https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/8f484b3e-761b-11e8-a95e-4d8f3c5d626c
General Paul von Hindenburg, Kaiser Wilhelm II and General Erich Ludendorff
While General Erich Ludendorff’s focus of attention was Kaiserschlacht, his continuing offensive on the Western Front, the de facto head of the German army was only too aware of the interconnection of the four discrete European fronts. In the east, fighting had effectively come to an end with the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March, and what troops remained there were a force of observation, except in Finland, where the Bolsheviks were reluctant to cede independence under the terms of the treaty. Ludendorff had sent the Baltic division to assist the former tsarist General Carl Gustaf Mannerheim, later president of Finland, to eject the remaining Russian troops and put down the Finnish communists. By the end of May German troops held both Vyborg (western Russia) and Narva (Estonia), north and south of the Gulf of Finland. These Ludendorff intended to use as bases for an advance on Petrograd if it became necessary to overthrow the Bolshevik government or prevent the British troops sent to Murmansk in support of the “White” (anti-Bolshevik) Russian forces from doing so.
The Italian and Macedonian fronts had been quiet for many months, but Ludendorff was content. “They formed the protection of our flanks, the Macedonian Front at the same time protecting the flank of Austria-Hungary,” he wrote in his memoirs. This seemingly distant backwater was rather less secure than he supposed, however, for morale in the poorly fed and ill-equipped Bulgarian army, which, with a stiffening of German generals, formed the main part of the Macedonian Front, was beginning to ebb. The capitulation the previous month of the Romanians, who after the Russian collapse were effectively surrounded and unable to continue the fight, had at first seemed propitious. The Romanian army, if not exactly agile, had been numerically strong. In July the previous year they had fielded 80 infantry and 19 cavalry divisions and more than 900 artillery batteries — about 800,000 men, with a million in immediate reserve.
The Treaty of Bucharest, signed on May 7, allowed Ludendorff to withdraw several divisions from the Balkans, which added to his reserves for Kaiserschlacht. However, this immediately weakened Bulgarian enthusiasm for the fight, for many army officers, seeing the Turks as the traditional enemy, had anyway been more favourable to the entente. Allied strength on the Macedonian Front had received a boost in late 1917, too, with the entry of Greece into the war. At the end of May the Royal Greek Army, although fielding only ten divisions, roundly defeated the Bulgarians in a two-day battle at Skra-di-Legen, northwest of Thessaloniki (also known as Salonika).
Serbia, which the Austrians and Bulgarians had overrun in 1916, was the other factor on the Macedonian Front. The country remained turbulent, but extreme repressive measures had largely kept it in check. The Serbian army, having been evacuated via Albania and Montenegro by the Italian navy, had then been re-equipped by the Allies and was biding its time in Macedonia. Indeed, the manpower ratio on this southernmost front was now about three to two in the Allies’ favour (720,000 Serbian, French, British, Greek and Italian to 575,000 Bulgarian, German and Turk). But the ratio was two to one in artillery, and ten to one in aircraft.
Nevertheless, in March the Austrians, who might have been expected to reinforce their allies in the Balkans, had sent artillery to the Western Front to support Kaiserschlacht, and then in accordance with the treaty of mutual assistance signed in May — the Waffenbund (literally, “weapons federation”) — sent several divisions. With ammunition in short supply, however, the artillery had soon returned to the Italian Front. The Austro-Hungarian army had received a boost after Brest-Litovsk with the repatriation of several hundred thousand prisoners of war, although some, notably the Czechoslovaks, heeding President Wilson’s promise of national determination, had decided to join the Allies (or, at least, the White Russians) instead. Jaroslav Hasek, author of the semi-autobiographical comic novel The Good Soldier Svejk, was a member of this “Czechoslovak Legion” until, disillusioned, he defected to the Red Army.
Yet while the boost in manpower was welcome, it increased the logistic difficulties (notably food supply) with which the Austrians had been struggling for some time. Still, the Austrian chief of staff, Generaloberst Arthur Arz von Straussenburg, felt ready to go on to the offensive once more against the Italians, who were now strengthened by French and British divisions and holding firm positions on the Piave, to where they had withdrawn after the debacle at Caporetto in October. Both sides were evenly matched in numbers, but the Austrians’ supply situation had become so acute that Straussenburg saw the offensive in part as the solution to his problems: the north Italian plain beyond the Piave was a veritable storehouse. Indeed, the army began speaking of it as das Brot offensiv — the bread offensive.
Meanwhile on the Western Front, having closed down Operation Blücher, the renewed offensive towards Paris, and launched its adjunct Operation Gneisenau on June 11, Ludendorff began hoping that “relief on the Western Front might be secured in Italy itself”. The cost of Kaiserschlacht was already enormous, with very little strategically to show for it. The Germans had lost 160,000 men in operations Blücher and Gneisenau alone, and although the Allies had lost as many, they at least had the satisfaction of success in halting the offensives.
Ludendorff’s hopes of relief were soon to be dashed. On June 15 the Austrians attacked, with their main effort between Asiago and the sea. Straussenburg had 58 divisions available with almost 950,000 men, as many as Ludendorff had had at his disposal for Kaiserschlacht. Facing him were 57 divisions, with a slight advantage in artillery (fielding 7,000 guns) and considerable superiority in the air with almost 700 aircraft, including five Royal Air Force squadrons (the RAF had been formed on April 1 by the amalgamation of the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Naval Air Service).
Two of the five British divisions hurriedly dispatched to Italy in the aftermath of Caporetto had been recalled to the Western Front in March when Kaiserschlacht began, but two were in the line. These held a front of about five miles south of Asiago in the foothills of the Alps, with a third division in reserve, although influenza had rendered many troops sick. On June 15 they found themselves hard-pressed opposing the Austrian main effort. In his dispatch on the fighting, their corps commander, General the Earl of Cavan, one of the most diminutive yet capable senior British officers of the war — who would soon be appointed to command a newly formed 10th (Anglo-Italian) Army — described how his front was attacked by four Austrian divisions:
“[The line] was held by the 23rd Division on the right and the 48th Division on the left. On the front of the 23rd Division the attack was completely repulsed. On the front of the 48th Division the enemy succeeded in occupying our front trench for a length of some 3,000 yards, and subsequently penetrated to a depth of about 1,000 yards. Here he was contained by a series of switches [alternative positions], which had been constructed to meet this eventuality. On the morning of June 16th the 48th Division launched a counterattack to clear the enemy from the pocket he had gained; this attack was completely successful, and the entire line was re-established by 9am.”
During the initial Austrian assault, Lieutenant Edward Brittain of the 11th Sherwood Foresters, the brother of Vera Brittain, the auxiliary nurse and author of Testament of Youth, was killed leading a local counterattack. Brittain had won the Military Cross on the Somme and was highly regarded in the battalion, but it later emerged that his letters to England, intercepted by the censor, revealed that he had engaged in homosexual activity with one of his soldiers and that his commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Hudson, had been told in confidence that Brittain would face court martial when the battalion came out of the line. Hudson warned him obliquely, and it has been suggested that as a result Brittain put himself in the way of fire that first morning. Hudson, already with a Distinguished Service Order and bar as well as the MC, and at 26 barely four years older than Brittain, would win the Victoria Cross that same morning and be badly wounded in the course of doing so.
Opposite them was Lieutenant Ludwig Wittgenstein of the Austrian artillery, alumnus of Trinity College, Cambridge, and at 29 already a philosopher of note. He was almost killed directing the fire of his battery, and was decorated for bravery a third time.
Despite some local successes, the Austrians made no real progress that morning or in the following days. Italian morale had recovered dramatically after Caporetto, in a large part due to the leadership of the new commander-in-chief, Armando Diaz, a humane and respected Neapolitan who had kept his head and stabilised the line after the debacle, and then played the part of Pétain after Verdun in nursing the army back to health. Commanders at all levels had taken to heart the lessons of Caporetto, adopting more “elastic” tactics for the defence.
Cavan himself described how the “High Command had ample reserves available and handled the situation with coolness and decision. Steps were at once taken to deprive the enemy of the gains that he had made. Torrential rains brought the Piave down in flood and added to the embarrassments of the enemy. Many of his bridges were washed away, and those that remained were constantly bombed by British and Italian aviators.”
George Macaulay Trevelyan, who was once described as probably the most widely read historian, and who in 1918 was commanding the British Red Cross contingent in Italy, recounted how: “Above all, the reserves were well handled, here locally as well as by Diaz on the grand scale. The Bersaglieri ciclisti were hurried up on their ‘push bikes’ along the lanes to the threatened spot time after time, and never in vain.”
After a week Straussenburg called off the offensive and withdrew his hard-won bridgeheads back north of the Piave. His casualties had been woefully heavy: nearly 12,000 dead, 80,000 wounded, and 25,000 made prisoner. The Allies had suffered too, with 8,000 dead, 30,000 wounded, and twice as many made prisoner, but they remained masters of the field. As Cavan wrote: “Not only was the original front line entirely re-established, but that portion of the right bank of the Piave, between the Piave and the Sile rivers, which had been in Austrian hands since November, 1917, was cleared of the enemy. Captured orders and documents proved beyond doubt that the enemy’s plans were extremely ambitious, and aimed in fact at the final defeat of the Allied forces in Italy. The result was a complete and disastrous defeat for Austria.”
Ferdinand Foch, the French generalissimo, whose powers to co-ordinate and direct the Allied armies now extended to the Italian Front, pressed Diaz to mount a general counteroffensive to follow up his success. Diaz successfully argued against it, however. Like Pershing, Diaz would not be hurried. When he mounted his grand offensive he intended it to be decisive rather than merely exploitive. Besides, he argued, once the Allies crossed the Piave they would face the same logistic problems that the Austrians had. For the time being, content to bank the boost in morale that his defensive victory had gained, Diaz ordered only limited actions to seize better start positions from which to launch his offensive when the moment came. He could afford to take his time; the repulse was a catastrophic blow to the Austrian army’s morale and cohesion. The internal ethnic tensions would play an increasing part in the collapse of Austrian resistance.
It was not just on land that Italian morale received a boost that month. Just before the Austrian attack, the Regia Marina (Royal Italian Navy) had sent the Szent Istvan to the bottom of the Adriatic — the only dreadnought on either side to be sunk at sea by direct action. The Allies had been strengthening the Otranto Barrage, making it almost impossible for even U-boats to get through the strait into the Mediterranean. The new commander of the Kaiserliche und Königliche Kriegsmarine (Austria-Hungary’s Imperial and Royal Navy), Rear-Admiral Miklos Horthy, who would become regent of Hungary after the war, decided to force the barrage by bringing the blockade ships to battle. During the night of June 8, Horthy left the naval base at Pola on the Istrian coast (in modern Croatia) with two of his four dreadnoughts, Viribus Unitis and Prinz Eugen, for the attack on the barrage, while his other two dreadnoughts, Szent Istvan and Tegetthoff, were to sail the next evening to rendezvous with him farther down the coast. At first light on June 10 two Italian motor torpedo-boats (Motoscafo armato silurante — “MAS”) under the command of Lieutenant-Commander Luigi Rizzo, returning from patrol off the Dalmatian coast, spotted smoke from the Szent Istvan and Tegetthoff group making for the rendezvous. Rizzo turned his boats towards the smoke, closed rapidly to penetrate the escort screen and made a run for the dreadnoughts.
MAS 21’s two torpedoes ran wide of Tegetthoff, but MAS 15’s hit the Szent Istvan abreast her boiler rooms. Both boats then evaded pursuit by dropping depth charges in their wake.
Szent Istvan’s aft boiler room quickly flooded, giving her a 10 degree list to starboard. Counter-flooding of the portside trim cells and magazines reduced the list somewhat, but the crew were unable to plug the holes and the captain therefore steered for the coast at low speed. Water continued to penetrate the forward boiler room, and eventually all but two of her 12 boilers were doused, cutting off power for the pumps. In a further effort to counter the list her captain ordered the turrets to be trained to port and their ready ammunition thrown overboard. Tegetthoff tried to take her in tow, but had to abandon the attempt when it became clear that Szent Istvan was about to founder. She capsized just after 6 o’clock, two and a half hours after being hit, with the loss of 89 crew. The number would have been far higher had the Kriegsmarine not changed its policy just before the war to require all seamen to be able to swim.
Horthy called off the attack on the barrage, and his fleet returned to Pola, where it remained for the rest of the war. Days before the Armistice a second of his dreadnoughts, the Viribus Unitis (“United Forces”, the personal motto of the late emperor Franz Joseph), would be sent to the bottom, sunk at anchor by Italian frogmen in a daring raid. By then, however, although unknown to the Regia Marina, the Austro-Hungarian Empire disintegrating so rapidly, Viribus Unitis had been handed over to the provisional Yugoslav navy.
Soon after Szent Istvan’s sinking the Russian dreadnought Svobodnaya Rossiya was sent to the bottom by torpedo, but one fired from a Russian destroyer. Launched in 1914 as the Empress Catherine the Great for the Imperial Russian Navy’s Black Sea Fleet, after the February Revolution of 1917 she had been renamed Svobodnaya Rossiya (“Free Russia”). When the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed she had slipped out of Sevastopol for the greater security of Novorossiysk on the eastern shore of the Black Sea, but was scuttled on June 18 when the Germans demanded she be handed over under the terms of the treaty.
The writing was well and truly on the wall for the German Kaiserliche Marine too. After a fruitless foray into the North Sea in April to attack a convoy, in which the battlecruiser Moltke was almost sunk by a torpedo fired by the Royal Navy’s submarine E42, the Hochseeflotte (“High Seas Fleet”) was to remain inactive at Wilhelmshaven for the rest of the war. The Imperial German Navy had lost none of its dreadnoughts, although they in turn had failed to sink any of the Grand Fleet’s except HMS Audacious, which in October 1914 struck a mine laid by a converted merchantman off the north coast of Ireland. Only after the Armistice were any of the German dreadnoughts sent to the bottom — by hand of their own crews, interned at Scapa Flow.
The Treaty of Bucharest, signed on May 7, allowed Ludendorff to withdraw several divisions from the Balkans, which added to his reserves for Kaiserschlacht. However, this immediately weakened Bulgarian enthusiasm for the fight, for many army officers, seeing the Turks as the traditional enemy, had anyway been more favourable to the entente. Allied strength on the Macedonian Front had received a boost in late 1917, too, with the entry of Greece into the war. At the end of May the Royal Greek Army, although fielding only ten divisions, roundly defeated the Bulgarians in a two-day battle at Skra-di-Legen, northwest of Thessaloniki (also known as Salonika).
Serbia, which the Austrians and Bulgarians had overrun in 1916, was the other factor on the Macedonian Front. The country remained turbulent, but extreme repressive measures had largely kept it in check. The Serbian army, having been evacuated via Albania and Montenegro by the Italian navy, had then been re-equipped by the Allies and was biding its time in Macedonia. Indeed, the manpower ratio on this southernmost front was now about three to two in the Allies’ favour (720,000 Serbian, French, British, Greek and Italian to 575,000 Bulgarian, German and Turk). But the ratio was two to one in artillery, and ten to one in aircraft.
Nevertheless, in March the Austrians, who might have been expected to reinforce their allies in the Balkans, had sent artillery to the Western Front to support Kaiserschlacht, and then in accordance with the treaty of mutual assistance signed in May — the Waffenbund (literally, “weapons federation”) — sent several divisions. With ammunition in short supply, however, the artillery had soon returned to the Italian Front. The Austro-Hungarian army had received a boost after Brest-Litovsk with the repatriation of several hundred thousand prisoners of war, although some, notably the Czechoslovaks, heeding President Wilson’s promise of national determination, had decided to join the Allies (or, at least, the White Russians) instead. Jaroslav Hasek, author of the semi-autobiographical comic novel The Good Soldier Svejk, was a member of this “Czechoslovak Legion” until, disillusioned, he defected to the Red Army.
Meanwhile on the Western Front, having closed down Operation Blücher, the renewed offensive towards Paris, and launched its adjunct Operation Gneisenau on June 11, Ludendorff began hoping that “relief on the Western Front might be secured in Italy itself”. The cost of Kaiserschlacht was already enormous, with very little strategically to show for it. The Germans had lost 160,000 men in operations Blücher and Gneisenau alone, and although the Allies had lost as many, they at least had the satisfaction of success in halting the offensives.
Ludendorff’s hopes of relief were soon to be dashed. On June 15 the Austrians attacked, with their main effort between Asiago and the sea. Straussenburg had 58 divisions available with almost 950,000 men, as many as Ludendorff had had at his disposal for Kaiserschlacht. Facing him were 57 divisions, with a slight advantage in artillery (fielding 7,000 guns) and considerable superiority in the air with almost 700 aircraft, including five Royal Air Force squadrons (the RAF had been formed on April 1 by the amalgamation of the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Naval Air Service).
Two of the five British divisions hurriedly dispatched to Italy in the aftermath of Caporetto had been recalled to the Western Front in March when Kaiserschlacht began, but two were in the line. These held a front of about five miles south of Asiago in the foothills of the Alps, with a third division in reserve, although influenza had rendered many troops sick. On June 15 they found themselves hard-pressed opposing the Austrian main effort. In his dispatch on the fighting, their corps commander, General the Earl of Cavan, one of the most diminutive yet capable senior British officers of the war — who would soon be appointed to command a newly formed 10th (Anglo-Italian) Army — described how his front was attacked by four Austrian divisions:
“[The line] was held by the 23rd Division on the right and the 48th Division on the left. On the front of the 23rd Division the attack was completely repulsed. On the front of the 48th Division the enemy succeeded in occupying our front trench for a length of some 3,000 yards, and subsequently penetrated to a depth of about 1,000 yards. Here he was contained by a series of switches [alternative positions], which had been constructed to meet this eventuality. On the morning of June 16th the 48th Division launched a counterattack to clear the enemy from the pocket he had gained; this attack was completely successful, and the entire line was re-established by 9am.”
During the initial Austrian assault, Lieutenant Edward Brittain of the 11th Sherwood Foresters, the brother of Vera Brittain, the auxiliary nurse and author of Testament of Youth, was killed leading a local counterattack. Brittain had won the Military Cross on the Somme and was highly regarded in the battalion, but it later emerged that his letters to England, intercepted by the censor, revealed that he had engaged in homosexual activity with one of his soldiers and that his commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Hudson, had been told in confidence that Brittain would face court martial when the battalion came out of the line. Hudson warned him obliquely, and it has been suggested that as a result Brittain put himself in the way of fire that first morning. Hudson, already with a Distinguished Service Order and bar as well as the MC, and at 26 barely four years older than Brittain, would win the Victoria Cross that same morning and be badly wounded in the course of doing so.
Opposite them was Lieutenant Ludwig Wittgenstein of the Austrian artillery, alumnus of Trinity College, Cambridge, and at 29 already a philosopher of note. He was almost killed directing the fire of his battery, and was decorated for bravery a third time.
Despite some local successes, the Austrians made no real progress that morning or in the following days. Italian morale had recovered dramatically after Caporetto, in a large part due to the leadership of the new commander-in-chief, Armando Diaz, a humane and respected Neapolitan who had kept his head and stabilised the line after the debacle, and then played the part of Pétain after Verdun in nursing the army back to health. Commanders at all levels had taken to heart the lessons of Caporetto, adopting more “elastic” tactics for the defence.
Cavan himself described how the “High Command had ample reserves available and handled the situation with coolness and decision. Steps were at once taken to deprive the enemy of the gains that he had made. Torrential rains brought the Piave down in flood and added to the embarrassments of the enemy. Many of his bridges were washed away, and those that remained were constantly bombed by British and Italian aviators.”
George Macaulay Trevelyan, who was once described as probably the most widely read historian, and who in 1918 was commanding the British Red Cross contingent in Italy, recounted how: “Above all, the reserves were well handled, here locally as well as by Diaz on the grand scale. The Bersaglieri ciclisti were hurried up on their ‘push bikes’ along the lanes to the threatened spot time after time, and never in vain.”
After a week Straussenburg called off the offensive and withdrew his hard-won bridgeheads back north of the Piave. His casualties had been woefully heavy: nearly 12,000 dead, 80,000 wounded, and 25,000 made prisoner. The Allies had suffered too, with 8,000 dead, 30,000 wounded, and twice as many made prisoner, but they remained masters of the field. As Cavan wrote: “Not only was the original front line entirely re-established, but that portion of the right bank of the Piave, between the Piave and the Sile rivers, which had been in Austrian hands since November, 1917, was cleared of the enemy. Captured orders and documents proved beyond doubt that the enemy’s plans were extremely ambitious, and aimed in fact at the final defeat of the Allied forces in Italy. The result was a complete and disastrous defeat for Austria.”
Ferdinand Foch, the French generalissimo, whose powers to co-ordinate and direct the Allied armies now extended to the Italian Front, pressed Diaz to mount a general counteroffensive to follow up his success. Diaz successfully argued against it, however. Like Pershing, Diaz would not be hurried. When he mounted his grand offensive he intended it to be decisive rather than merely exploitive. Besides, he argued, once the Allies crossed the Piave they would face the same logistic problems that the Austrians had. For the time being, content to bank the boost in morale that his defensive victory had gained, Diaz ordered only limited actions to seize better start positions from which to launch his offensive when the moment came. He could afford to take his time; the repulse was a catastrophic blow to the Austrian army’s morale and cohesion. The internal ethnic tensions would play an increasing part in the collapse of Austrian resistance.
It was not just on land that Italian morale received a boost that month. Just before the Austrian attack, the Regia Marina (Royal Italian Navy) had sent the Szent Istvan to the bottom of the Adriatic — the only dreadnought on either side to be sunk at sea by direct action. The Allies had been strengthening the Otranto Barrage, making it almost impossible for even U-boats to get through the strait into the Mediterranean. The new commander of the Kaiserliche und Königliche Kriegsmarine (Austria-Hungary’s Imperial and Royal Navy), Rear-Admiral Miklos Horthy, who would become regent of Hungary after the war, decided to force the barrage by bringing the blockade ships to battle. During the night of June 8, Horthy left the naval base at Pola on the Istrian coast (in modern Croatia) with two of his four dreadnoughts, Viribus Unitis and Prinz Eugen, for the attack on the barrage, while his other two dreadnoughts, Szent Istvan and Tegetthoff, were to sail the next evening to rendezvous with him farther down the coast. At first light on June 10 two Italian motor torpedo-boats (Motoscafo armato silurante — “MAS”) under the command of Lieutenant-Commander Luigi Rizzo, returning from patrol off the Dalmatian coast, spotted smoke from the Szent Istvan and Tegetthoff group making for the rendezvous. Rizzo turned his boats towards the smoke, closed rapidly to penetrate the escort screen and made a run for the dreadnoughts.
MAS 21’s two torpedoes ran wide of Tegetthoff, but MAS 15’s hit the Szent Istvan abreast her boiler rooms. Both boats then evaded pursuit by dropping depth charges in their wake.
Szent Istvan’s aft boiler room quickly flooded, giving her a 10 degree list to starboard. Counter-flooding of the portside trim cells and magazines reduced the list somewhat, but the crew were unable to plug the holes and the captain therefore steered for the coast at low speed. Water continued to penetrate the forward boiler room, and eventually all but two of her 12 boilers were doused, cutting off power for the pumps. In a further effort to counter the list her captain ordered the turrets to be trained to port and their ready ammunition thrown overboard. Tegetthoff tried to take her in tow, but had to abandon the attempt when it became clear that Szent Istvan was about to founder. She capsized just after 6 o’clock, two and a half hours after being hit, with the loss of 89 crew. The number would have been far higher had the Kriegsmarine not changed its policy just before the war to require all seamen to be able to swim.
Horthy called off the attack on the barrage, and his fleet returned to Pola, where it remained for the rest of the war. Days before the Armistice a second of his dreadnoughts, the Viribus Unitis (“United Forces”, the personal motto of the late emperor Franz Joseph), would be sent to the bottom, sunk at anchor by Italian frogmen in a daring raid. By then, however, although unknown to the Regia Marina, the Austro-Hungarian Empire disintegrating so rapidly, Viribus Unitis had been handed over to the provisional Yugoslav navy.
Soon after Szent Istvan’s sinking the Russian dreadnought Svobodnaya Rossiya was sent to the bottom by torpedo, but one fired from a Russian destroyer. Launched in 1914 as the Empress Catherine the Great for the Imperial Russian Navy’s Black Sea Fleet, after the February Revolution of 1917 she had been renamed Svobodnaya Rossiya (“Free Russia”). When the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed she had slipped out of Sevastopol for the greater security of Novorossiysk on the eastern shore of the Black Sea, but was scuttled on June 18 when the Germans demanded she be handed over under the terms of the treaty.
The writing was well and truly on the wall for the German Kaiserliche Marine too. After a fruitless foray into the North Sea in April to attack a convoy, in which the battlecruiser Moltke was almost sunk by a torpedo fired by the Royal Navy’s submarine E42, the Hochseeflotte (“High Seas Fleet”) was to remain inactive at Wilhelmshaven for the rest of the war. The Imperial German Navy had lost none of its dreadnoughts, although they in turn had failed to sink any of the Grand Fleet’s except HMS Audacious, which in October 1914 struck a mine laid by a converted merchantman off the north coast of Ireland. Only after the Armistice were any of the German dreadnoughts sent to the bottom — by hand of their own crews, interned at Scapa Flow.
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