The Second Cannon Shot Chapter 1: The Gold of Skagerrak (5)

  The great soldier, statesman, painter, orator, writer and journalist, former British Colonial Secretary, Minister of Munitions, Home Secretary, First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill has finally stepped down. No matter how much power he had in Downing Street and Buckingham Palace, it was impossible to save a house that was already leaning, no matter how beautifully Churchill decorated this period of history in his personal diary, facts are facts after all.

  At 8 o'clock on March 3, 1915, in front of the arched gate of a red brick old building of the British Admiralty, Churchill frankly announced to the crowd of over 600,000 Londoners who were demonstrating around the Admiralty that he had resigned. The Royal Navy's Churchill era has come to an end!

  Since the outbreak of the European war, the British Navy led by Sir Churchill has been defeated in a series of surface battles against the German and Italian navies. From the initial weakness in facing submarine warfare and breaking through the enemy's lines to the successive defeats in the Battle of Heligoland Bight, the Battle of Dogger Bank, and the Battle of Coronel, Churchill's seemingly solid position as First Lord of the Admiralty was actually on shaky ground.

  Faced with the formidable Grand Fleet, Sir Churchill finally realized that he could not achieve a victory similar to Trafalgar in the North Sea. The problem was that Churchill needed a resounding victory to maintain his authority over the Navy.

  The Battle of the Falkland Islands had broken out, a necessary battle in which three British battlecruisers overwhelmed two German armoured cruisers of the "Dreadnought" type, with the result that only one of them, the Gneisenau, was sunk by the South American squadron. Although the victory at the Falklands was frequently referred to by nervous Britons in the later years of the European war, yet in 1915, when the Royal Navy was still riding high, the British regarded the small success as a failure.

  Then, the vainglorious Sir Winston Churchill turned his attention to the weak man of Western Asia - Ottoman Turkey. Churchill thought this was a shortcut to glory, but he did not think that the death knell was sounded by his own hands, becoming the last straw that crushed the camel, and this order also led to Churchill's downfall and being cursed by the British people millions of times in the following days.

  In Mudros Bay, Lemnos Island, Greece, the British Empire lost a battleship, three old-fashioned pre-dreadnoughts and over 1,900 sailors and soldiers were killed. The ignominious defeat made the last shred of trust in Churchill disappear among the British people. Churchill had also thought about fighting with his back to the wall, he blocked the news of the Mudros Bay defeat and gambled on revising Admiral John Fisher's plan for a North Sea ambush, putting all the empire's eggs into one basket on the night of 3 March 1915.

  Named the Battle of Skagerrak by British naval historians and the Battle of Jutland by German naval historians, the North Sea's greatest clash of dreadnoughts had begun. The Heligoland Bight action, the night action in the North Sea, the confused melee at Skagerrak, the battlecruiser action and the main fleet engagement - naval historians always like to use fancy words to complicate things but in 1915, as the war grew more savage, people were only interested in the outcome of battles!

  The disastrous Battle of the North Sea, Germany lost a new battlecruiser, two old battleships, an armored cruiser from the 1890s, seven light cruisers, ten large destroyers and an auxiliary ship, with losses exceeding 82,000 tons. A total of 3,221 sailors were killed, 1,378 wounded, and 46 missing.

  The British lost three battleships, four battlecruisers, one fast battleship was completely destroyed, and two light cruisers, twenty-two destroyers sank, with losses of over 179,000 tons, a total of 9,631 officers and men were killed, 3,367 sailors were seriously injured, and eleven sailors went missing.

  The ratio of warship losses between the two sides was close to 1:1.5, and the tonnage loss ratio exceeded 1:2. The number of sailors killed in action was 1:3, and the main force ship loss ratio was a staggering 1:8! From any perspective, the British were the thorough losers in this epic sea battle that will go down in history as a classic.

  We can only guess at Churchill's feelings when he learned of the North Sea battle, but those of Prime Minister David Lloyd George are not hard to imagine.

  After the exposure of the Dardanelles fiasco, Asquith hastily accepted the resignations of First Lord of the Admiralty Churchill and First Sea Lord Fisher.

  Lloyd George succeeded Herbert Henry Asquith as Prime Minister after the Dogger Bank naval battle. At this time, the Liberal Party was no longer strong enough to form a cabinet on its own, and the new Prime Minister Lloyd George had to form a coalition government with the Conservative Party and the Labour Party. Lloyd George underestimated the differences between the parties in the coalition cabinet over seat allocation and power distribution, and the entire cabinet formation process was slow and difficult, until mid-February, when Lloyd George gave up supporting Reginald McKenna, also of the Liberal Party, and instead supported Bonar Law, a key figure in the Conservative Party and former leader of the House of Commons, to become Chancellor of the Exchequer.

  David Lloyd George had thought to sacrifice First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill to appease public and political outrage, but Churchill's confident advocacy for the imminent Battle of Dogger Bank changed the Prime Minister's mind. The Prime Minister privately supported Churchill's plan for a Battle of the Dogger Bank and promised to move him to Colonial Secretary to keep his options open rather than merely honorific Chairman of the Air Committee.

  The British called the meeting between Churchill and Lloyd George "the 1915 London Conspiracy". Even in the most pessimistic scenario, Lloyd George did not think that the Royal Navy would be defeated so thoroughly, let alone that he would go down with the discredited Churchill.

  News of the North Sea's disastrous defeat arrived, and the Prime Minister's downfall had become a certainty. The Navy Department was particularly hard hit. In response to the role reversal between 10 Downing Street and the Admiralty, the naval leadership could not help but be forced to start a beautiful crisis public relations campaign under the pressure of public opinion.

  From "The British Empire 1915", Edward J. R. Lampa

  The Prime Minister has resigned, Number Two in Downing Street is being held back by the Liberals and Labour, it will take more than a month to untangle the threads and get the storm-tossed government working again.

  The First Lord of the Admiralty has resigned, and Mr. Churchill's destination is not, as rumoured at first, the Colonial Office, nor yet the somewhat discredited Committee of National Defence, but the command of a Scottish territorial battalion. Yes, Lord Kitchener, Secretary for War, can swear that this battalion does not exist in the fighting line of the British Army!

  The First Lord of the Admiralty and the Chief of Naval Staff resigned, as close confidants of Churchill, they rose and fell with him.

  Cigars and whiskey fumes mingled, the Navy Department's dimly lit conference room reeked of defeat and despair.

  Perhaps there is still hope for the Navy. On the 4th, in the morning, a rumor spread through the Admiralty that the new Prime Minister Bonar Law had sent a telegram to Admiral Fisher, who was retired and idle at home, summoning him back to service. This rumor rekindled hope in the Admiralty, which was on the verge of collapse. Fisher's abilities are beyond doubt, and with his extensive influence in the Navy, he is destined to easily restore the Navy's low morale and lead the Royal Navy to rise again.

  On the 6th afternoon, the wind direction suddenly changed. Field Marshal Foch sent a strongly worded telegram to the Prime Minister and the Defense Council respectively. The old marshal did not want to repeat the days when he was tightly suppressed by Churchill, so he demanded "full rights, air that can breathe freely!"

  No surprise, the Defense Committee cashiered Marshal Foch. Although the Defense Committee announced on the 8th at noon that they had re-elected enough naval ministers and fleet commanders to lead them to self-redemption, and would read out the appointment book at the regular meeting of the Navy Department at 8 am on the 10th, no one remained optimistic about it.

  "Can he be even stronger than Fleet Admiral Feisal?"

  The cigarette butt was extinguished in the delicate ashtray. Several commanders of the fleet and senior naval officers were whispering, while the old sailors looked sorrowful, John Jellicoe and David Beatty sat quietly in the corner discussing the scenery of Scotland's northwest lakes and fishing techniques, out of tune with everyone else.

  The Commander and Deputy Commander of the Grand Fleet have been relieved of their duties as scapegoats, and a naval court-martial is brewing to bring charges against them for their inept performance in the Battle of the North Sea. Jellicoe and Beatty are only here to complete the formalities of handing over command, nothing more.

  The door was pushed open and Admiral Sir Henry Jackson, who had been the head of the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth during the war and had coordinated the blockade of Germany and its colonies, walked in with several members of the Committee of National Defence. The members of the Committee of National Defence walked indifferently up to the podium, while Admiral Jackson, whose two eyes did not quite coordinate, looked provocatively at Jellicoe and sat silently down in what had been Jellicoe's place.

  "The commander-in-chief of the Great Fleet is actually him!" The conference room was filled with a suppressed murmur.

  Henry Jackson had a technical naval background, having served as President of the Royal Naval College, Third Sea Lord and Chief of the Admiralty War Staff, which made his full Admiral's rank well-deserved, but nobody thought that Jackson would be more capable than John Jellicoe!

  The corridor again transmitted the crisp footsteps, the noisy conference room suddenly became quiet, and after involuntarily inhaling cold air, the old conference room finally exploded.

  "Oh God, it's actually this damn sadist!"

  "No, he's not a sadist, but a thorough and complete homosexual!"

  "He is said to have come into contact with certain supernatural events that defy scientific explanation, his four-man gang and the old man gang led by Sir Stafford Northcote are notorious for their verbal sparring in Britain, the blood he shed in Ireland could almost fill Lake Windermere, and together with Lord Lansdowne, they turned our Upper House from a watchdog of the Constitution into his own poodle!"

  A slightly frail old soldier quickly walked up to the podium, his withered hand waving lightly, and the entire conference room fell eerily silent, as if all birds had stopped chirping.

  "Fellow colleagues, don't be alarmed, I am Arthur Balfour!"

  "With a caterpillar chassis, sloping armor, wedge-shaped turret, equipped with a cannon and several machine guns, as long as the engine is powerful enough, it can cross trenches and crush pillboxes. Imagine when such a mighty weapon rushes onto the Entente's position, neither the British Mark IV, Enfield, nor the French Renault FT, nor the cuirassiers' sabers can stop us, while our cannons and machine guns can annihilate the enemy like cutting melons..."

  Wearing a grey and white striped hospital gown, Wang Haitie rummaged through the messy bedside table for a while, pulled out an expired newspaper and a charcoal pen, and began to scribble quickly in the margin.

  Even though it's been over a year since I last held a brush, some habits have seeped into my bones and become an indelible obsession. Before long, a divine instrument resembling a 21st-century tank took shape.

  "It's not just the Western Front, our Eastern Front also needs this thing to break the stalemate!" On another hospital bed, Colonel Max Hoffmann, the deputy chief of staff of the Imperial General Headquarters on the Eastern Front, who was about to go bald, had his eyes shining with excitement as he rubbed his hands together and exclaimed: "What's this thing called?"

  In Wang Haitian's view, the Imperial Army was a conservative and traditional Junker officer corps where rationality became a habit and strictness was a necessity. However, in this patient he had just met for less than six days, apart from occasional flashes of insight, Wang Haitian not only failed to find the aura of the Imperial Army but also saw nothing but trivialities and petty squabbles.

  However, despite the initial confusion among the patients who didn't recognize each other and had to clarify that they belonged to different military branches, and the joke about a patient resembling Heidi Siegmund and Heidi Siegmund herself not being the same person, Wang Haitian enjoyed this lighthearted atmosphere. Wang Haitian intuitively felt that he shared a common understanding with the army colonel.

  "Tank... oh no, it's called a land cruiser!" Wang Haiting rummaged through the drawer and pulled out a piece of chocolate, chewing on it with all her might. Since Annie came to the hospital to take care of Wang Haiting, smoking and drinking had become an unattainable luxury.

  "This name is not at all army!" The stout army colonel glanced at the neighboring naval officer and unconsciously touched his nose tip. "How about calling it panzer?"

  Wang Haitie carefully looked around and pulled out a bottle of rum from under the bed board, smiling slyly: "Want some?"

  "No, it's called a land cruiser!" Wang Haitian waved the newspaper in his hand, letting the sketch flutter wildly in front of Colonel Max-Hoffmann.

  The army colonel only nodded in agreement, and Wang Haiting, who was slightly tipsy from the army's wine, felt great, pulled out a small bottle of rum from under her pillow and took a sip.

  The rum had just gone down when Avril, exquisitely dressed and perfumed with the scent of mud, burst in.

  "Seal, look what I caught!"

  Avril stretched out her chubby little hand, showing off to Wang Haiting that she had caught some unknown small animal. Wang Haiting didn't have time to carefully distinguish it and awkwardly smiled as he stuffed the wine bottle under the newspaper.

  The headline of the newspaper's front page is still about the aftermath of the North Sea decisive battle. Unconsciously, most newspapers have shifted their focus from the Grand Fleet to Admiral Scheer alone, and the Berlin Daily News has given a more detailed description of the bold and imaginative decisions made by the Navy in the early hours of the 2nd.

  As shown in this newspaper, Wang Haitao's photo is placed on the front page center. The action schedule of the Pacific Fleet and the Navy Staff Headquarters are detailed on March 2nd midnight...

  Historically, Churchill's downfall should have come in May 1915, due to the stalemate of the Dardanelles campaign.

  Historically, David Lloyd George came to power on 7 December 1916 and was one of the Big Three at the Paris Peace Conference.

  Historically, Admiral Henry Jackson should have been promoted to First Sea Lord in May 1915, but the post was taken by Admiral Jellicoe after the Battle of Jutland.

  Arthur Balfour was indeed a real person, serving as the First Lord of the Admiralty from May 25, 1915 to December 10, 1916. His strange deeds are not fabricated by Xia Yu, you can check Wikipedia for yourself.

  Historically, Germany called tanks "Panzer", which literally means armor.