While Churchill remained in Whitehall watching the reports from the Channel grow more dreadful with every passing hour, the naval hunt he had already set in motion continued far beyond Britain.
By 20 July, the nine battlecruisers committed to the Atlantic search had spread across an enormous expanse of ocean. One three-ship division ranged north toward Iceland and the colder routes beyond it, another searched farther west across the central Atlantic approaches, while the four detached dreadnoughts and their accompanying cruisers and destroyers maintained a more central position behind them. The battleships lacked the speed to scour the Atlantic alongside the battlecruisers, but they remained ready to turn toward whichever hunting force first found something worth fighting.
The southern search belonged to Rear-Admiral David Beatty.
Since leaving Scapa Flow late on the nineteenth, his ships had rounded Scotland in darkness and driven south along the Atlantic side of the British Isles. By the following afternoon, HMS Lion was already west of Ireland, the island lying somewhere beyond her port horizon while Beatty continued following the increasingly convincing trail left by SMS Moltke.
The Germans had not passed through the Atlantic without leaving signs behind them. Neutral merchantmen had recovered British crews from lifeboats, American vessels had encountered survivors drifting among wreckage, and merchant captains repeatedly described enormous German warships appearing upon familiar routes, stopping British vessels and sinking them after their crews had been removed. Every report was already hours old by the time it reached Beatty, yet taken together they formed a trail that seemed to lead steadily southward.
Beatty followed it eagerly.
His own division had already spread far beyond visual contact. Princess Royal searched one adjoining sector and Queen Mary another, each separated from Lion by several hours of steaming and connected to Beatty only through wireless. He understood perfectly well that such dispersion carried risks, but the alternative seemed worse. Three battlecruisers travelling together could fight magnificently once the enemy was found, but they could search only a narrow strip of an ocean large enough to hide an entire fleet.
And every hour spent searching mattered. Somewhere beyond the horizon, another British merchantman might already be receiving a German warning shot across its bow. Another captain might be watching his ship sink while his crew pulled away in lifeboats. Beatty was not merely searching for a naval victory; in his own mind, he was racing the Germans for the lives and livelihoods of his countrymen.
That urgency suited him remarkably well.
At forty-three, David Beatty was young for the authority he carried and appeared even younger beside many of the Royal Navy's older flag officers. He was compact, clean-shaven and dark-haired beneath a broad naval cap worn at its familiar rakish angle, with an energetic manner that made complete stillness seem unnatural to him. Even while standing at the rail outside Lion's bridge with binoculars hanging loosely from one hand, he gave the impression of a man waiting impatiently for the next reason to move.
The hunt itself appealed to him almost embarrassingly well. Beatty had always enjoyed sport ashore, particularly the pursuit of something difficult to catch. Fox hunting possessed its own peculiar rhythm: fragments of a trail, long periods of uncertainty and then the sudden excitement when the quarry finally broke cover. Somewhere ahead, unseen but moving, was something equally determined not to be found.
Now the Atlantic had become his countryside, and the fox he wanted most was made of thirty thousand tons of German steel.
Captain Ernle Chatfield stood beside him, quieter and more measured in temperament. Chatfield commanded HMS Lion herself, while Beatty commanded the wider hunt from aboard her. The distinction was natural enough between them that little needed to be said about it. Beatty decided where the battlecruiser force would go and what it was meant to accomplish; Chatfield made certain the enormous warship carrying his flag actually did what was required of her.
The afternoon was almost offensively pleasant. Low Atlantic swells passed beneath Lion's long grey hull while sunlight scattered across the water in broad silver patches. The weather had cleared enough that the horizon seemed impossibly distant, and somewhere beneath the bridge more than a thousand men worked inside a vessel that, until Tiger was fully ready for service, Beatty regarded as the sharpest battlecruiser Britain possessed.
He raised his binoculars once more and studied the empty horizon.
"Beautiful day," he remarked.
Chatfield looked out across the water and nodded. "It is."
Beatty lowered the glasses with a faintly dissatisfied expression. "Pity about the Germans."
That earned the smallest smile from Chatfield. For a while they stood without speaking, watching nothing more threatening than sea and sky, before the captain rested one hand against the rail.
"It is strange how quickly things change."
Beatty glanced toward him. "The war?"
"The Germans."
Chatfield kept his eyes on the horizon. "Less than a week ago they were simply our neighbours across the North Sea. Rivals, certainly, but familiar ones. Their goods were everywhere, their books were read in our homes, their music played in our concert halls, and Oskar's inventions had admirers even among men who distrusted Berlin."
Beatty gave a small shrug. "Things change."
"Rather suddenly."
That much Beatty could hardly dispute. Germany had been regarded with suspicion for years, but suspicion was not hatred. Too much of German life had already become woven into British life for that. Now, almost overnight, familiarity was being stripped away and replaced by something darker.
The newspapers increasingly spoke not of Germans but of Huns. Cartoons turned the German soldier into some grotesque mixture of Prussian militarist, pagan barbarian and machine. Stories spoke of heretics and conquerors trampling Belgium beneath their boots before inevitably turning their attention toward Britain itself. Some papers had gone so far as to invoke the Vikings, warning of raiders crossing the North Sea to burn, pillage and conquer should the Royal Navy ever fail to stop them.
Chatfield shook his head faintly. "You would think some of them had been waiting years to print half this nonsense."
"Perhaps they have," Beatty replied.
Chatfield looked toward him.
Beatty seemed more amused than offended. "Newspapers prepare stories, governments prepare plans, and navies prepare wars. I see little reason to be shocked that everyone considered the possibility before the shooting began."
"Some of it is still absurd."
"Certainly."
"German hordes landing in Kent?"
Beatty smiled. "Absurd today."
The smile faded slightly as he looked back toward the horizon.
"Less absurd if we lose command of the sea."
Chatfield said nothing to that.
That was the part Beatty took seriously. He cared little whether every lurid newspaper story was true. Germany had invaded Belgium, built a fleet powerful enough to threaten British interests and now sent modern capital ships into the Atlantic to attack British commerce. Whatever Berlin believed it was doing, it had challenged the Royal Navy upon the one field Britain could never afford to surrender.
For Beatty, the response was therefore simple.
"They have chosen to test us," he said after a moment. "So we give them their answer."
His confidence came easily aboard Lion. She was nearly thirty thousand tons of steel and machinery, armed with eight 343-millimetre main guns in four twin turrets, backed by a substantial secondary battery, and powerful enough to drive close to twenty-eight knots when required. She embodied the British battlecruiser idea almost perfectly: enough firepower to destroy anything lighter, enough speed to choose when and where to fight, and sufficient secondary armament to deal with smaller warships that came too close.
The scattered reports concerning Moltke suggested that Germany had pursued much the same combination of heavy guns and exceptional speed. Beatty therefore arrived at essentially the same conclusion Churchill had already reached in Whitehall. If the Germans had managed to build a battlecruiser capable of carrying battleship-calibre weapons while maintaining such speed, then something had almost certainly been sacrificed to make it possible.
The obvious answer was armour.
Britain had accepted that compromise in its own battlecruisers, and Beatty saw little reason to believe German designers had somehow escaped the same arithmetic. If Moltke had been built to play Britain's game, then he was perfectly willing to meet her at it.
He lowered his binoculars and glanced toward Chatfield. "Latest positions?"
"Princess Royal remains southwest of us. Queen Mary farther west. Both several hours away if we ordered them toward a common point."
Beatty considered the distances for only a moment. "Push them wider."
Chatfield turned toward him. "Wider still?"
"We are trying to find Germans, not reassure one another. The first ship to make contact reports immediately and the others converge. Until that happens, I would rather have three battlecruisers searching three different pieces of ocean."
Chatfield gave the faintest sigh, though he had clearly expected the answer. "Very good, sir."
The orders went out shortly afterward. Somewhere beyond the horizon, Princess Royal and Queen Mary altered their courses, spreading the southern net farther across the Atlantic. Beatty returned his binoculars to the empty sea with the quiet satisfaction of a huntsman who knew his quarry could not remain hidden forever. Somewhere ahead was Moltke. He only had to find her.
Several hundred kilometres farther south, the fox was beginning to wonder where all the chickens had gone.
British commerce had adapted surprisingly quickly. During the first days of the German raid, merchantmen had continued along routes used for decades, trusting either in the Royal Navy or in the simple assumption that German capital ships could not possibly be waiting for them beyond Britain's northern screen. That confidence had disappeared almost overnight. Warnings now travelled faster than the raiders themselves. British captains delayed departures, abandoned familiar routes, travelled alongside neutral shipping when possible or accepted longer passages simply to avoid the waters in which German ships had most recently been reported.
Vice-Admiral Maximilian von Spee considered the development deeply inconsiderate.
He sat comfortably in the command chair inside the enclosed bridge of SMS Moltke, looking through broad panes of glass at an Atlantic stubbornly refusing to provide him with another British merchantman. Officers and ratings worked quietly around him among plotting tables, compasses, telephones, electrical repeaters and range information. At fifty-three, Spee made an immediate contrast with the younger Beatty. His dark hair had begun to grey, a prominent moustache dominated his longer, more weathered face, and his manner possessed the measured stillness of a man who had spent decades learning that excitement rarely improved a ship's performance.
At present, he had little reason for discomfort. Moltke was easily the finest vessel he had ever commanded.
The ship had been designed with an almost ruthless dislike of waste. Three centreline triple turrets concentrated nine 343-millimetre guns into a simple and tremendously powerful main battery without filling the hull with the sprawling secondary batteries and competing ammunition systems common aboard older capital ships. Oil-fired boilers supplied powerful turbines without mountains of coal or armies of stokers endlessly feeding furnaces by hand, and the space and weight saved throughout the design had been invested in armour, machinery, fuel, subdivision and the systems needed to keep the ship fighting after taking damage.
Even ordinary life aboard was noticeably easier. Ventilation moved fresh air through spaces that would once have become hot and miserable, electric lighting reached deep into the hull, and internal telephones allowed information to move between the bridge, machinery spaces and fighting stations with remarkable speed. The crew quarters remained cramped by civilian standards, but after decades aboard older warships Spee found them almost generous. His own quarters were hardly luxurious, yet they were clean, orderly and comfortable enough that prolonged time at sea no longer felt like an exercise in unnecessary suffering.
More than anything else, the ship simply worked.
Spee valued that more than ornament.
Only months earlier he had been considerably less enthusiastic about Germany's withdrawal from many of its distant Asian and Pacific possessions. Those waters had been his professional world for years. He knew their ports, coastlines and colonial stations, and watching Germany surrender so much influence had felt like abandoning something generations had struggled to build. The coming of war had changed his perspective. Had the old arrangement survived, he might now have been stranded in the Pacific with ageing cruisers, thousands of kilometres from home and surrounded by British, French and perhaps eventually Japanese naval power. Germany would have been forced to defend possessions it could neither reinforce nor properly supply once the sea lanes closed.
Instead, German naval strength had been concentrated much closer to Europe, and Spee now sat aboard Moltke west of Ireland, making the greatest maritime empire on earth worry about the safety of its own approaches. Seen from the bridge of such a ship, Berlin's reasoning suddenly appeared much more persuasive.
A staff officer approached with the latest reports. "Nothing again, Admiral. The others have seen little better. A few neutrals, but no worthwhile British or French traffic since morning."
Spee raised one eyebrow. "Have we frightened them all into port?"
"Possibly, sir."
"How inconsiderate."
The officer smiled, but Spee's attention had already returned to the sea beyond the bridge windows. Empty water might be evidence that British captains were learning caution, but it accomplished very little for Germany.
"Very well," he said. "We move closer."
"Toward Ireland?"
"Toward their ports. They may alter their routes as much as they please, but sooner or later a British ship bound for Britain still has to reach Britain."
The move carried obvious risk. Every mile closer to Ireland reduced the warning Moltke would receive if the Royal Navy appeared, yet Spee had not crossed into the Atlantic simply to admire the scenery. He ordered a southeasterly course, while Goeben and Seydlitz were instructed to reduce the distance between their own patrol sectors. They would continue hunting separately, but Spee wanted them within reasonable supporting distance should something more dangerous than a merchant steamer appear.
By nightfall, Spee's decision to move closer to Ireland finally began producing results.
Three merchant vessels appeared ahead in loose company, two flying Spanish colours and the third unmistakably British. The Spaniards were identified and allowed to continue, while the British steamer was ordered to heave to. Moltke's Marines crossed in their powered boats, and among them once again was Leutnant Ulrich, the enormous Marine officer who had already conducted several of the battlecruiser's boardings since the commerce campaign began. His clipped English remained functional rather than elegant, but by then the procedure required very little discussion. Papers were inspected, the wireless set secured, and the crew informed that their vessel would not be continuing its voyage.
The Germans had become efficient at the work. The British sailors were permitted to gather whatever personal belongings and emergency supplies they could carry quickly, while Ulrich's men searched the vessel and removed anything useful enough to justify taking aboard. Food, drink, tobacco, tools and other practical stores increasingly found their way back to Moltke. Several hundred kilometres from the nearest friendly harbour, the strict formality of prize warfare had begun acquiring something of a pirate's practicality. Spee did not object. If the ship was going to the bottom regardless, allowing perfectly good provisions to sink with it merely for the sake of appearances seemed foolish.
The displaced British crew were eventually accepted aboard one of the Spanish vessels, whose captain took them with nervous courtesy before continuing toward safer waters. Ulrich and his Marines returned to Moltke, and the captured steamer was opened to the Atlantic and left sinking slowly into the darkness behind them.
What Spee did not know was that the British wireless operator had managed to transmit a hurried warning before the Germans reached the set. One of the Spanish vessels repeated the report later, adding its own description and approximate position.
A German battlecruiser had been sighted west of Ireland.
Probably SMS Moltke.
The message travelled north through the night considerably faster than Spee could move south.
Hours later, it reached HMS Lion.
Beatty read the wireless slip twice, and whatever frustration the empty Atlantic had created disappeared from his face almost immediately. Chatfield noticed the change before the admiral handed him the message.
"What have we?"
Chatfield read it quickly. "Moltke?"
"Probably."
"And close."
"Very."
Beatty's grin returned. "There you are."
Lion began turning almost at once. Wireless orders went out to Princess Royal and Queen Mary, instructing both ships to converge upon the reported position at their best practical speed, but Beatty had no intention of remaining where he was until they arrived. Every minute surrendered gave Moltke another opportunity to alter course and vanish back into the Atlantic.
"South-west," he ordered. "And give me speed."
Chatfield glanced toward the plotted positions of the other battlecruisers. "They will need several hours to reach us."
"Then they can catch us."
Chatfield knew there was little use arguing once Beatty sounded like that. Deep beneath them, Lion's turbines began taking more power. Her great shafts increased their revolutions, the wake lengthened astern, and the battlecruiser accelerated into the darkness.
The hunter had finally caught the scent.
Spee knew nothing of it.
Through the remaining hours of 20 July and into the first pale light of the twenty-first, Moltke continued edging closer to Ireland. The coast was still distant, but the approaches were narrowing now. British captains might change their routes across the open Atlantic as often as they pleased, but ships bound for Britain eventually had to come toward Britain.
Shortly after dawn, another enemy vessel appeared ahead.
This one was considerably less impressive than the previous night's steamer.
It was an Irish fishing boat, a respectable medium-sized craft carrying the Red Ensign and operated that morning by only two men: an ageing father and his grown son. They had gone out before sunrise without hiring additional hands, preferring to work together as they had done countless times before, and the morning had treated them well. Much of the deck space aft was already occupied by barrels and boxes containing the day's catch when Moltke appeared upon the horizon.
The German battlecruiser dwarfed them so completely that there was little question of resistance.
Two Marine launches were lowered, partly because the Germans did not yet know what they might find aboard and partly because Moltke's boarding parties had long since learned that useful supplies had an irritating habit of occupying more space on the return journey than on the way out.
Ulrich stood in the first boat.
The fishermen watched the launches approach with expressions that changed rapidly from confusion to disbelief and finally to open fury. Ulrich climbed aboard with several Marines behind him, his huge frame making the little fishing vessel feel smaller still. His men spread through the boat while he approached the older fisherman.
"You captain?"
The father stared at him.
"What bloody business is it of yours, ye great long-legged Teutonic gobshite?"
Ulrich blinked.
His English was perfectly adequate for dealing with merchant captains who spoke something close to the language he had learned.
This was not quite that.
"What?"
The younger fisherman joined in, producing another rapid stream of Irish-accented outrage that left the German officer understanding perhaps every sixth word and none of the grammar connecting them.
Ulrich looked toward one of his Marines.
The Marine shrugged.
The fishermen continued.
The words were largely incomprehensible.
The meaning was not.
Ulrich allowed them to finish before pointing toward the small wooden boat carried astern.
"You take boat."
The older man's expression darkened.
"Take the bloody—this is my boat, you great—"
Ulrich pointed again.
"You take small boat. You go home."
The father stared at him.
"You sink mine?"
"Yes."
That produced an entirely new category of Irish vocabulary.
Ulrich waited patiently through most of it before turning toward his men.
"Get them off."
Father and son were eventually lowered into the little wooden boat with water, a few provisions and the possessions they could carry. They remained close beside their fishing vessel for several minutes, shouting furiously upward while the Marines searched what remained aboard.
Then the Germans discovered the catch.
Barrels began moving.
Then more barrels.
The second Marine launch was brought alongside.
From Moltke's enclosed bridge, Spee watched the increasingly strange operation unfold through the forward windows. At first he could not tell what the Marines were carrying, only that both launches seemed to be returning noticeably lower in the water than when they had departed.
He looked toward the communications officer.
"What have they found?"
The officer adjusted his headset and exchanged a short transmission with Ulrich's boat. His expression changed slightly as the reply came back.
"Mackerel, Admiral."
Spee raised an eyebrow.
"Mackerel?"
"Yes, Admiral. Apparently quite a lot of it."
A few officers nearby smiled.
Spee leaned back in his command chair and looked through the glass toward two German military launches returning with armed Marines surrounded by barrels of freshly caught fish.
"Well, gentlemen," he said, "it seems we shall be eating mackerel today."
He studied the loaded boats for another moment.
"And judging by that, perhaps tomorrow as well."
The bridge laughed quietly.
Even Spee found the spectacle difficult to take entirely seriously. Britain was already filling its newspapers with descriptions of German Huns, barbarians and modern Vikings descending upon civilization to rob and pillage. Yet here he sat aboard one of the most powerful warships Germany had ever built, watching Ulrich and his Marines return from an Irish fishing vessel carrying away barrels of stolen fish.
They were making the British propagandists' work embarrassingly easy.
Beyond the launches, the father and son were rowing toward Ireland, still turning occasionally to shout curses at the Germans while their fishing boat settled lower into the sea behind them. Spee felt some sympathy for them. Their livelihood had just been destroyed for reasons that, to men trying to earn a living from the Atlantic, probably seemed absurd.
But sympathy did not alter the purpose of the operation.
Britain lived from the sea. Merchantmen carried grain, fuel and industrial materials, while fishing fleets carried food directly into British ports. One fishing boat meant almost nothing. Hundreds frightened back into harbour meant less food reaching market, higher prices and another small pressure upon the British population. Germany's purpose was not to make Britain love Germans. It was to make continuing the war increasingly expensive.
And if the fish were already aboard a vessel they intended to sink, Spee saw no sense throwing them away.
For a fleeting moment he felt less like a vice-admiral of the Imperial German Navy than the commander of the most heavily armed pirate ship in the Atlantic.
The thought was still amusing him when a report came down from the mast.
"Smoke to the north!"
Every trace of humour vanished.
Spee straightened in his command chair before rising and stepping toward the forward bridge windows.
"Distance?"
"Too far to identify, Admiral."
He lifted his binoculars.
At first there was almost nothing to see, merely a dark smear upon the pale northern horizon. Then the upper portion of a mast emerged beneath it.
A large mast.
And the smoke behind it continued growing.
"Merchantman?"
There was a short pause.
"No, Admiral. I don't believe so."
Spee's eyes narrowed. Whatever was approaching from the north was moving quickly.
The atmosphere upon Moltke's bridge changed in seconds. Officers moved toward their stations, conversation shortened, rangefinding equipment began turning north and wireless personnel prepared their sets. Below, Ulrich's two launches were ordered back aboard immediately, and sailors hurried to the davits to recover Marines, boats and their unexpectedly valuable cargo.
The mackerel could wait.
Several kilometres to the north, another pair of binoculars had already found Moltke.
Beatty initially saw only a grey interruption upon the horizon. Then Lion's lookouts began calling bearings, and the distant shape slowly grew into something unmistakably large.
Chatfield stepped beside him.
"That isn't merchant traffic."
"No," Beatty replied, keeping the binoculars to his eyes.
As the distance narrowed, the German ship began resolving herself through the morning haze. She rode low and clean upon the water, with little of the clutter Beatty associated with older capital ships. Three enormous centreline turrets became visible.
Triple mounts.
Above them stood a compact superstructure, while behind the ship came remarkably little smoke compared with the darker plume trailing from Lion.
Beatty felt the uncertainty of nearly two days' pursuit harden into recognition.
Across the water, Spee was studying the British silhouette with equal concentration. Four heavy twin turrets gradually appeared through his optics, accompanied by the unmistakable profile of a British battlecruiser.
For several minutes neither admiral said much, and neither ship opened fire. There was still too much distance between them and too much neither man knew. Beatty searched beyond Moltke for another German mast; Spee searched northward behind Lion for whatever British force might be following her. Each understood that the solitary ship ahead might be exactly what it appeared to be—or merely the first piece of something much larger.
Yet about the ships themselves there could no longer be much doubt.
After five days of German commerce raiding and nearly two days of British pursuit, HMS Lion and SMS Moltke had finally found one another.
The hunt was over.
Now each man had to decide whether he had found his prey—or whether his prey had found him.