Castles of Steel

by Robert K. Massie

  Beatty, after receiving Goodenough’s first signal reporting the presence of the High Seas Fleet, held on to the southeast for two minutes in order to see for himself the masts of the German battleships twelve miles away. Then at 4:40 p.m., a flag hoist ran up Lion’s signal halyard: “Alter course in succession 16 points [180 degrees] to starboard.” The flags were hauled down, the flagship’s helm went over, and Lion, followed in turn by Princess Royal, Tiger, and New Zealand, drew a massive curve on the surface of the sea, straightening out on a reverse course, now to the northwest. By turning in succession, each on the same point, Beatty risked bringing all four of his ships one by one under the concentrated fire of the oncoming enemy battle fleet. All managed without harm, although New Zealand, at the tail of Beatty’s line, did so by intelligently turning ahead of time on her own, before the German battleships came within range. Beatty’s turrets trained around from port to starboard, and a few minutes later the duel with Hipper resumed on an opposite course, giving this phase of the battle the name of the Run to the North. Beatty was fortunate that, despite the momentum of his charge to the south, the two-minute delay to see for himself, and then his choice of a turn in succession, his squadron had pivoted just beyond the range of the leading battleships of the High Seas Fleet, Admiral Paul Behncke’s elite Königs. Still the German dreadnoughts, now only 20,000 yards away, were steaming hard, their guns at maximum elevation, awaiting the order to fire.

  When, at 4:40 p.m., Lion hoisted the flag signal for a turn to the north, Evan-Thomas on Barham, seven miles astern of the flagship and already firing at the rear ships in Hipper’s line, missed or was once again unable to read Beatty’s flags. Neither Lion nor Tiger passed the signal to Barham by searchlight, so the four superdreadnoughts continued steaming on course southeast, straight toward Scheer. The error or difficulty on Barham’s bridge was compounded by an error on Lion’s. Once the signal flag commanding a turn was hauled down at 4:41 p.m. and Lion actually began to turn, no one on the flagship’s bridge noticed that the 5th Battle Squadron continued racing south. It was not until 4:48, as the southbound battleships actually passed the northbound battle cruisers a mile and a half apart on an opposite course—and with Beatty’s squadron traveling at 26 knots and Evan-Thomas’s at 24, they charged by each other at a combined closing speed of 60 miles an hour—that Beatty saw and understood what had happened and repeated his turn-in-succession signal—again by flag hoist—to Evan-Thomas. Then the Lion’s signal staff—Ralph Seymour was the officer responsible—made another, more damaging error. The flags dictating that the 5th Battle Squadron turn were hoisted at 4:48. Because Seymour forgot or was distracted, they were not hauled down until 4:54. During this six minutes while Evan-Thomas awaited his superior’s command, his four dreadnoughts continued steaming toward the High Seas Fleet. By the time Seymour finally hauled down the flags, Evan-Thomas was 4,000 yards closer to Scheer, within gun range of the leading dreadnoughts of the German battle line. Warspite’s executive officer described the sequence:

  I suddenly saw our battle cruisers coming close by about half a mile away, going in the opposite direction and I realized that they had turned back. I noticed that Queen Mary and Indefatigable were . . . [missing] but never realized that they had been sunk. . . . “X” turret of Lion was askew and trained towards us [that is, away from the enemy], the guns at full elevation, several hits showing on her port side. . . . Then we turned . . . [180 degrees] and trained the turret around full speed. Very soon after the turn, I saw on the starboard quarter the whole of the High Seas Fleet—masts, funnels and an endless ripple of orange flashes all down the line. . . . I felt one or two very heavy shakes but it never occurred to me that we were being hit. . . . I distinctly saw two of our salvos hit the leading German battleship. Sheets of yellow flame went right over her masts and she looked red fore and aft like a burning haystack. I know we hit her hard.

  When Beatty’s command to turn had finally been given and received, Evan-Thomas in Barham led his dreadnoughts around, one after the other. As each turned on the same spot, wheeling in a semicircle 1,000 yards from a fixed point in the water, the onrushing Germans brought a concentrated fire on the British battleships. Barham was hit; Valiant was luckier and got around without being touched; Warspite was hit three times; and Malaya, the rear ship, received the concentrated fire of many German battleships. “The turning point was a very hot corner,” said one of her turret officers. “It is doubtful if we, the last ship of the line, could have got through without a severe hammering if the captain had not used his initiative and turned the ship early.”

  After their turn to the north, Beatty’s battle cruisers also continued to suffer. Soon after the turn, Lion and Tiger were hit by Lützow and Seydlitz, and Beatty steered to port to put off the enemy range finders. Lion found herself passing through the wide patch of oil and floating wreckage where Queen Mary had gone down forty minutes earlier; it seemed possible that before long she might join her sister on the bottom. Already she had been hit by thirteen heavy shells; now came two more. Nor was Lion’s wounding unique: Tiger had been hit seventeen times, Princess Royal almost as many. Of Beatty’s four remaining battle cruisers, only New Zealand had escaped relatively unharmed. On the damaged battle cruisers, fires were burning, but because shell fragments had slashed fire hoses, it was difficult to bring water to the flames. Wounded men lay in the twisted wreckage until stretcher parties could pry them free and carry them to dressing stations. There, doctors sawed and stitched. In Princess Royal, a surgeon amputating a foot noted that the dim light of oil lanterns made “the securing of arteries particularly difficult.” Nevertheless, in all four ships, the engines remained undamaged and, taking advantage of their superior speed, Beatty steered northwest at 24 knots, leaving the battle behind. Once out of range, he reduced speed and for half an hour, during which his battered ships did not fire a shot, his crews attempted to control fires, clear away wreckage, restore turrets, and transform their vessels back into warships. On Princess Royal, a midshipman recorded that at 5:15 there was “a lull in the action and people were going out to stretch their legs and get a little fresh air. At 5.25, the flagship signaled ‘Prepare to renew the action’ and at 5.43 we opened fire again.” On one battle cruiser, the resumption of the battle caught the ship’s paymaster by surprise. He had come on deck for some fresh air and was standing on the forward superstructure when P turret suddenly opened fire. The blast stripped off his trousers.

  Meanwhile, the battle cruisers’ withdrawal and time-out had left the 5th Battle Squadron to fight alone against Hipper’s five battle cruisers and the four powerful dreadnoughts leading Scheer’s 3rd Battle Squadron. This hour—from a few minutes before five o’clock, when the Queen Elizabeths wheeled north three miles in Beatty’s wake, until just after six, when they joined the Grand Fleet battle line—was their time of glory. “When we turned,” said a turret officer on Malaya, “I saw our battle cruisers proceeding north at full speed, already seven or eight thousand yards ahead of us. I then realized that just the four of us of the 5th Battle Squadron would have to entertain the High Seas Fleet—four against perhaps twenty.” Steaming at 25 knots, Evan-Thomas distributed the fire of his four ships: Barham and Valiant were to deal with the five German battle cruisers up ahead, while Warspite and Malaya took on the four Königs coming up behind. At the head of the German battle line, Behncke and his four formidable Königs—König, Grosser Kurfürst, Kronprinz Wilhelm, and Markgraf—pressed forward to the limit of their stokers’ ability to shovel coal. All the while, their total of forty 12-inch guns lashed out. Barham was the first to be struck; then she was hit again; then four more times. A heavy shell wrecked her auxiliary wireless office and inflicted casualties on both wireless and medical personnel. One shell burst caused a fire in a 6-inch gun casement; a junior officer fought the fire “until swelling from burns closed his eyes.” A shell fragment all but severed the leg of the ship’s assistant navigator; his midshipman “did his best to tie a tourniqu
et, but he was much handicapped owing to the lights going out. The navigator died quickly from loss of blood.” “Six, eight, nine salvos a minute” were falling around Malaya; between 5:20 and 5:35 p.m., the battleship was hit five times. One 12-inch shell peeled back the roof of her X turret, but inside the gun crews continued to work; another heavy shell pierced the starboard side below the waterline, admitting enough water to give the ship a starboard list. Within half an hour, Malaya suffered 100 casualties. “Everything was dark chaos,” said one of the officers of a 6-inch gun battery. “Most of the wounded had been taken away, but several of the killed were still there . . . [and] the smell of burnt human flesh remained in the ship for weeks giving everybody a sickly nauseous feeling.” In Warspite, the chief surgeon ordered burns to be dressed with pre-prepared picric acid gauze. “The effect was agonizing—picric acid only aggravated the burns—and the patients tore off the bandages.” Thereafter, the victims lay in “restless agony . . . injections of morphine seemed to have very little effect on them.” About this time, a 12-inch shell penetrated into the storage place for fresh meat and hit the armored grating over B boiler room. “On its way through the beef screen, it had carried a whole sheep with it which was wedged into the gratings. At first I thought it was a human casualty,” said the ship’s executive officer, moving around to inspect damage. A few compartments away, he found real human casualties: “three stokers dead, one having his head blown off and another badly smashed to pieces. Rather a horrible sight, but the burnt ones were far worse.”

  The human carnage and physical damage to the ships were bad enough, but for Evan-Thomas, his captains, and the crews themselves, worse was possible. The entire High Seas Fleet—Hipper’s five battle cruisers and light cruisers, Scheer’s sixteen dreadnoughts, six predreadnoughts, and dozens of destroyers—was rushing up behind them and if, at any moment during their 180-degree turn or their subsequent passage north, any one of the four British superdreadnoughts had been disabled, she must have shared the fate of Blücher at the Dogger Bank. Only one unlucky shell would have been required. It would not have been necessary to blow up the ship in a single cataclysm, as had happened with Indefatigable and Queen Mary. A more modest hit damaging the propulsion machinery or steering gear would have sufficed. And then the wounded ship would have been gobbled up. Moreover, should Evan-Thomas have decided at that point not to abandon the victim but instead to turn his squadron back to help, then perhaps all four of his ships would have been lost—although a German dreadnought or two might have been taken to the bottom with them. In any case, Scheer would have won the victory he desired, and a powerful, isolated squadron of the Grand Fleet would have been destroyed.

  Hit after hit crashed into the four British battleships, but all the while, their thirty-two 15-inch guns roared back. During the Run to the North, Evan-Thomas’s four dreadnoughts hit three of Hipper’s battle cruisers and three of Behncke’s battleships with 1,900-pound shells. Barham and Valiant scored hits on Seydlitz, Lützow, and Derfflinger, while Warspite and Malaya fired at König, Grosser Kurfürst, and Markgraf. Hits on Lützow’s main and reserve wireless stations severed these communication links to the other ships in Hipper’s squadron. But, again, it was Seydlitz that suffered most. She was stripped of much of her fighting power, battered, listing to port, down by the bow from her torpedo wound; the question now was whether she could survive.

  Briefly, at the start of the Run to the North, Von der Tann had made herself useful; firing at Barham, she had scored one hit, but then she had to give up. Her fore and aft turrets were already out of action and now her starboard waist turret, the only one that would bear on the enemy, gave out as well. The guns had become so hot that they jammed in their slides and would not return to firing positions. Captain Hans Zenker realized that his ship was no longer a fighting unit, but he kept on with Hipper to prevent concentration of enemy fire on the other ships of the squadron. At 5:30 p.m., Lützow and Derfflinger were hit again, and the fire of the German battle cruisers began to slacken. German gunners now had a setting sun glaring in their eyes, making ranging and spotting difficult.

  Nevertheless, to Scheer it looked at this moment as if Beatty and Evan-Thomas were beaten. Hipper already had sunk two British battle cruisers; Lion, the enemy flagship, had been streaming smoke from a gaping wound for more than an hour; and Beatty’s movement looked very much like flight. If Scheer could severely damage another battle cruiser or one of the Queen Elizabeths and then overtake and sink it, the victory he had planned would be won. Thus, Scheer vigorously urged his ships forward. At 5:20 p.m., confident that he faced no more than two isolated British squadrons and believing that a beaten opponent was escaping, he signaled “Give chase” and his whole fleet strained forward in pursuit. The four leading ships—König, Grosser Kurfürst, Kronprinz Wilhelm, and Markgraf—under Rear Admiral Paul Behncke began to draw ahead as the engine-room staffs strove for more and more speed. The slower dreadnoughts followed as well as they could, while the six predreadnoughts of the 2nd Squadron fell farther and farther astern. The long line of the High Seas Fleet straggled over twenty-five miles of sea. It did no good. Hipper’s battle cruisers could not maintain more than 25 knots for any length of time, while Beatty’s Cats, with their 28-knot speed, left them behind and drew out of sight.

  When Beatty ended his battle cruisers’ respite and signaled “Prepare to renew the action,” he swung his ships from north to northeast and Hipper saw again in the mist on his port bow the distinct shapes of his old enemies. The German admiral was profoundly frustrated. Lützow’s wireless had been destroyed and now, when he wanted to report Beatty’s reappearance, he could not; Scheer in Friedrich der Grosse was ten miles astern, beyond visual signal distance. The best he could do was send a man up into an exposed position to make wigwag semaphore signals to Derfflinger astern, to pass the news along. Meanwhile, Beatty, 14,000 yards away, was relentlessly crossing in front of him, bending back the German van to starboard. Hipper, unwilling to permit Beatty to cross his bow, had no choice but to give ground, swinging his own ships also to starboard, toward the east. This time visibility as well as firepower favored the British. “I had to work against a blinding sunset in the western sky and devastating enemy artillery,” Hipper said later. “The sun stood deep and the horizon was hazy and I had to fire directly into the sun. I saw absolutely nothing of the enemy, who was behind a dense cloud of smoke—the gunnery officers could find no target although we made a superb one ourselves. There was nothing else to do but take the ships out of the battle for a while.” As Hipper continually gave more ground, turning farther to the east, the whole of the German fleet now stretched out behind him in a vast, shallow curve. In the rear, more than twenty miles behind, Mauve’s old predreadnoughts still steamed northwest; in the van, Hipper in Lützow, six miles in advance of König, kept swinging east as Beatty relentlessly bore down on his van.

  The second round of the battle—the Run to the North—came to a close around 5:45 p.m., when one of Beatty’s lookouts and then Beatty himself caught sight of the advance guard of the Grand Fleet in the distant form of the armored cruiser Black Prince operating on the far right wing—the southwestern edge—of Jellicoe’s forward cruiser screen. Now Beatty knew that Jellicoe was close over the horizon; he knew also that Scheer, straining to catch him, was unaware of this peril. Possessing this knowledge, Beatty grimly altered course again to starboard, pressing even more heavily down on Hipper in order to deflect him from seeing the oncoming threat.

  By now, the deteriorating weather had begun to exercise a dominant influence on the battle. Ironically, because of the weather, Hipper, whose mission was to scout and warn the High Seas Fleet of peril ahead, learned the next piece of dreadful news—the worst that either German admiral would hear all day—after Scheer had heard it. The smoke pouring out of funnels and gun barrels, mixing with the blowing wet mist, formed a heavy surface cloud, which moved across the battlefield creating patches of dense, sometimes nearly impenetrable haz
e. Hipper, steering east, was in one of these patches and therefore knew nothing of any hostile ships other than Beatty’s four battle cruisers and Evan-Thomas’s four superdreadnoughts. For the moment, as he swung to starboard, he and his own battle cruisers were hidden from Beatty. Three miles ahead of him to the east were Bödicker’s four light cruisers; at 5:50 p.m., Hipper received a signal that they were in action with a single enemy cruiser. Five minutes later, Bödicker gave Hipper a shock: his light cruisers, he reported, now were in action with a group of British dreadnoughts to the east. Dreadnoughts? To the east? This could not be Beatty or Evan-Thomas. This was somebody else.