Castles of Steel

by Robert K. Massie

  So it was that by 10:30 p.m. on May 30, while Friedrich der Grosse still lay at anchor in the Jade, the Grand Fleet was at sea in three great formations, 150 ships, all heading toward the Jutland Bank. That night Jellicoe was bringing 28 dreadnought battleships, 9 dreadnought battle cruisers, 8 armored cruisers, 26 light cruisers, 78 destroyers, a minelayer, and an aircraft carrier. The Grand Fleet’s numerical superiority over the Germans was marked: 28 to 16 in dreadnought battleships; 9 to 5 in battle cruisers, 113 to 72 in lighter craft. In gun power, Jellicoe’s superiority was even more pronounced. The British battle fleet carried 272 heavy naval guns against the German fleet’s 200. And the guns of the British battleships were bigger: 48 15-inch, 10 14-inch, 110 13.5-inch, and 104 12-inch. The Germans brought 128 12-inch and 72 11-inch. Comparative figures for the battle cruisers were even more disparate: 32 13.5-inch and 40 12-inch British guns versus 16 12-inch and 28 11-inch German barrels. In addition to this overwhelming superiority in number of guns, caliber of guns, and weight of shell, the Grand Fleet also had a significant speed advantage over the High Seas Fleet. Beatty’s four Cats could steam 3 knots faster than Hipper’s battle cruisers, while, because Mauve’s predreadnoughts were in company with the German battle line, Jellicoe’s battle fleet was at least 2 knots faster than Scheer’s.

  At 7:37 p.m., before Iron Duke departed Scapa Flow, Jellicoe signaled Beatty his orders for the following day. The battle cruisers were to steer for a point 100 miles northwest of Horns Reef, arriving there at 2:00 p.m. At that time, the Grand Fleet would be sixty-five miles to the north. Then Jellicoe said, “If [there is] no news by 2 p.m. stand [north] towards me to get in visual touch.”

  Now, on both sides, the orders were given. Fifty-eight moving castles of gray steel—thirty-seven under one flag, twenty-one under the other, the dreadnoughts of the two greatest navies in the world—were about to collide.

  CHAPTER 31 Jutland: Beatty vs. Hipper

  It was a clear late spring day with a gentle, lazy wind and a light swell undulating the surface of the sea. The sun, rising higher, burned away the morning mist and left the water sparkling under a blue sky. At dawn, the separate Grand Fleet battle squadrons had merged into a single huge formation, which was further enlarged by the arrival around noon of Admiral Jerram’s eight battleships and their escorts from Cromarty. Now the formation advanced in six columns abreast, four dreadnought battleships in each column, all zigzagging in unison every ten minutes for submarine defense. Eight miles ahead of the battleships, the eight old armored cruisers were spread widely to form a screen. The light cruisers and destroyers were stationed on either flank and astern. Because Jellicoe wished to conserve the limited fuel carried by his destroyers, the fleet was steaming at 15 knots.

  On the ships, the crews relaxed; they had done this sort of thing many times before. A visitor to the fleet was impressed by the service of morning prayer on the battleship St. Vincent: “about a thousand bare-headed sailors standing erect in silence on the quarterdeck.” At 11:00 a.m. the crews were called to action stations for drills, then dismissed to routine painting and cleaning. Afterward, off-duty men gathered on the decks and turret tops to bask in the sun. The midday meal came and went. Officers off watch smoked or dozed in wardroom armchairs or went to their cabins to lie down. A Tiger midshipman, asleep in the sun on the battle cruiser’s quarterdeck, remembered later, “We did not appear to be expecting Huns, as we cruised along to the eastwards at no great speed.”

  Jellicoe with the battle fleet and Beatty with the battle cruisers and fast battleships were both moving eastward. At two in the afternoon they would turn toward each other and, about an hour and a half later, meet and form a single immense formation. If there was any response from the enemy before then, Beatty, seventy miles farther south and nearer to Germany, would encounter it first. But as the hours passed, the belief grew stronger in the British fleet that the Germans were not at sea and that this would be simply another routine and useless sweep. Despite warnings that German warships had been assembling in the Jade, there had been no reports of enemy activity since the previous night.

  At 12:48 that afternoon, a signal to Jellicoe from the Admiralty seemed to confirm this belief. That morning, Captain Thomas Jackson, Director of the Operations Division of the Admiralty, had marched into Room 40 and asked where directional wireless stations placed the call sign “DK,” used by Scheer’s flagship, Friedrich der Grosse. When he was told, “In the Jade,” he departed without saying or asking anything further. If “DK” was the flagship and the flagship had not sailed, it seemed reasonable to assume that the German battle fleet had not sailed. This was the assumption Jackson made and passed along to Oliver, who signaled Jellicoe: “No definite news of the enemy. They made all preparations for sailing early this morning. It was thought the fleet had sailed but directional wireless placed the flagship in the Jade at 11.10 a.m. GMT. Apparently they have been unable to carry out airship reconnaissance which has delayed them.” Given this information, Jellicoe reasonably assumed that if the assembly in the Jade had been a precursor to anything, it would be at most a battle cruiser raid and that Scheer was remaining behind, perhaps to steam out later to cover Hipper’s retreat.

  A German ruse had succeeded, in large part because of the ignorance and arrogance of Captain Jackson. If, while he was in Room 40, Jackson had asked one more question, he would have learned that “DK” was the German Commander-in-Chief’s harbor call sign and that when Scheer went to sea, he disguised the fact by transferring it from Friedrich der Grosse to a shore wireless station at the entrance to the Jade River. Scheer had been employing this subterfuge since he took command and had used it in the Lowestoft Raid, which was when Room 40 became aware of the practice. Unhappily for Jellicoe, the Grand Fleet, and the Royal Navy, Captain Thomas Jackson exemplified those British naval officers who scorned such modern capabilities and techniques as deciphering secret codes. He made no secret of his contempt for the gifted civilians who broke codes in Room 40 and he rejected the idea that such people could contribute anything useful to naval operations. They were, in Jackson’s eyes, “a party of very clever fellows who could decipher coded signals,” but must never be allowed to interpret them. “Those chaps couldn’t possibly understand all the implications of intercepted signals,” Jackson had said. Naturally, his feelings were obvious to the codebreakers and they and the captain had as little to do with each other as possible; Jackson’s visit to Room 40 on the morning of May 31 was only his third. Therefore, when he asked the codebreakers a single, specific question, they gave him only a single, specific answer. If Jackson had told Room 40 that he wanted to know where “DK” was so that he could pass it to Jellicoe, they would have understood the meaning and significance of his question and told him that they were not saying that the High Seas Fleet flagship was in the Jade; only that the call sign was. Naturally, Jellicoe assumed that the Operations Division was competent and he accepted what they told him: that Friedrich der Grosse and the High Seas Fleet were at anchor. If he had known that Scheer was at sea, he would have increased speed and might have brought the Germans to battle two hours earlier in better conditions of light and visibility and with two additional hours of daylight in which to fight. The damage done by Jackson’s bungling rippled on disastrously through the day and night.

  [Andrew Gordon, whose description and analysis of the Battle of Jutland are uncommonly thorough and balanced, abandons moderation when he characterizes Captain Jackson. “Ridiculous,” “angry,” “blustering,” “insufferable,” and “buffoon” are words he uses to portray this officer.]

  When, at 4:40 that afternoon, Jellicoe received a signal from Beatty that he was actually in sight of the High Seas Fleet—which the Admiralty had told him was still in the Jade, 180 miles away—he lost all confidence in Admiralty messages. And that night, the Commander-in-Chief’s mistrust of Admiralty information about German fleet movements painfully affected what was to happen.

  Beatty’s six battle cruisers w
ere in two columns on a southeasterly course, followed five miles astern and northwest by the four superdreadnoughts of Evan-Thomas’s 5th Battle Squadron. His three light cruiser squadrons were spread out ahead to the southeast. Beatty’s orders were to hold this course until 2:00 p.m., when he would be 260 miles east of the Firth of Forth and on the Jutland Bank, off the northwestern coast of Denmark. Jellicoe then would be three hours away, but the Commander-in-Chief felt no anxiety about this gap. If Scheer and his battleships were not at sea—and he had been told that they were not—Beatty’s force of six battle cruisers and four superdreadnoughts was more than adequate in speed and gun power to cope with any appearance of Hipper’s battle cruisers.

  At dawn, Beatty’s squadrons began zigzagging; on a signal from the flagship, each column of ships turned every ten minutes in unison 22 degrees to either side of the line of advance. The signal flags used were large: rectangular flags were eleven feet by nine feet, triangular flags fifteen by eleven. Still, flag signaling had practical limits imposed by distance, visibility, funnel smoke, and wind direction. With this in mind Beatty had instructed Tiger, the battle cruiser nearest to Barham, to repeat his flag signals to Evan-Thomas by searchlight. At 2:00 p.m., the wind remained low and the smooth sea was stirred only by the wash of bows and propellers. As far as the eye could see from Lion’s bridge there was no wisp of smoke or sign of ships except the British light cruiser scouting line spread eight miles ahead. At 2:10 p.m., Beatty hoisted the signal flags alerting his force to prepare to turn to the north. Five minutes later, the signal was hauled down, making the admiral’s declaration of intention a command, and the battle cruisers began their turn toward the Grand Fleet. At this moment, Lion was fifty miles west of Hipper’s flagship, Lützow, but the most extended flanking ships of the two cruiser screens were only sixteen miles apart.

  When Beatty signaled his command to turn, not every ship in his force reacted immediately. Far to the northeast of the flagship, the British light cruiser Galatea on the port wing of the advanced screen had difficulty seeing Lion’s signal flags and so held on a few minutes before beginning her turn. During these minutes, the lookout on her starboard bridge wing suddenly called out, “Ship ahead blowing off steam.” Instantly, all binoculars on the light cruiser’s bridge were trained on the horizon 20 degrees off the starboard bow. There eight miles (16,000 yards) away was a stationary plume of funnel smoke against the sky. Even though Beatty’s signal to turn had now been received, the light cruiser’s captain decided to delay obedience and hold course to see what ship lay hove to over the horizon, and why she had stopped: one possibility was that a surfaced U-boat lay nearby and had sent a boarding party. Increasing speed, Galatea bore down on the smudge and soon a small merchantman appeared hull up. She was the Danish tramp steamer N.J. Fjord, blowing off steam from her boilers and rising and falling in the gentle roll of the sea.

  Then, suddenly, the binoculars on Galatea’s bridge revealed something else: a low, gray shape coming out from behind the steamer’s hull: a German destroyer. A few moments later, a second destroyer appeared. The bugle sounded “Action stations” and the lookout’s voice came again, “Green two five [that is, 28 degrees off the starboard bow]. Cruiser . . . two cruisers.” At 2:20, Galatea sent a flag signal to the other ships in her squadron: “Enemy in sight.” Simultaneously, her wireless reported to Beatty: “Two cruisers, probably hostile, bearing east southeast, course unknown.” Then at 2:28 p.m., Galatea, now making 28 knots, opened fire with her forward 6-inch gun. It was the first shot of the Battle of Jutland.

  Roughly the same sequence had occurred on the German side. In bright morning sunlight, the German fleet had steered west of Heligoland, heading north. Half the gun crews were at their posts; the other half slept in hammocks slung nearby. Georg von Hase, gunnery officer of the battle cruiser Derfflinger, rose, shaved, had breakfast in the wardroom, and returned to his cabin to write letters. By midday dinner, excitement was rising. “Nearly everyone agreed that this time there would be an action,” Hase wrote later, “but no one spoke of anything more important than fighting English light cruisers or old armored cruisers. As was always the case when we were on one of our sweeps of the North Sea, no one drank a drop of alcohol. . . . We smoked our cigars, then I went to my cabin, lay down for a siesta and watched the blue rings from my cigar.” At 1:00 p.m. the drums beat the daily signal to clean the guns. Then at 2:28, alarm bells sounded, the drums beat again, and boatswains piped and shouted, “Clear for action!” This was not a drill.

  By this time—2:30 p.m.—Scheer and the main body of the High Seas Fleet were well to the northwest of Horns Reef, with Hipper’s battle cruisers fifty miles in advance. Spread ahead of the battle cruisers in fan formation were five light cruisers and numerous destroyers. Captain Madlung of the light cruiser Elbing, on the western edge of Hipper’s screen, had seen the Danish freighter’s smoke and sent two destroyers, B-109 and B-110, to investigate. Overtaking the freighter, the destroyers signaled her to stop and each destroyer lowered a boat with a boarding party to check her papers and cargo. While the boats were in the water, the destroyers sighted smoke to the west and, soon afterward, approaching warships. Urgently recalling their boats, the destroyers broke away from the tramp steamer. When Elbing and her sister light cruisers hastened to their support, the battle began.

  Beatty’s mind was on other things when Galatea’s first contact report came in. Anticipating his scheduled rendezvous with Jellicoe, he had just signaled Evan-Thomas, “When we turn north look out for advanced cruisers of the Grand Fleet.” Evan-Thomas had acknowledged the signal and Barham and her three sisters had just executed the turn. Nevertheless, Beatty’s reaction to Galatea’s report was characteristically quick. At 2:32, he ordered “Action stations,” increased speed to 22 knots, and turned southeast in an effort to get between the enemy ships and Horns Reef. His new course, signaled by flag hoist to his entire force, was not the one that would most rapidly bring the enemy to action; rather it was the one that would compel the Germans to action whether they wished it or not. Nor, before doing this, did Beatty wait until he ascertained the enemy’s strength; remembering his experience of Hipper turning and legging it for home at the Dogger Bank, he simply turned and went at maximum speed. Indeed, he moved so quickly that he told Chatfield to put Lion’s helm over without waiting for his signal to be acknowledged by his other ships. The battle cruisers, their captains aware of Beatty’s impetuous style, dutifully followed Lion around and sped away to the southeast.

  But the battleship Barham and her three giant sisters, five miles away on Lion’s port bow, did not follow. Five miles was an extended distance to read signal flags between moving ships at sea, even with the aid of binoculars. Moreover, as Beatty’s flagship continued to turn, the heavy black smoke pouring from her funnels shrouded the signal entirely. Inexplicably, Tiger, detailed to pass Lion’s signals along to Barham by searchlight, failed to do so. Evan-Thomas himself saw the battle cruisers turning, and Barham’s captain standing next to him urged the admiral to conform but Evan-Thomas had been schooled by Jellicoe strictly to obey orders. Accordingly, he waited for a specific signal from Beatty, and continued north. As Evan-Thomas said later, “The only way I could account for no signal having been received by me was that Beatty was going to signal another course to the 5th Battle Squadron, possibly to get the enemy light cruisers between us. Anyway, if he wished us to turn, the searchlight would have done it in a moment.” This mischance (after the war, the word used became “failure” and Beatty and Evan-Thomas would blame each other) was compounded when Tiger, assigned to relay Lion’s signals to Barham by searchlight, ignored this duty. Tiger’s excuse was that the battle cruisers’ turn had placed her in the farthest, not the nearest, position from the 5th Battle Squadron and that, under these conditions, her duty to pass along signals by searchlight must certainly have lapsed. Thus, while Beatty rushed off to the southeast, Evan-Thomas’s superdreadnoughts continued on a course almost exactly the opposite.
Seven minutes later Beatty realized that the 5th Battle Squadron was not following and he repeated by searchlight the order to turn to the southeast. By the time this was accomplished, Evan-Thomas was nearly ten miles away. In this manner, Beatty’s impetuous decision, coupled with the delay before Barham received his signal and Evan-Thomas’s refusal to act without it, combined to deprive the battle cruisers of the powerful support of forty massive 15-inch guns. When Beatty went into action a few minutes later, the number of his ships had been cut from ten to six and the striking power of his guns had been cut in half. Beatty could have reunited his force by slowing his battle cruisers and letting the battleships catch up, but slowing down was not in David Beatty’s nature. Obeying impulse, he charged, leaving his battleships to make their way behind. In fairness, it should be remembered that Beatty still had seen only German light cruisers; Hipper’s battle cruisers were twenty-five miles away from Lion, and neither Beatty nor Hipper was certain of the other’s presence.

  In Beatty’s force, the sounding of “Action stations” sent men running. A few were skeptical: in New Zealand’s wardroom several officers smiled knowingly and went out on deck to have a look. In many ships, tea was about to be served and those who had been on board any length of time thought first of food. On the light cruiser Southampton, Lieutenant Stephen King-Hall, dozing in the smoking room, jumped up and dashed to his cabin to set about his before-action routine: “putting on as many clothes as possible, collecting my camera, notebook, and pencils, and chocolate in case of a prolonged stay at action stations.” In Barham, a midshipman cast a wishful glance at the tea laid out immaculately on the gun-room table and wondered when he would get a chance to eat it. On Malaya, where the gun-room steward was just laying the table for tea, the midshipmen on hand scuttled etiquette and began downing as much food as possible. A turret officer in Warspite dashed into the wardroom, grabbed as much portable food as he could, and rushed off to his station. On Tiger, the chaplain, awakened from a nap, went to the wardroom to find out what was happening: “All the cups and plates were on the table but the room was empty. They had evidently been called away in the middle of tea. And suddenly.”