By the evening of 18 July, the scattered warnings from the Atlantic had travelled far enough to reach the men who could no longer answer them with another routine patrol order.
Inside the Admiralty at Whitehall, Winston Churchill stood before a chart that seemed to grow less reassuring every hour. Britain and Ireland occupied only a small portion of it. Beyond them stretched the North Atlantic, crossed by commercial routes, patrol areas and pencilled estimates of where German ships might be operating. Blue markers showed British forces. Black marks indicated confirmed or probable merchant losses. Circles surrounded sightings of large German warships, while question marks multiplied wherever reports mentioned submarines.
There were far too many question marks.
Around the table stood Prince Louis of Battenberg, the First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Doveton Sturdee of the War Staff, Rear-Admiral Henry Oliver from Naval Intelligence and several senior officers who had spent most of the evening moving markers, reading telegrams and arguing over ship lists. Light cruisers and destroyers were already searching the waters around Scotland, Ireland and the western approaches, but they were chasing reports sometimes six or eight hours old. More often than not they found lifeboats, wreckage or patches of oil upon an otherwise empty sea.
The enemy remained frustratingly difficult to define.
Merchant captains spoke of enormous grey ships carrying battleship-calibre guns yet moving with the speed of battlecruisers. Their descriptions contradicted one another in almost every detail—turret numbers, silhouettes, even how many vessels were operating—but the distances between the sightings told their own story. No single warship could have appeared in so many places so quickly.
After studying the reports with Oliver, Sturdee and Prince Louis, Churchill settled upon the number that seemed most plausible.
Six.
Six German capital ships scattered across the Atlantic approaches, probably operating independently or in loose groups so widely separated that each could hunt a different commercial route. One name appeared with far greater certainty than the others. Survivors recognized her from photographs, newspapers and the rescue of the Titanic two years earlier.
SMS Moltke.
If Moltke was among them, Churchill suspected she was no ordinary prewar German battlecruiser. Whatever Oskar's shipyards had done to modernize the Imperial Navy, the surviving descriptions pointed toward the same philosophy Britain itself had pioneered: speed married to heavy guns, capital ships powerful enough to destroy cruisers and fast enough to refuse battle with anything stronger.
That conclusion actually reassured him.
Speed had to be purchased somewhere. If the Germans had copied British battlecruiser theory, then armour was the obvious price. They might have large guns and impressive machinery, but British battlecruisers had been built for precisely this sort of contest, and Churchill had immense confidence in British gunnery.
The submarines bothered him far more.
There was no reliable count at all. Ten might explain the reports. Fifteen perhaps. Some officers feared several dozen, although Churchill found that difficult to believe. A completely new class of long-range submarine appearing in enormous numbers seemed improbable even for Germany.
Unfortunately, the reports themselves were improbable.
Merchantmen had been torpedoed in waters where British planners had never expected German submarines to operate so early in the war. Some victims never saw their attacker at all. Others reported a periscope or wake for only seconds before the weapon struck. No one had yet brought Churchill a sufficiently clear description of one of the boats.
The only certainty was that Germany had prepared this operation before Britain entered the war. The raiders had probably moved north under darkness during the diplomatic crisis, avoiding the busiest commercial routes and perhaps exploiting neutral colours or simple distance wherever necessary. By the time Britain declared war, they were already beyond the line that was supposed to contain them.
Churchill stared at the scattered marks across the Atlantic chart for several moments.
Then his expression changed.
"Gentlemen," he said, "perhaps the Germans have been a little too clever."
The conversation around the table quieted.
"They have escaped our northern screen. Very well. I congratulate Tirpitz upon the trick." Churchill rested a hand against the chart. "But in doing so he has also placed some of Germany's newest and most valuable ships on the wrong side of it."
Prince Louis watched him carefully.
Churchill continued.
"We do not tear apart the Grand Fleet chasing them. That may be exactly what Tirpitz wants. Jellicoe keeps the main force concentrated and keeps the gate shut. Nothing else comes out of Germany without our knowing about it."
He moved his finger westward.
"The raiders already outside are another matter."
For that problem, Churchill already knew the man he wanted.
"Send word to Beatty."
Sturdee looked up.
"Sir David?"
"Who else?"
A faint smile touched Churchill's mouth. David Beatty was aggressive almost to the point of recklessness, but this was not an assignment for a cautious man prepared to spend a week examining every possibility. Britain needed someone willing to cross an ocean, find the Germans and engage them the moment the opportunity appeared.
"Beatty takes Lion and whatever fast battlecruisers and supporting cruisers he judges necessary. Enough to defeat the German force if he finds it, but not so much that Jellicoe's position becomes dangerously weak. Let Beatty choose the composition. I want him moving, not waiting in harbour while Whitehall argues over individual hulls."
Prince Louis nodded slowly.
"And the lighter forces?"
"They search nearer home. Scotland, Ireland, the western approaches. Cruisers farther out where endurance permits; destroyers nearer their bases and the routes that actually matter. Every credible sighting is reported immediately. Every survivor is questioned. Every suspicious periscope or wake is investigated."
Churchill looked toward Prince Louis.
"The Channel worries me more."
Louis understood immediately.
"If these submarines possess the endurance the reports suggest, they may attempt to interfere with the Expeditionary Force."
"Exactly. Reinforce the patrols and the transport screens. Whatever forces the Channel commands already possess, use them. I do not want a single German boat reaching our troop routes unobserved if it can possibly be prevented."
That was the line Churchill would not permit Germany to cross.
Merchant losses were serious.
A troopship filled with British soldiers going down between Dover and France would become something else entirely.
"The Army continues crossing," Churchill said. "No delays unless the War Office itself requests them. Belgium is still fighting, France is moving, and every report we receive concerning German aircraft, motorized formations and these damned armoured vehicles suggests that we should take their new toys seriously."
His gaze passed briefly toward the larger imperial map.
"So we answer with what Germany cannot easily manufacture."
"Men?" Oliver asked.
"Men," Churchill replied. "British first, and behind them whatever the Empire can provide. Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, Indians, South Africans—soldiers, labourers, supplies. If Germany means to overwhelm Europe with machinery, then we make certain Europe meets it with the weight of an empire."
Nothing else was to stop either. Operations against Germany's African possessions would continue. German Greater Cameroon remained a prize Churchill wanted isolated and eventually taken. The Foreign Office could continue its work upon Japan and East Asia. Whatever leverage remained in German commercial interests overseas was to be used.
Churchill had no intention of allowing six battlecruisers and some submarines to reorganize Britain's entire war.
That, he suspected, might be part of Tirpitz's purpose.
Create panic. Pull cruisers west. Pull destroyers north. Make the Royal Navy solve one emergency after another until its concentration disappeared.
Churchill would not oblige him.
He looked around the table.
"Then that is our answer. Jellicoe holds Germany in. Beatty hunts what escaped. The Channel remains protected, the Expeditionary Force continues moving, and the rest of the war proceeds exactly as planned."
Several officers began writing.
Churchill raised his voice slightly.
"And one thing more. There will be no panic."
He waited until everyone was looking at him.
"Six German ships do not control the Atlantic. A collection of submarines does not overturn a century of British naval supremacy in three days. Merchant traffic continues. The public sees confidence because we will give them reason for confidence."
His expression hardened.
"The Germans surprised us. They have not defeated us."
That distinction mattered.
Churchill had no doubt that newspapers would soon carry stories of missing steamers, stranded sailors and German warships roaming waters the public had always assumed belonged to Britain. Insurance firms would complain. Shipowners would demand escorts. Parliament would ask how Germany had managed to put capital ships behind the Royal Navy's screen before anyone noticed.
Those questions would eventually reach Churchill himself.
He accepted that.
He was First Lord when the Admiralty succeeded. He could hardly pretend not to be First Lord when it failed.
But he also knew the answer.
The Germans had moved before Britain entered the war. They had not smashed through the blockade. They had gone around the door before Britain closed it.
Now Britain would make certain they never returned through it.
"And when Beatty finds them?" Prince Louis asked.
Churchill's confidence returned.
"Then we shall discover whether German engineering is quite so impressive when Lion begins putting thirteen-and-a-half-inch shells through it."
That earned a few tired smiles.
It was bravado, certainly, but Churchill believed most of it. Britain had pioneered the modern battlecruiser, and its crews had spent years training for long-range gunnery and high-speed engagements. The Germans might have copied the concept and improved the machinery, but Churchill saw no reason to believe they had somehow escaped the basic compromise upon which such ships were built.
Speed and heavy guns had to be paid for somewhere.
Usually, that price was armour.
If Germany intended to play the same game, Beatty was exactly the man Churchill wanted at the table.
Orders began moving almost immediately. Clerks carried messages from the room to wireless and telegraph stations. Somewhere north, Jellicoe would receive confirmation that the Grand Fleet was to remain concentrated. Elsewhere, David Beatty would soon discover that the Admiralty had given him a hunt.
Churchill watched the machinery begin moving around him and allowed none of his private uncertainty to appear.
That was part of leadership as well.
A man might doubt, but an institution could not afford to look as though it did.
Eventually the room emptied.
Churchill remained alone for several moments beside the Atlantic chart.
Without the officers around him, the black marks seemed darker. For men had died beneath them. Merchant sailors drowned in cold water, families would soon receive telegrams, companies would discover that investments worth fortunes had vanished beneath the sea. Churchill knew enough about war to understand that none of this was clean. He had seen men killed before. He had killed men himself. There was very little romance in what remained afterward.
And if the losses continued, the consequences would not remain confined to the sea.
Food prices would rise. Insurance would become more expensive. Factories might slow or close as raw materials failed to arrive, leaving men without work and families struggling to afford what remained. Grief could become hardship, hardship resentment, and resentment might eventually turn against the very government that had taken Britain into the war.
Churchill could not allow that to happen.
For the sake of the Empire, the government, his own career and the name he carried, Britain had to win.
Churchill looked toward the small Union flag upon his desk, then to the photographs of Clementine and the children arranged beside it.
He had spoken with confidence because confidence was part of his duty. Now the Royal Navy had to justify it.
Britain, he reminded himself, had accomplished extraordinary things from a comparatively small collection of islands. Generations of sailors, soldiers, merchants and administrators had carried British power across oceans until the Union flag flew over territories scattered around the globe. To Churchill, few achievements embodied that history more completely than India. A trading company had first gone there with merchants, officers and comparatively few British soldiers, learned the politics of a vast and divided subcontinent, forged alliances, raised armies, defeated rivals and gradually built a system that the Crown had inherited as the greatest possession of the Empire. Peoples of different languages, religions, kingdoms and traditions had been drawn beneath one imperial framework and connected by administration, railways, law and commerce.
Whatever others might say of the means by which that empire had been built, Churchill saw in it proof of what British organization, nerve and persistence could accomplish when confronted by odds that appeared impossible.
Six German raiders were not going to make him doubt that inheritance.
He gathered the Atlantic reports beneath one arm.
The naval orders had been given.
Now came the politics.
Downing Street was close enough that he had no need of the motorcar waiting outside. Churchill dismissed it and stepped into the evening air instead, setting off on foot through Whitehall.
London remained alive around him.
Young men still gathered outside public houses and newspaper offices discussing the war with excitement. Recruiting posters were beginning to appear. Groups of volunteers spoke loudly about France and Belgium, some treating enlistment almost like an adventure waiting to begin. Britain's army remained a volunteer force, and Churchill felt a familiar pride whenever he saw those men presenting themselves willingly rather than being dragged into uniform by conscription.
Beyond Britain itself stood the Empire, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India.
Different peoples separated by oceans, yet all connected through the same imperial system and now increasingly being drawn toward the same war.
Churchill intended to use that strength.
Germany could bring its aircraft, its motor vehicles and whatever strange weapons it had hidden behind factory walls.
Britain would answer with the Royal Navy, the wealth of global commerce and the manpower of an empire stretching around the world.
The Germans were clever, but that did not make them unbeatable.
Churchill reached Number 10 and was admitted almost immediately. His message had preceded him, though apparently not by enough to prevent Prime Minister Asquith from looking mildly irritated at being disturbed so late.
Asquith raised an eyebrow when Churchill entered carrying the bundle of Atlantic reports.
"Winston?"
Churchill closed the door behind him.
"Prime Minister."
He placed the papers upon the desk.
"We have a problem at sea."