Post by director on Nov 23, 2016 9:21:18 GMT -6
If the reaction to the battle in the Empire was disappointment, in Spain there was an uproar that drove Cervera to retirement. Given the lack of Imperial or allied bases overseas the Spanish colonies seemed secure from invasion, but Spain now found her commerce with them under sustained assault by Imperial raiders and her ports patrolled by Imperial and Austrian warships. The new commander of the Armada Espanola would be Almirante Luis de Rojas, who hit upon a plan to strike at Imperial shipping in its home waters and thereby force the allies to lift the blockade in order to defend themselves. The Armada would shelter and re-coal from colliers in Bomba Bay on the Libyan coast, then steam north around the eastern end of Crete for a raiding cruise that would bring the war onto the Emperor’s veritable doorstep. Imperial naval intelligence was not able to work out the details in advance but was able to report that the Spanish fleet had put to sea and had been lately seen in Libyan waters. Admiral Lykos moved his ships to the Chania roadstead on Crete’s western end and then, dissatisfied with the anchorage and its exposure to northerly winds, steamed for Heraklion on November 10th in company with a convoy of six merchant ships bound for Egypt.
Admiral Luis De Rojas; the plan was good but the Armada was weak
The battle of Cape Sideros opens at noon of November 10th, 1903
At noon the convoy was intercepted by de Rojas and five Fernando VII class battleships off Cape Sideros at the extreme eastern end of Crete. With his ships some distance northwest of the convoy and the enemy approaching from southeast of it, Lykos signaled his ships for full speed and moved to intercept. Unable to cut the Spanish battleships off as they turned west to open their gunnery arcs, he passed their leading ship and turned south in a maneuver against the rear of the enemy line. The enemy then reversed course to the east as Lykos attempted to break their line. Failing that in the face of enemy destroyers he turned north to cover the convoy, then swung south yet again, a matador dancing before a Spanish bull. Reversing course a third time, Lykos this time successfully drove his battleships through the scattered Spanish line but was unable to achieve a decision before the winter twilight closed in. With the convoy over the horizon and safe from harm, Lykos turned his ships northeast toward the safety of the harbor of Rhodes. Whatever Lykos may have thought, however, de Rojas had not agreed that the action was over and was already steering with three undamaged battleships to renew it. A close action developed as the ships steamed south-west on parallel courses in the gathering darkness, but however filled de Rojas might have been with martial ardor, his ships and crews were not up to the challenge. Tridente was pounded into a sinking wreck by repeated 12” hits, flagship Numancia took on water from hits in her submerged torpedo-tube flats, and Reina Dona Isabella II received 10 heavy-caliber hits before reeling out of line into the darkness. Far from ‘singeing the beard of the Emperor’, de Rojas was now hard-pressed to get his damaged vessels back to their temporary base at Bomba Bay.
After two disappointing fleet actions, Spain offered to open peace negotiations using France as an intermediary. Admiral Theodoros was adamant that the war must continue until Spain would have to make significant concessions, and it was his vision of an Empire enlarged by Spanish colonial possessions that would drive Imperial strategy in the war. It was at this time that Imperial intelligence officials hit upon the idea of turning Spain’s internal divisions against her by arranging for the release of the infamous communist and revolutionary, Pedro Lopez Amar, from his Austrian prison cell. We shall later see the results of that decision.
The Imperial Naval Staff’s post-battle analysis of the action off Cape Sideros was cautiously optimistic and seemed to show that the Imperial fleet had profited from refining rather than changing its doctrine. Imperial ships had sailed and fought as a unit, taking care to steam at less than full speed in order to preserve their formations. Imperial gunnery had proven good even in the twilight, helping lay to rest (perhaps prematurely) the anxieties of the month before. Despite effectively skirmishing with their opposite numbers, Imperial light forces had not made much use of their torpedo armament, leading to a lively debate over whether destroyers should be tied to the battleships or given independence of action.
“The Spanish almirantes are very like a master swordsman of advanced age,” Rear-Admiral Lykos observed. “His wits are still keen but his eye is weak and his muscles can no longer respond to the brain’s commands.”
“We are as the donkey of the parable,” Admiral de Rojas wrote in a letter to Admiral Cervera. “Starved until needed, whipped when our strength fails, cursed when we falter and die.” This, then, was how the leaders of the Armada viewed their political masters. In the letters of de Rojas and Cervera there is to be seen no enthusiasm for the war. “The enemy covets victories over our old and glorious names. They have sent the whole power of their young navy against us,” Cervera wrote. De Rojas responded, “They will be only able to take the splinters of our ships, the flags from our corpses. The enemy is superior to us in strength but they shall not be so in courage.” A more dismal call-to-arms it is difficult to imagine.
Winter came and went with small naval actions in the waters between Tunis and Malta. Come the spring of 1905 the light cruiser Basilisk caught and defeated a Spanish cruiser of the Aragon class off Cape Akritas in the Peloponnese by weaving an S curve back and forth across its wake, pounding her with 6” shells until the Spaniard caught fire and sank. Despite the hardships imposed by Imperial commerce raiders and the Allied blockade, Spain refused to either yield or to offer battle. The Imperial fleet covered an invasion of the Balearic Islands in May, with army brigades storming ashore on both Mallorca and Minorca. This proved to be a brilliant success; the Spanish army defending the islands collapsed, followed less than thirty days later by the disgraced Spanish government.
The Imperial cabinet was split over the peace terms to be demanded; either the rich island of Cuba in the Caribbean or all of the Spanish possessions in the Pacific seemed attainable, but not both. In the end naval strategy and logistics dictated that the Philippines, Guam, and the Caroline and Northern Marianas Islands should be taken, given the ease of access to them afforded by the Suez Canal. And so peace was restored; the Spanish flag came down from the ancient city of Manila and dozens of island posts and the Imperial Tetragrammaton rose in its place. Tellingly, no inhabitant of Spain’s former colonies was invited to the negotiations or included in the new colonial administrations.
In the brief period of peace that followed, strict budgets extended the construction times of the two Thalassion class battleships and prevented any other work from being carried forward. Some of the necessary money was recouped by sales of naval systems and technology to Imperial ally Austria, but that was no more than a temporary stop-gap. Other nations would not be so favored: Italy was now clearly defined as a rival to Imperial power in the Mediterranean and the Italian Eritrean colony was thought to make a valuable way-station to the Far East if it were in Imperial hands. Despite the financial incentive, Theodoros rebuffed Italian offers to purchase state-of-the-art central firing technologies or equipment.
From this first martial test we can conclude that the Navy commanders were brave and willing but not yet able to direct that spirit by the maintenance of disciplined formations and through the use of efficient signals. It must be said that had the Empire’s first war been against a navy of the first rank then despite its good new ships and brave men it might not have fared so well. But its plans proved workable, its administrative apparatus adequate and its bases up to the task of supporting the fleet, at least in regional waters.
One unexpected development during the war was the Navy’s discovery that its bureaucracy was almost ungovernable, not through size or inefficiency but through geographical dispersion. The Navarch had offices in a converted warehouse on the water’s edge near the Old Palace, naval schools were twenty miles to the east and west, supply was headquartered north of the Golden Horn in Galatea Old Quarter, Intelligence crammed into a manor out past the Anastasian Wall. And so it went, every department in a different place with endless problems of communication and co-ordination and with substantial duplication of effort. The Imperial – and Naval – estimates were cut to the bone post-war, but calculations showed that inefficiency and duplication were costing the Navy staggering sums, money that could be used for new construction if efficiency could be improved. Worse, communications delays between Intelligence, the Navarch’s offices and Operations HQ seemed likely to cost the Navy a battle, or even a war. The solution was simple and plain: the Navy’s critical administrative branches must be gathered together in one place. This would mean an ambitious and expensive construction program – opponents called the new Navarchy the “Marble Battleship” – but once Theodoros had made up his mind as to the necessity he put all of the Navy’s new-found prestige behind the project and took on the Assembly one delegate at a time until the funds were assured. Then it was a question of ‘where’; the Old Palace grounds were taken up by the Army, City office spaces were expensive and fully occupied. A location near the center of Imperial politics was essential if the Navy was to retain its influence, but the City’s suburbs now stretched west almost twenty miles from the old walls and seizing land by Imperial fiat would set off a political firestorm. Eventually a vast tract of Imperial parkland was selected across the Bosphorus strait, midway between the cities of Chrysopolis and Chalcedon, large enough for the purpose and just a quick ferry-ride across the water from the New Palace and Assembly House. The academies, shipyards, equipment foundries and ordinance works would not be moved, but the new Navarchy would bring the administrative, logistical, intelligence and operations arms in close proximity to one another. The Navy would now be one service in physical fact as well as in spirit.
The tensions with Spain, still high, began to rise again in the following year. Her new conservative government was intent on using popular resentment over defeat and support for revanchement to cover its resistance to political and social reform, and despite the nation’s poor showing in the last war, it pledged to seek a reversal of the peace terms... someday. Austria might be a reluctant ally in a maritime war with Spain, but she was an ally; the Spanish government was still having to deal with newspaper reports of atrocious reprisals in Cuba and would find no power willing to ally with her. But to an unpopular government their chances in war seemed less dire than risking another revolution.
In June of 1905, the cruiser Medusa ran aground while taking soundings off Tangier in Morocco, and for a brief time it seemed as if this second Moroccan crisis might renew the war with Spain. An unsuccessful Imperial attempt to seize power during a rebellion in Mozambique raised international tensions further. And then in February of 1906 a Spanish consular official was caught buying plans for the newly-completed Autokrator class battleship, and war came again to the Mediterranean.