On 28 August 1914 the Royal Navy's Harwich Force under Commodore Reginald Tyrwhitt swept into the Heligoland Bight, the waters off the German North Sea bases, to attack the German destroyer patrols there. It was the first significant naval battle of the First World War. In mist and confusion the British light forces were soon fighting German light cruisers, until David Beatty's battlecruisers came down from the north and sank two of them. The Germans lost the cruisers Mainz, Cöln and Ariadne and a destroyer, with more than 1,000 men killed; no British ship was sunk.
A trap off the German coast
The German High Seas Fleet lay in Jade Bay, reached through the Heligoland Bight, named after the island some thirty miles off the coast. Each evening a German destroyer flotilla came out to Heligoland on patrol, escorted by light cruisers, and returned in the morning. Commodore Roger Keyes of the submarine service and Tyrwhitt, commander of the destroyers and light cruisers at Harwich, proposed a raid to catch these patrols.1
Tyrwhitt's flotillas, led by the new light cruiser Arethusa and the Fearless, would sweep through the bight with submarines lying in wait. The Admiralty then added Beatty's battlecruisers and Commodore William Goodenough's six light cruisers in support, but the signal announcing them never reached Tyrwhitt or Keyes, a failure that made the day even more confusing and dangerous.2
Fighting in the mist
The Harwich Force reached the bight around 8 a.m. and was soon in action with German destroyers and the old cruisers Stettin and Frauenlob. The destroyer V187 was sunk, and British destroyers lowering boats to rescue her crew came under fire from a German cruiser. Arethusa, in a running fight with Frauenlob, was hit perhaps 35 times; her guns went out of action one by one, and she later had to be towed home.3
More German cruisers came out one by one, some of them having had to raise steam first, while low tide kept the German battlecruisers behind the bar at the mouth of the Jade. Around midday Goodenough's cruisers arrived and joined in sinking the Mainz. According to Tyrwhitt's dispatch, 7 officers and 79 men of her crew were taken prisoner.4
Beatty's battlecruisers
Beatty brought his battlecruisers down from the north at high speed. Shortly after midday his heavy guns sank the Cöln and the Ariadne, which got away from the fight but sank later in the afternoon. Beatty's report records that destroyers sent to look for survivors of the Cöln found none. Only the mist, Rickard notes, saved the other German cruisers.5
By about 1 p.m. the British forces were withdrawing. Several British ships had been badly damaged, but none was lost. The naval historian Gordon Smith's summary puts German losses at more than 1,000 killed.6
What it changed
In Britain the battle was celebrated as a great victory: three cruisers and a destroyer sunk just off the German coast for no ship lost. Its main effect, the historian John Rickard argues, was on the Kaiser, who became even more determined not to risk the High Seas Fleet in a major battle, which confirmed British control of the North Sea and the blockade of Germany.7
The same waters had seen a very different battle half a century earlier, told on our page for 9 May, the Battle of Heligoland of 1864, and the greatest sea fights of history are surveyed in our guide to the greatest naval battles. › Second Battle of Heligoland Bight, 1917
