You Did What__ Mad Plans and Great Historical Disasters - Bill Fawcett [64]
Churchill had time to repent of his decision between the appointment and the outbreak of war, but he found no way to undo it.
Milne’s unsuitability showed up at the very start of the war. The Germans had one very powerful naval asset in the Mediterranean, the battle cruiser Goeben and her escort, the Breslau. She was fast, she had big guns, and she was commanded by an energetic, even brilliant, young admiral named Souchon who knew exactly how to make the best use of her. Although Germany had many fewer places to resupply in the Mediterranean than did the French and British, this ship still posed a serious threat to operations. She could (and did) shell shoreside installations; she could attack ships directly; her top speed allowed her advantages in both attack and evasion. She could outrange anything but the top British battle cruisers.
She also had weaknesses. She was coal-fueled, which meant in practice that she had a short range and needed regular coaling. She had problems with her boiler tubes that needed constant tinkering, and much of the time could not achieve her rated speed. Designed for the cold North Atlantic, she was a hellhole in the Mediterranean, with inadequate ventilation. Belowdecks, a coal-fired ship required crew to keep shifting coal about, as well as shoveling it into the insatiable maw of the boilers, to keep the ship properly ballasted — in the heat of a Mediterranean August, a hot and miserable job that left crew fainting and sick. She was a design generation behind the newest oil-fired turbine cruisers — but she had impressed both friend and enemy when she first sailed from Germany, and she certainly impressed Admiral Milne, who was convinced that she could not be successfully attacked with anything but a modern battle cruiser, of which he had only two. And, as Admiral Souchon would prove, a brilliant commander can overcome the deficiencies of slightly outmoded machines.
Churchill, even before the outbreak of war, had tried to impress on Milne the importance of keeping track of the Goeben. She had been up the Adriatic, getting her pesky boiler tubes worked on (Austria, of course, had Adriatic ports). But on the eve of war, she had slipped past the Adriatic Squadron and disappeared into the blue distance. Churchill sent wire after wire to Milne: find the Goeben. Confine her. And — when war breaks out — sink her.
Milne, like many of the navy’s old guard, thought of Churchill as a hyperactive nuisance. He had too many ideas; he talked too fast and too much; he was probably unstable…a fox-hunting cavalry officer, after all. Journalist. Politician. Self-serving publicity hound. And perhaps worst, a protégé of Jacky Fisher, while Milne was a Beresford man.
And so Milne did not hasten to the chase. Coaling — that messy, slow business — occupied some of his destroyers, and while they were at it, the battle cruisers could use a topping up, too. In a sea ringed by Allied supply bases, he chose to backtrack.
Souchon did not. He attacked the French supply bases at Phillipeville, in North Africa, thereby terrorizing the French and putting off the transport of French colonial troops from Africa to southern France. Milne, informed of this, was sure that Souchon was trying to get out into the Atlantic; he conceived that his duty was to head him off, and also to protect French shipping between Algeria and France. So he pursued, but without grasping what his enemy might be up to. His secondary fear was that Souchon would get back into the Adriatic and hole up in Trieste.
Souchon, meanwhile, was running low on coal again. Evading the British meant using every knot of his speed, and that cost coal by the ton. At this point — in the first few hours of the war — Italy was still neutral. Neither side could afford