Castles of Steel

by Robert K. Massie

  At 4:00 p.m., Lion suffered a blow that might have killed her. A 12-inch shell from Lützow hit the British flagship on its amidships Q turret between the two 13.5-inch guns, penetrated the 11-inch armor, burst inside, and blew off the front half of the armored roof. Most of the gun-house crew was killed instantly, and both legs of the turret captain, Major Francis J. W. Harvey of the Royal Marines, were crushed. Dying, but realizing the great danger to the ship, Harvey dragged himself to the voice pipe and called down to his crew below to close the magazine doors and flood the magazine. Then he sent the only walking survivor in the gun house, a marine sergeant, to the bridge to report that the turret was out of action. Worse was to happen. The shell explosion had jarred open the breech of the elevated left-side 13.5-inch gun and the already loaded powder charge in its silk bag slid back out of the gun breech and burst open on the floor. The scattered powder instantly ignited, sending a sheet of white flame rushing down the hoist toward the magazine. Seventy officers and men were incinerated, but because the magazine doors had been closed, the flash reversed itself and vomited out through the opened turret top. The ship was saved and Harvey won a posthumous Victoria Cross. A few minutes later, the dazed, blood-stained marine sergeant in burned clothing appeared on the bridge to tell the first officer he met, “Q turret has gone, sir. All the crew were killed and we have flooded the magazines.” Surprised, the officer looked back. “No further confirmation was necessary: the armored roof of Q turret had been folded back like an open sardine tin; thick yellow smoke was rolling up in clouds from the gaping hole, and the guns were cocked up in the air awkwardly. All this had happened within a few yards of where Beatty was standing and none of us on the bridge had heard the detonation.”

  Five minutes later, at the rear of Beatty’s line, another British battle cruiser was badly hit and this time it brought catastrophe. Von der Tann had already fired forty-eight 11-inch shells at Indefatigable. Then she fired two more and the projectiles struck the British battle cruiser’s after superstructure. In New Zealand, just ahead, the navigating officer looked back at Indefatigable.

  We were altering course to port at the time and it seemed as if her steering was damaged as she did not follow around in our wake but held on until she was about five hundred yards on our starboard quarter. While we were still looking at her, she was hit again by two shells, one on the forecastle and one on the fore turret. Both shells appeared to explode on impact. There was an interval of about thirty seconds and then the ship completely blew up. The main explosion started with sheets of flame, followed immediately by a dense dark smoke cloud which obscured the ship from view. All sorts of stuff was blown into the air, a fifty foot picket boat being blown up about two hundred feet, apparently intact though upside down.

  Stricken, with smoke pouring from her shattered hull, Indefatigable rolled slowly onto her side, all the while driving through the water. Then the huge vessel turned completely over and plunged, taking with her 1,017 officers and men. Only two seamen survived, both shell-shocked and delirious when they were pulled from the sea hours later by a German destroyer. Curiously, because of the din of battle and because the Indefatigable was last in line, many in Beatty’s squadron were unaware of what had happened. From Lion’s bridge, an officer looked back to admire the following ships “with their huge bow waves and flashing broadsides. Astern of the rear ship was a colossal pall of grey smoke. I gazed in amazement and at the same time realised that there were only five battle cruisers in our line. Where was the sixth? The unpleasant truth dawned on me that the cloud of smoke was all that remained of the Indefatigable.” But the loss did not long affect the British squadron. “It happened so suddenly,” said a New Zealand officer, “that, almost before we realized she had gone, our attention was entirely absorbed in the fierce battle now progressing. The noise of our own salvos and the shriek of enemy shells falling over or short and throwing up great sheets of spray, left one with little time to think of anything except the work at hand.”

  As the five remaining British battle cruisers steamed on through towering waterspouts, Lion took five more hits, one of which destroyed her main wireless transmitter. Beatty thereafter was able to communicate by wireless with his own ships and with Jellicoe only by passing his messages by flag or searchlight to the ship astern, Princess Royal, which then would relay them. Needing time to deal with the problems afflicting his squadron, Beatty eased his course to starboard, opening the range to 18,000 yards. His guns fell silent.

  During this short lull, the cast in the drama changed. Since the battle began, Evan-Thomas had been pressing to catch up with Beatty, signaling his battleships that he wanted them to steam at 24½ knots. He was still eight miles behind the battle cruisers, but, as the Germans had only been making 18 to 20 knots, the superdreadnoughts were coming closer. The Germans saw him coming: “Behind the [British] battle cruiser line appeared four big ships,” said Hase. “We soon identified these as of the Queen Elizabeth class. There had been much talk in our fleet of these ships. They carried a colossal armament of eight 15-inch guns, 28,000 tons displacement and a speed of twenty-five knots. They fired a shell more than twice as heavy as ours. They engaged at portentous ranges.” Now, at 4:00 p.m., these mammoth 15-inch guns were coming within range of the rear ships of Hipper’s line. Visibility remained a problem: “Although out in the open sea there was maximum visibility and a bright sun shone down warmly on a sea smooth as a pond, the eastern horizon was shrouded in sea mist and even with the aid of a telescope no movement was discernible,” said a Warspite midshipman in the spotting top. Minutes later, two ships appeared through the haze, Von der Tann and Moltke, 19,000 yards away. It was enough to begin. The 5th Battle Squadron, meticulously schooled by Jellicoe at Scapa Flow, was one of the most accurate shooting squadrons in the Grand Fleet. After firing a few spotting rounds from the forward turrets of Barham, Valiant, and Warspite, Evan-Thomas turned 45 degrees to starboard, paralleling Hipper’s course. His gun turrets swung around to port, and at 4:10 p.m., after a few ranging shots, salvos of 15-inch shells thundered down on the two German battle cruisers, landing in the water so near their targets that the German hulls “quivered and reverberated.” Von der Tann was hit almost immediately by 1,920 pounds of steel and explosive, the shell ripping through her underwater armor, permitting 600 tons of seawater to flood into her after compartments. Then it was Moltke’s turn as one of these tremendous shells pierced her side armor, exploding in a coal bunker, igniting coal dust, and wrecking a 5.9-inch gun. A minute later, all four British battleships were within range. Barham and Valiant fired at Moltke; Warspite, adding her fire to New Zealand’s, shifted to Von der Tann, joined quickly by Malaya. To escape this dreadful bombardment, these two rearmost German battle cruisers began to zigzag, adversely affecting their own gunnery.

  Meanwhile, despite their injuries, the British battle cruisers were shooting more accurately. At 4:14 p.m., Lion landed a salvo on Lützow; at 4:17 p.m., Queen Mary hit Seydlitz again, while New Zealand sent a 12-inch shell into Von der Tann’s forward turret, putting it out of action with jammed guns and a flooded magazine. Almost simultaneously, a 15-inch shell penetrated Von der Tann’s armored deck aft and beat through the barbette of the rear turret, putting it out of action. Even so, Von der Tann hit New Zealand again, and Moltke struck back at Tiger. Fierce though this part of the battle was, the struggle at the head of the line was even more ferocious and punishing. Here, Derfflinger and Seydlitz together were concentrating twenty 12-inch guns on Queen Mary. In Derfflinger’s gunnery-control tower, Hase’s eyes were glued on this target:

  The Queen Mary was firing less rapidly than we were but usually full salvos. I could see the shells coming and I had to admit that they were shooting superbly. As a rule, all eight shells fell together, but they were almost always over or short. . . . But the poor Queen Mary was having a bad time. In addition to Derfflinger, she was being engaged by Seyd-litz. . . . At 4.26 p.m. [she] met her doom. . . . First, a vivid red flame shot up fro
m her forepart. Then came an explosion forward, followed by a much heavier explosion amidships. Black debris flew into the air and immediately afterwards the whole ship blew up with a terrific explosion. A gigantic cloud of smoke rose, the masts collapsed inwards, the smoke cloud hid everything and rose higher and higher. Finally, nothing but a thick, black cloud of smoke remained where the ship had been. At its base, the smoke column covered only a small area, but it widened towards the summit and looked like a monstrous pine tree.

  Tiger, only 500 yards astern of Queen Mary and moving at 25 knots, had to maneuver abruptly to avoid a collision with the doomed ship. An officer on Tiger’s bridge had an intimate view of what happened: “I saw one salvo straddle her. Three shells out of four hit. . . . The next salvo straddled her and two more shells hit her. As they hit, I saw a dull red glow amidships and then the ship seemed to open out like a puffball or one of those toadstool things when one squeezes it. There was another dull red glow forwards and the whole ship seemed to collapse inwards. The funnels and masts fell into the middle, the roofs of the turrets were blown a hundred feet high. Tiger put her helm hard-a-starboard and we just cleared the remains of Queen Mary’s stern by a few feet.”

  New Zealand, following Tiger at high speed, saw Tiger turning to starboard and immediately turned sharply to port to avoid the wreck. From New Zealand’s conning tower an officer reported:

  We disappeared in this dense mass of smoke and Tiger and ourselves passed one on either side of Queen Mary. We passed her about fifty yards on our port beam by which time the smoke had blown clear, revealing the stern . . . afloat, and the propellers still revolving, but the forward part had already gone under. . . . Men were crawling out of the top of the after turret and up the after hatchway. When we were abreast and only a hundred and fifty yards away, this after portion rolled over and, as it did so, blew up. The moist noticeable thing was the masses and masses of paper which were blown into the air. . . . Great masses of iron were thrown into the air and things were falling into the sea around us. Up in the air two hundred feet high [was] a boat which may have been a dinghy or a pinnace still intact but upside down. . . . Before we had passed, the Queen Mary had completely disappeared. This second disaster was rather stunning, but the only signal coming from the flagship was, “Battle cruisers alter course two points to port”—that is, towards the enemy.

  [Neither the charts nor the detailed record of Official Naval Despatches published after Jutland include this command or alteration of course. Nevertheless, it has become a part of the Beatty legend.]

  For those watching from Lion’s bridge, the horrors seemed to continue. Immediately after Queen Mary blew up, Princess Royal was straddled and disappeared into a forest of towering waterspouts. A Lion signalman stared in dismay and reported, “Princess Royal blown up, sir.” Beatty, turning to Chatfield, shook his head and said, “There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today.” Then Princess Royal reappeared intact from behind the massive curtains of smoke and spray.

  Beatty, who had just lost a 26,000-ton battle cruiser and an 18,500-ton battle cruiser along with their crews totaling more than 2,000 men, realized that he needed help. Twelve British destroyers, led by Captain Barry Bingham in Nestor, had reached a point to deliver a torpedo attack on Hip-per’s battle cruisers, and at 4:15 p.m., Beatty signaled them to go forward. The British destroyers charged at 34 knots. From Lützow’s bridge, Hipper watched the attack develop; he countered by sending his light cruiser Regensburg with fifteen destroyers dashing out at 30 knots to meet Bingham. On both sides, the massed torpedo attacks on the enemy’s capital ships quickly dissolved into numerous individual small ship battles. Churning white foam, their signal flags whipping frantically in the wind, their 4-inch guns banging incessantly, the little ships lunged at one another in the no-man’s-land between the lines of big ships. During this melee, each side launched torpedoes, but the British battle cruisers and battleships managed to avoid all eighteen torpedoes fired by the German destroyers and, by turning away, Hipper’s big ships successfully evaded nineteen of the twenty torpedoes launched by the British. Somehow, one British torpedo found Seydlitz, exploding on her port side near the forward turret and tearing a hole forty feet long and thirteen feet wide in her side plating. Although she took in hundreds of tons of water and listed to port, the splendidly constructed German battle cruiser was able to maintain speed and hold her place in line. The tumult brought casualties to the destroyers on both sides: Nestor and Nomad, each hit in a boiler, halted under clouds of escaping steam, and later both sank. The German destroyers V-27 and V-29 were also sunk. At 4:43 p.m., Beatty terminated the encounter by recalling his destroyers. As the British destroyers turned back, their captains saw something incredible: Beatty and his battle cruisers were giving up their pursuit of Hipper to the southeast. They were reversing course and heading north. Apparently, Beatty was running away.

  From his damaged flagship, Beatty now led only four battle cruisers. Exposed on Lion’s open compass platform, soaked by spray while shrapnel screamed around him, he seemed to his staff a heroic figure. Nevertheless, in the Run to the South, this first phase of the Battle of Jutland, Beatty was clearly the loser and Hipper the victor. The German admiral, commanding an inferior force, had sunk two British battle cruisers and two British destroyers at a cost of only two German destroyers. Hipper’s position remained difficult—he had begun with five heavy ships against ten; now it was five against eight—but the German plan was succeeding and every ninety seconds brought his unsuspecting enemies one mile closer to the sixteen dreadnoughts of the High Seas Fleet. When the battle began at 3:48 p.m., Hipper and Scheer had been forty-seven miles apart; now, an hour later, Hipper at last saw in the distance ahead of him the welcome sight of Scheer’s long, pale gray column. Glad as he was, Hipper now anticipated a larger victory. Beatty, hungry for battle, had impatiently taken Hipper’s lure and done what the German admirals had hoped he would do: charge impetuously into a German trap. Smoothly, Franz Hipper swung his battle cruisers around 180 degrees and took up his normal battle position at the head of the northbound High Seas Fleet.

  During the fifty-five-minute Run to the South, Beatty’s three light cruiser squadrons—twelve vessels in all—which had been left behind by the admiral’s turn to the southeast, had been straining to catch up and take their proper scouting positions ahead of Lion. In the new alignment, the veteran Commodore William Goodenough understood exactly where his place should be. “Those of us who had been in action with Sir David Beatty before knew that his general principle was to get between the enemy and his base,” said Goodenough. “I therefore had no difficulty in shaping a course to the southeast.” By 4:35 p.m., Goodenough’s 2nd Light Cruiser Squadron was the most southerly of the three squadrons. Then, from his flagship Southampton, the commodore sighted farther to the southeast something no British seaman had ever seen before: the entire High Seas Fleet at sea, dozens of light gray ships, large and small, steaming against a background of gray water and gray sky, all belching black smoke and steaming in his direction.

  “We saw ahead of us first smoke, then masts, then ships . . . sixteen battleships with destroyers around them on each bow,” Goodenough continued. “We hung on for a few moments to make sure before confirming the message. Then my commander, efficient and cool, said, ‘If you’re going to make that signal, you’d better make it now, sir. You may never make another.’ ” Goodenough saw the reasoning and at 4:38, he flashed an electrifying wireless signal to Beatty and Jellicoe: “URGENT. PRIORITY. Have sighted enemy battle fleet, bearing approximately southeast.” For Beatty, rushing toward this mighty force, and for Jellicoe pacing the bridge of Iron Duke fifty miles away, this signal instantly changed their perceptions of the situation. It made twaddle of the Admiralty’s noon signal that the Friedrich der Grosse was anchored in the Jade. Instead, Scheer was here, in the North Sea, 180 miles from the Jade and only a few miles from Beatty. The British battle cruisers, already severely punished and
diminished in number by Hipper, were about to face the massed guns of the High Seas Fleet.

  Hipper could be pleased: he had splendidly carried out his mission. He had led Beatty’s battered and diminished battle cruiser force, along with the lonely 5th Battle Squadron, into the arms of the High Seas Fleet. It seemed a moment of victory for the Imperial Navy, what the German people, the navy, and the kaiser had been awaiting for twenty years. But the real situation was not as Hipper imagined it. Standing on Lützow’s compass platform and watching Beatty’s wounded flagship lead her remaining sisters into his “trap,” the German admiral may have pictured Beatty suddenly dismayed by what was happening. In fact, Beatty had recognized the opportunity the Germans now laid before him. Here was his chance: with luck, he could turn and lure the High Seas Fleet into an ambush deadlier than anything the Germans might have prepared for him. Hipper and Scheer, Beatty was certain, had no idea what gigantic force lay over the northern horizon. If he turned north, seeming to flee, he could, with his superior speed, draw ahead. The 5th Battle Squadron, with its stout armor and powerful guns, would follow behind as both additional bait and a sturdy shield, keeping the Germans engaged. And then, in a little over an hour, he would rendezvous with Jellicoe. Scheer would come north confidently expecting to conduct a massacre. And a massacre would occur, but not in the form the German admirals expected.

  Goodenough had not immediately turned after spotting and reporting the presence of the High Seas Fleet. Instead, wanting to report accurately the number, course, and speed of the enemy ships, he and his four light cruisers continued at 25 knots toward Scheer until they were only 13,000 yards away from the German battleships. Oddly, as the four light cruisers came closer, the Germans did not open fire. The reason was not visibility; Scheer himself later wrote that at 4:30 p.m., “the weather was extremely clear, the sky cloudless, a light breeze and a calm sea.” Goodenough was spared because the German battleships could see the four cruisers only bow-on, a view from which one cruiser looks much like another and these ships, the Germans thought, could easily be German. Finally, at 4:48 p.m., satisfied with what he had seen, Goodenough wirelessed another URGENT PRIORITY signal to Beatty and Jellicoe: “Course of enemy’s battle fleet is north, single line-ahead. Composition of van is Kaiser class. . . . Destroyers on both wings and ahead. Enemy’s battle cruisers joining battle fleet from the north.” Then, duty performed, Goodenough turned his own ships away, displaying their unmistakably British four-funneled profiles. Ten German battleships immediately opened fire. Twisting and turning between the waterspouts, the British cruisers fled. One officer estimated that forty large shells fell within seventy-five yards of Southampton: “I can truthfully say that I thought that each moment would be our last. . . . We seemed to bear a charmed life. . . . How we escaped amazes everyone from the Commodore downwards.” In fact, the miracle was the commodore’s doing. Asked later how he managed to avoid being hit, Goodenough replied, “Simply by steering straight for the splashes of the last enemy salvo!”—his thought being that, with the German gunners making constant corrections, the next salvo was unlikely to land in the same place as the one just before.