The Great War at Sea: 1914-1918

by Richard Hough

  After causing Admiral Hipper the worst shock of his life, and shattering his light-cruiser squadron, Admiral Hood had completed his mission by locating Beatty’s line, turning his ships in succession onto the Lion’s heading and forming the Battle Cruiser Fleet’s vanguard. The 3rd Battle Cruiser Squadron had not undergone the agony and frustration experienced by Beatty’s surviving battle cruisers of firing at an enemy painted dim dull grey against a grey sky. For Dannreuther of the Invincible and the gunnery officers of the Indomitable and Inflexible, Lachlan MacKinnon and Ronald Oldham, their targets, when clear of mist, were sharply outlined against the bright western sky. Fresh from their gunnery practice at Scapa Flow, their shooting was superb. Beatty watched them with proud excitement, and one of his officers on the bridge recalled, ‘Hood pressed home his attack, and it was an inspiring sight to see this squadron of battle cruisers dashing towards the enemy with every gun in action. On the Lion’s bridge we felt like cheering them on, for it seemed that the decisive moment of the battle had come.’(9) It also seemed, ironically, that Hood was assuming the role he had feared for Beatty, that of taking on the whole German Fleet’.

  Then for one fatal minute, and probably no longer, the ever-shifting low cloud and mist parted like a net curtain before the Invincible. Von Hase of the Derfflinger and the other gunnery officers who still had guns to fight, including those of the leading German battleships, seized their chance with the speed and opportunism acquired by their long training. Turrets steadied on the Invincible’s bearing. gun barrels hovered in their elevation, steadied in accordance with the fine optical calculations, needles swung, electric buttons were firmly pressed and the broadsides blasted out.

  Dannreuther, standing high up in the Invincible’s foretop, had hit the Derfflinger two or three times, and also struck some heavy blows at the Lützow. ‘Your fire is very good.’ It was Admiral Hood calling to Dannreuther and his party through the voice pipe. ‘Keep at it as quickly as you can. Every shot is telling.’

  But suddenly, at 6.33 p.m., every enemy shot began to tell on the flagship in their turn. Time and time again she was hit, a heavy shell struck and pierced the 7-inch armour of ‘Q’ turret amidships. It detonated inside, hurled the roof into the sky, ignited the charges, the ‘flash’ simultaneously thrusting down with the speed of light to the magazines. The subsequent explosion, like those in the Indefatigable, Queen Mary, and Defence, was all-consuming.

  ‘Flames shot up from the gallant flagship,’ wrote Corbett, ‘and there came again the awful spectacle of a fiery burst, followed by a huge column of dark smoke which, mottled with blackened debris, swelled up hundreds of feet in the air, and the mother of all battle cruisers had gone to join the other two that were no more.’(10)

  The !North Sea is relatively shallow here, with the result that the poor Invincible created her own tombstones for her 1,026 dead. She blew up exactly in half, observed one of Beatty’s Staff Officers. ‘The two ends then subsided, resting on the bottom, so that they stood up almost vertically with the stem and stern standing an appreciable distance out of the water.’(11)

  Most of the handful of men who escaped from this holocaust were in the foretop. The senior survivor was Dannreuther himself. ‘I just waited for the water to come and meet me’, he recalled in later years. ‘Then I stepped out and began swimming. The water was quite warm and there was no shortage of wreckage to hold on to.’(12) Within half an hour the survivors had been picked up by the Badger, detached by Beatty. There were six in all. The destroyer’s commander, Charles Fremantle, was the first to remark on Dannreuther’s sang froid as he stepped on board, wet from the sea but showing no other evidence that this was any different from a courtesy visit to another ship.

  The destruction of the Invincible marked the opening of the next phase in the Battle of Jutland, a phase which Jellicoe had reason to believe and Scheer even stronger reason to fear, would lead to a decisive British victory. By 6.30 p.m. Scheer’s position had become highly dangerous. Hipper had reported heavy ships from the cast, and later from the north-east. Advanced destroyers reported that they had seen battleships on a south-easterly course. The 5th Battle Squadron had been last seen to the north-west. The realization that, far from having trapped the British Battle Cruiser Fleet, the High Seas Fleet was already poised at the jaws of a much superior enemy in an overwhelmingly superior tactical position, struck the German C.-in-C. with uncomfortable force at this time.

  ‘It was now quite obvious that we were confronted by a large portion of the English Fleet,’ Scheer remembered, ‘and a few minutes later, their presence was indicated on the horizon directly ahead of us by firing from heavy calibre guns. The entire arc stretching from north to east was a sea of fire. The muzzle flashes were clearly seen through the mist and smoke on the horizon, though there was still no sign of the ships themselves.’(13)

  Jellicoe’s battleships, still in the last phase of straightening out their line after the deployment, were, however, quite able to see Scheer’s vanguard: Hipper’s battle-cruisers, and then the König, Grosser Kurfürst, Markgraf, Kronprinz, Prinzregent Luitpold, the Kaiser and Kaiserin – all the newest and most powerful dreadnoughts of the Third Battle Squadron, and with names like the opening pages from the Almanac de Gotha. But the ever-varying visibility caused by smoke and mist and low cloud, like threads of gossamer, prohibited a continuous view of all the ships, and it was tantalizing to observe a target through the range-finder fading to invisibility before a reading could be obtained.

  There was not an officer or a rating off the Grand Fleet who had not imagined this moment of contact, had not prepared themselves for it, feared it or relished it in their minds, prayed perhaps that they would survive or not flinch, perform their duties punctiliously regardless of enemy fire, do credit to their ships and their mates. Everyone had their own picture of what it would be like – the line of distant ships, the thunder of gunfire, the shuddering of the ship, the scream of enemy shells. No one who spoke or wrote of the battle afterwards had predicted this reality: the confusion and blindness, the exasperation, the impossibility of keeping eyes and sights on an enemy for more than a few moments. Nobody could have known that when they met the enemy they would learn so little of his numbers. course, speed, or identity: that haze, cloud, mist, and smoke – smoke from burning ships, smoke from funnels, smoke from gun muzzles and deliberately created smoke to conceal and preserve – would blind and confuse and cause such instant confusion.

  To many the end of the Invincible was seen as a German catastrophe, and cheers went up as the wreckage was passed. ‘We were quite certain we had sunk a German battleship or battle-cruiser,’ one officer recalls, ‘and were very cheered by the sight.’(14) ‘At 6.40 p.m. the second König [class] was seen to be heavily hit and to be ablaze fore and aft’, ran the Official Despatch hopefully. ‘…The ship settled by the stern and was observed to blow up.’(15) Numerous witnesses attested to this sinking. Of the Derffinger ‘…on fire after being hit by a salvo. Water came up to quarter deck, then over funnels, and [Boatswain Charles Trenchard] saw the water close over her.’(16) Others saw enemy ships disappear without an explosion. Jellicoe’s flag-captain himself wrote of opening fire on a König-class battleship just after 6.30 p.m. ‘Range 12,000. The 2nd, 3rd and 4th salvoes hitting her, with a total of at least 6 hits.’(17)

  In bet, while several König-class battleships were hit, and knocked about, none was sunk and only the König herself had serious casualties (45 killed out of a complement of 1,100). The sinking of the Derfflinger was another piece of wishful thinking under the stress of combat and lack of clear vision. Like all the German battle-cruisers she was severely mauled and had over 150 dead but was never near sinking. And it is equally doubtful that the Iron Duke made six hits in three salvoes at a range – of 12,000 yards.

  While the Official Despatches were grossly inaccurate in many of their reported observations, passage after passage faithfully reflects the difficulties of seeing the enemy, holding him,
and firing on him, let alone hitting and sinking him and bringing about a conclusion to this battle. ‘We opened fire at her at a range of about 16,000 yards… by the time deflection was corrected, and about four salvoes fired, she had disappeared in the mist’, runs one typically laconic report. ‘Shortly afterwards another battleship came into sight, but before fire could be opened on her, she was obscured by smoke.’(18)

  Admiral Burney’s observations in the Marlborough in the minutes before she was torpedoed recount this flagship’s difficulties, and she was the closest ship to the German battle fleet prior to the deployment: ‘As the battle cruisers [Beatty] drew ahead and their smoke cleared, the German line could be more easily seen and 4 Kaisers and 4 Helgolands could be dimly made out. Marlborough opened fire at 6.17 p.m. at a battleship of the Kaiser class… Owing to haze and the enemy’s smoke organised distribution of fire was out of the question; individual ships selected their own targets. As the action developed and disabled ships of both sides passed down between the lines, great difficulty was experienced in distinguishing the enemy’s from our own ships.’(19)

  James Ley, Captain of the Collingwood, suffered the same experience: ‘The flashes of the guns of the enemy’s ships beyond the cruiser were observed, but insufficiently clearly to lay the director or guns on, and at no time could the enemy’s hulls be seen from the fore conning tower or director tower. An officer in the after director tower informed me afterwards that, on one occasion for a few moments, he was able to make out dimly the hulls of three or four ships and later he saw the enemy’s line, or some ships of them, turn away apparently together.’(20)

  The only German ship that every British battleship could see, stopped and battered and on fire, was the Wiesbaden, which received an uncounted number of heavy shells of every calibre as the deployed battle line passed her at short range. But unlike larger and more heavily protected British ships, she never blew up and remained afloat until about 7 p.m. when, full of water, she turned over like the Blücher at the Dogger Bank and went to the bottom with all 570 of her crew.

  While the British suffered only aggravation and gall at the frustration of their efforts to destroy Scheer’s battle fleet, the German position became more and more critical as they continued north-east and were ‘bent’ more to the east by the weight and proximity of their enemy an enemy still seen only as a continuous line of muzzle flashes against the evening sky. Scheer claimed afterwards, with outrageous hypocrisy, that the thought of retreat never entered his calculations; ‘There was never any question of our line veering round to avoid an encounter’, he wrote. ‘The resolve to do battle with the enemy stood firm from the start.’(21) In fact his mind was preoccupied by a single, decisive problem: how to extricate himself from the noose tightening about his neck. There was, he quickly accepted, only one answer, and that was to turn tail and flee, praying all the while that his luck would be better than Admiral von Spec’s and that the night would close about him before the Grand Fleet’s heavy guns sent every one of his ships to the bottom. In the German tactical manuals there was a manoeuvre called the Gefechtskehrtwendung, or battle turn-away, in which every ship simultaneously turned through 180 degrees, reversing both the order and the heading of the line. The High Seas Fleet had often practised this turn. It was a difficult manoeuvre to counter although Jellicoe had prepared contingency plans within the limitations imposed by torpedo and mine risk.

  Scheer gave the signal for the turn-away at 6.35, the same moment when the Invincible blew up, and ordered a simultaneous destroyer attack with torpedoes and smoke. It was the beginning of this turn that the Collingwood’s officer, and a number of others, had observed, although some minutes passed before Jellicoe realized that his enemy was extricating himself from the trap. Although it was an extremely difficult manoeuvre requiring the highest standards of seamanship, Scheer’s captains carried it out successfully, without a collision or even losing the symmetry of the line to any serious degree. And the reward was more than worth the risk. ‘The effect was all he could desire’, wrote Corbett. ‘In two or three minutes his fleet, already only visible from the British ships by glimpses, had disappeared, and all firing ceased.’

  Jellicoe was neither dismayed nor even surprised by Scheer’s turn-away; only determined not to fall into what he regarded as a probable trap. He knew the dangers of conforming to the enemy’s ‘invited direction’. Back in October 1914 he exemplified this in a memorandum directed to and approved by the Admiralty: ‘If for instance, the enemy were to turn away from an advancing fleet, I should assume the intention was to lead us over mines and submarines, and should decline to be so drawn.’ It was not yet 7 o’clock. Sunset was at 8.24 p.m. Although visibility continued to deteriorate, there would be sufficient light in the sky for gunnery action for two more hours at least. By turning south, Jellicoe planned (6.44 p.m.) ‘to place himself as soon as possible athwart [the enemy’s] line of retreat to the Bight, for along that line, sooner or later, they were almost certain to be discovered.’(22)

  At 7 p.m., then, the brief clash – no more than a brush – was over. The two flagships were some thirteen miles apart, Scheer steering west, his battle fleet spread out in echelon, the old pre-dreadnoughts now in the van, Hipper’s battle-cruisers to his cast; Jellicoe on a southerly heading with his battle fleet more or less back into pre-deployment divisions, Beatty’s battle-cruisers five miles in the van to the south-east. Beatty would have been farther ahead but for a mishap with the Lion’s gyro compass which had been so shaken about that it led the navigator to extend a turn to the south so far that it was quicker to complete it through 360 degrees than do an ‘S’ turn back. Beatty was always sensitive about this incident, with its hint that he was turning his stern on the enemy, and refused to allow it to be recorded in the official narrative.

  The last stage of the daylight battle is the most interesting and most controversial, the intentions of the two C.-in-C.s as grey and uncertain as the dusk light under which they were effected.

  What happened, in broad definition, was that Scheer carried out a second 16-point turn, reversing his course to the east, found himself facing again the full might of the Grand Fleet like an echo of the earlier shock, carried out a second Gefechtskehrtwendung and for a second time escaped the noose. Then, by a series of British mishaps, the relatively lightly damaged German Fleet escaped into the night.

  Pride demanded that Scheer and his Staff should ever after claim that this second thrust was an attack – ‘to deal the enemy a second blow by again advancing regardless of consequences’, as the C.-in-C. reported to his Emperor. If you accept this entirely unconvincing claim, then by the same token you deny to Scheer any claim to the most elementary tactical skill. Having had his ‘T’ crossed once and barely escaping with his life, why would he come back for more punishment:’ As Jellicoe’s biographer has written ‘If Admiral Scheer really intended to give a formidable thrust at the battleships of the Grand Fleet it is incomprehensible that he should have stationed his battle cruisers in the van… To charge with his ships in line ahead at the broadside of the enemy’s line of battle was, as it proved to be, futile: but to take the shock with his battle cruisers in the van was an incomprehensible manoeuvre.’(23)

  Scheer’s plan was to escape round the rear of the Grand Fleet and make for the Skagerrak and the Baltic, or Horns Reef and the safe passage inside the minefields off the Danish coast, if possible picking up any survivors of the Wiesbaden on the way. But he had miscalculated his antagonist’s position. Reports from his scouting forces told him that Jellicoe was on a southerly heading, intent on cutting him off but he gave him credit for a higher speed than Jellicoe was in fact steaming. The result was that Scheer for the second time ‘found himself enveloped in a flaming arc of gun-flashes, and now they were so near that his predicament was more critical than ever’.(24)

  Scheer’s ‘advance regardless of consequences’ was rapidly halted by the hail of shell fire from ranges of 11,000 to 14,000 yards which opened up b
etween 7.10 and 7.15 p.m. Scheer countered in the only manner open to him. In quick succession he ordered (7.13) his battle-cruisers to go straight for the enemy – van an den Feind, voll einsetzen, ‘give it everything’. Two minutes later he ordered his flotillas to carry out an equally reckless but essential torpedo attack and lay smoke. And then at 7.18 he signalled his fleet to turn about.

  The German destroyers discharged a large number of torpedoes in spite of the severe fire from their opposite numbers and from the battleships’ secondary batteries, scored no hits, and suffered one boat lost and two more badly damaged. They did, however, again force Jellicoe to turn away from the attack, taking two 2-point turns to port until his battle fleet was for a while steering SE. Hipper’s already severely mauled ships took a further battering on their ‘death ride’, as it was romantically called, to within a lethal range of 7,700 yards of the nearest British battleships. Then, observing Scheer’s vanguard turning through 180 degrees, he led away his ships first to the south and then south-west, and mercifully out of sight.

  The battle fleet’s second Gefechtskehrtwendung was a great deal less orderly than the first, many of the lead ships having already slowed down under the intense fire, and the whole manoeuvre taking on a disordered appearance, with a touch of panic evident here and there. By 7.30 the firing had died to spasmodic salvoes, and ten minutes later the German High Seas Fleet was making best speed to the west. The gun crews were able to relax, casualties dealt with – there were, amazingly, only 108 dead in the battleships – and temporary damage repairs carried out. Sunset was still half an hour away, but so deep was the dusk, so thick the mist and low cloud, that Scheer kit a renewal of confidence that he would succeed in gathering about him his great flock and steal his way home in the darkness. He was also confident that he had sunk more ships than he had lost: and that on 1 June he could proudly report a victory to his Emperor.