Castles of Steel

by Robert K. Massie

  The final misunderstanding caused by British Admiralty blunders occurred at 9:45 a.m., when Tyrwhitt heard Keyes’s signal that Lurcher was being chased by four enemy cruisers. Following his appeal to Goodenough to rescue Keyes, Tyrwhitt bravely turned his own damaged Arethusa back to the east to do what he could to help. Almost at once, he sighted a three-funneled cruiser, this one a genuine enemy, Stettin; with his destroyers, Tyrwhitt pursued her into the mist. Then, at about 10:10 a.m., he encountered the eight destroyers of the Fearless flotilla returning from sinking the German destroyer V-187. Fearing that he was again getting too close to Heligoland, and aware that other German light cruisers would be emerging from the river mouths, Tyrwhitt broke off the chase, reversed course, and once again headed west.

  By this time, Arethusa could steam no faster than 10 knots. In the engagement with Frauenlob, her feed tank had been holed, her torpedo tubes demolished, all her guns except the forward 6-inch put out of action. As Tyrwhitt’s two destroyer flotillas were now concentrated around her and no enemy was in sight, it seemed a favorable moment for making repairs. Accordingly, at 10:17 a.m. Tyrwhitt signaled the 1st Flotilla to cover his crippled ship and told Blunt in Fearless to come alongside. For the next twenty minutes, both British light cruisers lay dead in the water, their engines stopped, while the Arethusa’s engine-room crew and repair parties worked frantically. By 10:40 a.m., the hole in the feed line was plugged, the ship was able to resume at 20 knots and all but two of her 4-inch guns were unjammed and ready for action.

  It was approaching 11:00 a.m. British forces had been in the inner Bight for four hours and it was certain that a vigorous enemy counterattack would be coming. Indeed, it was on the way. Stettin was prowling about, emerging from and disappearing into the haze, and three more German light cruisers, Köln, Strassburg, and Ariadne, were approaching from Wilhelmshaven. Admiral Maass, commander of High Seas Fleet destroyers, who was on board Köln, did not know whether the battle was continuing, but he hoped at least to be able to pick off some British cripples or stragglers. Meanwhile, Hipper had ordered a fifth light cruiser, Mainz, to attack Tyrwhitt’s destroyers from the rear. Mainz sailed north from the Ems at 10:00 “to cut off the retreat of the hostile ships,” as her executive officer put it. In Wilhelmshaven, the German battle cruisers were raising steam and at 8:50 a.m., Hipper had requested permission from Ingenohl to send out Moltke and Von der Tann at the first opportunity. The Commander-in-Chief had approved, but because of the tide, the heavy ships could not yet cross the Jade bar.

  Thus, as Arethusa was restarting her engines, three German light cruisers were about to join Stettin on the scene. Fortunately for Tyrwhitt, Admiral Maass was so eager to fall upon and annihilate the intruding British destroyers that he did not take time to concentrate his force. Maass never imagined that Goodenough and Beatty were anywhere near. One by one, the German cruisers arrived and attacked. Strassburg appeared first and opened fire on Arethusa. “We received a very severe and most accurate fire from this cruiser,” Tyrwhitt wrote in his report. “Salvo after salvo was falling between twenty and thirty yards short, but not a single shell struck. Two torpedoes were also fired at us, being well-aimed, but short.” Outgunned in a crippled ship, Tyrwhitt ordered twelve destroyers to attack Strassburg with torpedoes. One torpedo passed near Strassburg’s bow, another under her stern, and the German ship turned away. Tyrwhitt, ever more anxious to get away to the west, gathered his destroyers to turn again in that direction. But as he did so, Köln, with Admiral Maass on board, appeared from the southeast. The weary British ships turned to engage her and Tyrwhitt, mistaking Köln for a powerful Roon-class armored cruiser, urgently signaled Beatty: “Am attacked by large cruiser. . . . Respectfully request that I may be supported. Am hard pressed.” Beatty responded by ordering Goodenough to send two more of his light cruisers to assist Arethusa. Instead, Goodenough came himself with his entire squadron at high speed. Tyrwhitt, meanwhile, had gained another respite: Köln liked facing the massed torpedo tubes of the Harwich destroyers no more than Strassburg had, and she also retreated into the mist. For a fourth time, Tyrwhitt’s force turned west.

  At 11:00 a.m., when Tyrwhitt was entangled in what he described as “a hornet’s nest,” Beatty and his five battle cruisers were still marking time forty miles to the northwest. Around 10:00 a.m., the admiral had broken radio silence to give his position and to tell all British ships that for the time being he would remain where he was. Through the morning, he had been “intercepting various signals [from Tyrwhitt, Keyes, and Goodenough] which contained no information on which I could act.” He had understood that Keyes had mistaken Goodenough’s cruiser squadron for the enemy and subsequently that Tyrwhitt’s force was heavily engaged and in distress. But why was Tyrwhitt still so close to Heligoland? Why had he made so little progress to the west? During the four hours since the fighting began, Tyrwhitt had advanced barely fifteen miles. Now, the British light forces, hotly engaged only twenty miles west of Heligoland, were still within easy reach of Wilhelmshaven. Beatty possessed a copy of the German coastal tide tables and knew that soon after noon, Hipper and Ingenohl would be able to send their dreadnoughts to sea. Already, Beatty had ordered Goodenough’s light cruisers to hurry to Tyrwhitt’s assistance, but he realized that against at least four, and possibly as many as six, German cruisers—including perhaps one large armored cruiser—this might be insufficient. With every minute, the possibility grew that the British light cruisers and destroyers would be overwhelmed.

  Beatty, pacing on Lion’s bridge, understood that the responsibility was his. As vice admiral commanding the Battle Cruiser Squadron, he far outranked the three commodores, Goodenough, Tyrwhitt, and Keyes. The decisions he faced were not easy ones. If he went forward, he exposed his ships to enemy mines and submarines—and to British submarines, ignorant of his presence. In addition, there was the strong possibility that within a short time, German battle cruisers and perhaps battleships would be coming out. The mist to the east was thickening and for his battle cruisers to be surprised by the sudden appearance of German dreadnoughts could mean catastrophe. One of these dangers—submarines—Beatty felt he could ignore. The sea was glassy calm, which made periscopes easy to detect, so no submarine could close in without danger of being rammed. Besides, his ships traveling at high speed could rush past a submerged submarine before it reached a position to fire.

  Still, for a moment, Beatty hesitated. “What do you think we should do?” he asked Captain Ernle Chatfield of Lion, standing beside him on the battle cruiser’s bridge. “I ought to go forward and support Tyrwhitt, but if I lose one of these valuable ships, the country will not forgive me.” Chatfield, admitting later that he was “unburdened by responsibility and eager for ex-citement,” replied, “Surely we must go.” Beatty nodded, and at 11:35 a.m., counting on high speed and surprise to see him through, he swung Lion, Queen Mary, Princess Royal, Invincible, and New Zealand around to the southeast and steamed in a single line at 26 knots into the Bight. Ten minutes later, he increased speed to 27 knots and signaled to Tyrwhitt and Blunt, “Am proceeding to your support.”

  Even at 27 knots, Beatty was still an hour away from the embattled Harwich force. Meanwhile, Tyrwhitt faced another new antagonist, the German light cruiser Mainz, which had sailed independently from the Ems estuary. About 11:30 a.m., British destroyers steaming west six miles ahead of Arethusa sighted Mainz. Both sides opened fire. Mainz had better aim, frequently straddling although not hitting the destroyers. Eleven British destroyers fired torpedoes; all missed. This action continued for twenty minutes when, to the astonishment of the British, their German antagonist abruptly reversed course. This strange behavior was subsequently explained by the fact that Mainz, racing north and battling the destroyers, had suddenly seen “heavy smoke clouds . . . to the northwest and a few minutes later three cruisers of the Town class emerged from them.” These were Goodenough’s light cruisers coming south at full speed to the aid of Arethusa. Southampton and her consort
s opened fire at 6,000 yards and Mainz, wrote one of Southampton’s officers, “very wisely fled like a stag.” “Even in the act of turning,” said one of Mainz’s officers, “the enemy’s first salvos were falling close to us and very soon afterwards we were hit in the battery and the waist.” It was an unequal contest: Mainz was under fire from fifteen 6-inch guns to which she could reply only with her two after 4.1-inch guns. The German light cruiser, hit at least twice, disappeared into the mist, hoping to escape. She did not. Fleeing south at 25 knots with Goodenough in pursuit, Mainz suddenly found herself running directly across the bows of Arethusa and the Harwich destroyers. Tyrwhitt, not knowing that the British light cruisers were in hot pursuit, immediately ordered twenty British destroyers to attack Mainz with torpedoes. The destroyers charged at close range, some approaching within 1,000 yards of the German ship. Mainz fought desperately and her fire was remarkably accurate. The destroyer Laurel fired two torpedoes, but was herself hit three times and crippled. Liberty, the destroyer next astern, was hit on the bridge, and her captain was killed. Lysander, the third destroyer in line, was not hit, but Laertes, the fourth, was struck by all four shells of a single German salvo and, temporarily, came to a standstill. Thirty-three British torpedoes had been fired; one observer described the sea as “furrowed” by the tracks of whitened, bubbling water.

  But Mainz was receiving as well as dealing blows. Her rudder was jammed to starboard, she was on fire, her port engine was dead, and she was slowly turning in the direction of Goodenough’s arriving cruisers. Worse was to come. Suddenly, a torpedo from the British destroyer Lydiard hit her. “The ship reared,” wrote one of Mainz’s surviving officers, “bent perceptibly from end to end, and continued to pitch for some time. The emergency lights went out. We had to find our way about with electric torches.” Stricken, Mainz turned west, straight into the arms of Goodenough’s four cruisers, now only 6,000 yards away. “We closed down on her,” wrote one of Southampton’s officers, “hitting with every salvo. She was a mass of yellow flame and smoke. . . . Her two after-funnels collapsed. Red glows, indicating internal fires, showed through her gaping wounds in her sides.” One of her guns still fired spasmodically, but within ten minutes she lay a blazing wreck, sinking by the bow. Then, the mainmast slowly leaned forward and, “like a great tree, gradually lay down along the deck.” “Mainz was incredibly brave, immensely gallant,” wrote another British officer. “The last I saw of her [she was] absolutely wrecked . . . her whole midships a fuming inferno. She had one gun forward and one aft still spitting forth fury and defiance like a wild cat mad with wounds.” A surviving German seaman added grim details: “The state of Mainz at this time was indescribable. . . . Gun crews, voice-pipe men, and ammunition supply parties were blown to pieces. The upper deck was a chaos of ruin, flame, scorching heat and corpses, and everything was streaked with the green and yellow residue of the explosives which produced suffocating gases.” At 12:20, the captain ordered, “Sink [that is, scuttle] the ship. All hands [put on] life jackets.” Then he stepped outside the conning tower and was immediately killed by a shell burst. At 12:25 p.m., Goodenough signaled, “Cease Fire,” and at 12:50 p.m. he ordered the light cruiser Liverpool to lower boats and pick up the men swimming in the water.

  At this point, Commodore Keyes with Lurcher and Firedrake arrived. Seeing Mainz’s smoking decks littered with men wounded and unable to move, he took Lurcher alongside, the steel plates of the two ships grinding with the movement of the sea. By this action, Keyes was able to evacuate and save 220 men. One man refused. “A young German officer [who] had been very active in directing the transport of the wounded” now stood motionless on the deck of his doomed ship. Keyes, anxious to push off before the cruiser capsized and guessing what was in this young man’s mind, shouted to him that “he had done splendidly, we must clear out, he must come at once, there was nothing more he could do, and I held out my hand to help him jump on board.” But the young man scorned to leave his ship as long as she remained afloat. “He drew himself up stiffly, saluted, and said, ‘Thank you. No.’ ” A few minutes later, Mainz rolled over, lay on her side for ten minutes, then turned bottom up and sank. Happily, the young officer who had refused Keyes’s offer was found in the water and rescued; another survivor was Lieutenant Wolf von Tirpitz, a son of the German Grand Admiral.

  Tyrwhitt still was not out of danger. One German light cruiser had been sunk and another damaged, but eight more were converging on his battered force. Stettin and Strassburg were still about; Köln, with Rear Admiral Maass, Stralsund, Kolberg, Ariadne, München, and Danzig were on the way; and still another, Niobe, was hastily coaling at Wilhelmshaven. Meanwhile, Arethusa, Laurel, Laertes, and Liberty were badly damaged and would have to be withdrawn from the Bight in the face of attacks by the German light cruisers. Fortunately for the British, the actions of the German ships remained uncoordinated. All were careening about, looking for smaller British ships to attack, fleeing when confronted by larger British warships. The British, at least, were attempting to exercise tactical control; for the Germans it was a confused barroom brawl. The ability to identify an antagonist depended on factors such as the number of funnels and the shape of the bows, characteristics difficult to make out in that day’s weather.

  As shells from Strassburg and then from Köln began to fall near Arethusa, Tyrwhitt began to wonder whether he and his ships would be overwhelmed. “I really was beginning to feel a bit blue,” he wrote after the battle. Then, suddenly, out of the haze to westward, the shadowy form of a large ship loomed up. She was coming at high speed, black smoke was pouring from her funnels, and a huge white wave was rolling back from her bow. Alarm and dismay were followed by relief and joy when the oncoming giant was identified as HMS Lion. One by one, out of the mist astern of the leader, four more huge shapes came into view. “Following in each other’s wake, they emerged . . . and flashed past us like express trains,” said an officer aboard Southampton. “Not a man could be seen on their decks; volumes of smoke poured from their funnels; their turret guns, trained expectantly on the port bow, seemed eager for battle.” A young lieutenant serving on one of Tyrwhitt’s crippled destroyers described the same moment: “There straight ahead of us in lovely procession, like elephants walking through a pack of . . . dogs came Lion, Queen Mary, Princess Royal, Invincible and New Zealand. Great and grim and uncouth as some antediluvian monsters, how solid they looked, how utterly earthquaking. We pointed out our latest aggressor to them . . . and we went west while they went east . . . and just a little later we heard the thunder of their guns.”

  For Arethusa and her flock, the battle was over. For Lion and her sisters, it was beginning.

  Aboard the British battle cruisers, excitement was at a peak: “As we approached,” said Captain Chatfield of Lion,

  everyone was at action stations, the guns loaded, the range-finders manned, the control alert, the signal men’s binoculars and telescopes scouring the misty horizon . . . one could hardly see two miles. Suddenly the report of guns was heard . . . [and] on our port bow, we saw . . . the flash of guns through the mist. Were they friendly or hostile? No shell could be seen falling. Beatty stood on the bridge by the compass, his glasses scanning the scene. At length we made out the hulk of a cruiser—indeed, she was little more than a hulk—[this was Mainz] her funnel had fallen and her foremast had been shot away, a fire raged on her upper deck. She . . . had been engaged by all four ships of Goodenough’s squadron. We swung around ninety degrees to port. “Leave her to them,” said Beatty. “Don’t fire!”

  At 12:37 p.m., Lion approached Arethusa and her destroyers, which were under attack by Strassburg and Köln. Strassburg turned and fled. Köln, however, was doomed. As Beatty steered to cut her off from Heligoland, the German light cruiser remained for seven minutes in clear sight on Lion’s bow. “The turrets swung around . . . [and] our guns opened fire, followed by those of the squadron,” said Chatfield. “In a few moments, the German was hit many times by heavy shells; she
bravely returned our fire with her little four inch guns aiming at our conning tower. One felt the tiny four-inch shell spatter against the conning tower armor, and the pieces ‘sizz’ over it. In a few minutes, the Köln was . . . a hulk.”

  Even so, Rear Admiral Maass’s flagship did not sink; indeed, she received a brief reprieve. Just at that moment, a small, two-funneled German light cruiser appeared, steaming east, directly across Lion’s path. Beatty immediately abandoned the shattered Köln and led his ships in pursuit of this new prey. Although by this time Invincible (which could make no better than 25 knots) and New Zealand (not much faster) were lagging behind the three modern Cats (as the London press had eagerly described the Lion-class battle cruisers), which were traveling at 28 knots, Beatty did not detach either of the two to sink Köln. Aware that he was close to the enemy’s base and that German dreadnoughts could appear at any moment, he wished to keep his squadron concentrated. Chatfield described what happened next: “A small German ship, a mile on [sic] the starboard bow . . . made off at right-angles, zig-zagging. Pointing her out to . . . [the gunnery officer] I told him to cease firing at Köln and to engage . . . [the new enemy ship] be-fore she could torpedo us. He rapidly swung the 13.5-inch turrets round from port to starboard and re-opened fire. Three salvos were enough and the German disappeared from sight; an explosion was seen and a mass of flame.”