by D. Vogt

Created on: June 23, 2010

The Battle of Heligoland Bight was the first sea battle between the British Royal Navy and the German High Seas Fleet during the First World War, in August 1914. Unlike subsequent naval actions in that war, which were more indecisive, the Battle of Heligoland Bight ended with a clear British victory.

Aside from the small but professional corps of the British Expeditionary Force, the British government tended not to invest heavily in land forces. (This changed with the Kitchener battalions in the first months of the war.) Instead, as befitted the history of the British Isles, the military pride and joy of the nation had long been the Royal Navy. For this reason, it is perhaps unsurprising that the first high-profile military action involving the British occurred at sea rather than in Belgium or France, where the armies would soon be bogged down in murderous trench warfare.

Despite the pre-war naval race, moreover, the German fleet still could not hope to best the Royal Navy in a full, head-to-head encounter, and therefore planned to remain in the safety of its ports until such time as smaller numbers of Royal Navy ships temporarily approached close enough to be vulnerable. Since Britain's own naval strategy was to blockade Germany, for most of the war this amounted to an extensive standoff, both countries' exorbitant post-dreadnought battleship fleets sitting harmlessly and uselessly at anchor. However, early on, there was one exception: the British transfer of its expeditionary force to France, which of course had to involve a crossing of the English Channel.

The Royal Navy seized the opportunity to send a large force to sea - five battlecruisers, eight light cruisers, over thirty destroyers, and several submarines - with the object of teasing out and engaging a substantial German fleet. It did so with considerable success, and on August 28 met a smaller German force of six light cruisers, with a large number of motor torpedo boats and minesweepers. Given the discrepancy in forces, the outcome is understandable: Germany lost three light cruisers and a destroyer, with its surviving cruisers suffering heavy damage. The Royal Navy lost no ships.

To a Kaiser who had already feared the power of the Royal Navy on the open seas, the lesson was obvious: Germany's ships must be pulled back and away from further confrontations, to be risked only when there was a clear prospect of victory. Another similarly sized action occurred at Dogger Bank the following year, which the British again won (though two ships were heavily damaged), and the two fleets ultimately only met in one larger encounter, the indecisive Battle of Jutland in 1916, which in terms of tonnage lost was a defeat for the British, but again convinced the Kaiser that his only hope at sea was U-boat warfare against lightly defended merchant convoys, not surface warfare against British capital ships.

Interestingly, a second battle at Heligoland Bight did occur in November 1917, when a pair of Royal Navy cruisers attacked German minesweepers as part of the maintenance of the British naval blockade. The minesweepers fled until they came under the protection of the guns of a pair of German battleships, and then several British battlecruisers hurried in  to join the fray. The result was indecisive, with the exception of the British cruiser HMS Calypso, the entire bridge crew of which were killed when a shell struck the bridge.

Learn more about this author, D. Vogt.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.