Letterstime - Ein Geleitzug: Homeward Bound? Part XXII
July 6,
1915
---- New
York Times
“French
schoolboys warily watch sentries”
“German
cavalry patrolling the streets of St. Pierre”
(Captions
to front page photographs)
“German
Cavalry Surprises French” - by Maxwell Browning
“German
cavalry played key roles in the quick and essentially bloodless conquest of St.
Pierre and Grande Miquelon, but military experts avowed that Germany had no
cavalry units in all of the Western Hemisphere.
Nonetheless, according to eyewitnesses, multiple groups of German
cavalry played crucial roles in the action and were seen by scores as they
galloped through the streets spreading panic and confusion, and terrorizing the
entire populace ....
“...
enabled the capture of the Western Union offices before anyone even knew that
there were Germans within 4,000 miles, effectively preventing the raising ....”
“Whatever
the doubts as to their origin, there can be no doubt that there were indeed
German cavalry in St. Pierre (see photographs on pages A-1, and A
17-through-23). Based on observed
numbers and photographic review, German cavalry strength in St. Pierre alone
was at least one full troop. (NOTE
1) No information was available as to the
other ....”
---- Room
40
The initial
hours after the thunderbolt that Germany had captured St. Pierre and Miquelon
had been eerie. Sartore attributed it to
the combination of tension from the HSF remaining loose and unsighted in the
North Sea, and the dread of just what mischief the Huns would be revealed to
have been up to since - let alone might still be perpetrating! - on the other
side of Atlantic. Commander Jan
commented in a low voice that everyone seemed to keep glancing over their
shoulder, or otherwise waiting for some second shoe to drop. The conversations in Room 40 roughly
duplicated those in several of the offices of the Admiralty that same
afternoon.
“...
Admiral Burney? To Halifax, you think?”
“Huh! And leave Bermuda undefended? And, with it, the way to Jamaica and beyond?!”
“Yes, isn’t
Admiral Seavey just a few days away now?”
“There’s no
coal on those little French fishing islands, is there?”
“No, quite
right, that!” “Correct, certainly.”
“True, but
there’s coal aplenty for the taking just a few miles off, in Newfoundland and
Nova Scotia. Cape Breton, Glace Bay,
Port Morien and all that.” (NOTE 2)
“Have there
been any reports of losses!?”
The speaker
meant ships gone missing, but his listeners had no trouble in this
context. Nothing about missing coal
barges or freighters had come before them, but all knew that such was no
assurance.
“Get a
cable off, immediately!”
“If the
Huns were out to shell another hamlet,” began another, shifting from ocean to
sea, “shouldn’t they have been spotted by now?
Are those markers for Harwich Force current?”
“Yes, m’lord,
I mean,” the speaker stumbled, realizing belatedly that there had been two
questions of which only one could he answer, “the positions are within the
hour.”
“Hmmph,
yes, well, thank you. Some sort of
bloody exercise, then?” This speaker
meant German exercises but, again, what might have been cryptic to outsiders
was quite clear to all present. Indeed,
there had been several German exercises in the last few weeks, and with
increasing numbers of ships each time.
Some had been in “internal” waters, but some had been brief
out-of-harbor sweeps. Then, four days
ago, the Huns had come out in force in a real sortie - hoping to catch them by
surprise? That had failed to achieve
much of anything, but what was all this about today?
----
Philadelphia Inquirer
“German
cruisers anchored at harbor mouth”
“Bullet
Marked St. Pierre Police Station”
(Captions
to front page photographs)
“Shootout
at the St. Pierre Corral” - by Blue Fox
“... The
police, or Gendarmes, provided the only armed resistance. Under cover of a brief but intense fusillade,
German sailors stormed the station known locally as the Gendarmie and captured
it without loss. One French Gendarme
received a leg wound in the attack, which left the Gendarmie’s front windows
shot out and its face scarred by bullets.
(See photographs Pages A-1 and A-23)
“Based on
interviews with both the French Gendarmes and the German soldiers, the attack
caught the French almost completely by surprise such that the policeman on
watch barely had time to bar the front door and sound the alarm. The Germans eschewed forcing the door and
gained quick entry through the large front windows instead, overwhelming the
defenders before they could organize any resistance. The reporter retraced the routes and ....
“Interestingly,
both the German soldiers and the French Gendarmes agreed that surprise would
have been complete save for the actions of a group of incredibly brave young
boys .... (See “The Paladins of Pierre”, Page 5)”
----
Wilhelmshaven
The senior
enlisted man approached carrying a leather folder.
“Herr
Kapitan, here are the latest ones.”
Kapitan
Jeff Lantz looked up from where his sat in the otherwise empty office, blurry
sheets of paper spread out fan-like on the table before him. The click-clack of telegraph keys echoed
oddly up and down the tiled corridor beyond the open door.
“Thank you,
chief,” he replied, hoping there would be something of value he could
identify. He had not had to struggle to
make sense of the earlier wireless intercepts from the British. There had been a distinct flurry of messages during
the period corresponding to between one and three hours following Admiral Necki’s
emergence into the North Sea. The
messages seemed to have gone out to every force and command of note, as well as
some others that had yet to be conclusively identified. That data yielded two obvious conclusions
with related questions. First, Necki had
been sighted, but by whom? And, second,
the British Royal navy had forces at sea, but what ships and where?
One or two
staffers held the view that spies ashore had made the initial reports. The time delay would correspond well, so they
asserted, to observers making their way back to a safe house to transmit. Another possibility was that a surface ship
had evaded detection and had spotted the German force. Here, the report delay would indicate a later
sighting.
The most
likely explanation, however, appeared to be that one or more RN submarines had
been waiting off shore for just such an opportunity as Necki’s sortie must have
presented. Yet, none had been sighted,
nor (fortunately!) had any German ship been struck by a torpedo. Despite both negatives, submarine(s) clearly
remained the majority opinion as the source.
Things got
a hell of a lot murkier after that, leaving Jeff to rub in frustration at the
skin itching just inside the lip of his cast.
There had
been no equivalent spike in British wireless messages when the Baron had passed
later through practically the same waters, no more than a few thousand yards
off Necki’s earlier track. If Necki’s
sighters had been shore-based, that might have made sense, as perhaps they had
not been able to return to resume their watch.
For submarine sentries, though, that did not seem to be reasonable. There had indeed been a discrete spike, but
it had come much later.
What Lantz
did not know was the reaction of the RN submarine skipper - LCDR G. Layton -
whose E-13 had nearly been run over by Kapitan Conda’s Bremen as he began to
set up to shoot torpedoes at Seydlitz.
He had been confident that he’d never been sighted, and so had taken off
in pursuit as soon as he had resurfaced.
In fact, he’d been exhorting his engineer to greater speed even as his
wireless operator had been sending off the sighting report. Unfortunately for Layton, Necki had
immediately gone to 18 knots, leaving the 15-knot E Class submarine with an
impossible stern chase of a faster quarry already nothing more than a plume
right from the start.
Nor could
Lantz know the rest of the comic opera in which the sub skipper found himself
cast as the hapless lead. It would take
three hours for Layton to finally gave up on catching the battlecruisers and
reverse course to return to his sentry position. Then, two hours later and still at flank of
course, HMS E-13 was again nearly run over, this time by the main body of the
High Seas Fleet as the Baron drove his force hard to clear the area and get out
into the North Sea. The encounter was so
sudden that Layton had been quite unable to get off a contact report; it had
been a very near thing indeed.
Once he got
back to periscope depth, swiveling the scope this way and that had yielded only
distant glimpses of dreadnoughts, and the few ships that ventured anywhere near
torpedo range had been frenetic flotillas whose small size and constant course
changes made them virtually impossible targets.
When E-13 at last surfaced and got off her wireless reports, Layton was
again presented with only a receding plume to chase. Again he chased to no avail, as the Baron
held the Main Body at 17 knots and soon broke contact, leaving HMS E-13 with the notoriety of having seen in
one day more warship target tonnage than any other submarine never to fire a
torpedo, and bestowing upon her commander the title of “Luckless Layton.” (NOTE 3)
----
Halifax
It had been
a long day already, and sunset was still hours away.
“July
2? Is that what they’re saying?!” The senior officer was on the telephone with
officials in Montreal. The officials had
others on a separate line reading the New York Times. “What in hell .... The Huns could be anywhere by now!”
Or nowhere
else, advanced one official in Montreal, lurking instead in ambush for Admiral
Burney. Good Lord, anything was
possible, they all realized, including so many things that had been flat
impossible just weeks ago.
“Sir?” A head poked around the slightly ajar door to
his office. The officer gestured to
enter.
“It may be
true. The packet boat was due back on
the 4th, but it hasn’t turned up yet.”
He closed
his eyes. It had happened before, but he
had no confidence in coincidence.
“Gentlemen,”
the officer interrupted into the phone, “I’ve confirmed the packet boat two
days overdue. I’ve already dispatched a
pair of .... What!?”
Three
minutes earlier, the distant reader in new York had read to the one he had on
the line in Montreal a certain distinctly relevant passage of one of the many
stories. It had taken that long for the
listener to get the attention of the one speaking to Halifax.
“Minefields?! Sir, if that’s true - God! - if it could even
possibly be true - I, well, I simply must put the phone down for a minute.
“George!”
“Sir?”
“Get down
to the wireless, this instant. The
bloody Huns laid mines at St. Pierre!”
He paused
to wipe his face with his handkerchief before he again picked up the receiver,
the sounds of uniform shoes staccatoing on tile receding in the distance.
“When did
you say it would be landing here?” They
had promised that copies had been put on planes for Halifax and Montreal. Who knows, he sighed, what else they may
still have missed?
----
Derfflinger, course 345, speed 18 knots
Admiral
Necki was delighted to have successfully evaded the British. British spies and scouts had become so “reliable”
that he had agreed with the Baron’s prediction that some sort of meeting
engagement was inevitable before he could turn north. Yet here they were, with dusk upon them and
the British not. Instead, His Majesty’s
Royal Navy apparently remained totally ignorant of their position and
visibility was dropping by the minute.
“Hoist the
signal,” he ordered. He swept the
darkening horizon again, as he waited.