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If I were in command, I should set out against Heligoland with the older ironclads Albion, Glory, Canopus, Coliath, Ocean, and Vengeance. The little island could hardly resist these six battleships for long, and the German North Sea fleet supposing one to exist would be obliged to come out from Wilhelmshaven to save its honour."
At sea. I have quite neglected my poor old journal for several weeks. But I have passed through an extraordinarily busy period. It was approved that I should relieve Korting, whose boat, the U.59, I discovered to be refitting at Wilhelmshaven.
The abandonment of the high seas by the German Navy precluded a naval battle, and the defensive strength of harbour defences which kept Nelson outside Toulon had so increased as to make it vastly harder for Jellicoe to penetrate Wilhelmshaven or Kiel. Naval power, which the war proved to be more than ever effective on sea, was shown to be more than ever powerless on shore.
Seaplane pilots were bombing specialists, including among their targets army headquarters, ammunition dumps, railway stations, submarines and their bases, docks, shipping in German harbours, and the German Fleet at Wilhelmshaven. Dunkirk, a British seaplane base, was a sharp thorn in the German side.
When the sharp outlines of the red cliffs of Heligoland appeared, the German cruiser Seeadler came from the island to meet the squadron and reported that the coast ironclads Aegir and Odin, the cruisers Hansa, Vineta, Freya, and Hertha, together with the torpedo-boats, had set out from Wilhelmshaven during the night and had seen nothing of the enemy. The sea appeared free.
The disadvantages of this arrangement once appeared in the delay through a labor strike, when it was necessary to transport part of the unfinished ships to Wilhelmshaven. Another drawback is that not enough room is provided in these ships.
All the available English warships of the North Sea squadron had advanced to attack Antwerp. Since the transport fleet did not appear to need reinforcements, it proceeded on its way west-north-west with its attendant warships, the Wilhelmshaven fleet remaining at Heligoland. What was its destination? Only a few among the many thousands could have given an answer, and they remained silent.
It was seen immediately by the Germans that it formed an excellent natural naval base, lying as it does, thirty-five miles northwest of Cuxhaven and forty-three miles north of Wilhelmshaven. They at once began to augment the natural protection it afforded with their own devices. Two Zeppelin sheds were erected, concrete forts were built and 12-inch guns were installed.
Where does Böhme come in? It was dusk, but light enough to see an unfamiliar craft, a torpedo-boat in fact, moored to stakes at one side. In a moment I remembered that page in the North Sea Pilot where the Ems-Jade Canal is referred to as deep enough to carry gun-boats, and as used for that strategic purpose between Wilhelmshaven and Emden, along the base, that is, of the Frisian peninsula.
The terms of the ultimatum had been discussed by the British Cabinet on Friday the 24th, and the British Fleet, which had been reviewed at Spithead on the previous Saturday, was, instead of dispersing at Portland, kept together, and then, on the 29th, dispatched to its war stations in the North Sea. Simultaneously the German High Seas Fleet withdrew on the 26th to Kiel and Wilhelmshaven.
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