The New Year began and Franz Hipper was restless. This most offensive-minded of the German admirals disliked keeping his men and ships on alert at a high pitch of readiness while at the same time restricting them to port. This self-contradictory policy was sapping morale. Besides, the German defeat in the Bight, his own frustrated aproach to Yarmouth, and his close escape after Scarborough rankled him. One explanation for his lack of success, Hipper believed, was that the British had known in advance about his plans. How they knew, he was uncertain, but he suspected that some of the neutral fishing vessels working on the fringes of the Bight and on the Dogger Bank were actually British spy ships. The Dogger Bank, with its shallow bottom, was a rich fishing ground and thus a natural concourse for commercial trawlers, British and Dutch; it also lay on the shortest route between Heligoland and the coast of England. A message from a trawler on the Dogger Bank, Hipper postulated, would enable Beatty’s battle cruiser force to intercept—if not on the way over, at least on the way back.
