We have long been regretting that the work and the fame of our Submarine Service are for the most part hushed to a kind of undertone. We cannot speak of them as we wish, lest the enemy should overhear and profit by information which he is unable to get for himself. But there are victories that cannot be concealed—blows which must and will reverberate, now and for ages to come. The work of the Navy at Ostend and Zeebrugge may openly be spoken of as it deserves. And this is fortunate; for nations, like men, ‘live by admiration, hope and love,’ and admiration is not the least powerful of the three elements. The double attack of St. George’s Day achieved not only a diminution of the enemy’s strength, but an increase of our own. All over the world we heard it hailed as a great feat of arms, and a proof of mastery; even our own hearts were stronger for being so vividly reminded that our seamen are what they have always been—the greatest fighting men alive.
The very conception of this attack was in itself conclusive evidence of a high heroic spirit. The enterprise was not a wild-cat scheme, it was both possible and useful, but it was one from which no man or officer could expect to return. It was planned in November296 1917, a month in which the long and splendid work of our anti-submarine division was rapidly advancing to success. The imagination of the Service rose with the rising tide, and it was determined that the pirates should be not only hunted down at sea, but harried and blocked in their principal submarine sally-ports.
These ports had, during the past two years, become more and more important to the U-boat campaign, and had therefore been more and more strongly guarded and fortified against attack. The section of coast upon which they lie had a system of defensive batteries, which included no less than 120 heavy guns, some of them of 15-inch calibre. A battery of these was upon the Mole at Zeebrugge—a solid stone breakwater more than a mile long, which contained also a railway terminus, a seaplane station, huge sheds for personnel and material, and, at the extreme seaward end, a lighthouse with searchlight and range-finder. An attacking force must reckon with a large number of defenders upon the Mole alone, besides the batteries and reinforcements on shore, and the destroyers and other ships in the harbour. But the attack on the Mole was an indispensable part of the enterprise; for the enemy’s attention must be diverted from the block-ships, which were to arrive during the fight and sink themselves in the mouth of the canal. And in order to deal satisfactorily with the Mole, it must be cut off from the reinforcements on shore by the destruction of the railway viaduct which formed the landward end of it.
That was not all. The main difficulty of the plan was the management of the approach and return of the expedition. The conditions were extremely severe. First, the attacking force must effect a complete surprise297 and reach the Mole before the guns of the defence could be brought to bear upon them. The enemy searchlights must therefore be put out of action, as far as possible, by an artificial fog or smoke-screen; but again, this must not be dense enough to obscure the approach entirely. Secondly, the work must be done in very short time, and to the minute; for though the attack might be a surprise, the return voyage must be made under fire. The shore batteries were known to have a destructive range of sixteen miles; to clear out of the danger zone would take the flotilla two hours, and daylight would begin by 3.30 A.M. It was, therefore, necessary to leave the Mole by 1.30; and as, for similar reasons, it was impossible to arrive before midnight, an hour and a half was all that the time-table could allow for fighting, blocking, and getting away again. To do things as exactly as this, a night must be chosen when wind, weather and tide would all be favourable. We need not be surprised at hearing that the expedition had twice before started and been compelled to return without reaching its objective—once it was actually within fifteen miles of the Mole—but fortunately the Germans, having no efficient patrol at sea, got no hint of what was being planned; and in the end were so completely taken by surprise, that some of their guns when captured had not even had the covers removed from them!
The attack was to be conducted by Vice-Admiral Roger Keyes, commanding at Dover. The force employed was a large and composite one which required masterly handling. The Ostend expedition was a comparatively simple affair; but for Zeebrugge there were needed, besides the principal ships, a fleet of smoke-boats for making fog, motor launches for showing flares and bringing off men in difficulties, monitors298 for bombarding the batteries, and destroyers for looking after the enemy ships lying in harbour, besides a submarine of which we shall hear more presently. The landing on the Mole was to be made from Vindictive, an old light cruiser of 5720 tons, and she was to be accompanied by two old Mersey ferry-boats, Daffodil and Iris, with storming and demolition parties. The three destroyers were North Star (Lieut.-Commander K. C. Helyar), Ph?be (Lieut.-Commander H. E. Gore-Langton), and Warwick, in which the Admiral himself was flying his flag for the occasion.
It need not be said, except for the pleasure of saying it, that the name of every officer present is worth remembering. Those who died, gave their lives to secure a victory as effective and gallant as any recorded, even in our naval history. Those who returned are marked men, to whom their country will never look in vain for sound and brilliant service. It is an inspiring thought that while their action was unique, they themselves were not. The British Navy is full of such men, and we may jostle them in the corridors of the Admiralty every day in the year. Anyone who happened to be near Room 24 on the morning of Monday, April 22, might have seen two officers come out who bore no sign of a destiny more heroic than the rest. Yet they were, in fact, Captain Alfred Carpenter, who had been selected to command Vindictive, and Wing-Commander Brock, who was to create the magic fog, and whose mysterious fate is one of the most heroic and moving episodes of the fight.
To Captain Carpenter we owe the best account yet given of the expedition. If we read the main portion of it, and supplement it with a few notes, we shall get as near to realising the achievement as anyone299 without experience or expert knowledge can do. ‘At last,’ he says, ‘the opportunity we had waited for so long arose, and everybody started off in the highest spirits, and with no other thought than to make the very greatest success of the operation. Fate was very kind to us on the whole, and everything went well—almost as per schedule. The various phases depended on accurate timing of the work of the various units. The smoke-screen craft and the fast motor-boats, at given intervals, rushed on ahead at full speed, laid their smoke-screens, attacked enemy vessels with torpedoes, and generally cleared the way for the main force, in addition to hiding the approach of the latter from the shore batteries. Meanwhile a heavy bombardment was being carried out by our monitors, and the sound of their firing, as we approached, was one of the most heartening things that I can remember. On arriving at a certain point some considerable distance from shore, the forces parted, some going to Zeebrugge and some to Ostend, the idea being that the forces should arrive at the two places simultaneously, so that communication from one place to the other could not be used as a warning in either case. Precisely at midnight (the scheduled time) the main force arrived at Zeebrugge and two of the block-ships arrived at Ostend. The Admiral’s signal before going into action was “St George for England!” and the reply from Vindictive was “May we give the Dragon’s tail a damned good twist!”
‘At midnight we steamed through a very thick smoke-screen. German star shells were lighting up the whole place almost like daylight, and one had an extraordinary naked feeling when one saw how exposed we were, although it was in the middle of the night.300 On emerging from the smoke-screen the end of the Mole, where the lighthouse is, was seen close ahead, distant about 400 yards. The ship was turned immediately to go alongside, and increased to full speed so as to get there as fast as possible. We had decided not to open fire from the ship until they opened fire on us, so that we might remain unobserved till the last possible moment. A battery of five or six guns on the Mole began firing at us almost immediately, from a range of about 300 yards, and every gun on the Vindictive that would bear fired at them as hard as it could. (Ours were 6-inch guns and 12-pounders.)
‘In less than five minutes the ship was alongside the Mole, and efforts were made to grapple the Mole, so as to keep the ship in place. The Iris was ahead. The Daffodil, which was following close astern, came up and in the most gallant manner placed her bow against the Vindictive and pushed the Vindictive sideways, until she was close alongside the Mole. There was a very heavy swell against the Mole; the ships were rolling about, and this made the work of securing to the Mole exceedingly difficult.’
Vindictive was specially fitted along the port side with a high false deck, from which ran eighteen brows or gangways, by which the storming parties were to land. The men were standing ready, but before the word was given a shell killed Colonel Bertram Elliot of the Marines, and Captain Henry Halahan (who was commanding the blue-jackets) fell to machine-gun fire. But no losses could stop the stormers.
‘When the brows were run out from the Vindictive, the men at once climbed out along them. It was an301 extremely perilous task, in view of the fact that the ends of the brows at one moment were from eight to ten feet above the wall, and the next moment were crashing on the wall as the ship rolled. The way in which the men got over those brows was almost super-human. I expected every moment to see them falling off between the Mole and the ship—at least a 30-feet drop—and being crushed by the ship against the wall. But not a man fell—their agility was wonderful. It was not a case of seamen running barefoot along the deck of a rolling ship; the men were carrying heavy accoutrements, bombs, Lewis guns and other articles, and their path lay along a narrow and extremely unsteady plank. (Of these plank brows only two were uninjured by the enemy’s fire; the rest were riddled.) They never hesitated; they went along the brows, and onto the Mole with the utmost possible speed. Within a few minutes three to four hundred had been landed, and under cover of a barrage put down on the Mole by Stokes guns and howitzer fire from the ships, they fought their way along.
‘Comparatively few of the German guns were able to hit the hull of the ship, as it was behind the protection of the wall. Safety, in fact, depended on how near you could get to the enemy guns, instead of how far away. While the hull was guarded, the upper works of the ship—the funnels, masts, ventilators and bridge—were showing above the wall, and upon these a large number of German guns appeared to be concentrated. Many of our casualties were caused by splinters coming down from the upper works. (One shell burst in the Stokes battery, another destroyed the flame-throwing house, and a third killed every man in the fighting top except one—Sergeant Finch, who was badly wounded,302 but kept his machine-gun going and won the V.C. for it.) If it had not been for the Daffodil continuing to push the ship in towards the wall throughout the operation, none of the men who went on the Mole would ever have got back again.’
But Daffodil’s men jumped across to Vindictive, and so joined the storming party. Iris, in the meantime, was trying to grapple the Mole ahead of Vindictive; but her grapnels were not large enough to span the parapet, and two most gallant officers—Lieut.-Commander Bradford and Lieut. Hawkins—who climbed up and sat astride the parapet trying to make them fast, were both shot and fell between the ship and the wall. Commander Valentine Gibbs had both legs shot away. He came out of action with his ship, but died next morning. His place on the bridge was taken by Lieutenant Spencer, R.N.R., who was already wounded, but refused to be relieved. Finally a single big shell came down through the upper deck and burst among some marines who were waiting their turn for the gangways. Out of 56 only 7 survived, and they were all wounded. Altogether Iris lost 8 officers and 69 men killed, and 3 officers and 102 men wounded. But the parapet was stormed all right, and the Germans under it put up no resistance except intense and unremitting gunfire. Some of them took refuge in a destroyer, and were sent to the bottom with her by a successful bombing attack from the parapet.
After some fifteen minutes of this work the batteries on the Mole were silenced, the dugouts cleaned out, and the whole range of hangars and store sheds set blazing, or blown to ruins with dynamite. Then came the first great moment of triumph. ‘A quarter of303 an hour after the Vindictive took her position, a tremendous explosion was seen at the shore end of the Mole. We then knew that our submarine (the old C. 3, who had certainly reached the age for retiring) had managed to get herself in between the piles of the (railway) viaduct connecting the Mole with the shore, and had blown herself up. She carried several tons of high explosive (the equivalent of over 40 good mines) and the effect of her action was effectually to cut off the Mole from the land. Before the explosion the crew of the submarine, which comprised some half-dozen officers and men (under command of Lieutenant R. D. Sandford, R.N.), got away in a very small motor skiff, which lost its propeller and had to be pulled with (a single pair of) paddles against a heavy tide and under machine-gun fire from a range which could be reckoned only in feet. Most of the crew were wounded,............