The War at Sea

T H E WA R AT S E A

Finally ready

By April 1918 the facilities in the Forth were at last judged sufficient. Beatty had

never liked ‘the horrid Forth like a great ditch full of thick fog’, which was vulnerable

to mining and with the further possibility that if the bridge were brought down ships

might be trapped above it and the Dockyard made

nevertheless brought the

Grand Fleet down from Scapa Flow to join the battlecruiser force,mooring above and

below the bridge.

It is maybe hard today to imagine the difficulty and danger of operating this

enormous number of big ships in such congested waters,when communication between

them, beyond the reach of a megaphone,was almost entirely by signal flags, semaphore

or morse lamp, and before the invention of radar, when poor visibility might require

each ship to tow a fog buoy to enable the ship astern to keep station.

Beatty’s biographer William Chalmers wrote this about operating from the Forth:

“

Strong nerves were needed to turn 30 battleships‘at rest’ through 180 degrees on an ebb

tide

[meaning that all the ships were facing upriver]

after the anchors had been weighed.

Under Beatty’s leadership it soon became a matter of routine,and at no time did weather

conditions prevent him from taking this huge armada of 150 ships to sea at any state of

tide by day or night… the superb seamanship of the Captains and Navigators overcame

all hazards

”.

Stephen Roskill, in his biography of Beatty, recorded that the Grand Fleet put to

sea in thick fog on 24thApril 1918. “

By early afternoon the whole armada of 193 ships

was at sea,and all within 90 minutes of receiving the order to

was to prove the last

time during the war that Beatty sailed in full fighting array”.

Within seven months, the

war would be over.

Granton harbour

ranton harbour also became a naval base, named HMS Gunner, after the largest

trawler in its flotilla,and was used for minesweeping,decoy vessels (‘Q-ships’),anti-

submarine patrols and the maintenance of the outer boom defences. The command at

Granton was divided into two parts. The northern area had a large complement of 24

motor launches and 18 paddle minesweepers,as well as 30 boom defence vessels amongst

its flotilla of 103 craft. The southern area was smaller, with a total of 47 yachts and

fishing boats.The first members of theWomen’s Royal Naval Service,theWRNS,arrived

during 1918.

Sailors serving at the Trawler Base,Granton,Midlothian,Scotland.

the royal navy in the forth