Original subtitles

Oh, do but think, you stand upon the rivage, and behold, a city on the

inconstant billows dancing, for so appears this fleet majestical.

In August 1914, Britain went to war with a very small

army, and the greatest navy the world had ever seen.

The first duty of the Royal Navy was to defend the British Isles against dangers

defined three and a half centuries earlier by Sir Walter Raleigh.

There are two ways in which England may be afflicted,

one by invasion, the other by impeachment of our trades.

A hundred years after Raleigh, the Marquis of Halifax wrote, To the

question, what shall we do to be saved in

this world, there is no other answer but this.

Look to your moat.

The first article of an Englishman's political

creed must be that he believeth in the sea.

Ever since Trafalgar in 1805, Britain's fleet majestical

had been the envy and despair of other powers.

Wherever there's water to float a ship, said

Napoleon, we're sure to find you in the way.

In 1900, Germany began to build a fleet, a battle fleet.

Admiral von der Goetz told the Reichstag, The maritime superiority of Great Britain,

overwhelming now, will certainly remain considerable in the future.

But she is compelled to scatter her forces all over the world.

With the increases about to be made in the German fleet, we will be in a position to

measure our strength with ordinary British naval forces in home waters.

The very foundations of Britain's security were placed in hazard.

The threat was unmistakable.

Sir Edward Grey, the foreign secretary, expressed its full extent.

If the German fleet ever becomes superior to

ours, the German army can conquer this country.

There is no corresponding risk of this kind to Germany.

For however superior our fleet was, no naval

victory would bring us any nearer to Berlin.

There were two courses open to Britain, to negotiate

to limit the German fleet or to increase her own.

In 1908, the Kaiser ruled out negotiation.

A good understanding with the English is not desirable,

at the cost of the completion of the German fleet.

Whether the British like it or not is immaterial.

If they want war, they can have it.

We are not afraid of it.

Britain met the challenge by stripping her overseas stations

and concentrating her scattered navy in home waters.

Sir John Fisher, First Sea Lord, wrote reassuringly, We will soon have,

in home waters, two fleets, each of which is incomparably

superior to the entire German fleet fully mobilised for war.

So, sleep easy in your beds.

Battleships and cruisers returned home from distant oceans.

A holiday for the Arab smuggler or the Malay buccaneer.

Yet this was not enough.

In 1906, Britain had launched HMS Dreadnought.

Faster, bigger, more heavily armed.

All existing battleships were rendered obsolete.

And in theory, all the shipbuilding nations were now on equal terms.

The naval race began.

Bigger ships, heavier armaments, 12-inch guns, 13.5-inch guns, 15-inch guns.

When war began, it was Britain who had won the race.

She had 24 dreadnoughts and battlecruisers ready to fight, to Germany's 16.

She also had the moral advantage of a century of unchallenged supremacy.

One of the officers on board ship where I served said, one of the first days of the

outbreak of war, I'm quite sure all of us will find our bones

lying at the bottom of the sea within the next ten days.

And I have decided to eat nothing until my death but caviar.

Well, he kept that up, as far as I know, for three

days, and then he gave it up just to avoid bankruptcy.

To Britain's naval strength was added that of France.

German policy had made allies of the old enemies of Trafalgar.

Together, the allied fleets ringed the German and Austrian fortress of Europe.

Colonial possessions throughout the world provided the fleets of Britain and France

and Germany with bases for supplies and repairs.

They also formed a network of radio stations,

connecting distant squadrons with their home command.

Above all, they served as coaling stations.

To steam ships, coal was life.

A heavier ship ate a tonne of coal for every mile steamed at high speed.

When she refuelled, up to 2,000 tonnes of

coal would have to be loaded into her bunkers.

So, across the world, the naval powers had built up chains of coaling stations.

And the filthy colliers that replenished them were the sinews of naval glory.

Coaling ship was a hated task which might take from dawn to dusk, or longer.

It was all right while we were breaking the surface of the coal.

But as you got lower and lower into the hole, it got terrible.

In fact, it was eating coal dust all the time we were down there.

Your nose got blocked up, your eyes got blocked up,

and we were jolly thankful when it was finished.

Only one more day, a-coaling.

One more day, oh, rock and roll me over.

Only one more day.

Only one more day, a-working.

In August 1914, Britain placed entire trust in the Royal

Navy, supreme, invincible repository of imperial might.

Sleep quiet in your beds, Admiral Fisher had said.

We will be incomparably superior to the entire German fleet.

Yet there were those who were uneasily conscious of new factors.

A naval revolution had been silently in progress.

Underwater.

The mine and the submarine created dangers to

which the largest dreadnoughts were vulnerable.

No one knew how these underwater weapons would affect the great fleets.

An American admiral had once said, damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.

And close observers knew that Britain had lagged

behind in developing the underwater armaments.

We had no efficient mine, no properly fitted minesweepers, no arrangements for

guarding our ships against mines, no anti-submarine precautions,

no safe harbour for our fleet.

The lack of submarine defences for the British fleet, even in its home base,

haunted the Commander-in-Chief, Admiral Jellicoe.

I was always far more concerned for the safety of the fleet when it was at anchor

in Scarpa Flow in the early days of the war, than I was when the fleet was at sea.

Unsuspected uncertainties hovered around the Royal Navy as it went to war.

Germany had acquired a colonial empire in Africa and the

Pacific, more than four times the area of her homeland.

And she had developed a huge export trade.

In the Far East was the only naval force outside the North Sea that carried the

flag of Imperial Germany, the German-Asiatic squadron under Admiral Graf von Spee.

This alone defended Germany's Pacific colonies.

The Allies planned von Spee's immediate destruction.

Take away his bases, his radio and coaling

stations, and his squadron would be helpless.

The first to be seized was Samoa.

Palms and sands and lazy islanders ringed by the glamorous South Seas.

This was where Robert Louis Stevenson of Treasure Island had died and been buried.

That ridiculous island, the Kaiser called it.

There was no fighting in Samoa.

A party of New Zealanders came ashore to

accept the German surrender with due ceremony.

The black, red and white flag of Germany came slowly

down the mast, and the Union flag flew in its place.

On the same day, the BEF was marching back from Mons and Le Cato in due exhaustion.

On September the 10th, the remote tropical war moved to another German island,

New Pomerania, off the coast of New Guinea.

There was a brisk action, ending in an Australian victory.

On September the 15th, the whole of German New Guinea surrendered.

Australia, in her first campaign of conquest, had added 90,000 square miles to

the British Empire, at a cost of six dead and four wounded.

But Germany's strongest Pacific colony, and von Spee's main base, was Tsing Tau,

on the Kiao-Ciao peninsula of China.

Its governor telegraphed to Berlin, Tsing Tau is impregnable.

It cannot be taken from the sea, and no one would try from the land.

But it could be besieged.

Japanese, British and Indian troops landed on September the 2nd.

The Japanese had a problem.

They couldn't tell a German-European from an English one.

We sent out a mixed patrol, ourselves and the Japanese.

And they shot one of our men.

They were never really forgiven for that.

Asked why they did it, they said, oh, we look the same as the Germans.

So they gave us Japanese kimonos, coming down to our thighs, which had capes.

And then when we all wore kimonos, we were all sort of chaps together,

no more extents.

The siege of Tsing Tau went on for nine weeks.

The Japanese brought up heavy howitzers to smash the

forts, as the Germans had smashed Liège and Namur.

We were out resting now on the 6th and 7th.

We were behind the ridge, nice cover.

And all of a sudden, the Japanese officer coming on the horseback, full gallop.

He said, Germans, finish, Germans, finish.

White flag is up.

And they surrendered on the 7th, on a Sunday morning, the 7th of November.

Now the last islands to fly the German flag in the Pacific fell one by one.

The Marianas and the Carolines, the Marshalls and Bougainville.

And one by one, Admiral von Spee lost his hopes of coal and sucker.

His sleek ships steamed on in isolation.

Winston Churchill described his dilemma.

With the blockade of Tsing Tau, he was cut off

from his only base on that side of the world.

To steam at full speed, or at high speed, for any length of time, on any quest,

was to use up his life rapidly.

He was a cut flower in a vase.

Fair to see, yet bound to die.

Germany's African empire was crumbling too.

In August, Togoland fell.

In September, the Cameroons.

Southwest Africa was attacked.

The operation was delayed by a rebellion of Afrikaners,

who wanted to reverse the result of the Boer War.

Rebels were killed, dispersed or captured, but the Germans had been granted a respite.

But by the summer of 1915, the Union flag flew over the whole of this vast territory.

The first invasion of German East Africa ended in rout.

A British and Indian force, poorly commanded

and poorly trained, landed on the swampy coast.

Amid muddles and misunderstandings, they were attacked by well-trained African

Ascaris under a great German commander, Colonel von Letow Vorbeck.

The British, their invasion hopes shattered by dysentery and gunfire,

withdrew after four days, leaving behind 800 dead and many prisoners, as well as

enough guns and ammunition, coats and blankets,

to supply the German garrison for years.

Von Letow Vorbeck and his mobile force of never more than 15,000 harassed up to

130,000 Allied troops till the very end of the war.

East Africa held out, but the German Empire had disappeared from the map.

Her merchant fleet had also disappeared.

The blockade mounted by the British Navy on the first day of war was doing its work.

German merchant ships were penned up in neutral ports all round the world.

Ships of neutral nations were prevented from bringing her any materials of war.

This created an instant source of friction between Britain and America.

Lloyd George wrote... Germany's chief power was on land, Britain's on the sea.

Germany's invasion of Belgium, her devastation of France, might arouse

disinterested wrath in America, but it did not touch American pockets.

On the other hand, Britain's firm measures to prevent contraband of war from reaching

Germany, and her wide and constantly widening interpretation of contraband,

caused serious inconvenience to American shipping,

and direct interference with American business.

It was a test of diplomacy, as Britain and Germany competed for America's sympathy.

President Wilson's confidential advisor said...

The British have gone as far as they possibly could in violating neutral

rights, though they have done it in the most courteous way.

President Wilson had determined to keep America out of war.

He contented himself with protests.

And now, under the protection of the Royal Navy, soldiers from Britain and the

British Empire poured unmolested into France and Egypt.

In October, the first Canadian contingent left Halifax, Nova Scotia, for France.

Over 31,000 soldiers.

The greatest concentration ever carried by ship in a single journey.

Everywhere, the oceans were a broad and safe high road for the Allies.

For troops from India, sailing to protect the oil fields of the Persian Gulf.

For Australians and New Zealanders bound for Egypt, where Indian and British

soldiers were defending the Suez Canal against the Turk.

In all this vast traffic, not one soldier was lost through German naval attacks.

The same sea power protected Britain's merchant

trade, more vital now than ever before.

Everywhere, the Allies sailed safely over

the oceans under the wing of the Royal Navy.

But it is the duty of a fleet to destroy enemy warships.

On August the 28th, the Admiralty planned a

daring assault deep into German home waters.

Their destination was Heligoland Bight, the stretch of sea between the small,

heavily armed island fortress of Heligoland, and the mouths of the Elbe and

the Yada, where the main German fleet was concentrated.

The Admiralty knew that German destroyers patrolled this area every night.

They'd planned a trap for the Germans.

But when German light cruisers appeared on the scene,

the British destroyers found themselves in difficulties.

Then suddenly, an impressive new element surged into the battle.

Admiral Beattie's battle cruisers racing into action.

They quickly pounded the German cruisers into wrecks with their big guns.

Admiralty's signalling models caused much confusion among the British squadrons,

but the action was an unqualified British success.

They lost no ships.

The Germans lost three cruisers and a destroyer.

A defeat right on their own doorstep.

Admiral Tirpitz, creator of the High Seas fleet, lamented...

It was a day fateful for the work of our navy.

The Emperor did not want losses of this sort.

Orders were issued by the Kaiser, framed to restrict still further the

initiative of the Commander-in-Chief of the North Sea Fleet.

The loss of ships was to be avoided.

Fleet sorties and any greater undertakings must be approved by the Kaiser in advance.

Germany turned to her underwater weapons.

The frightening potential of mine and torpedo was still a haunting enigma.

Soon, they gained an outstanding and ominous success.

On September 22nd, near the Dutch coast, one of Germany's oldest U-boats,

the U-9, sighted a patrol of three old British

cruisers, the Hogue, the Aboukir and the Cressy.

Within an hour, it had sunk all three, with a loss of 1,400 lives.

More men than Nelson lost in all his battles.

On October 27th, Audacious, a new British dreadnought, hit a mine and blew up.

All the crew were saved, but it was another

alarming sign of the shifting balance of naval war.

On the surface, too, Germany still boasted one conspicuous success.

The cruiser Emden, detached from Von Spee's squadron, was pursuing a hectic and

brilliant career of destruction in the busy sea lanes of the Indian Ocean.

She was a scarlet pimpernel of the sea, gallant,

elusive, always springing surprises on her pursuers.

Emden's exploits rang round the world.

She captured or sank merchant ship after merchant ship.

If they were colliers, she filled her bunkers and took a new lease of life.

Eight British men of war combed the Indian Ocean for her in vain.

Marine insurance rates rocketed.

She delayed the sailing of a New Zealand troop convoy.

She entered Penang Harbour and sank a Russian and a French warship.

One night, she entered the port of Madras and switched on her searchlights.

Her guns blazed away at the shore oil tanks.

They were wrecked, and a million and a half gallons went up in smoke.

In Britain, the Admiralty's prestige was shaken, as even the First Lord,

Winston Churchill, had to admit.

The press and public were not in a position to

understand all that the Admiralty was doing.

They saw only a few German cruisers doing whatever

they chose and sinking British merchantmen.

A great deal of discontent began to make itself heard and felt.

After two profitable months, Emden sailed to the Cocos Islands

and sent a landing party ashore to wreck the radio station.

But the new weapon of radio was her undoing.

The operator had already signalled for help, and

the Australian cruiser Sydney was on her way.

Outgunned and outranged, ran herself onto a reef.

The Indian Ocean was safe again.

Now the flame of German naval imperialism was flickering out.

Only Von Spey remained.

From the outbreak of war, he had eluded his pursuers.

Alone with his five ships, cut off from his colonies,

he steamed on in the empty vastness of the Pacific.

Every day, Churchill studied charts of his possible position and stared at his

Admiralty map, pondering where the Asiatic squadron might be.

At last, news came that it was sailing towards the coast of Chile.

Admiral Craddock, commanding a British squadron

in the Pacific, was ordered to hunt him down.

Craddock wrote...

Somehow, I think we shall say, how do you do to these Teutonic gentlemen?

I'm generally pretty lucky, and we don't want any more disappointments.

Craddock, with the old cruisers Good Hope and Monmouth, and the light cruiser

Glasgow and the armed merchant cruiser Otranto, found

Von Spey near the Bay of Coronel, off the coast of Chile.

We formed Singaline ahead, and Good Hope fired a range in shot, which was short.

The enemy then opened up with repelling salvos.

We did not possess that method of firing, but it soon became apparent to us that

both the Monmouth and the Good Hope were under severe punishment.

About one hour, there was a terrific explosion in the Good

Hope, and she went up like a huge bouquet, and disappeared.

After that, they concentrated on the Monmouth, and us.

And the Monmouth were soon in trouble, and could make very little effective reply.

The Monmouth sank, and the whole crew was drowned.

Craddock, too, was drowned with the crew of the Good Hope.

A fellow admiral said of him, Poor Kit Craddock.

He'd always wanted to die on the hunting field or in action.

News of the black defeat at Coronel staggered a British

public reared on the legend of an unconquerable navy.

U-boats, mines, the Emden, and now a British squadron smashed in a fair fight.

The admiralty, already under heavy criticism, reacted instantly and ferociously.

The battlecruisers, invincible and inflexible,

were ordered out to find Fonspey and destroy him.

There was to be no delay.

The admiral superintendent, Devonport, reports that the earliest possible date

for completion of Invincible and Inflexible is midnight the 13th of November.

Admiralty to CMC, Devonport.

Ships are to sail Wednesday the 11th of November.

They are needed for war service and dockyard arrangements must conform.

If necessary, dockyard men should be sent away

in the ships to return as opportunity may offer.

You are held responsible for the speedy dispatch

of these ships in a thoroughly efficient condition.

On Wednesday, November the 11th, the two great ships under Admiral Sturdy

steamed south towards the South Atlantic and the Falkland Islands.

Forty-five allied warships were now after Fonspey's blood.

He had no illusions.

We have at least contributed in a certain measure to the glory of our arms,

although that cannot signify greatly against the enormous number of British ships.

Unknown to each other, Fonspey and Sturdy were

steaming towards the same place at the same time.

The Falklands.

Sturdy arrived first.

He was coaling in the morning after his arrival when he received the signal of

four-funnelled and a two-funnelled man-of-war in sight.

The ships he was scouring the ocean for were sailing into his arms.

The British crews worked feverishly to prepare their ships for the chase.

The Germans at first thought they had surprised a cruiser squadron.

Then, suddenly, the Germans saw the tripod masts.

Battlecruisers.

They meant certain death.

The battlecruisers swept out of the harbour.

For three hours they chased Fonspey, eating up his 15-mile lead.

At nine miles, Sturdy opened fire.

The Scharnhorst and the Gneisnau fought back gallantly, but they had no hope.

We could feel one or two shots coming.

And hitting us, we could hear...

We could hear the shots piercing in the

funnels and the superstructure and the casings.

And...

But we were assured, from time to time, from the bridge, that all was going well.

Sturdy's advantage was overwhelming.

The British gunnery was uneven.

And many shells that did land on target failed to pierce the German armour.

It was five hours before Scharnhorst sank.

Gneisnau soon followed her.

The Kent finished off the light cruiser Nuenberg.

He was on fire, far and aft.

And...

Some of them were jumping into the water on

bits of wreckage, so as to try and get to us.

But the seas were icy cold.

We all had the impression that those Germans were very, very plucky people.

I actually saw one man pull out the flag that was aft.

How I got hold of it, and I saw him as he was sinking under

the water, still waving that flag as that ship went down.

Much to say, Deutschland, still Uber Alice.

Only one light cruiser escaped.

Coronel was avenged, at the expense of three quarters of the battlecruiser's

ammunition, and... some disturbing questions about the quality of British gunnery.

A month later, on the other side of the globe, another battle raised more

questions, this time about British signalling.

A British battlecruiser force in the North Sea

met a smaller German one near the Dogger Bank.

Their heavy cruiser, Blücher, was badly hit and burning.

She began to slow down.

The British flagship, also damaged and her radio gone, flag

signalled the other ships to continue chasing the fleeing Germans.

But by a combination of mistakes, the whole force stopped

pursuing and turned on the already doomed Blücher.

We annihilated her, brought her to rest, and she was in a very bad position.

But the most extraordinary thing about it was that she was heeling over,

and there must have been over a thousand men

clambering up the deck, onto the side of the ship.

And as she steadily rolled over again, so they was

sliding down the side of the ship into the water.

The German battlecruisers escaped.

Safe in harbour again after their brief foray,

they returned to their old, passive role.

But recreation was not victory.

The German fleet had little to show after six months

of war, except confirmation of the Kaiser's fears.

The British Grand Fleet was too strong for them.

Morale was in danger.

The Kaiser had to issue a special order to his fleet.

I urge you to maintain a spirit of cheerful fulfilment of duty, even when

there has so far been no opportunity in the face of the enemy, or where,

in all human probability, no such opportunity is likely to occur at all.

The German Navy had failed.

But the British had not entirely succeeded.

Six months of war had revealed ominous weaknesses in British training.

It was a fine training of character and seamanship in the long tradition of Drake

and Nelson, but less adapted to the technology of modern naval war.

At Dogger and Heligoland, there had been grave signalling errors.

At the Falklands, Sturdy's guns took five hours to sink Von Spee, whereas at

Coronel, Von Spee had destroyed Craddock in an hour.

The main base at Scarpa Flow was still weakly defended against U-boats.

Thoughtful observers noted defects in British equipment and in tactics.

The long lack of a naval staff was beginning to tell.

Yet the balance sheet was decidedly in Britain's favour.

The German Navy might still be powerful and intact, but her fleet was penned up in

harbour, her merchant ships had disappeared from

the seas, and all her colonies had been seized.

In the first months of the war, the Royal Navy had done its job.

Only a few sensed the absence of the Nelson touch,

and of the tremendous superior might of Nelson's day.

The sea dice into the Against the Coincreons

Of when reformers supposed to possessions