The Great War at Sea: 1914-1918

by Richard Hough

  At 5.30 p.m. Jellicoe noted the cessation of fire to the south, and waited in vain for some reports of the engagement and of the enemy’s position. He received neither. Hood, with the 3rd Battle Cruiser Squadron, the light cruisers Chester and Canterbury and four destroyers, was twenty-one miles ahead. Between them and the Iron Duke were seven armoured cruisers, eight miles apart, with one, the Hampshire, as linking ship. The four squadron light cruisers covered the battle fleet’s flanks.

  This great spread of scouting ships, designed to provide a visual warning screen forty miles wide had been obliged gradually to draw in to conform with the reducing visibility, so that by the critical hour of 6 p.m. it was only twenty-five miles wide.

  Other mischances and mishaps served to conceal events from the Iron Duke. Because of the relatively slow speed of the old armoured cruisers, and of Jellicoe’s acceleration to 20 knots; and also because one of their duties was to stop and search suspicious merchantmen in case they were acting as enemy scouts, the armoured cruisers were only six instead of sixteen miles ahead. An even worse handicap which had developed gradually through the day was the consequence of the errors in the dead reckoning calculations of both Beatty’s and Jellicoe’s flagships. Jellicoe claimed that he took into account the likely inaccuracy of Beatty’s dead reckoning position in view of the Lion’s severe shocks from enemy hits and their effect on the compasses, the numerous changes of course, to say nothing of zig-zagging, which had been necessary in two hours of action.(2)

  In fact, the Iron Duke’s dead reckoning calculations, in spite of Jellicoe’s later claims to the contrary, were inaccurate, too, due to the long run from Scapa at varying speeds through tides and currents. He was four and three-quarter miles ahead of his dead reckoning position, and Beatty almost seven miles west of where Jellicoe calculated he was. Jellicoe expected to sight Beatty to the south-east (visibility permitting) at twelve miles at 6 p.m., the enemy battle fleet half an hour later dead ahead. Instead, he learned from the Marlborough on the extreme starboard wing that Burney had identified the Lion a mere five and a half miles distant to the south-west. Now he had to be prepared for action twenty minutes earlier with the enemy appearing from a different bearing. Deployment could not therefore be delayed, and he had to decide in seconds whether he should turn his fleet into a single line to the east, or to the west and towards the assumed course of the enemy. No martial decision was more critical, no order from one commander’s lips more inl1uential on the outcome of a battle, and a war.

  We see John Jellicoe, fifty-six years old, uncertain in health and endurance, confident in his intellectual powers and decisions, less confident in his admirals and his ships, standing on the Iron Duke’s compass platform. He is dressed in a much-worn blue raincoat, white muffler round his neck, old cap with tarnished brass on his head – an unpretentious, rather plain figure, below average in height and standing erect. At 6.01 p.m. Jellicoe sights the Lion at a distance of about five miles to the south-west. She is moving fast, turning on an easterly heading, and bears evidence of the fierce battle she has been fighting since 4 o’clock.

  The Iron Duke’s Hag-captain recalled this moment: ‘Beatty in the Lion appeared out of the mist on our starboard bow, leading his splendid battle cruisers, which were engaged to starboard with an enemy invisible to us. I noted smoke pouring from a shell-hole on the port side of the Lion’s forecastle and grey, ghost-like columns of water thrown up by heavy enemy shells pitching amongst these great ships.’(3)

  Jellicoe at once ordered the signal, by searchlight: ‘Where is enemy’s battle fleet!’

  The answer was not satisfactory, and the C.-in-C. was not pleased by it. ‘Enemy battle cruisers bearing SE.’ But Goodenough, ten minutes earlier, had reported that Scheer had altered to a northerly course, with Hipper’s battle-cruisers bearing south-west from him. Could there have been yet another signalling error Jellicoe repeated the signal to Beatty. This time he got an almost immediate answer. Jellicoe was not to know that Beatty had been out of touch for a long time with the main enemy battle fleet lumbering up from the south but by happy chance had that minute, just caught a glimpse of the head of Scheer’s line, dimly through the mist. ‘Have sighted enemy’s battle fleet bearing SSW’, the Lion flashed in reply: no indication of heading, speed, or distance, but it was something to go on.

  Jellicoe had earlier worked out the position of Scheer’s battle fleet from a combination of the Barham’s sighting at 6.10 p.m. and that of the Lion four minutes later. He did this by taking the point of intersection or the two bearings adjusted for the time difference. Under all the circumstances, it is very creditable that the actual position was only two and three-quarter miles south of the calculated position. Now Jellicoe worked out that his enemy must be double the distance away of the Lion, or ten miles, on the speculative assumption of similar visibility to the south-east.

  Five miles at 18 knots, plus his own 18 knots. Perhaps a shade less if they were closing obliquely. Was it already too late to deploy at all? To be caught by an enemy in battle formation while still himself in cruising formation, after all these years of training and dashed hopes! Such a calamity did not bear thinking about.

  Nothing of the strain or anxiety showed on Jellicoe’s face as his flag-captain watched him and waited for the order.

  ‘He stepped quickly on to the platform round the compasses and looked in silence at the magnetic compass card for about twenty seconds. I watched his keen, brown, weather-beaten face with tremendous interest, wondering what he would do.

  With iron nerve he had pressed on through the mist… until the last possible moment, so as to get into effective range and make the best tactical manoeuvre after obtaining news of the position of the enemy battle fleet. I realised as I watched him that he was as cool and unmoved as ever. Then he looked up and broke the silence with the order in his crisp, dear-cut voice to Commander A. R. W. Woods, the Fleet Signal Officer, who was standing a little abaft me: ‘Hoist equal-speed pendant SE.’(4)

  It was his decision, and his alone, without consultation with his flag-captain or his Staff. This was not a situation for debate, even if there had been time. Already the ships were answering the signal, the Orion, Monarch, Conqueror, and Thunderer to port, the Benbow, Brllerophon, Temeraire, and Vanguard the nearest dreadnoughts to starboard. Jellicoe emphasized the order to his flag-captain: ‘Dreyer, commence the deployment’; and Dreyer blew the two short siren blasts indicating a deployment to port, which was taken up by the other ships in rapid turn, creating a mournful chorus echoing across the water.

  The Hon. Horace Hood was the beau ideal of a naval officer, spirited in manner, lively of mind, enterprising, courageous, handsome, and youthful in appearance. The gods had given him everything, including a beautiful wife and two sons. His lineage was pure Royal Navy, at its most gallant. Hood at forty-five was one of the youngest flag-officers in the fleet, and had come out with top marks from the earliest days of his training in the Britannia. In his naval career he had contrived to be in troublesome places – in the Sudan Expedition, at Omdurman, in the Somaliland Expedition in 1903 when he won a DSO. After Churchill had been First Lord for two and a half years, he chose Horace Hood as his naval secretary for the same reasons that he had earlier selected Beatty. The two officers had much in common, including their fighting record. In October 1914 he accompanied Churchill to Antwerp, and was then placed in command of the Dover Patrol during the most critical days of that month when the Allies were attempting to hold the Belgian coast.

  A year before Jutland he was given command of the 3rd Battle Cruiser Squadron, with his flag in that active progenitor of the battle-cruiser, HMS Invincible. ‘He drew from all of us our love and respect’, one of his captains once remarked.

  At 5.35 p.m. on 31 May Hood was leading – the Indomitable and Inflexible on a SSE course, and was – unknowingly – only ten miles from Hipper’s 2nd Scouting Group of light cruisers headed by the Frankfurt on an opposite course. Hipper himself was four mile
s farther west behind this screen. Hood’s order at 3.11 p.m. had been to reinforce Beatty. He was now steaming at his best speed of 25 knots the actuality of Fisher’s dreams of his ‘ocean greyhounds’ racing – into battle. He had a screen of four destroyers ahead, the Canterbury a further two miles ahead of them, the Chester six and a half miles to the west acting as linking ship to pass signals visually to the armoured cruisers.

  The sound of firing was renewed and at a much closer range this time, with yellow flashes lighting the western horizon. Hood led his squadron round through 160 degrees to starboard and made for the scene of action. A few minutes later, out of the haze to the west there emerged his light cruiser Chester, zig-zagging frantically at 26 knots through a forest of shell bursts. Outgunned by the four German cruisers, she made it just in time after being under fire for nineteen minutes. Several of her own guns were knocked out, dead and wounded lay about her decks. At one 5.5-inch gun, Boy First Class Jack Cornwell, sixteen-year-old sight-setter, was found manning his gun, though mortally wounded, the rest of the crew lying dead about him. He died within a few minutes, earning a posthumous VC.

  As the Chester raced across the Invincible’s bows, still the target of enemy fire, Commander Dannreuther in the fore control ordered his 12-inch guns to turn onto the German cruisers just visible in the mist and firing their torpedoes as their only effective defence. It was one more example of rapid tit-for-tat against this massive assault. Hood’s 12-inch shells tore into the German cruisers, reducing the Wiesbaded to a wreck and severely damaging the Pillau and Frankfurt. Then Hood was forced to put over the helm to comb the tracks of the approaching torpedoes.

  Now it came the turn of Hood’s destroyers to charge gloriously and pay the price. The Shark, Commander Loftus Jones, Acasta, Ophelia, and Christopher had turned to conform with their flagship, and when the German cruisers were seen fleeing west, followed them in the hope of launching a torpedo attack. It was Commander Loftus Jones who had earlier played a gallant part in the Scarborough raid. Now as he raced in he also spotted through the mist a developing German destroyer attack against Hood’s battle-cruisers. His sudden appearance frustrated this attack, and as Loftus Jones lunged at the German cruisers his four destroyers were subjected to a hail of fire during which the Shark succeeded in despatching a torpedo at one of his assailants.

  Again in this battle, just as one side appeared doomed, ‘spared and blest by time’, rescue appeared. For Jones and his tiny battered ships, salvation appeared out of the south in the form of the cruiser Canterbury, which had doubled back on Hood’s orders and now lured the German cruisers away from their mauled prey. The relief was brief. Hipper’s destroyers in overwhelming numbers chanced on the crippled enemy. The Shark took the main brunt. ‘In a moment her after gun was hit, and its crew killed, and Commander Jones, who was himself controlling its fire, had a leg shot away at the knee’, Corbett wrote. ‘Yet he continued to encourage his men to fight the only gun he had left… So, maintaining to the last the finest traditions of the Service, she came to her end, and it was in the heart of the battle she found it.’(5)

  The unexpected appearance of heavy ships from the east, followed by the savaging of the German light cruisers and the development of an enemy destroyer attack, had come as an unpleasant shock to the hard-pressed Hipper, already suffering badly in a renewed gunnery duel with Beatty and the 5th Battle Squadron. His immediate conclusion was that he was faced with the full might of Jellicoe’s battle squadrons, and this seemed confirmed by the thunder and flash of heavy gunfire dead ahead. His first order, therefore, was to turn through 180 degrees and double back on to Scheer behind him. At the same time, he recalled a full-scale destroyer attack which he had just launched against Beatty to the north, and diverted it against this new force to the east, which he mistakenly believed to be the Grand Fleet. Rightly, his first thought was for Scheer. It was, he knew, no part of his C.-in-C.’s plans to become involved in a gunnery duel with a fully deployed Grand Fleet in an overwhelmingly superior tactical situation across the ‘T’ of the High Seas Fleet.

  Although they were frequently and inaccurately to lament later that providence was denied them at the Battle of Jutland, Jellicoe and Beatty now (6-6.15 p.m.) experienced it in full measure. Hood was the magician who pulled off the trick; the dying Loftus Jones applied the finishing touches. But for this intervention from the east, Beatty would have been forced to turn away from Hipper’s destroyers, exposing the Grand Fleet both to German eyes and German gunfire. Its real position and its state of vulnerability in the full throes of deployment, would have been revealed to Hipper and to Scheer. Appalling devastation would have fallen upon Jellicoe’s fleet at a moment when it had scant means to defend itself, allowing the German Admiral to withdraw at leisure with his fleet intact and the British Fleet broken. As one German admiral recalled: ‘Shortly before his death, Admiral Scheer told me that the thought of how Providence had given them opportunities for a complete annihilation of the British fleet still robbed him of sleep.’(6)

  Instead, Jellicoe was allowed time to complete his majestic deployment, ship following ship, division following division, squadron following squadron, like – an uncoiling cobra. Appropriately, but by chance, the leader of this long line of dreadnoughts was the – King George V, not only reigning monarch but an Admiral of the Fleet: the Iron Duke ninth in line: and last the proud Agincourt, ‘the gin palace’, armed with more – heavy guns than any battleship in the world. There was, inevitably in view of its scale, some bunching during this complex evolution: but it was worthy of a Fleet Review. By 6.30, the twenty-four battleships were on an easterly heading ready to face the enemy coming up from the south. From a potentially disastrous tactical situation, Jellicoe was now poised ready to coil his great cobra about his enemy and crush him to extinction.

  How many men had died, how many ships had already gone to the bottom, before the main fleets clashed in this long-drawn-out overture?’ There can never be an accurate answer. Over 1,000 in the Indefatigable, nearer 1,300 in the Queen Mary, some 600 in the Wiesbaden, several hundred in all in the German battle-cruisers and Evan-Thomas’s squadron, 85 in the Shark besides her gallant commander, and many more in other sunk destroyers on both sides. But nearly 2,000 more were to disappear in sheets of flame, billowing clouds of smoke and disintegrating men o’war before Scheer and Jellicoe were finally matched against one another.

  Robert Arbuthnot in his obsolete armoured cruiser Defence had indicated to one or two of his close friends what he would do in a fleet action. Now, he was stationed on the starboard wing of the battle fleet prior to deployment, at the rear of the line after deployment. In order to take up this position he could, he said, either do this by passing down the disengaged side of the battle fleet, protected from the enemy, which would, he felt, be ‘a dull performance’. or he could pass down on the engaged side between the two opposing fleets. Captain Dreyer, reporting this conversation, said he thought he ought to go down the disengaged side, that if he went between the fleets it would be highly dangerous and, anyway, his smoke might interfere with the battle fleet’s shooting. ‘He was inclined to pooh-pooh both these objections.’(7)

  By unhappy chance, Arbuthnot had caught an early glimpse of German light cruisers to the south, had opened fire out of range, and when the mist closed about them, set off in pursuit with the Warrior at full speed. His hell-bent course took him across the bows of the Lion, forcing Beatty to swerve to port to avoid a collision. Arbuthnot’s movement also obscured Beatty’s view of the enemy and forced him to break off contact.

  Arbuthnot pressed on, trailing a huge cloud of smoke and paused to pour several salvoes into the luckless Wiesbaden. A moment later the dark silhouettes of towering superstructures, turrets, and great hulls of German battle-cruisers and battleships loomed up out of the mist. The Defence and Warrior were four and a half miles distant from the batteries of 11 -inch and 12-inch guns when they opened fire, the first salvoes tearing into the vitals of the two thin
ly-armoured vessels. The Warrior was reduced to a wreck in seconds, the Defence blew up, ‘suddenly disappearing completely in an immense column of smoke and flame, hundreds of feet high’, reported one observer. ‘It appeared to be an absolutely instantaneous destruction, the ship seeming to be dismembered at once.’(8) And thus perished the bold Arbuthnot and his 856 officers and men. As he had wished, it had not been ‘a dull performance’.

  The Warrior would have gone the same way but for the Warspite of the 5th Battle Squadron, which suffered a jammed helm from its being put hard over at 25 knots, and was forced into two successive complete circles, the second of which brought the battleship within 10,000 yards of the head of Scheer’s line. The target was irresistible, and within a minute the Warspite had suffered thirteen heavy hits. She was better able to sustain them than the Warrior, which limped away during this diversion only to sink later with the loss of some seventy of her crew.

  Intermittently through the mist and against the dark sky of the north-cast, Hipper and his captains, von Egidy, von Karpf, Hartog, and Zenker with the gunless von der Tann, perceived the parallel enemy Battle Cruiser Fleet. It was impossible to count them all at once, but by careful calculation through their powerful Zeiss binoculars there could be no doubt of the number. Four hours ago this now battered, weary German First Scouting Group had faced a superiority of six to five. Two of the enemy had been eliminated – of that there could be no doubt, either – and now there were seven. This was the arithmetic of madness, or were they overwrought from the cacophony of their own guns and the shock of enemy hits? At that moment – 6.30 p.m. – the leading British ships opened fire at a range of five miles, the salvoes coming swiftly and at once straddling the German battle-cruisers.