The High Seas Fleet in the First World War

The High Seas Fleet (Hochseeflotte) was the main battle force of the Imperial Navy of Germany. Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz built it to challenge the Royal Navy, but in the war it proved too weak for an open fight with the Grand Fleet, and the only great clash of the two fleets, the Battle of Jutland, did not change Germany’s position. In the autumn of 1918 a mutiny of its sailors set off the revolution in Germany, and in June 1919 the ships interned at Scapa Flow were sunk by their own crews.

Tirpitz’s fleet (1907–1914)

The name Hochseeflotte was given on 16 February 1907 to what had been the active battle fleet, but its strength came from the Navy Laws that Tirpitz carried in 1898 and 1900. Under his risk theory Germany did not need as many ships as Britain: it was enough that a clash with the German fleet should threaten British command of the seas. London answered, however, by building dreadnoughts and drawing closer to France and Russia, and the naval race became one of the main sources of hostility between the two countries.

In July 1914 Admiral Friedrich von Ingenohl’s fleet was on its usual summer cruise to Norway, from where Kaiser Wilhelm II recalled it home. From then on the heavy ships lay at anchor in the roads off Wilhelmshaven. In the North Sea alone the Royal Navy had 26 capital ships of the newest type, Germany only 18.

A fleet on a leash (1914–1915)

The British did not close in on the German ports but kept up a blockade from a distance, closing the exits from the North Sea. The German command treated its fleet above all as a “fleet in being”, which ties down enemy forces by the mere fact of existing. After the defeat in the Battle of Heligoland Bight on 28 August 1914 the Kaiser forbade the fleet to be risked without his consent. From then on only the battlecruisers of Vice-Admiral Franz von Hipper were sent against the English coast.

The first such raid, on Yarmouth on 3 November, cost the Germans the cruiser Yorck, which ran onto German mines. On 16 December Hipper shelled Scarborough, Hartlepool and Whitby, killing more than a hundred people, most of them civilians. This time the battleships followed him, but Ingenohl concluded that he faced the whole Grand Fleet and turned back, although only an isolated part of it was within his reach.

In January 1915 Hipper sailed for the Dogger Bank, where on 24 January the British, who were reading German signals, lay in wait for him. In the Battle of the Dogger Bank the Germans abandoned the damaged cruiser Blücher, which sank with most of her crew. On 2 February the Kaiser dismissed Ingenohl, and his successor, Admiral Hugo von Pohl, avoided risk even more carefully. In August part of the fleet covered the attack on the Gulf of Riga, but in the North Sea the big ships hardly put to sea for more than a year.

Scheer and Jutland (1916)

In January 1916 the gravely ill Pohl was replaced by Admiral Reinhard Scheer, who formally took command on 24 January. He meant to use raids, airship attacks, mines and submarines to draw parts of the Grand Fleet out to sea and crush them with superior force. In April his battlecruisers shelled Lowestoft and Yarmouth.

At the end of May Scheer set out towards the Skagerrak, unaware that the whole Grand Fleet was already at sea. In the battle, fought on 31 May – 1 June 1916, his smaller fleet sank 14 British ships for the loss of 11 of its own and twice slipped out of the trap. It did not break British superiority in the North Sea or the blockade. In July Scheer wrote to the Kaiser that no victory at sea would force Britain to make peace, and that only unrestricted submarine warfare could do so.

A fleet in harbour (1916–1918)

On 19 August 1916 the fleet sailed once more towards Sunderland, but did not fire a single shot at the Grand Fleet. In the years that followed its main task was to guard the bases from which the submarines sailed, and from 1 February 1917, when unrestricted submarine warfare began, the navy’s main weapon was the U-boats. The best young officers were moved from the battleships to the submarines, and inexperienced lieutenants took their place.

Idleness, poor food and the gulf between officers and men led to a mutiny in the summer of 1917. On 2 August about 600 sailors and stokers of the battleship Prinzregent Luitpold went ashore without leave at Wilhelmshaven, demanding the release of their comrades. Scheer confirmed the death sentences on two leaders, Max Reichpietsch and Albin Köbis, and both died before a firing squad in September. In the autumn part of the fleet took the islands of the Gulf of Riga in Operation Albion, and cruisers and destroyers destroyed convoys bound for Norway in October and in December.

Mutiny and the end (1918–1919)

In August 1918 Scheer became head of the Naval Warfare Command, and Hipper took over the fleet. At the end of October the two prepared Operational Order No. 19: the fleet was to strike off the Flanders coast and in the Thames estuary and then fight a battle with the Grand Fleet. The government, which was seeking an armistice, was not informed. On the night of 29–30 October the crews of several battleships refused to obey orders and Hipper called off the operation.

The command split up the squadrons to calm the crews, but the III Squadron, sent to Kiel, became the seedbed of the mutiny. On the evening of 3 November a patrol there fired on a procession on its way to free arrested sailors, and on 4 November the town was in the mutineers’ hands. From Kiel the mutiny spread across Germany as the November Revolution and brought down the Empire. The High Seas Fleet never sailed into battle again.

The Armistice of Compiègne required the newest ships to be handed over for internment. On 21 November 9 battleships, 5 battlecruisers, 7 light cruisers and 49 destroyers under Rear-Admiral Ludwig von Reuter met the Grand Fleet at sea, which escorted them into the Firth of Forth. From 22 November the ships sailed in groups to Scapa Flow in Orkney. Their fate was to be decided by the peace conference.

On 21 June 1919, when the Allies were due to take over the ships under the Treaty of Versailles, Reuter ordered them scuttled. Of the 74 interned vessels 52 went to the bottom, and nine German sailors were killed. So ended a fleet that had been twenty years in the building.