Franz von Hipper

Franz Hipper – from 1916 Ritter von Hipper – commanded the German battlecruisers throughout the First World War: the fastest heavy ships of the Imperial Navy and the ones most often sent into action. His squadron shelled English towns, escaped a trap at the Dogger Bank in January 1915 at the cost of the cruiser Blücher, and at Jutland sank three British battlecruisers. He was considered one of the finest naval commanders of the war, respected by his opponents as well. In August 1918 he took command of the entire High Seas Fleet. His last order – a great sortie of the fleet against the British a few days before the armistice – provoked a sailors’ mutiny that within a week had turned into a revolution and brought down the empire. His closest collaborator on his staff, Erich Raeder, later built the navy of the Third Reich, and a heavy cruiser that fought in the Second World War bore Hipper’s name.

Youth and career

He was born on 13 September 1863 in Weilheim in Upper Bavaria, into a middle-class family. His father, a merchant, died when Franz was three. The boy went to school in Munich and, after a short spell of volunteer service in the army, decided to become a sailor – an unusual choice for a Bavarian from deep inland. In April 1881 he joined the Kaiserliche Marine as a cadet, and in 1884 he was commissioned. He never married. The navy was his whole life.

For many years he served in torpedo boats, commanding divisions and flotillas of them. He was also navigating officer of the imperial yacht Hohenzollern, which gave him the chance to get to know Kaiser Wilhelm II more closely. From 1906 he commanded the armoured cruiser Friedrich Carl, whose crew won the Kaiser’s prize for the best gunnery in the fleet in 1907. He then spent three years in charge of the training of most of Germany’s torpedo boats. He was one of many officers who grew up together with the fleet that Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz had been building since 1898 to challenge the Royal Navy. In 1912 he was promoted to rear admiral and became deputy commander of the scouting forces, and on 1 October 1913 he took command of the I Scouting Group – the battlecruiser squadron of the High Seas Fleet. His chief of staff was Erich Raeder, later a grand admiral.

Raids on the English coast

After the defeat in the Heligoland Bight in August 1914 the Kaiser forbade any risk to the fleet, and Hipper’s battlecruisers became the only force the high command was prepared to send towards the British coast. On 3 November 1914 his squadron shelled the coast near Yarmouth and laid mines, and on 16 December it bombarded Scarborough, Hartlepool and Whitby. More than a hundred people were killed, most of them civilians. Britain was outraged, and the press called Hipper a “baby-killer”. This time the main body of the fleet was following Hipper, but the fleet commander, Admiral Friedrich von Ingenohl, convinced that he had run into the whole Grand Fleet, turned for home. British squadrons lay in wait for Hipper’s cruisers on their way back, but thanks to poor visibility and errors in British signalling he managed to slip away.

Dogger Bank

On 23 January 1915 Hipper put to sea to destroy British patrols and fishing boats on the Dogger Bank. British codebreakers in Room 40 had read the German signals, and on the morning of 24 January the battlecruisers of Vice Admiral David Beatty were waiting for him. Hipper turned back, but his squadron could steam only at the speed of its slowest ship, the old armoured cruiser Blücher. During the battle a shell pierced the aft barbette of the flagship Seydlitz, and both after turrets went up in flames. The ship was saved by the flooding of her magazines. When the badly hit Blücher fell behind, Hipper judged that trying to save her would endanger the rest of the squadron and left her to her fate. The cruiser sank with most of her crew.

The blame for the defeat fell not on Hipper but on Ingenohl, who was replaced. The fire aboard Seydlitz proved a valuable lesson, too. The Germans changed their rules for storing and handling propellant charges, which, according to many authors, saved several of their ships at Jutland from the fate of the British battlecruisers. In 1915 Hipper was promoted to vice admiral. In the spring of 1916, exhausted by almost two years of constant readiness, he spent several weeks on sick leave. He returned in May and hoisted his flag in the new battlecruiser Lützow.

Jutland

The new fleet commander, Admiral Reinhard Scheer, wanted to lure part of the Grand Fleet out of its bases and defeat it with superior forces. At the Battle of Jutland Hipper, with five battlecruisers, steamed far ahead of Scheer’s battleships. On the afternoon of 31 May 1916 he ran into Beatty’s battlecruisers and, as planned, turned south to draw them under the guns of the main fleet. In this duel the British battlecruisers Indefatigable and Queen Mary blew up and sank. When Beatty turned north, Hipper in his turn let himself be led under the guns of Admiral John Jellicoe’s battleships.

That evening Lützow and Derfflinger sank the battlecruiser Invincible, but Lützow took hits that sealed her fate. Hipper transferred under fire to a torpedo boat and for a long time searched for a ship from which he could command, since the other battlecruisers were badly damaged. Meanwhile his squadron covered the fleet’s withdrawal with a daring attack on the British line. Lützow sank during the night, and the remaining battlecruisers returned to port heavily damaged. After the battle the Kaiser awarded Hipper the Pour le Mérite, and the King of Bavaria conferred on him the Military Order of Max Joseph, which carried personal nobility and the title Ritter von Hipper.

Fleet commander and mutiny

In August 1918 Scheer took charge of the new Supreme Naval Command, and Hipper succeeded him as commander of the High Seas Fleet and was promoted to admiral. The war was already lost. On 22 October Scheer instructed him to prepare a strike by the fleet, and on 24 October Hipper issued Operations Plan No. 19. The fleet was to attack shipping off the Flemish coast and in the Thames estuary and then give battle to the Grand Fleet. Hipper wrote in his notes that a battle for the honour of the fleet, even if it were to be its last, would become the foundation of a new German fleet, and that there would be no such fleet after a shameful peace. The government of Prince Max von Baden, which was just then seeking an armistice, was not informed of the plan.

The sailors had no intention of dying a few days before the end of the war. On the evening of 29 October, as the fleet assembled in the Schillig Roads off Wilhelmshaven, crews on several battleships refused to obey orders. At around 2 a.m. on 30 October, on the advice of his chief of staff, Rear Admiral Adolf von Trotha, Hipper called off the operation. The fleet’s squadrons were dispersed to calm the situation, but the III Squadron, which returned to Kiel, became the seat of the mutiny that started the revolution in Germany. Hipper tried to address the sailors, to no avail. After the Armistice of Compiègne the fleet was to be interned at a British base. Hipper refused to lead it into internment, and the task passed to Rear Admiral Ludwig von Reuter. Watching the ships sail away, he wrote that his heart was breaking and that his command had ended without glory. On 13 December 1918 he retired.

After the war

In the first months of the revolution Hipper, fearing the radicals, lived in hiding under an assumed name and frequently moved. When in June 1919 the crews scuttled the interned ships at Scapa Flow, he expressed his approval in a letter. He settled in Othmarschen near Hamburg and lived in seclusion. Unlike Scheer, he wrote no memoirs, and his war diary remained in manuscript. He died on 25 May 1932 after a long illness, and the urn with his ashes was buried in his native Weilheim. On his death Beatty, his old adversary, said that he was bidding farewell to a gallant officer and a great seaman.

Legacy in the Third Reich

Hipper’s men led the German navy right up to the Second World War. His former chief of staff Erich Raeder headed the navy of the Weimar Republic from 1928, and after 1935 rebuilt it as Hitler’s Kriegsmarine. Raeder, who had lived through the mutiny of 1918, attached great importance to discipline and to ensuring that the fleet would never again become a seedbed of revolution. On 6 February 1937 the heavy cruiser Admiral Hipper was launched in Hamburg; she was commissioned in April 1939, a few months before the outbreak of war. On 8 April 1940, on her way to Trondheim during the invasion of Norway, she sank the British destroyer Glowworm after a collision. Her unsuccessful attack on an Arctic convoy in the Battle of the Barents Sea in December 1942 enraged Hitler and led to Raeder’s dismissal. The ship was scuttled at Kiel in May 1945.

Assessment

In the literature, British included, Hipper is regarded as one of the ablest admirals of the First World War. He is praised for his calm under fire, his tactical sense and the training of his squadron, whose gunnery proved more effective than the British in the first phase of the Battle of Jutland. Opinions are not unanimous, however. The German historian Walther Hubatsch wrote that he was a cool-headed tactician ready to take personal risks, but without outstanding operational talent. Whether he was right to abandon Blücher at the Dogger Bank is still debated. The raids on English towns cost civilian lives and handed British propaganda an argument that outlasted the war.

The darkest shadow over his command is cast by the plan of October 1918. Many historians believe that the fleet’s last battle, prepared behind the government’s back while armistice talks were under way, had no chance of success and was driven mainly by concern for the navy’s honour and future. Instead of saving the fleet’s honour, the plan of Hipper and Scheer led to mutiny, the fall of the empire and the birth of a republic that nationalists, in the navy among others, regarded as the fruit of treason.