Coastal Waters
As a neutral nation with the ability to trade with the world, by 1916 both Dutch merchants and the Netherlands government itself found there were great profits to be made from the war, particularly when it came to importing materials from their East Indies colonies, or buying from the Americas, and then re-exporting to Germany.
Needless to say, the Allies took a dim view of this practice, as it created a leak in the blockade. However, the Dutch were clever, and with very few exceptions, their cargoes always passed the neutrality inspections that were regularly carried out in the North Sea. Both warring alliances largely respected Dutch territorial waters, despite occasional clashes between British and German light forces in the southern parts of the North Sea.
However, most of the action was away to the southwest, and in late 1916 the Germans began a series of more aggressive attempts to disrupt shipping in the English Channel by challenging the Dover Barrage. Two Flotillas of torpedo boats were deployed to Zeebrugge and Ostend under Admiral von Schroder, and they launched a series of night-time raids.
The skirmishes in the dark after the Battle of Stavanger had confirmed earlier German suspicions that the British were ill-prepared and even unwilling to engage at night. Black-painted British destroyers showed up better than the grey German boats on anything other than the darkest of nights, and so Schroder chose to use the night to maximise his forces’ advantage.
A series of close-range, snap actions occurred throughout October, during which six British destroyers were sunk and a dozen more damaged, in return for the loss of just three German torpedo boats. British cross-Channel shipping had to be halted during the lengthening nights of autumn, and the old destroyers that had been guarding the Straits had to be reinforced by newer ‘M-class’ ships from the Grand Fleet.
Admiral Schroder submitted a plan to use the repaired Goeben and Seydlitz to support a heavy raid on the Anglo-French base at Dunkirk, to open the way for German torpedo-boats and cruisers to enter the channel in daylight. However, the loss of the G91 to a mine on 27th October highlighted one particular risk of the plan, while Admiral Hipper objected to the idea of sending two of his three operational battlecruisers so far into the congested waters south of the Hook of Holland.
By the middle of November, the German raids were producing diminishing returns. Two more torpedo boats were lost on the night of the 16th, when a British force unexpected fired large numbers of powerful flares to illuminate the scene, whereupon four M-class destroyers, Munster, Noble, Morris and Mindful, poured fire into the leading German ships and launched a total of ten torpedoes. G88 had her bows blown off and would sink later that night, while S54 was overwhelmed by the British gunfire. All her boilers were put out of action within minutes and she was left crippled, but she maintained steady fire from her aft 4.1” gun, despite the impossible odds. She sank with her colours still flying, leaving the British ships to pick up just eleven survivors.
Aside from a few inconclusive skirmishes later in November, that was the end of the Dover Strait campaign, and in December the torpedo boats were withdrawn back to Wilhelmshaven.
The operations caused disproportionate loss for the Royal Navy and some interruption to the smooth flow of supplies across the Channel, but the long-term consequences were probably more favourable to the British. The great increase in the number of patrols led to an alarming discovery; that U-boats were in the habit of running the Dover Straits at night on the surface. Most of the minefields were deployed on the assumption that submarines would be submerged, and during the course of the war so far, only one submarine had been sunk by mines in the Dover Barrage. It was therefore assumed that most U-boats were using the route around the north of Scotland to reach the Atlantic and the Western Approaches, which had led to disastrously bad practices that greatly helped the submarines’ skippers. At night, many of the Channel minefields were marked by acetylene lamps to help prevent British shipping from blundering into them.
At Dover, Admiral Bacon would respond by starting to deploy new minefields, but progress was initially slow, in part due to a reluctance to accept the facts. He had spent the better part of 1915 and ‘16 arguing that the lack of sinkings in the Channel was a clear indication that few U-boats were using the Dover Straits. The need the accept and admit the exact opposite slowed the pace of change, until a host of new appointments were made in the opening days of 1917.
, the story's HMS Canada is a Royal-class battleship (8-15", 23 1/2-knots), part paid-for by the Canadian gov't. 
