The Battle of the Dogger Bank was over.
Beatty found Lion, battered and listing, making for home at 10 knots on her starboard engine, surrounded by a screen of light cruisers and destroyers. Despite the appalling appearance of her decks and superstructure, casualties had been remarkably low: two men killed and eleven wounded. The critical damage to the ship was below the waterline. Here, work parties had placed collision mats and built wooden cofferdams to stop the inflow of seawater, shored up bulkheads to prevent collapse, and started the pumps. Nevertheless, the injury to the ship’s propulsion system was grave. Saltwater contamination of the boiler-feed-water system already had caused the failure of the port engine and now was also affecting the starboard engine. All dynamos were out of action and, except for the light produced by lanterns and candles, the ship was dark. No stoves were working, but Beatty’s steward, left behind when the admiral departed the ship, managed to produce a cold lunch of champagne and foie gras sandwiches for the members of the staff. Young and his colleagues, their faces blackened by cordite smoke and their nerves jangled by hours under shellfire, sat down and cheered themselves at this unusual picnic.
Beatty, returning to them in Princess Royal, wrestled with a final, aggressive impulse. He might still inflict harm on the Germans by sending a mass of destroyers into the Bight to make a night attack on Hipper and the High Seas Fleet. At 2:30 p.m. he proposed to Jellicoe that he hold back one flotilla to screen Lion and thrust the rest toward Heligoland. Before Jellicoe could answer, however, Lion’s starboard engine began to fail. Her speed dropped to 8 knots and Chatfield was told by his engineering officer that there was no guarantee that the engine would keep going through the night. At three o’clock, Chatfield passed this information to Beatty, who ordered Indomitable to take Lion in tow. Beatty chose Indomitable, partly because her captain, Francis Kennedy, was known as an exceptional seaman, and partly because, should the battle somehow be renewed, Indomitable was the least potent of the remaining British battle cruisers. Towing a huge ship, listing with thousands of tons of water inside her and the bow down by six feet, was a dangerous and delicate operation; Kennedy needed all of his experience and skill. Simply passing and establishing the tow absorbed almost two hours. First, a 5½-inch wire hawser was passed between the two ships and successfully secured, but the wire parted when the strain of moving Lion’s 30,000 tons of steel plus the 3,000 tons of water was applied too quickly. On the next attempt, a 6½-inch hawser was passed over and this line, tautened more gradually, got the ship moving. At 5:00, Lion restarted her own starboard engine and, tethered to Indomitable, began the 300-mile voyage home. Eventually, linked in tandem, the two ships reached a speed of 10 knots.
In midafternoon, Jellicoe arrived. He knew that Hipper had fled and he doubted that Ingenohl remained at sea, but he wished to give Lion maximum protection. Accordingly, he dispatched Vice Admiral Bradford’s seven predreadnoughts, along with Pakenham’s armored cruisers and two light cruiser squadrons, to a blocking position twenty-five miles east of Lion in the direction of Heligoland. At 4:30 p.m., while Indomitable was attempting to establish its tow to Lion, the Grand Fleet appeared on the horizon. Jellicoe, understanding the dangers facing the crippled ship, immediately detached from the Grand Fleet the light cruiser Galatea and seventeen destroyers of the 2nd Flotilla, and the light cruiser Caroline and eighteen destroyers of the 4th Flotilla, adding these thirty-seven ships to Lion’s protective cordon. In addition to Jellicoe’s battleships and Beatty’s battle cruisers, Lion now had, by James Goldrick’s calculations, “an escort of thirteen light cruisers and sixty-seven destroyers, most of the Royal Navy’s front-line strength in these types.”
Jellicoe’s decision to strip away his own destroyers and assign them to screening Lion was the result of an urgent message from the Admiralty sent to Iron Duke at 3:45 p.m.: “Germans are preparing a night attack by destroyers but the two flotillas which were out with their battle cruisers last night have not enough fuel to take part. Our destroyers should protect damaged ships.” Hipper, of course, had pondered just such an attack with his own destroyers, but—as the Admiralty had predicted—he was deterred by a shortage of fuel. And the High Seas Fleet destroyers were too far away. But neither the Admiralty, Beatty, nor Jellicoe could be certain of this.
At nightfall, anxious to remove his own (now unescorted) battleships before German destroyers could appear, Jellicoe turned the Grand Fleet back for Scapa Flow. Soon after, for the same reason, Beatty accelerated northward with his three remaining battle cruisers. Behind, the wounded Lion, roped to Indomitable and surrounded by their numerous escort, made her laborious way across the North Sea. The night was anxious for those on board. Shortly after Beatty departed, Lion’s starboard engine broke down again and Indomitable, her engines now pulling more than 50,000 tons of steel and water (her own weight plus Lion’s) through the sea, slowed to 7 knots. If the enemy knew this, it seemed certain that he would attempt a destroyer or submarine attack, but the hours went by without interruption. At dawn, Lion was still over a hundred miles from the Firth of Forth. The British destroyer flotillas re-formed as a submarine screen, but still no enemy appeared. All day, Lion crept along, silent and helpless.
“It was a strange journey lasting all night, all the next day and through the night following . . . along the road over which we had made such an exhilarating chase in the morning,” wrote Filson Young. “The wounded Lion in tow of her consort was surrounded by a cloud of destroyers and from her bridge that evening I watched in the calm twilight the beautiful evolutions of these craft, weaving in and out in ever changing formation. All about us as far as we could see, the divisions were zigzagging weaving their web of safety around us.” At nightfall, Tyrwhitt, commanding the sixty destroyers of the escort, issued a blunt command: “Keep a good lookout for submarines at dawn. If seen, shoot and ram them regardless of your neighbors.” Inside the ship, the night passed without heat or electric light—an uncomfortable novelty for Young, who was not a professional sailor. “The silence of the ship was the strangest element of all,” he said.
The absence of those buzzings and whinings that come from the innumerable dynamos, ventilating fans, refrigerating machines and motors that are never silent . . . [and which now were silent] made audible other sounds: the echo of voices through the long steel alleyways, the strange gurgling of water where no water should be. Most of us had headaches; all of us had black faces, torn clothes and jangled nerves. The ship was as cold as ice, all the electric radiators by which the cabins were warmed being out of action. Blows and hammerings echoed on the decks down below where the carpenters were at work. The sick bay, into which I looked before turning in, was a mess of blood and dirt, feebly lighted by oil lamps. . . . The remaining staff managed to have quite a cheery little dinner with Captain Chatfield whose galley and pantry were in commission. But there is nothing so cold as an unwarmed steel warship in the winter seas. The only place to get warm was in bed; and I turned in after dinner and slept like the dead.
At midnight on the second night, the crippled ship arrived off May Island at the entrance to the Firth of Forth. Here, as Lion dismissed her escort and transferred her tow cable to tugboats, Beatty returned to his flagship and, accompanied by his friend Tyrwhitt, stood on the bridge as the ship was pulled slowly up the estuary. With her bow drawing an extra six feet, the battle cruiser was forced to anchor below the Forth bridge while harbor craft with additional pumps came alongside and pumped out water. This done, the ragged voyage resumed. “There was a thick fog that morning,” said Filson Young, “but as we approached the little island on which the central pier of the Forth bridge is founded, we could hear sounds of cheering coming faintly to us through the mist, which thinned just enough to show us the shore of the island thronged with people cheering and waving. Lion’s band played ‘Rule, Britannia.’ As we came under the bridge, we could see that the mighty span was lined with diminutive human figures, waving and cheering.”
At Rosyth,
examination revealed that the Lion’s wounds were beyond that facility’s capacity to repair. Beatty and Chadwick wanted to send the ship to Plymouth where she could be dry-docked and repaired rapidly. But the Admiralty, particularly Fisher, was anxious that the extent of her damage be kept secret and directed that the battle cruiser not be brought to one of the major naval dockyards in the south. Instead, Fisher sent her to Armstrong’s shipyard at Newcastle upon Tyne even though no dry dock was available there. “It was a bad decision,” said Chatfield. “We spent nearly four months in the Tyne with the ship permanently heeled over while the bottom was repaired by means of a vast wooden cofferdam.” Lying on her starboard side in the black mud while damaged armor plates were removed and new plates attached, the once “proud” and “noble” Lion appeared to Young “incredibly small and mean.”
The Dogger Bank was a British victory, even if it was not the total annihilation of the enemy that the British navy and public so eagerly desired. The Germans had run for home, Blücher had been sunk, Seydlitz was badly damaged, and more than 1,200 German seamen had been killed, wounded, or taken prisoner.
[The best estimate of German casualties is 951 killed and 78 wounded. Most of these men were from Blücher, although the fire that destroyed the two after turrets of Seydlitz killed 153 men and wounded 33. In addition, the British rescued and took prisoner 189 unwounded and 45 wounded men from Blücher.
British casualties totaled 15 killed and 80 wounded. Lion, despite the pounding she received, suffered only 2 men killed and 11 wounded, almost all by a shell that had burst in the confined space of the A turret lobby. Tiger lost 2 men killed along with 9 wounded. The destroyer Meteor had 4 dead and 2 wounded.]
On the British side, Lion had been severely punished, but only one other battle cruiser, Tiger, had been struck by heavy shells. Princess Royal and New Zealand had not been touched, and Indomitable was hit once by an 8.2-inch shell from Blücher. The damaged destroyer Meteor was towed to safety in the Humber, and no other British destroyer or light cruiser had been hit. There was immense satisfaction in the outstanding engineering performance of the new battle cruisers, which had surpassed their design speeds without the faltering of a single turbine. Ironically, in view of what was to happen at Jutland, the British were also pleased by their ships’ seeming ability to withstand punishment.
The victory provided an enormous lift to British civilian morale, depressed over the long casualty lists from the Western Front. On the twenty-fifth, even as Lion was under tow, Beatty received a signal from the king: “I most heartily congratulate you, the officers and ships’ companies of squadrons on your splendid success of yesterday. George, R. I.” The British press trumpeted the German “rout” and the avenging of the previous month’s Scarborough and Hartlepool bombardments. “It will be some time before they go baby-killing again,” chortled The Globe. The victory also rebutted the German claim that the British navy was skulking in port, afraid to contest the mastery of the North Sea. “After yesterday’s action,” declared the Pall Mall Gazette, “it will not be easy for the loud-mouthed boasters of Berlin to keep up the pretence that the British Fleet is hiding itself in terror.” A Daily Mail photograph of the capsized Blücher—the huge ship lying on her side and her crew scrambling down into the water—gave satisfaction to millions.
The navy knew better. “For the second time, when already in the jaws of destruction, the German Battle Cruiser Squadron escaped,” wrote Winston Churchill. “The disappointment of that day is more than I can bear to think of,” Beatty wrote to Keyes. “Everybody thinks it was a great success, when in reality it was a terrible failure. I had made up my mind that we were going to get four, the lot, and four we ought to have got.” Moore became the primary target of criticism. Years later, Keyes wrote, “I think the spectacle of Moore & Co. yapping around the poor tortured Blücher with beaten ships in sight still to be sunk is one of the most distressing episodes of the war.” Moore defended himself by saying that he had obeyed explicit orders flying from Lion’s signal halyards: “Attack the enemy rear bearing northeast”—the bearing of the Blücher. Because this confusing signal had, indeed, come from his flagship, Beatty did not ask for Moore’s relief. He knew that Seymour had made an unfortunate choice in selecting and hoisting the Lion’s signal flags and that Moore had correctly read their literal meaning as flown. Nor did Beatty blame Seymour; he knew that, to some extent, the faultiness of the signal resulted from the shooting away of all but two of Lion’s halyards. “I am against all charges,” he wrote to Jellicoe. “It is upsetting and inclined to destroy confidence.” But, “frankly, between you and me,” he admitted to the Commander-in-Chief, “he [Moore] is not of the right sort of temperament for a battle cruiser squadron. . . . Moore had a chance which most fellows would have given the eyes in their head for and did nothing. . . . It is inconceivable that anybody should have thought it necessary for four battle cruisers, three of them untouched, to have turned on the Blücher which was obviously a defeated ship and couldn’t steam, while three others, also badly hammered, should have been allowed to escape.”
Fisher, chronically unable to moderate opinions or soften blows, roared that Moore’s conduct had been “despicable!” “No signals (often unintentionally ambiguous in the heat of action) can ever justify the abandonment of a certain victory such as offered itself here when the Derfflinger and the Seydlitz . . . were blazing at the end of the action . . . severely damaged.” Furiously, the First Sea Lord minuted Moore’s report: “The Admiralty require to know WHY the Derfflinger and the Seydlitz, both heavily on fire and in a badly damaged condition, were allowed to escape, when, as Admiral Moore states in his letter, gun range with the leading ships of the Enemy could have been maintained by Tiger and Princess Royal at all events.” Jellicoe put it more gently but agreed that “if, as has since been stated, two of the enemy battle cruisers were very seriously damaged and the fact was apparent at the time, there is no doubt whatever that the Rear Admiral [Moore] should have continued the action.” Moore was spared court-martial, but bitterness at his failure to annihilate a crippled, fleeing enemy lifted only gradually. Early in February, Beatty wrote to Jellicoe that Churchill “wanted to have the blood of somebody” and that the First Lord and Fisher had settled on Moore. Near the end of February, Moore was quietly removed from the Grand Fleet and assigned to command a cruiser squadron in the Canary Islands where the possibility of any appearance by German surface ships was remote.
Fisher’s fiercest wrath fell on Henry Pelly of Tiger, whom he labeled a “poltroon.” It was “inexcusable that Captain Pelly should have left a ship of the enemy [Moltke] unfired at and so permitt[ed] her to fire unmolested at Lion.” Why, the First Sea Lord roared, did Pelly, whose ship was in the lead once the flagship had staggered out of line, not take the initiative and, in the absence of a countermanding order from Moore, continue to pursue the German battle cruisers? Pelly, Fisher said, “was a long way ahead, he ought to have gone on had he the slightest Nelsonic temperament in him, regardless of signals. Like Nelson at Copenhagen and St. Vincent! In war the first principle is to disobey orders. Any fool can obey orders!” Beatty made excuses for Pelly. “Pelly did very badly, first in not carrying out the orders to engage his opposite number which had disastrous results [the crippling of the Lion],” he conceded to Jellicoe. But Beatty also recalled that Pelly was commanding a new ship and that he had been given a mixed ship’s company, which included a large number of apprehended deserters. It had been an uphill task, Beatty realized, for her captain to pull them together in wartime. As for Pelly himself, Beatty said, he “had done very well up to then, he had difficulties to contend with and I don’t think he is likely to do the same again. But he is a little bit of the nervous, excited type.” Nevertheless, Jellicoe could find no excuse for Pelly’s failure to comply with Beatty’s order to engage opposite numbers. “Special emphasis is laid in Grand Fleet Orders on the fact that no ship of the enemy should be left unfired at, and a consideration of this ru
le should have led to the Tiger engaging No. 2 in line.” Pelly survived because Churchill preferred to close the book on the matter. “The future and the present claim all our attention” was the First Lord’s verdict. Despite his ship’s continued poor shooting, Pelly was to captain Tiger at Jutland.
Fisher was especially furious at the failure to annihilate, as “the rendezvous was given in both cases [the Scarborough Raid and the Dogger Bank battle], and the enemy appeared exactly on the spot [identified by Room 40].” Privately, he questioned Beatty’s turn away from the supposed submarine and the admiral’s error in not explaining his action either to others on Lion’s bridge or to other ships in the squadron. The only extenuation came years later from Beatty’s biographer and fellow admiral W. S. Chalmers, who pointed out that the admiral’s sighting of a periscope and his decision to turn were made “in a split second from the sloping bridge of a listing ship which had borne the brunt of the battle.”
On Wednesday night, January 27, Beatty, still at Rosyth, received a letter from Fisher “urgently inquiring how it was that the action had been broken off.” That same night, as the battle cruisers were preparing to go back to sea, Beatty wrote a quick note to the First Sea Lord, instructing Filson Young, who knew Fisher, to carry it personally to London. Young arrived in London at 6:00 on the evening of January 29 and went immediately to the Admiralty. “I was taken to Lord Fisher at his room. . . . He had aged a great deal in three months, and the yellow face looked very old and worn, but grim as ever. . . . He shook hands . . . and turning his hard, wise old eye on me, he said, ‘Well, tell me about it. How was it they got away? What’s the explanation? Why didn’t you get the lot? And the Derfflinger—I counted on her being sunk, and we hear that she got back practically undamaged. I don’t understand it.’ ” He criticized Beatty’s 90-degree turn to port. “Submarines?” said Fisher. “There weren’t any; we knew the position of every German submarine in the North Sea; and there wasn’t a mine within fifty miles.” Two days later, Fisher told Beatty himself the same thing: “We know from themselves [that is, from Room 40 intercepts] exactly where they [the U-boats] were—hours off you.” Nevertheless, when all the action reports were in, Beatty retained the full confidence of Churchill, Fisher, and Jellicoe. On the last day of the month, Fisher followed his first “very hurried line” to Beatty with warmer words: “I’ve quite made up my mind. Your conduct was glorious. Beatty beatus!”
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