Castles of Steel

by Robert K. Massie

  As the day began, three messages were brought to Scheer on the bridge of Friedrich der Grosse. One of his submarines, U-32, on the surface 300 miles away, reported sighting two British dreadnoughts, two cruisers, and several destroyers off May Island, sixty miles east of the Firth of Forth. They were heading southeast. An hour later, a second submarine, U-66, reported eight British battleships attended by light cruisers and destroyers sixty miles east of Cromarty on an easterly course. About the same time, the German radio station at Neumünster reported intercepting British wireless messages indicating that two British dreadnoughts—or groups of dreadnoughts; the call signs did not make clear—had left Scapa Flow. Scheer considered these pieces of information and discarded them; they seemed too vague and disconnected to be related to his operation. The enemy forces were far apart and they seemed to represent isolated movements by separate units of the British fleet. There was no indication that the entire Grand Fleet was at sea; Scheer held to his northerly course.

  In this sequence of early events lay Scheer’s greatest miscalculation at the Battle of Jutland. Before the first shot was fired, his U-boats had failed. The submarine ambushes—the underlying reason for the entire operation—had been spectacularly useless. Submarines had neither provided Scheer with useful information nor reduced Jellicoe’s superiority by a single vessel. Now, the full might of the Grand Fleet was at sea, coming toward him, unattacked, undiminished, and undetected.

  The twelve months following the Dogger Bank had been difficult for the officers and men of the Grand Fleet. As long as the kaiser held his fleet in port, Great Britain exercised command of the sea. Yet Royal Navy tradition demanded more. British naval officers yearned for a new Trafalgar, although they knew that, before Trafalgar was fought, Nelson had spent two monotonous years patrolling off Toulon. Nor did they consider the slow strangulation of Germany by blockade a substitute for battle. Not only were they frustrated and bored; they were plagued by guilt. The army—their brothers, cousins, and friends—was dying in the trenches while they, cooped up in their gray ships, swung uselessly around mooring buoys in remote northern harbors.

  Beatty, particularly, chafed. “I heard rumors of terrible casualties on the Western Front,” he wrote to Ethel on May 15, 1915. “I don’t think, dear heart, you will ever realize the effect these terrible happenings have upon me. . . . I feel we are so impotent, so incapable of doing anything for lack of opportunity, almost that we are not doing our share and bearing our portion of the burden laid upon the nation. . . . We spend days doing nothing when so many are doing so much. . . . [It] makes me feel sick at heart.” Six months later, things seemed, if possible, worse. “The horrid Forth like a great ditch full of thick fog makes everything so cold,” he wrote to Ethel. “There is no joy in life under such conditions. . . . My time must come.” Beatty’s time would come, but not before still another seven months had passed.

  Jellicoe and the Admiralty shared Beatty’s frustration. Correspondence between London, Scapa, and Rosyth continually discussed offensive projects that might lure or force the Germans out: Bombard Heligoland. Fill six tankers and twelve trawlers with oil, set them alight, and drive them into the middle of Heligoland dockyard. Bombard the High Seas Fleet in Schillig roads, then send destroyer flotillas in to attack with torpedoes, then have at them again with a midnight ram, gun, and torpedo suicide attack by five old battleships. Penetrate the Baltic with predreadnoughts to open a path to Russia. Jellicoe vetoed all these suggestions. The Commander-in-Chief favored action, but even more strongly, he opposed risk. Without a battle, Britain possessed command of the sea. Frustrating as it was, a new Trafalgar would have to wait.

  The new Admiralty Board endorsed Jellicoe’s caution. Lacking a Churchill, who had tried to thrust battleships through the Dardanelles, and a Fisher, who had wanted to storm into the Baltic, they made suggestions, but never pushed the Commander-in-Chief. The tone was set by Jackson, who once wrote wistfully to Jellicoe, “I wish we could entice them out from Heligoland to give you a chance. Have you any ideas for it? I wish I had.” Jellicoe’s replies—like this one on January 25, 1916—always came back to the bedrock of British naval strategy: “Until the High Seas Fleet emerges from its defences, I regret to say that I do not see that any offensive against it is possible. It may be weakened by mines and submarine attack when out for exercises, but beyond that no naval action against it seems practicable.”

  While the Grand Fleet waited, it grew. By April 1916, there were thirty-three dreadnought battleships and ten dreadnought battle cruisers in the Royal Navy; thirteen of these ships had been added since the beginning of the war. The battleships Benbow and Emperor of India had come to the fleet in December 1914. Canada, requisitioned from Chile in 1915, had been added to Agincourt and Erin, requisitioned from Turkey. Five Queen Elizabeth–class superdreadnoughts had joined the Grand Fleet: Queen Elizabeth herself, along with Warspite and Barham in 1915 and Valiant and Malaya early in 1916. These five, each mounting eight 15-inch guns and firing projectiles weighing 1,900 pounds, were then the finest battleships in the world. They were heavily armored and able to take severe punishment; their 25-knot speed was 4 to 5 knots greater than the designed speed of any German battleship and almost the same as that of the older British and German battle cruisers. They burned fuel oil, which permitted greater steaming endurance and saved their crews the exhausting labor of hand coaling and stoking. In addition, another five superdreadnoughts of the Royal Sovereign class, each carrying eight 15-inch guns, were on their way: Royal Oak and Revenge arrived in time to fight at Jutland; Royal Sovereign was a few days too late, and Resolution and Ramillies were still under construction. Overall, the British margin over the Germans in dreadnought battleships had increased substantially. Since August 1914, the Germans had added five dreadnoughts: four Königs—all of them present at Jutland—and the new 15-inch-gun Bayern, which was left behind at Wilhelmshaven.

  From day to day, however, the numbers were never the same. On Janu-ary 6, 1916, the predreadnought King Edward VII, proceeding from Scapa Flow to Belfast for dockyard maintenance, hit a mine, turned over, and sank off the Scottish coast. Fortunately, she went down slowly and all her crew was saved. On December 3, 1915, the superdreadnoughts Barham and Warspite collided in heavy seas. Barham, the flagship, had hoisted a signal reducing squadron speed to 8 knots; Warspite misread the signal as 18 knots and began to overtake. Then just as Barham’s stern sank into a deep trough, Warspite’s bow, coming up behind, lifted high in the air. When the bow dropped, it came down on Barham with a noise described as “a horrible crunching, like a giant robot chewing crowbars.” Barham was able to repair her damage at Cromarty, but Warspite had to go south to Devonport.

  As for battle cruisers, Beatty now commanded ten of these fast ships. Two more were coming, Renown and Repulse, converted from battleships on the building ways during Jacky Fisher’s brief second term as First Sea Lord. Meanwhile, to the four battle cruisers Hipper commanded at the Dogger Bank, only Lützow, a sister of Derfflinger, had been added. Their third sister, Hindenburg, was still under construction. Beatty’s battle cruisers remained at Rosyth, where they had been based since December 1914. In addition to his flagship Lion, the vice admiral now had three squadrons of three ships each: the fast, 13.5-inch-gun Cats, which were Lion’s sisters: Prin-cess Royal, Queen Mary, and Tiger; the second-generation, 12-inch-gun ships New Zealand, Indefatigable, and Australia; and finally, Britain’s three oldest battle cruisers, Invincible, Inflexible, and Indomitable. Beatty never ceased trying to augment this force, and he and Jellicoe had been wrestling for possession of the new Queen Elizabeth superdreadnoughts, which had been coming to Jellicoe at Scapa Flow. Beatty declared that he needed these fast, powerful ships to stiffen the Battle Cruiser Fleet, as Lützow and Hindenburg were reported ready to join Hipper; Jellicoe resisted, wanting to keep maximum strength in his own command and to use the new dreadnoughts as a fast wing of the Grand Fleet battle line. Beatty, the Commander-in-Chief pointed out, al
ready had ten battle cruisers to Hipper’s four (five with Lützow, six with Hindenburg) and, he confided in Jackson, his feeling was that “the stronger I make Beatty, the greater is the temptation for him to get involved in an independent action.” Twice—in February 1916, and again in the middle of March—Jellicoe had overruled Beatty’s request for these new ships.

  Three circumstances joined to reverse Jellicoe’s decision. At the end of March, the Admiralty learned that Lützow had indeed joined the High Seas Fleet and become Hipper’s flagship. Then, the collision on April 22 of New Zealand and Australia and the need of both for repairs reduced Beatty’s strength from ten to eight. Meanwhile, both Jellicoe and Beatty were concerned about British battle cruiser gunnery. In one shoot in November 1915, both Lion and Tiger had performed abominably; Beatty had admitted to Jellicoe that it had been a “terrible disappointment.” In March 1916, a group of junior officers from the light cruisers attached to Beatty’s force, meeting one night in Southampton’s wardroom, agreed “collectively and separately . . . that the battle cruisers’ shooting was rotten.” One explanation was that Beatty’s ships, lacking a gunnery range near the Firth of Forth, were unable to carry out sufficient practice. At a conference held at Rosyth on May 12, 1916, Jellicoe decided to rectify this problem by bringing the battle cruisers north from Rosyth to Scapa, squadron by squadron, to do heavy-caliber firing on the ranges developed near Scapa Flow. To plug the gap in Beatty’s ranks while some of his battle cruisers were away, Beatty was to get what he wanted; the Queen Elizabeths would join him at Rosyth. Accordingly, in the third week of May, Rear Admiral Horace Hood’s 3rd Battle Cruiser Squadron—Invincible, Inflexible, and Indomitable—was detached from Beatty for three weeks of gunnery practice, while Rear Admiral Hugh Evan-Thomas’s 5th Battle Squadron—the five Queen Elizabeths—came south to bolster Beatty. Hood was displeased by the order. “This is a great mistake,” he said. “If David [Beatty] gets these ships [the Queen Elizabeths] with him, nothing will stop him from taking on the whole German fleet if he gets the chance.” Once the five superdreadnoughts arrived, Queen Elizabeth herself went into a Rosyth dry dock, leaving Beatty with four. With the three Invincibles gone north and Australia still in dry dock, Beatty’s force now consisted of six battle cruisers plus four fast battleships. This was the force he led at Jutland.

  There were many flaws in Beatty’s leadership during the battle, some of which can be traced to a curious failure beforehand. Having succeeded in his persistent effort to add the 5th Battle Squadron to his force, Beatty—inexplicably—did little to ensure its effective use. Ten days passed between the arrival of the Queen Elizabeths at Rosyth and their sailing for Jutland. During this time, the four great battleships lay at anchor not far from Lion in the Firth of Forth. Not once did Beatty summon Rear Admiral Evan-Thomas on board his flagship so that the two men could sit down and Beatty could explain his tactics. Normally, such a conversation would take place with any new subordinate; here, it was especially important because Evan-Thomas was a battleship man, devoted to Jellicoe and the Grand Fleet, where all tactical maneuvers were controlled by explicit signals from the flagship. Evan-Thomas had never served under Beatty, and his squadron had never operated at sea with the battle cruisers. If he and they were now to fall in with Beatty’s freer “Follow me!” style in battle, he needed to be told what was expected of him. Andrew Gordon, whose recent history of Jutland is one of the best ever written, calls Beatty’s behavior “shockingly unprofessional. . . . For how long Evan-Thomas would have had to swing around a buoy a few hundred yards from Lion before Beatty bothered to talk to him, is unknown.” In any case, Evan-Thomas sailed uninstructed.

  There was another change in the array of the British fleet, of less significance for the moment, but with portent for the future. On April 12, 1916, a bulky, unusual-looking ship joined the fleet at Scapa Flow. She was the converted 18,000-ton Cunard liner Campania, a veteran of the North Atlantic tourist run, coming up from a Liverpool yard that had converted her into an aircraft carrier. Jellicoe was pleased to see her. From the beginning of the war, he had asked the Admiralty for aircraft-carrying vessels to counter the zeppelins that soared over his fleet, reporting its movements. He also yearned for some means of providing himself with aerial scouting of his own. Britain’s small, early carriers, the 3,000-ton cross-Channel steamers Engadine, Riviera, and Empress, with their canvas shelters for three seaplanes, had remained with Tyrwhitt at Harwich while the Admiralty worked on something better for Jellicoe.

  Seaplane operations in the open sea were inherently difficult: any combination of light wind, fog, and rough seas hampered takeoff. More important, the virtual uselessness of seaplanes as antizeppelin weapons had become obvious; the weight of their floats limited rate of climb, speed, altitude, and radius of action. The solution embodied in Campania was a flight deck, extending forward from the bridge over the bow, from which single-seat aircraft with wheels could take off into the wind. With their minimal weight, these craft could rise to the altitudes where the zeppelins flew, attack the monsters, then return and land in the sea near their ship; air bags would keep the plane afloat long enough for the pilot to be rescued. Jellicoe followed these developments closely and hoped for great things. “I’m glad to say we got one up yesterday,” he wrote to Beatty on August 7, 1915, “the first that has risen from a ship underway. It is not a nice job for the pilot as he has to get up a speed of 45 miles an hour before he leaves the deck. . . . If there is any hitch, he . . . is certain to be finished.” This system fulfilled one of Jellicoe’s wishes—attacking the zeppelins—but not the other—providing himself with scouting information. Unfortunately, Campania’s new forward platform-ramp was not long enough for takeoff by the larger, heavier two-seat planes needed to carry the wireless equipment essential for reconnaissance work. Therefore, the new carrier remained a fore-and-aft hybrid: along with its forward flight deck, it retained a large afterdeck hangar for seaplanes, which, as before, had to be placed in the water for takeoff. Seven seaplanes and three fighters made up the new carrier’s air group.

  While the ships increased in number and evolved in design, the men in the fleet continued to wait. In many ways, their situation had improved. Scapa Flow now was a heavily fortified anchorage, and its minefields and the strong steel nets spread across its entrances permitted British admirals and sailors and their hundreds of vessels—battleships, battle cruisers, armored cruisers, light cruisers, destroyers, submarines, depot ships, oilers, colliers, store ships, ammunition ships, hospital ships, trawlers, and drifters—to rest in the same tranquil security enjoyed by their German counterparts in Wilhelmshaven. But safety in harbor was only one ingredient of life at Scapa Flow. There also was the bleak isolation of the base, the often fierce, always changeable weather, and the sheer, grinding boredom of the endless wait.

  Jellicoe did what he could with fleet exercises to keep the men alert. Again and again, the admiral took the fleet to sea, drilling the ships tirelessly in battle evolutions. Because the water inside the Flow was secure from torpedo attack and ships could practice there without danger, gunnery and torpedo drills were held every day except Sundays. At regular intervals, battleship squadrons went outside to the west of Pentland Firth for main battery firing at towed targets. On most days, the little bays around the Flow were occupied by ships firing at small targets towed by steam picket boats. After dark, the Flow would be lit by the gun flashes and searchlights of ships exercising in night firing. Occasionally, battleships exercised steaming in company without lights inside the Flow to give practice to their officers of the watch.

  The island anchorage had no railway connection with the rest of the British Isles, so everything had to be brought by ship: coal, oil, ammunition, and food. Every month, 320 tons of meat, 800 tons of potatoes, 6,000 bags of flour (each weighing 140 pounds), 1,500 bags of sugar (each weighing 120 pounds), and 80,000 loaves of bread were delivered to the fleet. For the men, of course, the most important delivery was the daily mail, b
rought around to all ships every morning except when the seas were too high for the mail boat to come alongside.

  The seasons at Scapa Flow offered spectacular contrasts. Winter was an elemental world of darkness, wind, and snow. Nightfall arrived between 3:30 and 4:00 p.m. and did not fade until 9:00 the next morning. Sometimes, the sun did not appear for days. In December 1915, Jellicoe noted fog or mist at Scapa on the fifteenth, twenty-second, and sixteenth, gales on the sixth, eighth, and twenty-third, snow on the third, fourth, eighth, and twelfth. The following month, January 1916, he recorded winds of up to eighty miles an hour on the fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth, nineteenth, twentieth, twenty-second, twenty-third, twenty-fourth, and thirtieth: fifteen days out of thirty-one. When it blew hard, bending the stunted trees on shore to the ground, the heavy seas inside the Flow made it impossible to lower boats, leaving the men penned up on ships rolling on double anchors. On clear winter nights, the Northern Lights burned and crackled, flinging giant curtains of green and silver across the sky. Summers were gentler and often lovely. Scapa Flow became a world of airy space and seabirds, of blue skies and green fields, of towering cloud formations and red-gold sunsets. Looking at the shore from their anchored ships, the men saw low hills and moors purple with heather. In June, a man could fish at dawn from the deck of a battleship at 2:00 a.m. and then sit on the same spot and read his mail or a newspaper at 11:30 that night.

  But fishing and reading were not enough. In the early months of war, when the fleet was continually at sea, the few hours spent in harbor were consumed in coaling and replenishing stores; then it was back to sea. As the months passed and the Germans failed to come out, the Grand Fleet spent more time at anchor. It became necessary to provide the officers and men—between 60,000 and 100,000 of them, many wrenched from their homes on the eve of war—with something more than “coaling, sleeping, sleeping, eating, sleeping, reading mail, writing letters, arguing about the war, eating, sleeping and then to sea.” Leave was given only when a ship left the fleet to enter a yard in the south for repair and maintenance; then a week or two might be granted. Meanwhile, Kirkwell, a sleepy Orkney town of 4,000 inhabitants, offered a medieval redbrick cathedral and a single hotel. “I should not select it for a cheery weekend,” said an officer of a light cruiser.