Castles of Steel

by Robert K. Massie

  After the battle and after the war, Scheer was asked about his decision. His answers varied. Reporting to the kaiser, he wanted William to believe that before making his extraordinary turn back to the east and exposing the kaiser’s beloved fleet a second time to the crossing of its T by a superior and practically undamaged enemy battle fleet, he had carefully calculated every possibility: “If the enemy followed us,” he wrote, “our action in reversing course would be classed as a retreat and if any of our rear ships were damaged, we would have to sacrifice them. Still less was it feasible to disengage, leaving it to the enemy to decide when he would meet us next morning.”

  It was as yet too early to assume night cruising order. The enemy could have compelled us to fight before dark, he could have prevented our exercising our initiative, and finally he could have cut off our return to the German Bight. There was only one way of avoiding this: to inflict a second blow on the enemy by advancing again regardless of cost, and to bring all the destroyers forcibly to attack. Such a maneuver would surprise the enemy, upset his plans for the rest of the day and, if the blow fell really heavily, make easier a night escape. It also offered the possibility of a last attempt to bring help to the hard-pressed Wiesbaden, or at least of rescuing her crew.

  After the war, Scheer, speaking candidly to friends, admitted: “The fact is, I had no definite object. . . . I advanced because I thought I should help the poor Wiesbaden and because the situation was entirely obscure since I had received no wireless reports. When I noticed that the British pressure had ceased and that the fleet remained intact in my hands, I turned back under the impression that the action could not end this way and that I ought to seek contact with the enemy again. And then I thought I had better throw in the battle cruisers in full strength. . . . The thing just happened—as the virgin said when she got a baby.”

  Some historians refuse to believe that the German Commander-in-Chief knowingly and deliberately thrust the High Seas Fleet straight into the jaws of the massive British battle line. And, if he did so, they find it incomprehensible that he placed his battle cruisers—his weakest heavy ships, with the thinnest armor, already battered and two almost sinking—in the van. Scheer himself later admitted that “if I’d done it in a peacetime exercise, I’d have lost my command.” Whatever his reasons—or perhaps there was no reasoning, only impetuosity, instinct, desperation—the German admiral turned his ships around and steamed back through the same water they had just passed through.Scheer’s move did not, as he had hoped it would, catch Jellicoe by surprise. Once again, it was Goodenough in Southampton who discovered the German fleet and sounded the alarm. The commodore had faithfully and expertly followed Scheer’s retreat and then, suddenly, out of the mists he saw the German dreadnoughts coming toward him. His own ship immediately came under fire, which did not prevent him from signaling Jellicoe that the High Seas Fleet was coming back. Grand Fleet officers and seamen standing on deck or sitting on turret tops tumbled back into their battle stations, and soon the giant, light gray ships—first Hipper’s battle cruisers, then Behncke’s battleships—appeared out of the mist. Without speculating as to his opponent’s motive, Jellicoe took the offered gift.

  No naval assault during the Great War was as useless as this second attack of Reinhard Scheer’s. Weather and visibility were against him; as the day neared its end, his ships stood out sharply against the glowing western horizon, while to the east the Grand Fleet was shrouded in mist. Initially the resumption of British fire was sporadic, but it swiftly mounted in volume. Soon, the Grand Fleet’s broadsides merged into a solid, unbroken wave of endless thunder. Hercules fired on Seydlitz; Colossus and Revenge on Derfflinger; Neptune and St. Vincent on Derfflinger and Moltke. Marlborough, ignoring her torpedo injury, fired fourteen salvos in six minutes and saw four of them hit. Monarch, Iron Duke, Centurion, Royal Oak, King George V, Téméraire, Superb, Neptune—all reported scoring hits. By 7:14 p.m., fire from the whole of the British line was sweeping the length of the German line at ranges from 10,000 to 14,000 yards. At 7:15, Beatty’s battle cruisers joined in. As always, the German battle cruisers suffered most, but the cannonade also further devastated the ships in the German van. König, with Rear Admiral Behncke wounded on the bridge, was hit repeatedly. Grosser Kurfürst, next astern, was hammered seven times in two minutes by 15-inch and 13.5-inch shells from Barham, Valiant, and Marlborough. Markgraf, Kaiser, and Helgoland were hit. Under this torrent of heavy shells, the German column wavered; ships “bunched together”; the battleships, surrounded by towering waterspouts, found themselves overtaking and overrunning the battle cruisers. Captains ordered helmsmen to turn out of line and engine rooms to slow down, stop, and back astern. Scheer’s fleet was disintegrating.

  Meanwhile, the German reply to this deluge of British fire was ineffective. German gunners saw nothing but smoke and mist and, in the words of the naval historian John Irving, “an almost continuous flickering orange light right round the horizon ahead, from port to starboard.” The nearly invisible British dreadnoughts could be located only by these gun flashes; German spotters desperately attempted to take ranges and fire back at the orange flashes, but they had no means of seeing the fall of shot. Only two heavy German shells hit the British battle line, both striking Colossus. These two 12-inch shells landed on the forward superstructure, one of them failing to explode, neither doing significant damage or inflicting casualties. A third heavy shell—an observer saw that it was bright yellow—fell short, bursting when it hit the water thirty yards from the forward turret. “Splinters penetrated . . . unarmoured parts of the ship in about 20 places,” her captain reported after the battle. Two men were wounded in the foretop and three at a 4-inch-gun post. The most serious harm was done to a seaman manning a range finder on the foretop; his right arm was practically severed by a steel splinter. His life was saved by a marine captain who stopped the bleeding with a tourniquet; the arm later was amputated at the shoulder. Remarkably, these five men wounded were the only gunfire casualties suffered by Grand Fleet dreadnoughts during the Battle of Jutland.

  Ten minutes of this—unanswerable salvos fired by huge guns hidden in the eastern mist—was all that Scheer could stand. He had gambled and steered a second time into the greatest concentration of naval gunfire any fleet commander had ever faced. He had lost. The attack had failed and he understood that if he persisted, his fleet would be destroyed. Now there was only one thing to do: quickly extricate as many ships as possible. The most valuable ships, the dreadnought battleships, the core of German sea power, the kaiser’s glories, the cause of the naval building race with England—these must be saved, whatever the cost. To cover their retreat, the battle cruisers, already badly damaged, could, if necessary, be sacrificed. The destroyers massed on his port bow could be flung in to attack with torpedoes and lay smoke. But if it was to be done, it must be done now.

  Again, Scheer acted instinctively, giving three commands intended to save his battleships. The first, hoisted on Friedrich der Grosse at 7:12 p.m., and left flying from the halyard for six minutes, signaled the battleships to prepare for a third emergency turnaround; this command was to be executed the moment the flags were hauled down. At 7:13 a second dramatic flag sig-nal rose up the halyard: “Schlachtkreuzer ran an den Feind, voll einsetzen,” meaning “Battle cruisers, at the enemy. Give it everything!” At 7:21 p.m., the third of Scheer’s orders was hoisted: a mass destroyer attack on the Grand Fleet was to cover the withdrawal of the German battleships.

  The charge of the German battle cruisers has come to be called a “death ride.” Although Lützow was out of action and the other four German battle cruisers were heavily damaged, Derfflinger’s Captain Hartog led the squadron at 20 knots toward the British line. Two of the ships were scarcely more than battered hulls, filled with thousands of tons of salt water, the sea rolling over their bows up to the forward turrets, more than half their guns destroyed or out of action, their compartments filled with dead and dying men. Yet they drove forward
.

  “We were steaming into this inferno,” said Derfflinger’s Hase;

  the range fell from 12,000 to 8,000. . . . Salvo after salvo fell around us, hit after hit struck our ship. . . . A 15 inch shell pierced the armor of “Caesar” turret and exploded inside. The turret commander had both legs torn off and most of the gun crew was killed. The flames passed to the working chamber and then to the handling room and seventy-three of the seventy-eight men in the turret died. . . . Another 15-inch shell pierced the roof of “Dora” turret. The same horrors followed. With the exception of one man who was thrown by the concussion through the turret entrance, the whole turret crew of eighty men was killed instantly. From both after turrets, great flames were spurting, mingled with clouds of yellow smoke. . . . Then, a terrific roar, a tremendous explosion, then darkness. . . . The whole conning tower seemed to be hurled in the air. . . . Poisonous, greenish yellow gasses poured through the aperture into our control. I called out “Don gas masks” and every man put his gas mask over his face. . . . We could scarcely see anything of the enemy who were disposed in a great semi-circle around us. All we could see was the great reddish-gold flames spurting from their guns.

  Derfflinger was hit fourteen times during the “death ride.” Seydlitz, her bow already partially submerged, was hit five more times, bringing her total for the day to seventeen. Von der Tann, still keeping up although she could not fight, was struck again. Even Lützow, already hit nineteen times and now without Hipper, was seen struggling to get away. Five heavy shells in quick succession from Monarch and Orion battered the hulk again. Again, only Moltke escaped serious damage. The carnage ended at 7:17 p.m., when Derfflinger made out a new signal from Friedrich der Grosse, “Operate against the enemy’s van.” In effect, Scheer was saying that the battle cruisers had achieved their purpose and could be permitted to sheer off to starboard and draw away. Thus ended the “death ride” of the German battle cruisers, the bravest and, as it turned out, the last surface attack by dreadnoughts of the Imperial German Navy.

  Scheer was able to reprieve his battle cruisers because, given a moment’s respite from the Grand Fleet’s overwhelming gun power, the German battleships were beginning their turn to the rear. For the third time that afternoon, the High Seas Fleet executed “Gefechtskehrtwendung nach Steuerbord!” This time, however, the emergency turn had none of the precision of a peacetime drill in the Baltic, none of the cool efficiency of the first course reversal forty minutes before. This time, captains turned their ships as well as they could, some to starboard, some to port, some finding their neighbors so close that collision seemed inevitable, then just missing. As they turned, the beleaguered ships fired an occasional defiant salvo from their after turrets; no shell came close to a British ship.

  Nevertheless, Jellicoe soon faced another threat. The battle cruiser “death ride” had been a kamikaze charge without success, but the destroyer torpedo attack that followed helped to save the High Seas Fleet. When it came, the attack was delivered in less strength than Scheer would have wished. Only fourteen destroyers, carrying a total of fifty-eight torpedoes, were in position to obey his order, but they set out for the British line at 30 knots. They were met by a wall of fire from the 4-inch and 6-inch secondary batteries of the British battleships, by heavy shells from numerous dreadnought main battery turrets, and by the shells of British light cruisers and destroyers sent out by Jellicoe to blunt the attack. One German flotilla managed to come within 8,000 yards of the British battle line, where it launched eleven torpedoes before turning back and laying down smoke. The next flotilla, plunging into the same firestorm, launched more torpedoes, but one of its destroyers was sunk. A third wave attacked, but was out of range and fired only a single torpedo before retreating behind another smokescreen. In all, the fourteen German destroyers fired thirty-one torpedoes.

  Even as the enemy destroyers were disappearing back into their own smoke, Jellicoe knew that their torpedoes were in the water. To escape this oncoming danger, the Commander-in-Chief ordered the standard Grand Fleet Battle Order response to approaching torpedoes: he turned his battleships away so that their sterns, rather than their broadsides, would be presented as targets. At 7:22 p.m., the battle fleet turned 2 points [22 degrees] away to port; then, to make sure, at 7:25, Jellicoe ordered the fleet to turn again another 2 points; in all, he now had turned a total of 44 degrees, onto a new course of southeast. Jellicoe’s turn away, putting hundreds of additional yards between the launch tubes and the intended targets, may have been responsible for ten torpedoes’ running out of fuel short of the Grand Fleet. Nevertheless, twenty-one torpedoes kept coming and reached the British line, forcing a number of battleships to maneuver independently to avoid them. It helped that the white torpedo tracks were visible in the water and that it was relatively easy for the men in the foretops to spot them and alert the bridges. The first torpedoes were sighted at 7:33 p.m., and separately the battleships began turning and twisting. Marlborough, already carrying a torpedo wound in her hull, saw and avoided another three torpedoes. She “altered course to starboard so that one track passed ahead, another passed so close astern that we should certainly have been hit if the stern had not been swinging under helm, while number three must have been running below depth because it went right under the ship.” Revenge, next behind Marlborough, swung hard to port to avoid two torpedoes; one passed ten yards before her bow and the other twenty yards from her stern. Hercules and Agincourt, the third and fourth ships behind Marlborough, saw torpedoes and escaped by putting their helms over to port and sheering out of line. Agincourt then watched one torpedo pass up her port side and the other up the starboard side. A torpedo ran between Iron Duke and Thunderer, while Colossus eluded another. A torpedo came very close to Collingwood’s stern; at least four passed through the line not far from Barham. Neptune was pursued from dead astern with what almost appeared to be a conscious malevolence. A torpedo “following exactly in our course, but going faster than our fastest speed . . . [kept] coming closer and closer. . . . We could do nothing but wait and wait, mouths open. . . . Nothing happened.” Afterward, the battleship’s Action Report conjectured that the “torpedo was either deflected by the wash from Neptune’s propellers or ran its range out. The latter is more likely.” Probably, other torpedoes went unnoticed before the danger passed. Twenty-one torpedoes had reached the British line, but none had found a victim. Meanwhile, the German battleships and battle cruisers and, now also, the destroyers had disappeared. And, for a while, the firing ceased.

  Measured by his own hopes, Scheer’s three desperate offensive thrusts—with his battle fleet, his battle cruisers, and his destroyers—had failed: they had cost him the remaining fighting capability of his battle cruisers, additional punishment of his battleships, the expenditure of many torpedoes, and the loss—by sinking or damage—of five destroyers. But, although Scheer could not have known this, he had managed something critically important: he had forced Jellicoe to turn away at a moment when the German fleet was in a desperate position and a little more pressure might have produced a rout. And by the time Jellicoe returned to the pursuit, Scheer and the German battle line were out of sight and out of range, ten or eleven miles distant. The fact was that for seventeen critical minutes while the fate of the High Seas Fleet hung in the balance, Scheer had been given time to disengage his battle fleet—and thereby to avoid its annihilation.

  Turning large ships away from an oncoming torpedo attack was a tactic then approved by the British, German, French, Italian, and American navies. To protect a fleet, or even a single ship, turning away from torpedoes rather than toward them offered substantial advantages. The greatest was relative speed. The torpedoes would be approaching at 30 knots, but the ships would be steaming away from them at 20; the relative speed of the approaching missiles, therefore, would be 10 knots. By the same arithmetic, turning toward approaching torpedoes could mean that the underwater missiles were approaching at 30 knots plus 20; thus, 50 knots. Anyone could see that
dealing with an enemy approaching at 10 knots was preferable to dealing with one approaching at 50 simply because the slower relative speed gave the targeted ship a better opportunity to maneuver out of the way. In addition, turning away would put more distance between the attackers’ torpedo tubes and the intended victims, and this added distance might mean that some of the torpedoes would—as they did in this attack—run out of fuel before they reached their targets.

  As a defensive measure against this German destroyer attack, Jellicoe’s turnaway at Jutland was a complete success: no torpedo hits were scored on British dreadnoughts. But the maneuver shocked some officers in the fleet and later became the most heavily criticized British decision of the entire battle. Beatty, who at the Dogger Bank had turned away because he believed he had seen a single periscope, was privately scornful, and three of Jellicoe’s squadron vice admirals had misgivings. The argument turns both on tactics and timing: at the moment Jellicoe turned away, the High Seas Fleet was beaten, in disarray, and in headlong flight. Had Jellicoe turned toward the torpedoes and pursued, rather than turning away, he might have lost some ships—so the argument goes—but he must have inflicted further heavy damage on the Germans and perhaps even brought about their total destruction. Instead, time and range were sacrificed—seventeen minutes and over 3,000 yards—and Scheer made good his escape. Jellicoe, by this decision, was said to have forsaken the Royal Navy’s chance for a new Trafalgar. This view would hover over Jellicoe’s reputation for the rest of his life.