The Battleship Britain Pretended Not to Lose

Cameras on the High Decks

On the morning of 27 October 1914, passengers aboard the White Star liner RMS Olympic had a view most Royal Navy secrets never got: a modern British battleship, listing and burning, off the north coast of Ireland^6,7. Olympic, sister ship to Titanic, had picked up the stricken ship's distress calls and come alongside to help^3,7. Among those watching from the high decks were American tourists, cameras in hand, recording the whole slow disaster as it happened^3,6,7.

What they captured that day was supposed to never reach a newspaper^3,7.

Audacious was barely a year old. She was the fourth and last of the King George V-class dreadnoughts, built by Cammell Laird at Birkenhead and commissioned on 21 October 1913, armed with ten 13.5-inch guns and costing just under £1.92 million^3,1. By October 1914 she was assigned to the Grand Fleet's 2nd Battle Squadron under Admiral Sir John Jellicoe, doing gunnery practice near Tory Island when she ran onto a mine laid by the German auxiliary minelayer SMS Berlin^3,2,9.

The mine struck at around 8:45 a.m. and the ship did not go down quickly^9,10. She took on a port list that crews fought with counter-flooding, and her captain, believing he could beach her, turned south for Lough Swilly and covered fifteen miles before the engine rooms flooded and she drifted to a stop³. Destroyers and tugs came out to help, Olympic's boats assisted in taking off crew, and by two in the afternoon only 250 men remained aboard³. A tow line went across from Olympic that afternoon, and later the battleship Exmouth was sent out once Jellicoe learned there was no submarine threat in the area after all³. The whole crew got off alive; the sole casualty was a petty officer aboard the cruiser Liverpool, killed by debris when Audacious's magazine finally exploded that evening, between roughly 800 metres from the wreck by one account^3,7.

Jellicoe's response to all this was immediate: he proposed that the sinking be kept secret, and the Board of Admiralty and the Cabinet agreed^3,1,5. The logic was strategic rather than embarrassed. Audacious had been mined, not torpedoed, so Germany might not have firm confirmation she was gone, and admitting the loss would tell Berlin that the Grand Fleet's strength had just dropped by one modern dreadnought¹. British newspapers were asked not to print the story, and they didn't; Audacious stayed on the Navy's published fleet lists for the rest of the war as if she still floated^1,4.

The trouble was that the people who had watched her sink were not under Jellicoe's authority. Many of the Olympic's passengers were American, and the United States was neutral^3,7. Jellicoe tried to have the passengers' film seized, but Americans beyond British jurisdiction simply kept theirs and talked⁷. By 28 November 1914, barely a month after the sinking and a full four years before Britain admitted anything, Scientific American published an article on the loss, illustrated with one of the amateur photographs taken from Olympic's deck⁷. The pictures had already spread into American and neutral newspapers^1,6.

Germany, for its part, appears to have had the loss more or less confirmed by mid-November 1914, and its own naval command later approved of Britain's silence on the matter: Admiral Reinhard Scheer wrote after the war that he approved of the English not revealing a weakness to the enemy, since accurate knowledge of the other side's strength shapes decisions³. The censorship, in other words, worked mainly as domestic theater: British readers were kept in the dark for four years, while American magazine readers could see the ship going down within weeks.

The formal admission came only on 14 November 1918, four days after the Armistice, when The Times finally reported the loss and explained, in its own words, that it had been "kept secret at the urgent request of the Commander-in-Chief, Grand Fleet, and the Press loyally refrained from giving it any publicity"⁸.

For four years, then, the official British record held that Audacious was still afloat, while a Scientific American reader in 1914 could flip past a photograph of her sinking, taken from the deck of the ship that was supposed to be rescuing her quietly.

Timeline

1. 1913-10-21HMS Audacious is commissioned into the Royal Navy³.
2. 1914-10-27, morningAudacious strikes a German mine off the north coast of Ireland near Tory Island^3,9.
3. 1914-10-27, afternoonRMS Olympic and nearby destroyers assist in evacuating the crew; a tow attempt fails³.
4. 1914-10-27, eveningAudacious's magazine explodes and the ship sinks; one man is killed by debris aboard HMS Liverpool^3,7.
5. 1914-11-19 (approx.)Germany is understood to have accepted the loss had occurred³.
6. 1914-11-28Scientific American publishes an account of the sinking illustrated with an Olympic passenger's photograph⁷.
7. 1918-11-14The Times publicly reports the loss, four days after the Armistice⁸.

Pictures