Four days after the Battle of Jutland, William II visited Wilhelmshaven to inspect the High Sea Fleet. Aboard Scheer’s flagship Friedrich der Grosse, the emperor gave “a hearty speech of welcome to divisions drawn from the crews of all the ships, thanking them in the name of the Fatherland for their gallant deeds.” The kings of Bavaria and Saxony led the list of subsequent visitors from among the crowned heads of the smaller German states, while Scheer reported that “congratulations on the success of the fleet poured in from all divisions of the army in the field, from every part of the country and from all classes of the people.” The German celebration of what was, at most, a tactical victory contrasted sharply with the disappointment on the other side of the North Sea. Ever since the prewar arms race the British navy, from the admirals down to the sailors and stokers, had fully expected that a fleet-scale encounter with the Germans would end in a glorious victory, a modern-day Trafalgar. While no one considered Jutland a defeat, it also did not feel like a victory, even though the outcome, in practical terms, was just as decisive: as one journalist put it, the prisoner may have succeeded in assaulting its jailer, but was now safely back in its cell. King George V expressed his continued confidence in Jellicoe, but would not go so far as to congratulate him, instead sending the admiral a telegram blaming the weather for the missed opportunity to crush the German fleet: “I regret that the German High Sea Fleet in spite of its heavy losses was enabled by the misty weather to evade the full consequences of the encounter they have always professed to desire, but for which when the opportunity arrived they showed no inclination.” Jellicoe echoed the same theme in his own post-battle message to the fleet: “Weather conditions of a highly unfavourable nature robbed the fleet of that complete victory which I know was expected by all ranks.”
Scheer did not send his full, formal account of the battle to William II until July 4, by which time the reality of how little had been accomplished had set in. In the preamble to his concluding remarks, he argued that “the far-reaching heavy artillery of the great battleships was the deciding factor, and caused the greater part of the enemy’s losses…The big ship – battleship and battle cruiser – is therefore, and will be, the main strength of naval power. It must be further developed by increasing the gun calibre, by raising the speed, and by perfecting the armor.” But Scheer followed this vigorous defense of the battle fleet built under the Tirpitz plan with a telling rejection of the strategic premise for building it, admitting that “even the most successful result from a high sea battle will not compel England to make peace.” Like Tirpitz a year and a half earlier, Scheer had come round to the view that the only hope for victory at sea lay in a U-boat war against British commerce. Thus, he advocated a resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare, pursued this time “with the greatest severity.” But until the navy had the means and the mandate to wage such a campaign, Scheer planned to continue regular sorties with the surface fleet. For lack of a better strategy, he persisted with the concept of leading with his battle cruisers, followed by the rest of the fleet, hoping to provoke a British response that would enable him to engage part of Jellicoe’s fleet with all of his own. The only difference was that he hoped to make better use of submarines in conjunction with these future sorties.
Scheer made good on his promise to the emperor, included in the same report, that “by the middle of August the High Sea Fleet…will be ready for fresh action.” By then, the refitting of the König Albert and the commissioning of the new Bayern left him with eighteen dreadnoughts, supplemented by the Moltke and Von der Tann, the only German battle cruisers not still in dry-dock. Rather than devise something new, Scheer revised his plan for the raid on Sunderland intended for late May. On August 18, at 22:00 (German Summer Time, 20:00 GMT), the fleet left the Wilhelmshaven roadstead and struck out on a west-northwest course leading some 400 miles (640 km) across Dogger Bank to the northeastern coast of England, on a timetable for Hipper’s lead ships to shell Sunderland at dusk on August 19. As substitutes for the absent battle cruisers, Scheer gave Hipper the Bayern and the König-class dreadnoughts Grosser Kurfürst and Markgraf, and followed behind with the remaining fifteen dreadnoughts. This time he kept the main body of the fleet just 20 miles (32 km) behind Hipper’s advance group “to ensure immediate tactical co-operation in the event of our meeting the enemy,” which he considered more likely this time because Sunderland was so much closer to Rosyth and Scapa Flow than the targets of the previous raids. As in the March sortie, Scheer left behind the pre-dreadnoughts of the II Squadron and, as in April, the zeppelins (eight, this time) went aloft to accompany the fleet rather than bomb British coastal towns ahead of it. The main difference came in Scheer’s inclusion of two lines of U-boats directed by a submarine officer aboard one of his battleships, which were to protect the port and starboard flanks of the German column on the outbound voyage, then deploy to ambush pursuing British capital ships when the High Sea Fleet made for home under cover of darkness following the shelling of Sunderland.
At least initially the plan appeared to be working to perfection. Scheer felt more comfortable being just 20 miles behind Hipper, indeed, so close that “the smoke of the cruisers was visible all the time.” The submarine pickets provided him with intelligence and also claimed two of the British light cruisers sent out to monitor his advance: the Nottingham, torpedoed and sunk by U 52 at 09:10 (07:10 GMT) on the morning of August 19, and the Falmouth, torpedoed by U 66 that afternoon (and finished off the following day by U 63, while being towed back to port). Just after 07:00 (05:00 GMT) on August 19, the British submarine E 23 torpedoed the last dreadnought in the German line, the Westfalen, causing damage significant enough to force its return to Wilhelmshaven, but Scheer pressed on with the rest of his ships. The navy’s cryptography center at Neumünster provided evidence that the sortie had provoked a considerable response, and by the early afternoon of the 19th Scheer’s U-boats and zeppelins had also reported British forces of various sizes approaching from the south as well as the north. Jellicoe, acting on intelligence that the High Sea Fleet was coming out, had brought the Grand Fleet out for a southward sweep of the North Sea the previous day, and Tyrwhitt’s Harwich force had also put to sea. Unfortunately for the Germans, summer thunderstorms intervened to punctuate an otherwise clear day, disrupting the intelligence flow from the airships, while reports from the U-boats grew too inconsistent to be considered reliable. Scheer later recalled his frustration that “from all the information received, no coherent idea of the counter-measures of the enemy could be formed.” Finally, just after 14:20, he ordered Hipper to fall back on the main body of the fleet so that all of them could alter course to the southeast, to meet what seemed to be a significant British force coming up from the south, from the direction of Harwich and Sheerness. Ironically, had Scheer continued on his intended course toward Sunderland, he would have run right into Jellicoe, who calculated that at one point the two fleets were just 42 miles (68 km) apart. But two hours on his new course brought no contact with British warships, and at the same time left the High Sea Fleet too far from Sunderland to make landfall there at sunset, as planned. At 16:35, Scheer again altered course, this time to the east-southeast, to return to Wilhelmshaven. By 18:00 (16:00 GMT) Jellicoe had Beatty break off his pursuit, and the British forces, too, returned to their bases.
In a strategic sense the battle that did not happen on August 19 was more significant than Jutland, in that it marked the last time the Grand Fleet would be so aggressive in sweeping the North Sea in search of the High Sea Fleet. “The ease with which the enemy could lay a submarine trap for the fleet had been demonstrated on the 19th of August,” Jellicoe later noted, “and risks which we could afford to run earlier in the war were now unjustifiable.” The loss of the Nottingham and Falmouth prompted him to argue that, in the future, light cruisers should not be used as a screen for capital ships without, in turn, being screened by destroyers. He cited the “general agreement…between the flag officers of the fleet and the Admiralty” that “it was unwise to take the fleet far into southern waters” unless accompanied by a far larger destroyer force than Britain then had. Beatty concurred, and in a letter to Jellicoe on September 6, quoted the adage “when you are winning, risk nothing.” By mid-September the two admirals had agreed not to send British dreadnoughts and battle cruisers south of 55°30′N, a line stretching across the North Sea from Newcastle to the German–Danish border.
A stormy September forced the postponement of Scheer’s fifth fleet sortie of 1916 until October, by which time the new chief of the army High Command, Hindenburg, and his chief of staff, Ludendorff, had been invested with sweeping powers not just over the German war effort, but over that of the other Central Powers as well, exercised in the name of William II, whom Germany’s allies had agreed to accept as titular supreme allied commander. Recognizing the economic dimension of the struggle, the new leadership militarized German war industries under the “Hindenburg Program,” and also authorized the resumption of restricted submarine warfare against Allied commerce, preliminary to another unrestricted campaign to be launched early in 1917. Scheer could not complain, having advocated unrestricted submarine warfare in his July memorandum to the emperor, but the change in strategy meant that U-boats would no longer be available for operations with the High Sea Fleet. His improvised strategy called for destroyers to scout the Dogger Bank area and “capture prizes,” while the capital ships acted “as a support to the light craft that were sent out.” As in August, Scheer had eighteen dreadnoughts and two battle cruisers at his disposal, and once again left behind the pre-dreadnoughts of the II Squadron. When the sortie finally came, on October 18–19, rough seas forced the destroyer operation to be scaled back, and it failed to provoke a response from the Grand Fleet (which, under the “risk nothing” line Jellicoe and Beatty had adopted a month earlier, would not have steamed that far south in any event). Afterward, Scheer concluded that his destroyers would be of more use against British antisubmarine defenses at the eastern approach to the Channel, and sent two of the High Sea Fleet’s torpedo flotillas to Zeebrugge on the coast of Flanders, where a half-flotilla was already based. On the night of October 26/27, this combined force attacked the Dover Barrage, sinking ten drifters, two destroyers, and one transport steamer without losing any of its own ships.
Scheer’s sixth and final sortie of the year involved just half of his capital ships, and had the limited purpose of covering a half-flotilla of destroyers sent to rescue two U-boats stranded on the coast of Jutland, north of Horns Reef. The drama unfolded after U 30, on the morning of November 3, reported engine trouble while off the coast of Norway, near Bergen. The crippled boat was soon met and escorted by U 20, homeward bound around the northern tip of Scotland from a cruise in the Irish Sea. British naval intelligence, reading German wireless traffic, became aware of their situation during the day on November 3 and alerted Jellicoe, who dispatched light cruisers and destroyers on sweeps of the Norwegian and Danish coasts to intercept them. U 20 accompanied U 30 across the Skagerrak to the Danish coast, where both boats ran aground in a fog after nightfall on November 4. If the stranded U-boats were found first by the British navy, they were likely to be shelled until destroyed; if they survived intact until the following morning, to be found by Danish authorities, they would be interned with their crews for the duration of the war. U 30 soon managed to work itself free of the sand, but was too damaged to submerge, and in any event its commander refused to leave while U 20 remained aground. Shortly after 22:00, news of their predicament reached Wilhelmshaven, prompting Scheer to dispatch the destroyers on their rescue mission, with a robust escort consisting of the battle cruiser Moltke and eight dreadnoughts.
Scheer was especially concerned for U 20, which had torpedoed the Lusitania eighteen months earlier and was still commanded by the same officer, Kapitänleutnant Schwieger, whom the Allies considered a war criminal. The German destroyers reached the scene shortly after 07:00 on November 5, and for four hours tried to pull U 20 free, but gave up after high tide passed with the boat still stranded. Moltke and the dreadnoughts continued to stand guard while Schwieger and the crew of U 20 were rescued, U 30 taken under tow, and U 20 blown up by a demolition team. The operation proceeded without interruption until 13:00, just after the ships put to sea for the return voyage to Wilhelmshaven, when the British submarine J 1 (Lieutenant Commander Noel Laurence) arrived on the scene to torpedo the dreadnoughts Grosser Kurfürst and Kronprinz. Laurence’s E 1 had torpedoed the Moltke in August 1915, without sinking it, but in the process had prompted the decision to end the German navy’s Riga operation; on this occasion, too, neither German capital ship was badly damaged and each made it safely home under its own power, but the realization that they might have been lost for the sake of saving two submarines prompted William II to forbid Scheer to take such a risk in the future. On November 22, the admiral defended the sortie in person at an audience with the emperor, at Pless in Silesia, the German army’s Eastern front headquarters, warning him that, once unrestricted submarine warfare resumed, “the fleet will have to devote itself to one task, to get the U-boats safely out to sea and bring them safely home again,” thus likely necessitating similar operations in the future. Scheer concluded “every U-boat is of such importance that it is worth risking the whole available fleet to afford it assistance and support.” While at Pless, Scheer had his first meetings with Hindenburg and Ludendorff at which “it was agreed that, if the war should drag on for so long, February 1, 1917, was the latest date at which to start the unrestricted U-boat campaign.” The generals wanted to postpone the campaign for the moment because the Central Powers were on the verge of crushing Romania, which had just joined the Allies in August, and there was at least some hope that this turn of events might lead to peace talks. They also shared with Scheer the fears (ultimately unfounded) of Germany’s ambassador to The Hague that a resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare would prompt the Netherlands to join the Allies.
By the time Scheer went to Pless to meet with the emperor and the generals, the resumption of restricted submarine warfare already had taken a heavy toll on Allied shipping, claiming 231,573 tons in September, 341,363 tons in October, and 326,689 tons in November. The latter figure included the largest Allied ship sunk in the war, when, on November 21, the 48,160-ton Britannic, sister of the Titanic, serving as a hospital ship, struck a mine laid by U 73 in the Aegean Sea; because it was running empty at the time, just thirty lives were lost. German submarines went on to claim another 307,847 tons in December, then 328,391 tons in January 1917. Even though the U-boats were adhering (albeit at times only loosely) to internationally accepted prize rules, the damage inflicted was much greater than during the first round of unrestricted submarine warfare because Germany now had many more submarines in service. The total deployed German undersea force topped 100 boats early in the new year, and in the five months to the end of January they had sunk roughly twice the tonnage that had been taken in the seven months of unrestricted submarine warfare in 1915. Almost all of the damage was done by surfaced U-boats, with 80 percent of the victims warned before being sunk, and 75 percent sunk by the deck gun rather than by torpedoes. Remarkably, during these five months Germany lost just ten submarines, three of which were sunk by the Russians in the Black Sea. After Jellicoe turned over command of the Grand Fleet to Beatty on November 28, 1916, to take office as First Sea Lord, addressing Britain’s dismal record in antisubmarine warfare became his top priority, entrusted to a new Anti-Submarine Division in the Admiralty. Germany’s resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare soon added a greater sense of urgency to such efforts.
