Third Fleet

[Gibbo]

I've found a website which lists the allocation of to squadrons in the RN in 1914. You'll have to scroll a long way down to get to the section headed 'Fleet Deployments // Fleet Lists.

WWI War at Sea

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Has anyone done any research into the inexperience or age of the crews of Craddock’s squadron? I’ve only done some random sampling, but I found that there were boys (standard on all ships), men with less than 2 years experience (again standard) and men who’s service went back to the 1880s, but the majority had joined, or become adults in the navy since 1900, the younger reservists were a mixture of short service men who‘d had around 5 years in the Navy men who‘d done their 12 and not re-engaged and some that had continued. Some records showed that they had served on similar ships or even Monmouth and Good Hope themselves. Many appear to have been prime seamen, who had a three month working up cruise and were familiar with the ships, they had the same amount of time that Captain Arthur Rostron was in command of the Carpathia before the Titanic rescue.

Why is it that the army reservists in the BEF are regarded as competent soldiers, but the naval reservist are regarded as doddery fools? If they were such useless crews they wouldn’t have sailed tens of thousands of miles and rounded Cape Horn - one of the greatest tests of seamanship possible in that voyage they demonstrated a familiarity with their ships. The difference was that they were unfamiliar with fighting the ships and their opponents were men who’d been with the same vessels for years, who had trained together in their ships and as a squadron and practiced their gunnery - something Craddock’s reservists had rarely done in their careers let alone on the voyage down.

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It is doubtful that Craddock knew about Troubridge’s action, let alone court martial, he’d been on the North America and West Indies station since before the war. Wireless was primitive and limited to official traffic and he had no ‘need to know’ about that theatre of war. I have a copy of ‘Official Naval Dispatches’ for the period and there is no mention of Goeben. Given that he was at sea it is unlikely he received the information from any other source.

For most of Craddock’s career it was assumed that ships would ram each other (even Mahan thought they would) and both his ships were built with rams! Gunnery had the reputation of making the paint dirty and the navy was notoriously bad at it; the incompetent Commander In Chief, Mediterranean (J.A. Fisher) after the Boer War was holding gunnery practices at ranges less than the maximum for a Mauser G98 rifle and far less than the 4.7” the naval brigades were using in South Africa. Craddock charged in regardless and his ships were hopelessly outgunned; if Defence and Canopus had been present they would have added to the targets and the possibly getting in shots that would require major repair facilities, but the outcome to the British would have probably been the same.