Antwerp, a danger to WW1 Britain?

Tuesday 20 May 2014

Antwerp in the hands of a major continental power was dangerous for Britain, but I thought it would be interesting to examine the factors limiting its utility in the First World War, and how that war could have gone differently.

The main fleet base of the German High Seas Fleet was at Wilhelmshaven on the Jade Bight. This was closer to Antwerp than the British Grand Fleet under Sir John Jellicoe based at Scapa Flow in the Orkneys, and closer even than Sir David Beatty's Battlecruiser Squadron based at Rosyth on the Firth of Forth.

Yet the German High Seas Fleet could not enter the Scheldt estuary, most fortunately for Britain, as if it had it would have been far closer to the mouth of the Thames and the most vulnerable part of the English coast than the British were themselves. At least if they were still at Scapa and Rosyth.

This would have caused some problems for the British. Jellicoe was adamant that the modern dreadnoughts remain at Scapa, and for a time he thought even that was too close and retired to Lough Swilly on the north coast of Ireland. This was because these relatively remote anchorages were believed to be too distant and too dangerous for German U-Boats, while obviously being beyond the reach of aircraft.

If the German fleet gained the Scheldt, Jellicoe would have no choice but to dock the fleet at Chatham or at Portsmouth, as Scapa and Lough Swilly were simply too far away to allow the British to impede a landing by the Germans at Antwerp. This would have placed Jellicoe in a position of risk that he'd rather avoid.

Additionally German possession of Antwerp would allow them to gather a great deal of transport shipping in a sheltered inlet that the British could not strike. This was exactly why the Scheldt was so dangerous in the times of Philip II and Napoleon, and why the British have ever been opposed to a strong continental naval power being established there.

Yet even though the British would be unable to intercept the German fleet in time to prevent it from reaching Antwerp, the Germans were nonetheless unable to use the harbour. Why would this be? Incidentally, it was for the same reason the British had difficulty reinforcing it in the early weeks of WWI.

The problem goes back very far, to the origins of the present political configuration of the Low Countries. Antwerp initially declared for the Prince of Orange in the early years of the Dutch Revolt, as had the whole of Brabant. But it was regained by the Spaniards under the Duke of Parma in 1584.

Despite this victory, the Spanish were unable to use the port due to Dutch control of the island of Walcheren. The Duke of Alba had intended to retake this island, but was distracted by the intervention of the Nassau brothers, and of the French under Gaspard de Coligny, who wished to weaken Spain. Alba was never to get the chance. And Parma after him was unable to make good due to his own perpetual distractions.

With the destruction of Spanish naval power in the north following Maarten Tromp's fantastic victory at the Downs over Antonio de Oquendo in 1639, regaining Walcheren was out of the question.

When the Spanish Netherlands passed to the Austrians, it was even more out of the question. The Austrians had no sea power to speak of, and the Dutch Army garrisoned their forts because the Austrians had precious few troops there.

Charles VI and Joseph II attempted to get use out of Antwerp and the latter even started a war over it, but to no avail. When Belgium was finally created in 1830, it seemed the problem was over as the Dutch allowed use of the Scheldt to Belgian commerce and everybody was happy.

But the problem only seemed over because Belgium had no navy. When war broke out in 1914, Belgium appealed to Britain and France for help. The British Army had already committed itself to France, but Winston Churchill as First Lord of the Admiralty was quick to grasp the importance of Antwerp, a position that could threaten German communications from behind and for which reason Schlieffen had outlined a plan to seize it with all haste.

Churchill was able to send over the Royal Naval Division, the regiments of the Royal Marines, and some French Marines. But these could not enter the Scheldt. The Netherlands protested that the mouth of the Scheldt was Dutch territorial water and that international law obliged them to open fire on any warships attempting to pass Flushing.

Unwilling to compel a Dutch declaration of war upon the United Kingdom, Churchill instead sent the men to Ostend and Nieuport. They then went to Bruges, then Ghent, and finally to the forts of Antwerp to reinforce the Belgian Army that had retreated behind its defences.

The arrival of the British caused the Germans to redouble their efforts to encircle Antwerp entirely, and after they crossed to the left bank of the Scheldt, Churchill withdrew his contingent, which retired back up the Scheldt to Termonde, continuing it to Ghent, where it's joined by the Lys, and from there down the canal linking Ghent with Bruges, and Bruges with Nieuport and Ostend. The British then retreated south to the line of the Yser formed by Nieuport and Dixmude, the canal linking the Yser with Ypres, and continuing on to connect Ypres with the Lys.

It was here that the British would face the Germans in their most terrible and famous battles; Ypres and Passchendaele between the Yser and the Lys. But this is moving beyond the scope of our work.

The point is that the British were unable to directly enter the Scheldt to reach Antwerp, nor could they directly evacuate Antwerp from that direction, as one might presume from glancing at the map. They were required by Dutch neutrality to cross Flanders from and to the ports of Ostend and Nieuport.

Appreciating this fact we realise that's precisely why the Germans could not bring their fleet into the Scheldt estuary and why they did not bother assembling invasion craft at Antwerp. For neither would be able to pass Flushing without being fired upon by the Dutch, just as the Dutch government had informed Churchill earlier would be done to the British if they tried it.

Whatever one might think of Dutch military capabilities, there were powerful forts defending the Scheldt on both sides and the distance was exceptionally narrow. Additionally the western Scheldt was controlled by Terneuse after passing east of Flushing, and the Dutch controlled that too, almost to the very entrance of Antwerp. There could be no reaching Antwerp against the resistance of the Dutch. Germany would have to invade Holland, or else secure her alliance. Neither of which Germany attempted.

During the Second World War Germany overcame this problem by subjugating the Netherlands along with Belgium. But then it was too late, the Germans had no fleet. Though the British could not stop the Germans from collecting invasion craft in the Scheldt, they had no need to fear it. Unable to escort them with battleships, the British could easily stop the Germans with light units that were based all over the south and east coasts of England under Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay. As Admiral Erich Raeder was so fond of telling Hitler, even a single British destroyer getting in amongst the landing craft would be a massacre, and there was nothing stopping the destroyers from doing that.

If the High Seas Fleet still existed the German battleships could have shielded the German transports and have blasted any destroyers or cruisers trying to attack them. But since the Germans had no battleships, and their destroyers and cruisers were hopelessly outnumbered, the British did not need to keep battleships in the Channel or at the mouth of the Thames where they'd be vulnerable to submarines and dive-bombers. And so Ramsey with the Channel Fleet was enough to defend England even without Admirals Sir Charles Forbes and Sir John Tovey with the Home Fleet.

So if we were consider, for a moment, that Schlieffen's plan as originally written was adhered to in 1914, and the Netherlands invaded, Germany could have moved its fleet into the Scheldt at Antwerp. This would force Jellicoe and Beatty to the Thames and the Medway, where, perhaps, their battleships and battlecruisers would have been the prey of submarines and aeroplanes within easy striking distance of German bases, all the more so if the Dutch coast was in German hands.

This could have been very serious for the English position. Fortunately, the Germans apparently never thought of it, or thought it not worthwhile. And so the German main fleet remained at distant Wilhelmshaven which allowed the Royal Navy to keep its capital ships far to the north out of the reach of submarines and aircraft on the remote northeast coast of Scotland.

England's southern bases offered other problems in addition. Light units; destroyers, cruisers, frigates, and corvettes, were maintained at Harwich on the east coast to cover the mouth of the Thames. The problem with Harwich was that it was not deep enough for battleships and battlecruisers.

Therefore, in order to protect the east coast and the mouth of the Thames, the fleet would have to dock at Chatham in the Medway. This was a proper fleet base with sufficient depth for a main battlefleet. Unfortunately the mouth of the Medway was too small. It could not hold the entire fleet, and what it could hold would be tightly crammed within. This would make evasion of aircraft and submarine-launched torpedoes difficult, as the ships ran the risk of collision.

Due to this fact, and Chatham's confined space, the Grand Fleet would have to be divided between Chatham and Portsmouth.

Portsmouth, like Chatham, was relatively cramped, and therefore vulnerable to submarine and aircraft attack. But additionally the separation of the main units of the fleet between the two would allow the concentrated German fleet at Antwerp to get between them. This would have enabled Germany to land on the east coast of England, at the very mouth of the Thames.

The other base at Plymouth in the West Country was ideally suited to control the entrance to the Channel from the Atlantic, but the Germans would not be coming from that direction. It was too far away to be of any use in protecting the Thames, and is therefore of no further consequence to the present work.

Constricted conditions in the southern bases is why Jellicoe much preferred keeping the fleet at Scapa. That anchorage is enormous, one of the largest anchorages in the world. The fleet could be sprawled out making it impossible for submarines, should they get into the harbour, to hit multiple ships with one salvo, and making it much easier for ships to evade if the submarine was sighted, for every ship would be able to move some distance in any direction without risking collision.

This, together with the swift currents in the channels between the Orkneys that were deadly to underwater vessels, made Scapa infinitely more secure against submarines than Chatham or Portsmouth. This was further advantageous on account of the distance from German airbases, for aircraft in those days could not reach Scapa from the continent, and even if they did, the widely scattered ships throughout the bay would make difficult targets.

At Scapa the British main battle fleet with all of its most precious and powerful battleships was untouchable. The Germans could not harm it unless their own main fleet came out to fight. This would not be the case at Chatham or Portsmouth. Both were in range of German aircraft and submarines, who could enter the harbours much more safely than Scapa, and whose targets would be much more vulnerable. Unable to take wide evasive manuevres the ships would have to choose taking the full brunt of the torpedo to their hulls, or else chance ramming their neighbours. In such conditions two developments might easily have occurred.

1. Either the Grand Fleet would determine to remain in the south, where it could be chipped away by successive harbour raids until the margin of British superiority was so narrow that the Germans could emerge from the Scheldt and successfully challenge it.

2. The Grand Fleet would decide that remaining at Chatham and Portsmouth was tantamount to a slow death by German raids, and therefore resolve to return to the safety of Scapa.

If either one happened the south and east coasts of England would be entirely naked to German amphibious assault. The British armies in France would likely have to be evacuated to meet the possibility of German invasion.

Even if this were not attempted, the British would perforce abandon the French to face the Germans alone on the Western Front, which may well have resulted in a German decisive victory over France.

Then it would be England alone against a victorious Germany with a fleet in the Scheldt poised for invasion, that the British fleet would either be too weak or too far away to prevent.

Such may have been the course of WWI had Schlieffen's original intention to invade the Netherlands been adopted. Schlieffen had not proposed it on grounds of a naval war, he cared not for the Scheldt or the mouth of the Thames. He had advocated it on solely military grounds, and solely on those grounds, with considerable justification, it was rejected. But what neither Schlieffen nor his successors saw was the advantage to Germany to be gained from controlling the Scheldt estuary, which could only be done by coercing or occupying Holland.

- Kaiser