German Exultation
Neither Sir Edward Grey and Ambassador Gerard, nor others interested in securing a fair trial for the accused, imagined that his trial and execution would be the hurried work of an afternoon, and there was consternation when a Reuter despatch of July 28th gave the first news of the shooting and made public the German communiqué as follows:
“The accused was condemned to death because although he was not a member of a combatant force, he made an attempt on the afternoon of March 20, 1915, to ram the German submarine U-33 near the Maas Lighthouse. The accused as well as the first officer and the chief engineer of the steamer received at the time from the British Admiralty a gold watch as a reward of his brave conduct on that occasion, and his action was mentioned with praise in the House of Commons.
“On the occasion in question, disregarding the U-boat’s signal to stop and show his national flag, he turned at a critical moment at high speed on the submarine, which escaped the steamer by a few meters only by immediately diving. He confessed that in so doing he had acted in accordance with instructions from the Admiralty.
“One of the many nefarious franc-tireur proceedings of the British Merchant Marine against our war vessels has thus found a belated but merited expiation.”
This report aroused intense indignation in England, and hardly less resentful feelings in neutral countries, especially in the United States, whose Ambassador in Berlin was the intermediary of the English protest against the basis of the court-martial. At once the British Foreign Office addressed a note to Ambassador Page in London in which was the statement:
“His Majesty’s Government finds it difficult to believe that a master of a merchant ship who, after German submarines adopted the practice of sinking merchant vessels without warning and without regard to the lives of passengers or crew, took the only means at his disposal of saving not only the vessel but the lives of all on board can have been deliberately shot in cold blood for that action”; and the request was made that urgent inquiry be made by the United States Embassy at Berlin.
The inquiry made it only too clear that the report was authoritative. Premier Asquith, in the House of Commons, July 31st, said: “I deeply regret that it appears to be true that Captain Fryatt has been murdered by the Germans.” That he was not speaking extravagantly in using the word “murdered” is evidenced by the fact that naval and military experts, including those of Holland, strongly suspected of more than a casual sympathy with the Germans, concurred in denouncing the execution as a “judicial murder,” and insisting that Fryatt was entitled to be regarded as a prisoner of war. In the subsequent review of the case it was demonstrated conclusively by many citations from German legal and military naval sources in declarations and regulations made in 1914 and earlier that “Capt. Fryatt was well within his rights in attempting to ram a hostile marine.” Had he sent the submarine with her crew to the bottom by shell fire in avoiding capture or destruction, he would have been held as a prisoner of war if subsequently captured, but because he used the only weapon at his command to escape the enemy vessel itself, “he was condemned to execution by a court of German naval officers as a franc-tireur.”
August 15th, in the House of Commons, Premier Asquith declared: “This country will not tolerate a resumption of diplomatic relations with Germany after the war until reparation is made for the murder of Capt. Fryatt.”