
or raiding. Such an account reveals, in its cumulative detail of success, failure,
and near run affairs, in its record of fleeting encounters and battleship clashes,
how the combatants conducted the war at sea, what they considered important,
on what they were willing to hazard their assets, and how the management of
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risk evolved throughout the war. This history illustrates how weapons
performed, how doctrine met operational requirements, and how the naval and
land wars intertwined. This work also illuminates one of the great watershed
periods of naval development. For decades weapons, processes, and tactical
thought had evolved at breakneck speeds in relative peace. In the subsequent
trial by fire some systems did not work as expected, some were not used as
anticipated, and others established an unexpected importance. The analogies
between 1914 and 2017 are striking in that powerful new platforms and
weapons have again evolved untested by a full-blooded naval war. Doctrine and
training have raced to anticipate the realities of what combat will be like should
another war occur. There is much for today’s naval professional to consider in
the conflict that occurred one hundred years ago.
The general themes of this work are:
• That sea power played a vital role in World War I
• That surface combat and the ability to impose surface combat power
was a key capability of navies throughout the war
• That surface combat was fundamental to the application of sea
power in all its aspects
• That new technology was difficult to apply and sometimes
diminished rather than enhanced naval combat power
The book contains seven chapters: The first introduces the weapons and the
fleets of the Great War while the following five cover individual years. The final
chapter compares surface combat of the Great War to the wars that preceded
and followed it, assesses the performance of the combatant navies, and draws
certain conclusions. The chronological chapters are divided into sections
corresponding to major geographic areas in which fighting occurred: the North
Sea, the Baltic Sea, the Black Sea, the Mediterranean and Adriatic Seas, and non-
European waters. The components of these geographic subchapters are the
battles themselves. This organization allows the massive sweep of action to be
presented in a structured format. Space limitations restrict the detail in some
cases but at the minimum every description contains a header of basic facts, an
order of battle, and a broad outline of what transpired. Certain key or interesting
actions are presented in greater detail and their consequences assessed. The
objective is a holistic overview of the war at sea through which the themes of
this work resonate.
For the purposes of this book, a naval engagement is defined as an encounter
between opposing warships of at least 100 tons standard displacement (the
smallest-sized oceangoing torpedo boats) in which guns or torpedoes were used.
Each of the belligerents had its own terminology for ship types, ranks, and
measurements; reconciling these for the modern, nonspecialist reader has led
the authors to adopt certain conventions. For example, a 1,000-ton warship
armed with torpedoes and 4-inch guns would be called a torpedo boat destroyer
or destroyer in the British navy, a contre-torpilleur (or roughly a torpedo boat
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