The large and medium surface ships of Kaiserlichmarine (KM) had been mostly confined to port after Jutland. Despite minor operations in the Baltic, and the occasional training sorties, the sailors of this moribund force had relatively little to do between 1917 and the 18. Although they were better fed than the rest of the civilian population, KM rations were increasingly lower quality. One of the common staples was Drahtverhau, a this soup one KM sailor described as 75% water, 10% sausage, and 6% vegetables, and 9% other. Officers often resorted to petty busywork and discipline to keep their men from being too idle, but while this strategy has its uses over the short-term, it was deleterious to their relationship with their men the longer it went on. Sitting idle at port also meant KM sailors came into contact with dockworkers and other laborers who were increasingly radicalized by news of the Russian Revolution as well as the increasing privations on the home front. The emergence of the Independent Socialist Party (USPD) among various working-class circles sharpened labor activism in the docks and other port facilities. Many of the KM enlisted came from skilled working class families, so these connections with their dock workers were easy to accomplish. Sailor canteens became a source of political discussion, USPD literature circulated among sailors, as well as other pamphlets advocating radical political change.
By the summer of 1917, it was clear that some radicalization of the lower decks was apparent. In June 1917, the engine-room of dreadnought Prinzregent Luitpold went on a hunger strike demanding higher rations and an end to Drahtverhau. The Prinzregent Luitpold's officers gave in, and that in turn only stimulated more disturbances. On 5 July, Friederich der Grosse's enlisted men ate the next day's rations during coaling and threat of a hunger strike forced the officers to relent to the demands of the sailors to evade punishment and permission to form food supervisory committees. Many of the other ships' enlisted men followed suit and formed these organization, despite not receiving official permission.
By August 1917, the fleet was in a state of near-mutiny; when the officers cancelled the Prinzregent Luitpold stokers' leave and ordered the to report to shore for infantry training, the stokers simply deserted. When the officers put the stoker ringleaders under arrest, representatives from the sailor's councils of the other ships decided that the crew of Prinzregent Luitpold should stage a walkout. On 2 August, 600 men of the dreadnought left the ship. The officers of the KM managed to restore order by summoning a courts-martial and executing five ringleaders of the walkout. But in authorizing these executions, KM commander von Scheer denied the accused a chance to appeal their sentence to the Kaiser. Further regulations forbid political agitation by the USPD in the fleet and the KM officers further tightened discipline. One of the purposes of Operation Albion in the Baltic was to give the fleet something to do and restore the sailors' martial character by participation in a successful attack.
But the damage between enlisted and officers had been done and remained in place after the events of 1917. When the Kaiser visited the High Seas Fleet in October 1917, instead of the traditional "Hurrah", some sailors said "Hunger." The false dawn of Germany's military fortunes post-Brest-Litovsk staved off activism, but by the time it was apparent that Germany had lost in the West saw a renewal of activism within the fleet. In the fall of 1918, rumors circulated within the fleet of the imminent Operations Plan No. 19, a plan to bait the numerically superior British and American fleets around the North Sea island of Terschelling. Beneath the rhetoric of victory, there was a sense that Operations Plan No. 19 was a suicide mission to restore the honor of the KM. The ships' rumor mills spun Operations Plan No. 19 into an even more ludicrous operation verging on suicide (and to be fair to the scuttlebutt, the plan itself was quite impractical). When the High Seas Fleet assembled on 29 October, the insubordination started on the larger ships and spread outwards. Memories of the previous summer meant that sailors' councils would not give their officers time to act, and the widespread sense among the ratings that they were to be sacrificed for their officers' honor added to the mutineers' ranks. Thus emboldened, the mutineers seized port facilities that mushroomed into wider activism among the dockworkers and garrisons.
In his social history of the RN, Christopher McKee noted that many of the RN's rating preferred serving on smaller ships like destroyers than battleships or carriers because there was less of an emphasis upon spit and polish and petty discipline in the small ships. The officer-rating bond was much closer in these smaller ships, while larger ones it was more antagonistic. Examining the pattern of outbursts in the KM during the summer of 1917 bears this out. The larger dreadnoughts and battle-cruisers tended to be the epicenters for revolts that started as complaints about food, but soon metamorphosed into wider grievances of a political nature. The idleness of a fleet in being only exacerbated tensions that were often inherent to service in a large ship.
Yet the nature and scale of activism within the KM over 1917-18 went beyond the problems of military discipline. The KM's officers typically came from a middle-class Bürgertum milieu and evinced a nationalist and reactionary political outlook. Navalism was a much more middle class phenomena in Wilhelmine Germany. In contrast, many of the ratings came from working-class backgrounds and had knowledge of German trade unionism and other forms of labor activism. The social makeup of KM ships thus had something of a class character to it, and the post-Jutland idleness not only led to this division to reassert itself, but also to become more antagonistic. The actions of the sailors of the Aurora in starting the February Revolution gave the sailors of the KM a clear precedent in which they were no longer soldiers but revolutionaries. Thus while the mutiny of the Kaiser's "children"in the fleet shocked many outside observers, there were a lot of latent tensions within the KM's organization that inactivity brought to the fore and greatly lowered the threshold for a massive revolt.
Sources
Broué, Pierre. The German Revolution, 1917-1923. Leiden: Brill, 2005.
Herwig, Holger H. "Luxury Fleet": The Imperial German Navy, 1888-1918. London: Allen & Unwin, 1980.
Spector, Ronald H. At War, at Sea: Sailors and Naval Combat in the Twentieth Century. New York: Viking, 2001.
Rüger, Jan. The Great Naval Game: Britain and Germany in the Age of Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.