Mutiny that
IN LATE October 1918, German ships were given orders to instigate one last strategic battle against the Royal Navy in the North Sea. But after four long years of war the sailors had had enough and news of the apparent suicide mission instigated a rebellion among the ranks stationed at Kiel, Germany’s largest naval base, 60 miles north of Hamburg.
The sailors were convinced that going into battle would have no effect on the outcome of the war and on the day the attack was to commence – 100 years ago today – they ignored an order to leave the safety of the port.
The ramifications of their refusal led directly to the end of the war, as well as to the dissolution of the German monarchy a few days later.
The sailors’ actions and the lack of response of the government to them, fuelled by an increasingly critical view of Kaiser Wilhelm II – the adored eldest son of the oldest daughter of Queen Victoria – went on to spark the German Revolution, which swept aside a thousand years of royal history and ushered in democratic reform.
“The revolution of 1918 famously started in Kiel as an alliance of the workers and sailors uprising,” says Dr Sebastian Gehrig, senior lecturer in modern European history at the University of Roehampton.
“That was the crucial thing. It was not just the case that the sailors refused the order to sail but that they did so in a city context where you also had a rather frustrated workforce centred on shipbuilding who were primed to go on strike.
“These two things came together, and in such numbers in the two days following November 3, that there was no way for the military or the Kaiser to suppress the situation.”
Mutiny is normally a word that brings to mind swashbuckling pirates standing against their masters on wooden-hulled boats on the high seas but in a country exhausted by a long and brutal conflict, and with no confidence in the man at the metaphorical helm, this was mutiny of a different kind.
The German sailors simply refused to return to their posts on board ship and take to sea in battle formation. Word spread and ship workers in the town were drawn into the rebellion, soon followed by enlisted ranks and industrial workers at naval bases and cities around Germany.
“From that moment, in many spots across the German empire, unrest tipped into revolution as the very localised Kiel situation spread across the entire nation,” says Dr Gehrig.
“As well as bringing down the Kaiser, the mutiny basically ended the war following months of mismanagement in the German high command.”
Yet the creation of the German Navy had been the Kaiser’s most cherished ambition. Having inherited