Castles of Steel

by Robert K. Massie

  When the Grand Fleet went by a few minutes later, many British seamen in the passing dreadnoughts thought the victim was a German ship. “My gun layer took her for a Hun and the crew cheered. But I could read the name Invincible on the stern,” said an officer. It was not British naval practice for warships still in action to stop to pick up survivors, but when Beatty passed by at 6:40 p.m. and saw men in the water, he signaled the destroyer Badger, “Pick up survivors from wreck on starboard side.” Only six men were rescued out of a crew of 1,031. One of them, Dannreuther, the gunnery officer and Wagner’s godson, had been in the control top on the foremast. When he was picked up, he told his rescuers that he “had not a scratch on his entire body,” and that he had merely “stepped off into the water when the foretop came down.” When Iron Duke came by, Jellicoe asked, “Is wreck one of our own ships?” To which Badger, still searching for men in the sea, replied, “Yes. Invincible.”

  Franz Hipper was unable to savor his third victory that afternoon over the British battle cruiser force. Three of the nine British battle cruisers that had sailed for Jutland had now been sunk, but four of Hipper’s own five ships were in worse condition than the six surviving British battle cruisers. Lützow, Hipper’s flagship, was barely afloat, with water pouring into her forward compartments, dragging her bow deep into the water. Her wireless stations had been destroyed. Facing this situation, Erich Raeder, Hipper’s Chief of Staff, forced himself to confront the admiral, telling him that the ship must drop out of line and return to Wilhelmshaven as well as she could; meanwhile, Hipper must transfer to another battle cruiser. When Raeder said this, “a kind of paralysis seemed to descend on Hipper. . . . [He] issued no orders. It was the first time that he had nothing to say.” Raeder tried again: “We can’t lead the squadron from Lützow anymore, Your Excellency.” “But I can’t leave the flagship,” Hipper protested. Raeder persisted: “We’re unable to signal by wireless and anyhow our speed isn’t enough.” “No doubt!” said Hipper. “But my flagship!” Then Raeder spoke sharply: “The squadron needs Your Excellency,” and Hipper jerked back to reality. “You’re right,” he said, and signaled the destroyer G-39 to come alongside. Just before 7:00 p.m., with Lützow stopped and the destroyer waiting, Hipper grasped Lützow’s Captain Viktor Harder by the hand, saluted the officers on the bridge, and declared, “We’ll come back. We won’t forget you.” Then, as Beatty had done at the Dogger Bank, he jumped down onto the destroyer’s deck and told the captain to take him to another battle cruiser that he could use as his flagship. As Hipper departed, Lützow, with a huge volume of smoke pouring from her forecastle back across her bridge, turned out of line and, alone, steamed slowly off to the south. Her part in the battle was over.

  For the next three hours, Hipper wandered across the battlefield in his small destroyer seeking to board another battle cruiser and make it his new flagship. He went first to Derfflinger, but her condition was almost as calamitous as Lützow’s. She had received twenty heavy-caliber shell hits; two armor plates had been torn from her bow, leaving an enormous hole open to the sea; her masts and rigging were shattered; most signal halyards were blown away or burned; her wireless apparatus was damaged so that she could receive but not send messages. And she had on board 180 dead or wounded men. Leaving Derfflinger, Hipper headed for Seydlitz, which was in even worse condition. The ship had “a hole as big as a barn door in her bow and several thousand tons of water gurgling inside her.” She was listing, awash forward up to the middle deck, and also had no working wireless. Von der Tann, which he tried next, had no gun turrets able to fire and was valueless as a fighting unit. That left Moltke, still largely undamaged. Hipper’s destroyer was about to come alongside Moltke when a new order from Scheer for the battle cruisers to attack made this impossible. As the squadron could not be controlled from the bridge of a destroyer, Hipper signaled Captain Johannes Hartog of Derfflinger to take temporary command until circumstances permitted Moltke to halt long enough to take him on board. But this did not happen until 10:00 p.m.

  As the Grand Fleet deployed, the divisions came up to their turning points and swung into line, each ship “breaking into a ripple of flame from all her turrets” as soon as she could bring her guns to bear. Because of the haze and the interference from the funnel smoke of Beatty’s ships steaming at high speed across the front of the Grand Fleet, no organized distribution of fire was possible and individual ships selected their own targets. At 6:17 p.m., Marlborough, leading the starboard-wing column nearest the Germans, trained on one of the Kaisers at a range of 13,000 yards and fired seven 13.5-inch-gun salvos in four minutes. The other ships of her division followed: Revenge with eight 15-inch, then Hercules, then Agincourt with her seven turrets and fourteen 12-inch guns. At 6:23 p.m., Iron Duke opened fire at Wiesbaden; seven minutes later, she found a more suitable target in one of the Königs and gave the German nine salvos. Benbow, Colossus, Orion, Monarch, and Thunderer joined in. Even so, for the first fifteen minutes, firing came from only about one-third of the British fleet. There were other difficulties: at 6:26 p.m., Jellicoe was forced to reduce speed to 14 knots to allow Beatty’s battle cruisers to cross in front of him. This signal did not reach all ships, and there was bunching up and overlapping of battleships in the rear of the line; Marlborough had to reduce to 8 knots and, briefly, St. Vincent was forced to stop dead in the water. At 6:33 p.m., Beatty reached his new station ahead of the battle fleet’s new course and Jellicoe was able to increase speed to 17 knots. By then, firing was general.

  It was a moment of triumph for Jellicoe and of horror for Scheer. Earlier in the afternoon, the German Commander-in-Chief, in Friedrich der Grosse, had been optimistic about the battle’s outcome. Hipper had told him that enemy light cruisers had been sighted and that the battle cruisers could handle them; in consequence, Scheer did not increase the speed of the High Seas Fleet battle squadrons. When, at 3:46 p.m., Hipper reported that six British battle cruisers were present, Scheer was delighted. The situation for which he had been hoping was developing: he had come upon a fraction of the Grand Fleet operating on its own, far from home. Scheer altered course to the northwest, toward Hipper, and his leading battleship squadron, Behncke’s four Königs, engaged both Beatty’s remaining battle cruisers and Evan-Thomas’s Queen Elizabeths. At maximum speed, the German dreadnoughts pressed forward, hoping to lame, and then overtake and sink, one or more of the big British vessels. Even as the Grand Fleet was preparing to deploy, Scheer was still pursuing the 5th Battle Squadron, and his battleships were firing enthusiastically at the circling Warspite. At 6:20 p.m., five minutes after Jellicoe’s signal to deploy, the German advance continued with Scheer and his admirals wholly unaware that König, leading their battle line, was only 14,000 yards southeast of Marlborough on the Grand Fleet’s starboard wing. Then, just as Warspite straightened out and steamed away, Rear Admiral Behncke, on König’s bridge, stared ahead and, to his horrified amazement, saw massed columns of battleships turning in front of him. Heavy fire began to fall on his ships and Behncke himself was wounded on his bridge. By 6:30 p.m., fifteen British battleships had come into line and, with every minute, more of Jellicoe’s dreadnoughts were adding their guns to the cannonade. The Grand Fleet now was crossing the German T, punishing the head of the German line—König, Grosser Kurfürst, and Markgraf. To relieve some of the pressure, Behncke followed Hipper’s battle cruisers ahead of him as they bore off to starboard; thus, without the knowledge or permission of its Commander-in-Chief, the High Seas Fleet’s original course, north to the Skagerrak, was bending to the east.

  Scheer, even more than Jellicoe, was hampered by lack of information. His flagship was thirteenth in line in the long German column and the admiral himself could see nothing in the haze. Scheer’s Flag Lieutenant, Ernst von Weizsäcker, bluntly declared after the war that during the battle, Scheer “had but the foggiest idea of what was happening.” Even as he steamed steadily toward Jellicoe, Scheer still was not convinced that the Grand Fleet was at sea;
the gunfire on the horizon ahead he assumed to be coming from the battle between Beatty and Hipper. Then, five minutes after the Grand Fleet had begun its deployment and as the volume of gunfire rose and the rain of heavy shells fell thicker on his fleet, Scheer realized that something larger and more ominous than Beatty and Evan-Thomas lay across his path. “It was now obvious that we were confronted by a large portion of the English fleet,” he said. “The entire arc stretching from north to east was a sea of fire. The flash from the muzzles of the guns was seen distinctly through the mist and smoke on the horizon although the ships themselves were not distinguishable.” The shock to Scheer was a terrible one. And then, at 6:25 p.m., with the four Königs in the van of his fleet immersed in a maelstrom of fire, he was handed a signal from the commander of his 5th Destroyer Flotilla; British prisoners rescued from the sunken destroyer Nomad had told their captors that sixty large British ships, including twenty dreadnoughts and six battle cruisers, were “in the vicinity.”

  What could Scheer do? He was 150 miles from home, facing a more numerous, more powerful enemy, which, thanks to the presence of Mauve’s six predreadnoughts, was also superior in speed. He could not hope to win a running heavy-gun battle on a parallel course; his slower ships would certainly be lost and probably others as well. Already his punished van was beginning to lose formation. The volume of fire made it impossible to sight on and fire on any individual British ship. Worst of all, he had permitted his enemy to cross his T. Scheer was a professional and a realist; he knew that if he continued on this course, the life of his fleet could be measured in minutes.

  Scheer reacted quickly. “While the battle is progressing a leader cannot obtain a really clear picture, especially at long ranges,” Scheer wrote after the war. “He acts and feels according to his impressions.” Scheer saw only one way out: to order a carefully rehearsed German fleet maneuver, designed for exactly this situation: when it was necessary to break away rapidly from a stronger fleet. At 6:36 p.m., Scheer signaled, “Gefechtskehrtwendung nach Steuerbord!” (“Battle about turn to starboard”). The maneuver called for each ship independently and simultaneously to make a 180-degree turn onto an opposite course; in this case directly away from the British fleet. The result would save time by reversing the course of the fleet without the need to follow the leader around a single point ahead. Scheer’s captains had practiced the maneuver often in peacetime in the Baltic; now, when the command was given, its execution was superb. Westfalen, the last dreadnought in line, turned immediately. Then, together, each heeling sharply, twenty-two battleships turned in place, and, within four minutes, the entire column had vanished into the murk. To the British, watching the advancing German column suddenly fade from view, it was inexplicable.

  Jellicoe was astonished and perplexed: the High Seas Fleet, which had been heading straight for his battle line, had suddenly vanished. And it had disappeared before Jellicoe had finished deploying all of his battleships; only at 6:40 p.m. had the last Grand Fleet division turned onto the new deployment course with Barham, Valiant, and Malaya forming astern of Agincourt, the last ship. And now, extraordinarily, Scheer’s fleet was gone. The serious fleet action had lasted for only twenty minutes—from 6:15 to 6:35 p.m.—and even then, in the shifting banks of mist and smoke rolling toward the British line, no more than three or four enemy battleships had ever been visible from the bridge of Iron Duke. “I could not see his turn away from where I was on top of the chart house, nor could anyone else with me,” Jellicoe said later of Admiral Scheer. “I had imagined the disappearance of the enemy to be due merely to the thickening of the mist, but after a few minutes, I realized that there must be some other reason.” Only at 6:44 p.m., nine minutes after Scheer’s turn and once he had finished superintending the deployment of his own fleet, did Jellicoe react. Supposing, at first, that Scheer had made only a small alteration in course, Jellicoe responded by turning the British line slightly to starboard—to the southeast. Eleven minutes later, at 6:55 p.m., Jellicoe realized that Scheer must have made a larger turn, perhaps toward the southwest, which would have been the quickest way out of the British trap. Jellicoe again altered course, this time by 45 degrees to a heading of south, still at a diverging angle from Scheer’s new course to the southwest. This divergence did not concern Jellicoe; in bad visibility, he had no wish to pursue Scheer into the unknown. In addition, the new Grand Fleet course put the High Seas Fleet in ultimate peril: every mile placed Jellicoe in a better position to prevent Scheer’s return to Germany.

  Jellicoe’s decisions before, during, and immediately after Scheer’s emergency turnabout were the results of his own personal analysis and estimates; no one in the British fleet passed along any useful information to the Commander-in-Chief. Most bridge officers in the battle fleet, of course, were necessarily absorbed in their own close-quarters deployment ship-handling; Scheer’s unexpected maneuver had gone virtually unobserved. But not totally unobserved: men on some British vessels—the light cruisers Falmouth and Canterbury, for example—had clearly seen Scheer’s battleships turning away, but no one thought to report this fact to the flagship. Iron Duke’s own gunnery-control staff in the battleship’s foretop witnessed the turn but failed to inform the admiral on the bridge. Throughout this critical time, therefore, Jellicoe was forced to rely solely on what he could see for himself—and he could see nothing. Even at 6:55, twenty minutes after Scheer had turned away, Jellicoe was uncertain what Scheer had done or where he had gone. Looking for help, he asked Marlborough, at the eastern end of the battle line, “Can you see any enemy battleships?” “No,” Marlborough replied.

  Meanwhile, more trouble was on the way: torpedoes were heading for the rear of the British line. Most of the tracks were clearly visible and easily avoided, but not all. Revenge felt “a heavy shock”; a torpedo had struck the side, and, failing to explode, had bounced off the underwater armor. A moment later an explosion occurred on Marlborough’s starboard side. A torpedo destroyed thirty feet of hull plating, killed two men, and flooded a boiler room as well as the diesel- and hydraulic-engine rooms. The battleship listed 8 degrees and her speed was reduced to 17 knots, but she managed to maintain her position in line. This, as it turned out, was the only torpedo to hit and damage a British dreadnought during the Battle of Jutland. But the hit on Marlborough had a powerful effect on Jellicoe, strongly reinforcing his tendency to caution. His declared policy was not to risk his battle fleet to underwater damage by following closely in the wake of a retiring enemy who might launch a destroyer torpedo attack, or sow mines in his path, or both. No one knew where the torpedo that hit the Marlborough had come from; possibly a U-boat, possibly a mine, possibly even the wreck of the immobile Wiesbaden. On the chance that this last possible source might be the true one, more British salvos crashed out toward that crippled vessel. Still she did not sink and, on board, thirty desperate men remained alive.

  Nothing better illustrates the difficulties facing Jellicoe at Jutland than the brevity of the first clash between the two battle fleets. Despite the skill with which Jellicoe and Beatty had enmeshed the High Seas Fleet, Iron Duke had fired only nine salvos when Scheer turned his ships around and vanished into the mist. Even so, Jellicoe remained hopeful. He retained the superior tactical position, and when the firing stopped, he and most men in the British fleet believed this to be only a temporary hiatus in the long-awaited day of reckoning. The High Seas Fleet remained out there somewhere, and the Grand Fleet was in position to prevent Scheer from returning to the Jade. Meanwhile, as ship after ship took stock, British admirals and captains realized that the Germans had not scored a single hit on any Grand Fleet battleship. The men in the fleet were cheerfully exuberant and, during the respite, those who were able came out to take a look. Prince Albert, whose A turret in Collingwood had been hammering away at Derfflinger, emerged to sit on the turret top and escape the cordite fumes inside. Later, the king’s second son wrote to his brother, the Prince of Wales, that, during the fighting, “all sense of d
anger and everything else goes, except the one longing of dealing death in every possible way to the enemy.”

  For twenty minutes after reversing course, Scheer retreated to the west, managing to lose Jellicoe in the mist and smoke. The turn had reversed the order of the German line: Westfalen now led the dreadnoughts, and König brought up the rear. Battle damage was severe, although not equally distributed. The battle cruisers, except for Moltke, were badly hurt. Behncke’s battleship squadron, which had led the fleet, had been hard hit: König had heavy damage; Markgraf’s port engine was stopped and she was having trouble keeping her place in line. The other two ships of Behncke’s elite division were fighting fires, plugging holes below the waterline, and shoring up bulkheads. But Scheer’s other dreadnoughts were relatively unharmed, and Mauve’s six old ships had not been touched. Scheer could count his superbly executed Gefechtskehrtwendung a brilliant success.

  Then, suddenly, Scheer did something even more extraordinary. At 6:55 p.m., the same signal soared again up the halyards on Friedrich der Grosse: “Gefechtskehrtwendung nach Steuerbord!” The German Commander-in-Chief was calling for another simultaneous 180-degree turn. Scheer was reversing course again; he was abandoning caution, staking everything on a single throw and deliberately hurling his fleet at the center of the British battle line whose immense firepower he had already felt. For this move, no one—not even Scheer himself—ever offered a rational explanation. Certainly, the admiral was acutely aware that his fleet was still in danger, that with every mile he steamed west into the North Sea, he was farther from home. He may also have believed that Jellicoe’s scouting cruisers must have seen his turn and that the whole Grand Fleet would be steering westward after him. But now, twenty minutes had passed and there was no British vessel in sight. The enemy was not following him, and Scheer wondered why. Perhaps the relative situation was better than he had thought. Perhaps he could capitalize on this. By returning to the battle he had just broken off, by attacking head-on with his entire fleet, he might surprise his enemy and throw him into confusion. And, if the Grand Fleet had moved far enough to the south, his own fleet might, in the coming darkness, be able to cross Jellicoe’s rear and make for Wilhelmshaven. Along the way, he might even be able to do something for Wiesbaden; rescue survivors, at least.