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Mine Warfare WWI

By Loren Mitchell

June 18, 2019

In the cataclysm that was World War I, the naval mine is seldom remembered
alongside the Somme, Verdun, and other bitter engagements that ended or
otherwise ruined the lives of millions. Likewise, the sea mine plays but a bit part—if
any at all—when recounting the awful debut of horrifyingly destructive weaponry
such as poison gas, the tank, and the flamethrower during the conflagration that
raged from 1914 to 1918.

Such lack of recognition may be fitting since mines are designed to lay silent,
unnoticed and unseen, until roused from slumber to release their own destructive
fury. Even then, no hero draws a saber, storms the stronghold, or repels the attack.
Void of human glory, the mine’s deadly reckoning is impersonal, having neither face
nor name.

In fact, before and during the early years of the war, “this most unpleasant of all
weapons” was roundly criticized, much maligned as “dastardly,” “despised,”
“devilish,” “morally indefensible,” “a stab in the back,” an “ungentlemanly
contrivance,” an “underhanded infernal device” that was “rather unsporting,” “a
weapon that no chivalrous nation should use,” and later, “a terrible thing that waits.”

Many years before and even after the opening of hostilities, the British Admiralty
was rife with such thought. One result was that in August 1914, Britain claimed a
paltry four thousand ineffective mines, seven “obsolete cruisers” converted into
minelayers, and “six old torpedo gunboats fitted as fleet sweepers.” Britain’s status
as the world’s premier sea power no doubt influenced her negative views: for
decades, sea mines had been considered “the weapon of the weak.”

Before the war, mines were often employed defensively to protect harbors, ports, or
inlets, as by the Germans against the superior Dutch navy in the Schleswig-Holstein
war of 1848-1851. A few years later the Russians did the same during the Crimean
War against a coalition that included a pair of mighty sea powers—England and
France. The Russians employed the “Nobel mine,” named for Immanuel Nobel, a
Swedish industrialist and inventor turned Russian arms manufacturer. An
interesting aside: Nobel’s son Alfred continued the family business, inventing and
manufacturing ordnance and explosives. When faced with public opposition to his
militaristic endeavors, the younger Nobel established a series of peace prizes that
bear his name to this day.

The mine that also bore the family name was distinguishable by perhaps the most
widely recognized characteristic of any naval mine—the protruding horns, or
spikes. Those lead horns were later known as “Hertz horns” after the German
inventor, Dr. Albert Hertz, who perfected them. The horns bent upon impact—a
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force of about fifty pounds was adequate—breaking an enclosed glass tube, which
released a mixture of various chemicals, thus establishing a circuit and essentially
creating a battery. Germany first used Hertz horn mines in 1866 during the Austro-
Prussian War and also in 1870-71 in the watershed War of German Unification to
thwart the much stronger French Fleet. These experiences surely contributed to
Germany’s advanced state of preparedness regarding mine warfare at the dawn of
the Great War.

At least one other power was also ready—Imperial Russia. During the Russo-
Japanese War of 1904-05, both sides use mines extensively, innovatively, and with
telling effect. Russia apparently took stock, Japan seemingly not so much, leading
one author to state that aside from Germany, when WWI began only “Russia had
thoroughly studied the employment of mines and intended to use them to the fullest
extent possible.” While all maritime belligerents possessed some form of mine
warfare capabilities at the start of the conflict, most were not prepared. Count the
United States among that number, which is surprising given the country’s history
regarding naval mines.

During the War of Independence, the Americans launched a few rather feeble
attacks on British warships with contraptions that, while crude, nonetheless meet
the modern definition of a mine as anti-vessel ordnance that explodes underwater.
Those contraptions were the work of American David Bushnell. He had designed an
egg-shaped submersible, the Turtle, that in 1776 set out across New York Harbor to
screw a mine into the wooden hull of the British frigate Eagle. However, the Eagle’s
hull was copper clad, the mine could not be affixed, and the mission failed. Even so,
Bushnell’s efforts at underwater warfare continued, the next year resulting in the
so-called “Battle of the Kegs,” referring to the watertight kegs filled with gunpowder
and suspended from buoys that drifted down the Delaware River toward the British
fleet moored off Philadelphia. Only slightly more effective than his Turtle, Bushnell’s
kegs caused much alarm in the city but did little or no damage to the fleet.
Regardless, Bushnell is rightly known as the father or “pioneer” of mine warfare.

Another American, Robert Fulton, also contributed greatly to mine warfare. More
widely known for his development of the steamboat, in the early 1800s Fulton
approached the French, British, Dutch, and Americans to pitch various ideas for
underwater attack but was met with limited support, funding, or success. However,
the continued pursuit of success helped lead Fulton to develop the first moored
contact mine—that is, a mine that floats beneath the surface tethered to the seabed
and explodes upon contact with a vessel. Consider the following comment from a
British source: “During the War of 1812 the Americans laid what was possibly the
first defensive minefield in order to keep British ships out of New York harbour. By
the end of the war the Americans used mines so extensively that British ships had to
remain offshore.” Fulton continued to innovate.

He also designed the first firing device that, after a set time, locked itself, rendering
the mine inactive. Significantly, both features figured prominently in the Great War
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and are still found in modern sea mines. At least one other key feature was
developed around that time or shortly thereafter, was widely used during WWI,
remains prevalent in mine warfare, and is also associated with a famous name—
Colt.

In 1843, Samuel Colt of Colt firearm fame developed what would be the world’s first
“controlled mine.” Most often found in harbors, river mouths, and estuaries, these
mines were moored to or embedded on the ocean floor and detonated electronically
by lookouts on shore who remotely “controlled” the timed explosion—hence, the
name.

During the American Civil War the Confederates—yet another decidedly weaker
power—used various types of mines aggressively and effectively to sink numerous
Union ships, including the USS Cairo, the first US Navy ship ever sunk by a mine. (At
least twenty-two ships were lost to mines during that war). Interestingly, at the
time, sea mines were called “torpedoes,” shedding light on Rear Admiral Farragut’s
famous command, upon entering the Confederate minefield in Mobile Bay in 1864,
to “Damn the torpedoes!”

In the years leading up to WWI, America’s isolationist tendencies likely retarded

further mine technology development or application in the US. This lack of attention
left the nation forced to play fast catch-up in 1917 when tasked with the dominant
role in laying the most far-reaching and widespread minefield in world history: the
North Sea Barrage. According to the commander of the American minelaying
squadron, “Neither the British nor ourselves yet had a mine that was quite
satisfactory for the prospective requirements.” At the time, unrestricted German U-
boat warfare had resumed and was as its height:

 German subs were averaging one mine per hour laid off the British coast.
 One in four British ships that left the Isles never returned.
 Britain’s stock of effective mines was a mere 1,500.
 An average of one British minesweeper was lost per day.
 Allied shipping losses totaled an estimated two million tons February to April
1917, compared to less than a half million tons during the same time 1916.
 At one point during what has been called the “crisis year” of 1917, Britain
was “on the verge of starvation,” reported to have only two weeks’ supply of
food.
 “Between February and April 1917, U-boats sank more than 500 merchant
ships. In the second half of April, an average of 13 ships were sunk each day.”

A statement by Capt. J.S. Cowie in his book Mines, Minelayers, and Minelaying serves
to illustrate the dire predicament facing the Allies: “By early 1917, however, it had
become evident that drastic anti-U-boat measures were required if an Allied defeat
was to be averted.” The world’s greatest maritime power, the victor of Trafalgar, the
empire on which the sun never set, was threatened with disaster.
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Although a tale unto itself, Germany’s U-boat offensive is inextricably tied to the
topic of mine warfare, especially relating to the North Sea, the English Channel, and
the coastal waters of the British Isles and Ireland. Yes, mining activities were
ongoing literally across the globe: Russia mines were laid in the Gulf of Finland in
the Baltic Sea, the Black Sea, and off the German coast; Allied mines and indicator
nets stretched across the Straits of Otranto in an attempt to block German subs and
Austro-Hungarian warships from exiting the Adriatic into the Mediterranean; the
Allies and the Central Powers mined the Aegean; Norway, Denmark, Sweden—all
neutrals—sowed mines in the North Sea and the Baltic. Several more specific
examples are also warranted.

Carrying more than 450 mines, the German raider Wolf under Capt. Karl Nerger had
gone round the world under orders to “contaminate” the “most important ports of
British India and British South Africa,” as well as the waters off Calcutta, Bombay,
Karachi, Rangoon, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, and the South China Sea,
claiming a reported seventy thousand tons of allied shipping. North America was
not immune either. In the final year of the war, several long-range German subs of
the UE II class dropped mines off Cape Hatteras, NC; in waters off Delaware and New
Jersey; and as far north as Newfoundland; in July the cruiser USS San Diego, used as
a convoy escort, sank off Long Island, NY, reported as “the only total loss of a large
US Navy ship of the whole war”; in September the USS Minnesota, an aging
battleship, was severely damaged by a German mine off the Delaware coast.
Interestingly, at the time Germany considered extending the U-boat campaign to
blockade America, but limited resources precluded the plan. Those incidents pale in
comparison to the next.

The Ottoman Empire laid a relatively insignificant number of mines during the war,
but in March 1915, three hundred or so Ottoman mines had a profound effect on one
campaign in particular and, by many estimates, on the war overall. The Turk mines,
laid in ten rows along the narrow passage of the Dardanelles and protected by shore
batteries, were sufficient to halt the Allied offensive aimed at forcing the Straits and
sending a battle fleet into the Sea of Marmora to take the capital of Constantinople.
The campaign was designed to take Turkey out of the war, secure passage through
the Bosphorus to the Black Sea to relieve Russia, and initiate a flanking movement to
open a new front against the Central Powers, finally breaking the stalemate on the
Western Front. In other words, the war could be won. Counterfactuals aside, a small
Turkish steamer, the Nousret, crept down the Straits and laid twenty mines parallel
to the Asiatic coast. On the afternoon of March 18, “British pre-dreadnought
battleships ‘Irresistible' and 'Ocean' and the French 'Bouvet' were all lost in this
small field, and British battlecruiser 'Inflexible' badly damaged.” In consequence, the
Allied naval assault was called off and the ill-fated Gallipoli peninsular campaign
begun. The little ship had, observed British Fleet Admiral Keyes, “altered the whole
course of history.” One can only wonder.

Nonetheless, mine warfare in far-flung waters is largely viewed as having played a

secondary role. Of the estimated quarter of a million mines deposited worldwide,
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some 200,000 were laid by the Germans, English, and later, the Americans, in
northwest European waters. The decisive naval action occurred in those waters, or
more accurately, under them.

Surface minelayers, some of which were camouflaged with canvas coverings, stored
mines in the hold and fed them onto rails running the length of the ship onto chutes
extending beyond the stern. The mines rode from bow to stern atop an iron box
with little wheels that rolled along the tracks. The box contained a plummet cable
and served to anchored the horned cylindrical mine, about a yard in circumference,
once deposited into the water. The whole apparatus was about six feet high, about
fifteen hundred pounds, and contained as much as 320 pounds of explosive. Mines
could be deposited haphazardly or, more often, in symmetrical patterns at varying
depths. For example, the Great North Sea Barrage, a joint US-British effort, was
approximately 230 miles long and twenty-five miles wide, with mines from near
surface to as deep as 240 feet.

Throughout the war, mine laying and sweeping was a deadly game of cat and mouse,
with roles reversed depending on which navy was laying and which was sweeping.
Later in the war, the process at times became near routine. A passage from Taffrail
illustrates:

Mines were laid with such regularity and punctuality, that the approximate
date of appearance and position of fresh cargoes could be forecast with
tolerable accuracy. Moreover, the submarines [British and German] were
aware that minefields were usually swept up the moment they were
located . . . On one occasion the sweepers merely pretended to sweep a
certain area, and U.C. 44, commanded by an officer named Tebbenjohanns,
arrived on the same spot to lay a new consignment in the certainty that the
previous ones had been cleared.

UC 44 dropped eight mines before striking a German mine laid days earlier. Upon
being rescued, Tebbenjohanns “complained most bitterly” that the English sweepers
“had not carried out their work with the usual thoroughness!” Such routine was yet
to be established at the start of WWI.

In 1914, the Germans wasted no time laying defensive minefields in their coastal
waters. As stated in the authoritative multi-volume account From the Dreadnought
to Scapa Flow, “The Germans began the war with a large stock of efficient mines and
the intention to use them against British warships and merchant shipping, as well as
to defend their harbours and home waters.” Even before Britain’s August 4
declaration of war, an English tanker wrecked on a mine—albeit accidentally—
while exiting German waters. Later incidents were not accidental.

Elsewhere the following day a ship was seen “throwing things overboard” in
international waters off the British coast. The ship was the German minelayer
Konigin Luise, a converted steamer carrying 180 mines that, according to Admiral
Reinhard Scheer of the German High Seas Fleet, was under orders to “make for sea
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in Thames direction at top speed. Lay mines near as possible English coasts.”
Significantly, the Hague Convention forbade minelaying beyond a three-mile limit of
enemy shores although both sides ignored the restriction.

The next morning, in the first naval engagement of the war, the Konigin Luise was
“caught and sunk” by several English ships, with the HMS cruiser Amphion dealing
the fatal blow. Ironically, on the return journey, the Amphion herself was mined and
sank with more than 150 lives lost, including all the German sailors rescued from
the Konigin Luise. Thus began German offensive minelaying, designed to disrupt
British shipping lanes, destroy enemy patrols, and hamstring the Grand Fleet. At the
beginning of the war, “Germany was far more prepared and attuned to minelaying
and utilized warships of many types, including her most modern vessels.” For
example, all German destroyers built after 1912 had minelaying capacity. Such
preparedness bode well for Germany in 1914.
One account has Germany laying twelve hundred mines in Great Britain’s coastal
waters during the first five months of hostilities.

In addition to the Amphion, HMS Audacious also was an early victim. The only
English dreadnought lost during the war, she sank October 27 in waters off northern
Ireland after striking one of several hundred mines laid by SS Berlin, a converted
Germany luxury liner. As an aside, late in the war, during a daring nighttime raid,
Italian frogmen attached a limpet mine to the hull of the Austrian dreadnought
Viribus Unitis, sending the ship to the bottom of the harbor. Thus, mines claimed
two of the three dreadnoughts lost to confirmed enemy activity during the war.
Mines had a role in other daring events as well.

Late in 1914, German battle cruisers bombarded a number of English coastal towns,
causing loss of life and property and creating a nationwide uproar amid fear of
invasion. Incidentally, the Germans considered the towns “fortified” while the
English stated otherwise. Often overlooked is that the bombings served as
diversions allowing German minelayers to ply their deadly cargo throughout British
shipping lanes.

As did all belligerents, the Germans employed a variety of vessels as minelayers,

including destroyers, purpose-built ships, converted merchantmen and passenger
liners, old battleships and cruisers, and, most effectively for the Kaiser’s Navy,
submarines. Depending on size, the subs usually carried twelve or eighteen mines,
sowing their seeds from the stern or dropping them vertically from the bottom, the
latter being a risky maneuver that resulted in more than a few subs being blown up
by their own demolition.

The summer after the advent of unrestricted submarine warfare in February 1915
and until the Armistice, the vast majority of German mines were laid not by surface
ship but by U-boat. Such use was unprecedented and caught the British by surprise.
The U-boat minelayers were extremely potent and, until late in the war, difficult to
counter. In fact, a German sub was responsible for a loss on June 1915 that left
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Britain reeling. To avoid a gale, HMS Hampshire had changed speed and course and
was hugging the Scottish coast in waters thought to be free of U-boat activity when,
ironically, she steamed into a small minefield mistakenly laid a week earlier by U.75.
More than seven hundred perished, including national hero and Secretary of State
Lord Kitchner and his staff, on an important diplomatic mission to Russia. Yet
another key figure, the commander of the US fleet in Britain, was aboard when the
flagship USS New York in 1917 ran upon a mine in the Irish Sea. The ship was
damaged but managed to make Liverpool. Further, a U-boat mine has the dubious
distinction of sinking the largest ship of the war: the 48,000-ton hospital ship
Brittanic, which was, fortunately, en route to pick up her human cargo. All told, U-
boats sunk perhaps as many as five thousand to eight thousand ships of all kinds;
however, more U-boats and Allied warships were lost to sea mines than to
torpedoes, gunfire, ramming, depth charges, or any other cause during the four
years, three months, and seven days of conflict.

The British Response

Unlike Germany when the war began, Great Britain was seriously “unprepared for
large-scale, indiscriminate mining warfare . . . Mines simply were not taken seriously
before the war” nor were subs.

“Minelaying from submarines was unknown” and the Admiralty reckoned “surface
minelayers could be dealt with by the coastal patrols.” Owing to the foresight of
Lord Charles Beresford in 1907, a trawler reserve of around eighty to a hundred
fishing boats “manned by ordinary fishing crews” had been trained to sweep for
mines in home waters and was available at the outbreak of war. Within two weeks
another one hundred fishing trawlers had been requisitioned, armed, and added to
the ranks of the Royal Naval Reserve (Trawler Section). “The men . . . did not wear
uniform” and were “under the control of their regular skippers, who normally went
to sea wearing a bowler hat and a tweed suit, which was adorned with Navy-issue
brass buttons, of which they were extremely proud.” By the end of the war, the
trawlers numbered over four hundred, more than half of the total British
minesweeping force. Over two hundred, at the least, were lost during the war. In
peacetime, they steamed great distances in all kinds of weather, pulling large scoop
nets across the seabed. Thus, they were well suited for towing minesweeping cables
called paravanes—or “Otters”—attached to the nose or rear quarters of the ship and
dragged along like a flying V, scooping up mines rather than fish. Mines that rose to
the surface could be shot or otherwise harmlessly exploded. According to one
contemporary authority: “No merchant ship fitted with the Otter was lost my mine.”
Crewed by no more than a dozen “rough, sturdy, undisciplined” North Sea fishermen
—on average half of whom would be lost in the event of a mine explosion—these
scrappy little vessels were part of a larger force sweeping a thousand miles of home
waters per day by the end of 1914. (Perhaps the most unusual minesweepers were
employed shortly after the armistice: flying the White Ensign of the Royal Navy, two
horses pulled a cable between them and swept the Zeebrugge Canal.)
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Swept waters included rivers, estuaries, harbors, bays, and—remarkably—a narrow

channel, cleared near constantly, running the length of Great Britain’s east coast,
through which all shipping traffic, foreign and domestic, was compelled to pass. To
do otherwise was to risk the perils of the North Sea war zone, which included mines,
U-boats, and warships. Incidentally, this arrangement allowed the British to monitor
and inspect vessels headed to or from the continent for possible contraband or
other prohibited cargo that might aid the German war effort.

When the war started, the Royal Navy had no purpose-built sweepers, so the job fell
to the trawlers, paddle steamers, and drifters and their civilian crews. With limited
training, the men worked non-stop, in horrendous weather, under terrible
conditions, and in near constant danger of mine explosion or enemy attack. As
witness to the inherent danger, consider the words of Taffrail: “In about 1916, an
order came out that all minesweeping sloops were to fit strong nets immediately
before and abaft the bridge, the idea being to catch the personnel on the bridge
before, after being blown up into the air like acrobats, they came down on anything
hard.” Just another day—or night—under the White Ensign.

In spite of their value, the reserve minesweepers were too slow to clear a path for
the big ships of the Grand Fleet to follow. Therefore, “Outdated gunboats or old
destroyers manned by regular naval personnel were pressed into service.” Later, the
Admiralty’s ships of the Flower class took over the bulk of responsibility for fast
sweeping in open water, in time augmented by the similar Hunt class sloops.
Eventually, naval minesweepers of the Racecourse class replaced the civilian
excursion paddleboats, just as the Navy’s Dance class replaced tunnel tugs. All told,
the Royal Navy and the RNMR swept 28,000 mines during WWI.

Aside from sweeping mines, the British navy was obligated to lay them as well.
However, even after the German naval menace was well known, many in the
Admiralty and in government opposed both offensive and defensive minelaying on
the grounds that it would restrict movement of the Grand Fleet and interfere with
merchant shipping. As U-boat activity ramped up, in fall 1914 “it was agreed to lay
defensive minefields to cover the Dover Straits” and to protect a number of ports.
Surprisingly, or perhaps not, many in power—including First Lord of the Admiralty
Winston Churchill—opposed the laying of minefields designed to bottle up the
Germans in their bases at Wilhelmshaven and Cuxhaven.

The Germans had two ways out: west or northwest directly into the North Sea or
east through the Kiel Canal and harbor, then proceeding north around the Danish
peninsula through the waters off Sweden and Norway, respectively known as the
Cattegat and the Skagerrack. German captains preferred the time-saving if more
dangerous direct route. Any excursion from base by either route required, at the
least, minesweeper accompaniment to and from. Protective measures also included
“aeroplanes, outpost flotillas [and] barrier breakers”; plus, “regular reconnaissance,
guard, and mine-searching service was established.” In this way, at no time was the
Imperial Navy totally sealed up.
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Mitigating the German threat was an unrealistic goal in the first three years of the
war. Although “a limited amount of offensive minelaying in the Heligoland Bight
[around the two naval bases] was finally sanctioned” in early 1915, “all such
operations ceased abruptly.” In retrospect, even when the British finally came to
their senses and began to authorize extensive mining of all types throughout the
North Sea, across the English Channel and the Dover Straits, and around the Bight,
the efforts were largely ineffective. Scores of U-boats routinely passed through the
net barrages and minefields unscathed. On one occasion, a British delegation sent to
observe the Cross-Channel Barrage accidentally ran over one of the mined nets—
and nothing happened, fortunately.

As further insult, “British mines were a joke.” They exploded early—or not at all—
and German subs were reported to have returned home with mines wrapped
around their conning towers. Meanwhile, German ships were reported displaying
dud English mines on their decks. Mines often were dragged miles away by the
current or simply broke free from their moorings and drifted away. A safety feature
was supposed to render them harmless, but that was not always the case, as when
an unexploded German mine washed up on an English shore. That mine served as
the model for a new and improved British mine later in the war. Stories abound of
civilians stumbling across strange objects on the beach that turned out to be naval
mines. One such tale involves an intoxicated fellow who spent the night atop a live
mine; another is of a lad who tossed rocks at the queer device—imagine his surprise
when the thing blew up in a fury of smoke and flame. Although he was uninjured,
nine Irish villagers were not as fortunate when they were blown up attempting to
pry open what they thought was a new type of whisky cask.

An especially tragic example of the poor quality of British mines was the Princess
Irene disaster of May 1915. An ocean liner that had been converted to a minelayer,
the doomed ship was moored near Kent with a cargo of four hundred mines when a
horrific explosion occurred that could be seen for miles. Most likely caused by the
overly sensitive firing devices—or pistols—used at the time, the blast killed 358,
including all hands as well as nearly eighty civilians, one of whom was a nine-year-
old girl more than a mile distant. Taffrail explains: “It was not until 1917 that we had
a really reliable mine of our own, and it was the H.2 mine with horns, of practically
identical type to the German. And not until the end of this year were they being
manufactured in sufficient quantities to make offensive minelaying on any
considerable scale a practical possibility.”

In October that year, work was begun to improve the channel barrage. “It was
completed by the end of December but was still being strengthened when the war
ended, by which time over 9,000 mines had been laid in some twenty lines at depths
of 30 to 100 feet below water.” In autumn 1918, the addition of the North Sea
Barrage, also not quite complete, as well as plunging morale that bred mutiny
throughout the German Navy, and the dearth of experienced sub captains and crew,
bought an end to the U-boat scourge. Admiral Scheer wrote that “the U-boat service
was the one which suffered the heaviest losses of the navy”: of 360 U-boats and U-
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boat cruisers total, 184—fifty percent—were lost, the majority to mines. Thus
ended what Scheer termed Germany’s final desperate “hope of a favorable end to
the war.” In sadly bitter irony, the final casualties of the war occurred after the Nov.
11 armistice and were caused by naval mines. The victims were innocents, not
combatants: thousands of civilian refugees were killed in separate disasters while
being evacuated to supposedly safer quarters. Those terrible tragedies should serve
as somber reminders of the horribly destructive power of any war weapon, but
especially of the deadly reckoning of the silent and deadly mine.

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Mine Barrage. Reprint from the Collections of the University of California Libraries.
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Cornford, L. Cope. The Paravane Adventure. Hodder and Stoughton: 1920. iBooks.

Cowie, Capt. J.S. Mines, Minelayers, and Minelaying. Oxford UP. London: 1949.

Crossley, Jim. The Hidden Threat: The Story of Mines and Minesweeping by the Royal
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Friedman, Norman. Naval Weapons of World War One: Guns, Torpedoes, Mines, and
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Hartmann, Gregory K. NSWC Technical Report: Mine Warfare History and Technology.
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Hoole, Rob. “The Development of Naval Minewarfare.” Mine Warfare & Clearance
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Marder, Aurthur J. From Dreadnought to Scapa Flow: The Royal Navy in the Fisher
Era, 1904-1919: The War Years: To the Eve of Jutland. Vol. II. Oxford UP. London:
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Marder, Aurthur J. From Dreadnought to Scapa Flow: The Royal Navy in the Fisher
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Scheer, Reinhard. Germany’s High Seas Fleet in the World War. Digital copy. Cassell.
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