‘Battleship H’ lies quietly at anchor on a calm sea. The white circles towards the bow and on the aft turret indicate her to be a target ship awaiting an ignominious end. Her funnel arrangement and turret configuration suggest a German battleship of the Helgoland Class, but by this point, she had changed navies as well as her name. In 1916, the SMS Ostfriesland had played a minor role in the Battle of Jutland. Her sinking five years later would be one of the most talked about in naval history.
SMS Ostfriesland was the second unit of four Helgoland Class battleships; Germany’s second class of dreadnoughts. The ships were similar in design to the previous Nassau Class but with three funnels as opposed to two and with the main armament increased from 11in to 12in to match existing British dreadnoughts. The distinctive hexagonal arrangement of their turrets was partly the result of hull space limitations created by the use of triple-expansion engines. This pattern was less efficient than later super-firing turret configurations but was advantageous in terms of providing a useful reserve in the case of damage to other turrets. Compared to the contemporaneous British St. Vincent Class, the Helgolands were roughly 3m broader, 4m longer and 3,000t heavier. Their hulls were subdivided into a ‘steel honeycomb’ of 17 watertight compartments with a double-bottom extending over 86% of the length. This internal subdivision was well in advance of existing Royal Navy dreadnoughts.
Named after the country’s most north-westerly region, Ostfriesland was constructed at the Wilhelmshaven Imperial Shipyard (Kaiserliche Werft Wilhelmshaven). She was laid down there on 19th October 1908, launched on 30th August 1909, and commissioned on 1st August 1911. The ship was peripherally involved in a number of important German naval sorties during the course of WWI. As flagship of the 1st Division of the 1st Battle Squadron, she briefly engaged British battleships at the Battle of Jutland and had a hand in the destruction of the hapless cruiser Black Prince. While running for home, she struck a mine laid by the destroyer HMS Abdiel, the damage from which delayed her return to port by 12 hours but did not threaten the survival of the ship. After the German surrender, Ostfriesland and her sisters were part of the German fleet which remained at Kiel while the more modern vessels were interned at Scapa Flow. As a result, she was not a participant in the grand scuttle, remaining in German waters until April 1920, when she was formally ceded to the United States as war reparations.
The ship was formally taken over at Rosyth along with the light cruiser Frankfurt, three destroyers and several submarines. An American contingent of 300 ‘blue-jackets’ took 40 days to make the Ostfriesland seaworthy. The homeward voyage via Brest and the Azores took another 54 days, the battleship towing her cruiser consort most of the way. These ships finally arrived in New York on 9th August 1919, where their arrival attracted a lot of press attention. Military minds were eager to study the ‘engineering cunning’ that had served the German navy so well at Jutland [1], while the American public was simply keen to get a close up look at the hardware of its erstwhile enemy. The ships remained on display on the Hudson River for two weeks, whence the Ostfriesland was exhibited in other Atlantic and Pacific ports. Newspapers speculated wildly on the fate of these ships, some suggesting they should even be commissioned in the US Navy [1]. However, the USN had no greater plans for these outdated Great War relics than to learn their secrets and expend them as targets.
At the end of WWI, military planners were already debating the possibilities of aerial warfare. It had been demonstrated on several occasions during the war that aircraft could damage and even sink enemy ships. In March 1915, a British seaplane had sunk a Turkish supply vessel with an air-launched torpedo. However, the idea that a capital ship could be taken out by aerial bombing was still considered heresy. One of the chief proponents of this idea was William ‘Billy’ Mitchell. An early aviation enthusiast and decorated war hero, Mitchell had risen via the US Signal Corps to become commander of all American air combat units in France by war’s end. Appointed Assistant Chief of the Air Service in 1920, Mitchell secured an influential position in a newly-constituted combatant arm of the US Army.
As with the Royal Navy, the US Navy had operated its own aviation division during wartime, called Naval Aeronautics. Senior navy men had successfully resisted efforts to amalgamate their aviation division with that of the army. This created friction between the two services and led to increasingly strident criticism from Mitchell that the Navy was holding back aviation development to preserve its own dominant position. Mitchell was convinced that aircraft could easily sink a battleship, and his views received considerable press attention and public support. Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt was also impressed by the potential of air power, but he was at heart a navalist and dismissed Mitchell’s publicly expressed views as ‘pernicious’.
In an attempt to placate Mitchell and others who shared his beliefs, the Navy organised a test involving its own aircraft and the old battleship USS Indiana in November of 1920. The test was carried out in the shallow waters of Chesapeake Bay, close to the home to the US Atlantic Fleet at Norfolk, Virginia, and Langley Airfield, a combined services installation. The aerial bombing was carried out using dummy bombs – sandbags were used – and the ship was later subjected to high explosives strategically placed in positions on and under the vessel. The results were controversial. According to a report written by Captain William D. Leahy, the Navy’s director of Gunnery Exercises and Engineering Competition: “The entire experiment pointed to the improbability of a modern battleship being either destroyed or completely put out of action by aerial bombs.”
However, the navy lost control of its own narrative when in January of the following year The New York Tribune ran damning photos of the Indiana wreck under a headline that read ‘Test Proves That One Aerial Bomb May Wreck a Dreadnought’. In its article, the paper accused the Navy Department of ‘seemingly [ignoring], or [failing] to realize that a modern fleet must operate upon three planes instead of one – on the surface, below the surface and above the surface of the sea’ [2]. Despite the one-sided and sensationalist nature of the Tribune article, the Navy came under increased public pressure to allow Mitchell to test his theory.
Bow Creek to Anatahan 