The Great War at Sea: 1914-1918

by Richard Hough

  The defensive note in Jellicoe’s GFBOs extended to every class of ship. While the torpedo by inference was the most dangerous weapon, the activities of all ships must be subordinated to the primary need of the battle fleet to destroy the enemy’s battle fleet with its guns. Battle-cruisers were for destroying battle-cruisers, light scouting cruisers their opposite numbers. Above all, destroyer flotillas had as their first duty to help preserve the battle fleet by fighting off German destroyer attacks, with attack against the enemy battle fleet as a secondary role. In short, the object of destroying the enemy’s battle fleet ‘should not be diverted by the proceedings of other classes of enemy vessels’ which must be dealt with by their British equivalents. ‘If you have to decide between his battle fleet and destroyers,’ British destroyer commanders were instructed, ‘the latter are to be given primary attention, so as to stop them before they can fire their torpedoes at our fleet.’

  Beatty, however, preached the opposite gospel. ‘I believe that if the Enemy Torpedo Craft attack first, ours would never get into a position to enable them to frustrate it. The moral effect of the first attack with these vessels, I think, will be very great.’ This principle was aired in a letter to Jellicoe of 12 August 1915 so that the C.-in-C. clearly accepted a different role for Beatty’s destroyers. At Jutland both Beatty and Jellicoe adhered to their own battle orders with the result that Beatty’s destroyers greatly interfered with Hipper’s tactics, and Jellicoe’s destroyers were effective in defending his big ships against German destroyer attack.

  Apart from their stifling effect, the GFBOs may be criticized on several other levels. First, they presupposed a German willingness to face the Grand Fleet in a full-scale battle of the line. If the enemy turned away you did not chase him, and therefore, especially under typical North Sea weather conditions, the action was likely to be broken off, as it twice was at Jutland. There was nothing in all those 200 pages to provide for dealing with an unwilling enemy. And yet, in spite of Jellicoe’s tendency to ascribe greater strength to Scheer than he ever possessed, he knew that the Grand Fleet had an abundant superiority in numbers of dreadnoughts and a vast superiority in total weight of broadside. Jellicoe never asked himself: ‘Why should Scheer steam in a long outnumbered line and be knocked to pieces?’ It was much more likely that his tactics would be governed by the need to isolate inferior detachments of the Grand Fleet and destroy them piecemeal in order (with the help of mines and U -boat torpedoes) to bring about a superiority in numbers to his advantage before venturing into a full-scale battle. Moreover, North Sea weather favoured these tactics, and in the event Scheer came very near to success when he appeared out of the mist to surprise Beatty and Evan-Thomas. Without his Battle Cruiser Fleet Jellicoe would have been crippled – as crippled as Scheer was by the temporary elimination of his own battle-cruisers.

  The GFBOs were also over-detailed, and this did raise criticism at the time and later. Nelson’s instruction to his captains before Trafalgar was that ‘they might adopt whatever [tactics] they thought best, provided it led them quickly and closely alongside the enemy’. As Admiral Dewar was to write, ‘Only the initiative of Captains and Divisional Commanders was likely to achieve decisive results in a very large area where 154 British flags and pendants were flying. Elaborate instructions for cruising formations. station keeping. deployment, etc., may have been necessary, but they were of subsidiary importance. The main thing – perhaps the only thing – for the Commander-in-Chief was to issue a general idea of attack, so that everyone could act with confidence and determination in destroying the enemy’s force.’(2)

  By contrast, the German Battle Orders were brief and allowed considerable latitude to individual commanders.

  The inflexibility of the GFBOs was matched by Jellicoe’s own inflexible view of them. By contrast with Nelson’s ‘Band of brothers’, with whom he frequently exchanged ideas over plans and tactics in a comradely manner, Jellicoe did not encourage consultation and did not care for any questioning of what he had laid down. Discussions with his flag-officers did take place when they were requested but not with alterations to the dogma of the GFBOs on the agenda. Sturdee tried on several occasions to persuade Jellicoe to change his mind on, for example, the tactics to he used in closing a retreating enemy. Jellicoe would have none of it, and took him to task for disturbing the status quo and causing questioning among his commanders. ‘I am afraid that the controversy that has arisen over this matter is doing harm in the Fleet’, he wrote to this much admired senior officer and squadron commander. ‘I hope you will take my word for it that it is doing harm, and is causing a feeling of unrest and possibly criticism of the manner in which I intend to handle the fleet, which is bound to be injurious.’(3)

  There is tragic irony in the fact that Jellicoe commanded a fleet of dreadnoughts whose design and construction signified offensive, risk-taking tactics, when he was concerned primarily with the survival of his ships and the avoidance of risks. The Grand Fleet had been built on the calculated policy of risk: more and bigger guns to destroy the enemy at the cost of protection from the enemy’s gunfire. Jellicoe favoured long-range action with plunging fire when the upper deck of his flagship was protected by 1 1/2-1 3/4 inches of steel armour. But Scheer’s flagship, Friedrich der Grosse boasted 2-2 1/2 inches and was structurally better equipped to take plunging fire. Especially when considering Jellicoe’s great respect for German long-range gunnery, it would have seemed more productive of results to close to a relatively short range, using his superiority of speed to do so, and smother Scheer’s battle line with a fusillade of low-trajectory shells, greater in weight and numbers than Scheer could answer with Jellicoe’s tactical policy was better suited to German than British battleships.

  Much criticism has been made in the past of British warship design, citing the heavier losses at Jutland and the sturdy manner in which German armoured ships stood up to British gunnery. At the Falkland Islands and the Dogger Bank the Gneisenau, Scharnhorst, and Blücher all took a terrible beating from heavy shellfire before succumbing. With the exception of one flaw which was to prove fatal and was the cause of the loss of all three battle-cruisers and the Defence, the design and construction of British men o’war was quite as good as the German, bearing in mind the priorities applied. From the start, as laid down by Tirpitz, the German first priority was to survive in order to fight again; the British, to destroy the enemy. Class for class, German battleships with their broader beam were better able to resist shellfire than their British counterparts. Their wide beam also gave them superior stability and a slower period of roll as gun platforms. Because of more and better internal subdivisions German capital ships were much better able to resist underwater damage. The Seydlitz, struck a mine before Jutland and was torpedoed at least once during the battle, but was little affected. When the Ostfriesland was mined on the way home, she was able to keep her station. When the Audacious struck a mine she went down and the Marlborough finally had to leave the line when she was torpedoed. All German ships were honeycombed with compartments to reduce the risk of Hooding. For their tight internal sub-division and unpierced bulkheads, the Germans had to pay the price of accommodation cramped by British standards. Officers were berthed four or six to a cabin, the men lived claustrophobically on top of one another, something that should not be forgotten when considering the causes of the 1917-18 Fleet mutinies. For the British seaman, his ship was his home, the centre of his way of life for a minimum of seven years and usually much longer. He might be at sea for weeks at a time, and travel to the other side of the world through different climates. German ships, manned by short-term conscripts, did not have to contemplate the tropics, only the North Sea where ventilation invariably meant cold air! A German man o’war was like a tank, keine Bequemlichkeit, keine platz! – neither comfortable nor roomy. An officer recalls exploring the Friedrich der Grosse, Scheer’s flagship, when she was docked upside down at Rosyth after being salvaged from Scapa Flow: ‘What impressed me most’, he w
rites, ‘was the honeycomb of small boiler rooms, all in completely separate watertight compartments, whereas our boiler rooms were vast compartments stretching athwart the ship. To pass from one to the other one had to climb up to the main deck! Again, I was impressed by the use made of coal bunkers to add to the protection of the side armour. No wonder they lost some speed. One certainly got the impression she would have been the very devil to sink!’(4)

  German battleships were also, class for class, slower than their British equals. A knot does not read as statistically significant; tactically, it is all that is needed to gain an advantageous position in relation to the enemy. The first German dreadnoughts could not make 20 knots. The most modern in Jutland – the Königs – could be pushed up to 22 knots but were still 2 1/2-3 knots slower than the Barhams as well as being relatively undergunned – 12-inch against 15-inch.

  The same relative merits and demerits applied to the battle-cruisers at Jutland. The Derfflinger was a magnificent ship, strong and fast and adequately gunned. But the Lion, Princess Royal, and Tiger all stood up to enemy shellfire as well as the German ships, and their superior speed (as Hipper ruefully noted) allowed them to get ahead on the run to the north and ‘bend’ the German battle-cruisers round to the east and prevent them from sighting Jellicoe’s battle fleet until it was right on top of them. The Lützow took some twenty-four heavy shell hits and had to be abandoned and sunk. She was little more than a twisted wreck with not a gun working and probably 10,000 tons of water in her. The Lion – which received only half that number of heavy shells, it is true, but the German shells were much more lethal – could steam at full speed at the end of the battle and only two of her guns were out of action. Tea had been laid in the Lion’s wardroom just before action. ‘Some fourteen hours later,’ Chalmers noted, ‘the furniture was found to be still intact. The cups, saucers and plates of cake were all in proper array and even the flowers stood proudly in their vases, as if in defiance of the death and devastation that lay on the other sick of the bulkhead.’(5)

  Another twelve hits might have sunk the Lion. But it is wrong to draw the conclusion that British battle-cruisers were like tin cans by contrast with the well-nigh impregnable German battle-cruisers. Hipper’s battle-cruisers were virtually hors de combat after suffering some fifty heavy shell hits in all. Beatty’s Lion, Princess Royal, Tiger, and New Zealand, which had been in the heat of the engagement like the enemy from the start, had endured some thirty heavy shell hits but still made up a fit, fast fighting force. These figures also suggest that British gunnery was not as weak as some critics have made it out to be; nor is the fact that the New Zealand, always in the heat of the fighting, remained unscratched to the end a great credit to German shooting.

  But before too many bouquets are presented to Beatty and to British naval architects, the uncomfortable truth must be faced – that the Germans had only one battle-cruiser sunk and the British had three, even if two of the British ships were obsolescent and expendable. Was something indeed wrong with our bloody ships that day? What was the one fatal flaw?

  The reason for the loss by explosion of three British battle-cruisers was one of the great tragedies of Jutland. Although Jellicoe and Beatty blamed the battle-cruisers’ loss on weak construction and inadequate armour protection, the failure did not lie there. The one flaw was the lack of internal protection which allowed an explosion inside the turret to ignite cordite there which led to instant ‘flash’ transmission by way of the trail of cordite in the hoists, the hoppers in the handing room, and at the magazine bulkheads to the magazines themselves. It is true that if the turret itself had been impenetrable by heavy shell, this would not have occurred. But the turrets were relatively well protected with 7-inch plate and in the case of the Queen Mary 9-inch, only one inch less than her German contemporaries. Both British and German turrets proved penetrable. It is what happened afterwards that decided the fate of the ship. After the Seydlitz’s narrow escape from magazine explosion at Dogger Bank, all German dreadnoughts were fitted with protection to prevent a repetition. That hit by the Lion sixteen months before Jutland was a most fortunate one for the German Navy.

  Flash risk was not some new and unprepared-for factor in a modern naval battle. There were flash doors in the hoists and the working chamber, hut these proved inadequate to exclude the enormous and spontaneous heat given off by cordite, and might have been made of cardboard. There is good reason to believe that there had earlier been better protection but that it had at one time been removed. In an urgent telegram from Beatty to Jellicoe immediately after their return to base, he wrote: ‘Present arrangements of flash doors are ineffective when turret armour is penetrated. Flash from shell may reach cordite in main cages and handing rooms… Almost certain that magazines of three lost battle cruisers exploded from such a cause. Consider matter of urgent necessity to alter existing communication between magazine and handing rooms by reverting to original system of handing room supply scuttles… ’(6)

  The last sentence suggests that flash-proof scuttles originally fitted had at some time been discarded. The reason for this no doubt lay in the Navy’s cult for rapid fire and the intense gunnery competition between individual ships and squadrons in peacetime. It is possible to imagine a gunnery officer, always on the look-out for time-saving short cuts, saving several seconds by leaving open these scuttles to allow for a continuous flow of charges to the handing rooms, and thence to the main hoist. Word of this dodge would inevitably spread, in time the flash-proof scuttles would be removed altogether on account of disuse, with the justification that the flash doors in the hoists and working chambers were adequate on their own.

  Such an impromptu modification could not have occurred in a German ship. It was against the German character to tamper with official design and procedures, and against the German principle of ship-survival and emphasis on protection to reduce safety precautions. Those three battle-cruisers were, quite simply, a gambling loss, part of the price paid for the element of self-confident aggression in British naval tradition. The firm belief existed that there was something weak and even effete in giving too much attention to caution and protection from the enemy.

  It was the gunnery system and the gunnery officers themselves which may have been more responsible for the loss of those three great ships and some 3,000 men than the ships’ architects or builders. If those scuttles had been retained, it is very probable that the Grand Fleet would have had no capital ship losses at Jutland. The Indefatigable was quite able to stand up to five shell hits. From the foretop of the Invincible Dannreuther observed – one imagines with clinical interest – the hits suffered by his ship below. ‘Then I saw the roof of this turret [‘Q’ turret on the starboard side] hit by a heavy shell and blown off like a bit of scrap metal. Almost immediately there was a huge explosion as Q and P magazines blew up, destroying and cutting in half the ship.’(7) He had no doubt that the two other battle-cruisers, and the Defence, went up the same way.

  The second great tragedy of Jutland had nothing to do either with the design of the ships or the gun crews but relates to the quality of the shell they were given to fire, and these were not even designed and produced by the Navy. The Ordnance Board, controlled by the War Office, was responsible. Fisher had long before wrested control of the Navy’s guns from the Army but in 1916 the design and testing of shell was still the Ordnance Board’s responsibility, with only nominal naval representation until 1919.

  The grim and indisputable fact was that the armour-piercing (AP) shell fired at Jutland should have pierced the armour of the German ships at any angle and exploded inside, and did not do that. On striking at an oblique angle, British heavy shell broke up either on impact or before complete penetration. The intelligent and down-toearth Dreyer calculated that during one period of the battle alone, between 7 p.m. and 7.30, effective British armour-piercing shell would have sunk three or four battle-cruisers and four or five battleships. It was a heartbreaking experience for gunnery officers, a
nd for that most senior gunnery officer, Jellicoe, to witness the relatively harmless effect of their heavy gunfire in the short time in which they had the High Seas Fleet in their sights. ‘We thus lost the advantage we ought to have enjoyed in offensive power due to the greater weight of our projectiles,’ Jellicoe later wrote, ‘while suffering the accepted disadvantage in the protection of our ships due to the heavy weights of our guns and ammunition which reduced the total weight available for armour plating.’(8)

  The Admiralty is not immune from blame for this catastrophic state of affairs. When it was belatedly recognized in 1910 that future naval battles were likely to be fought at ranges above 5,000 yards (at which the Navy carried out gunnery practice), greater attention had to be paid to shell impact at a relatively steep angle as a result of the longer range and consequent steeper trajectory. The specification for an AP shell to meet this need was passed by the DNO to the Ordnance Board, and in due course the shell provided was tested, but on normal impact at or near a right angle and not on oblique impact. Jellicoe, the Controller at the time, insisted on realistic long-range trials. They were disallowed for reasons of expense. The argument was still raging when he took up a seagoing command and was finally lost after his departure. Heavy shell was tested, but it was of such a haphazard nature, in favour of the manufacturers, that there was small likelihood of the defects revealed in action being discovered in Proof.