Castles of Steel

by Robert K. Massie

  Jellicoe was not left defenseless by his friends. The turn away was defended after the battle as vigorously as it was attacked. Admiral Sir Reginald Bacon, the first captain of the Dreadnought and eventually Jellicoe’s biographer, pointed out that Jellicoe had no way of knowing how many German destroyers would attack him, how many torpedoes they would launch, or from what directions the torpedoes would come; in the event, Bacon argued, Jellicoe’s turn away had saved at least six British battleships. John Irving puts this figure at “eight or even more.”

  But the ultimate issue, beyond questions of timing and of potential losses to the British and German fleets, was one of grand strategy. The High Seas Fleet, as it was employed by the kaiser and his admirals in the Great War, never posed a mortal threat to Britain’s survival. Accordingly, the Admiralty and Jellicoe held the destruction of the German fleet to be infinitely less important than the preservation of the Grand Fleet, and thereby of overall British naval supremacy. Fervently though Royal Navy officers might yearn for a new Trafalgar, the naval status quo in May 1916 was acceptable to Great Britain; sea supremacy permitted the Allies exclusive use of the ocean highways while the blockade of Germany continued its corrosive work. Jellicoe, therefore, saw his primary duty as the preservation of the Grand Fleet. He was not afraid to risk his ships in a long-range gun battle because, as a gunnery expert, he knew the awesome weight of metal the British fleet could bring down on an enemy battle line. But he was agonizingly wary of exposing his fleet to any underwater ambush by torpedoes or mines. Jellicoe knew that Scheer was a torpedo specialist who believed that this weapon could be as decisive as the big gun and who would use it whenever he could. Moreover, he knew that the primary duty of German destroyers was to execute a massed torpedo attack; beating off enemy destroyers was their secondary duty. Finally, Jellicoe’s own torpedo experts had told him that in peacetime exercises, 35 percent of torpedoes fired indiscriminately at a line of battleships would find a target. The German navy had eighty-eight destroyers; if all were present, they could launch up to 440 torpedoes. The numbers were sufficient to deprive John Jellicoe of hours of sleep.

  Jellicoe, therefore, saw turning away simply as an exercise of a fundamental Grand Fleet battle tactic in use throughout his command. Long before, in his letter to the Admiralty of October 30, 1914, he had made his intentions clear. He had explained that he meant to assume the defensive against all enemy underwater weapons while attempting to conserve his ships for offensive action with their more numerous, heavier guns. If the Germans attempted to retreat or escape from a fleet action, he was determined not to pursue; if he were confronted by a concentrated torpedo attack, he would turn away. The Admiralty had approved, expressing “full confidence in your contemplated conduct of the fleet in action.” On May 31, 1916, therefore, John Jellicoe simply did what he had said he intended to do.

  For thirty minutes after Scheer’s second turnabout, the guns were silent. For the first ten of these minutes, Jellicoe steered southeast, approximately 135 degrees off Scheer’s course to the west. Then, feeling that the torpedo threat had evaporated, Jellicoe turned back expecting—once the dense clouds of black smoke spewed out by the retreating German destroyers had blown away—to find the High Seas Fleet where he had left it, still within gun range. But there was no sign of the Germans and, again, as with Scheer’s previous turnabout, Jellicoe did not know where his enemy was. Five minutes passed and Jellicoe turned south. Still the sea was empty. At 7:40 p.m., he ordered another turn, this time to the southwest. Still nothing. Then, at 8:00 p.m., a signal from Goodenough confirmed that the Germans were heading west. Jellicoe turned farther west. By then, Scheer was fifteen miles away, out of reach. Yet the British Commander-in-Chief remained optimistic: steaming south, he was actually nearer to Germany than was Scheer.

  Meanwhile, Scheer, after two encounters with Jellicoe and two emergency course reversals, found himself in an appalling situation. He now knew that he was facing the entire Grand Fleet and that this superior force lay between him and his base. He knew that he could not afford to be driven farther west and he changed course, first to the southwest. His ships now were in reverse order to that in which they had twice assaulted the British line: Mauve’s old predreadnoughts were now in the van; the modern dreadnoughts were bringing up the rear. The half-demolished battle cruisers were a mile to port. Scheer’s overriding purpose now was to get away: to save as much of his fleet as he could, and, above all, the dreadnought battleships. At 7:45 p.m., knowing that he must get these ships into friendly waters by daybreak, he altered course to south. The single factor now in his favor was that sundown and twilight were approaching. Perhaps night would hide him.

  Beatty’s six remaining battle cruisers, six miles ahead and to the southwest of the British battle line, had been too distant to have been affected by the German destroyer torpedo attacks that had caused Jellicoe to turn away. To Beatty at 7:45 p.m., Scheer’s position was a mystery, but he was anxious to press forward and find the High Seas Fleet before daylight failed. However, he did not wish to find them by himself, without the support of at least some British battleships. The eight dreadnoughts of Jerram’s squadron, now in Jellicoe’s van, were 12,000 yards to his northeast and would serve admirably. On the spur of the moment—perhaps annoyed to the point of cheekiness by what he saw as the excessive caution of Jellicoe’s turnaway—Beatty offered to take matters into his own hands. At 7:47 p.m., he signaled the Commander-in-Chief, “Submit van of battleships follow battle cruisers. We can then cut off whole of enemy’s battle fleet.” Jellicoe’s supporters later described this message as typical of Beatty’s “posturing”; even the modest Commander-in-Chief eventually declared, “To tell the truth, I thought it was rather insubordinate.”

  Beatty’s signal took fourteen minutes to reach Jellicoe’s hand and by this time the Commander-in-Chief saw no need for urgency. He had already turned the fleet, including Jerram’s squadron, to a westerly course—nearer the enemy, in fact, than Beatty’s course. Nevertheless, coming from Beatty, the signal demanded consideration. But what did the signal mean? Where was Lion? What could Beatty see? Jellicoe assumed that, before sending this message, Beatty must have recovered visual contact with some German ships. But what ships? The German battle fleet? The German battle cruisers? If Beatty could see Germans, Jerram, leading the van of the battle fleet in King George V, also must see them. Therefore, the Commander-in-Chief responded by signaling Jerram: “Follow our battle cruisers.” Jerram, who received the order at 8:07 p.m. and who at that moment could see neither Beatty nor Germans, turned to the south hoping to find one or the other. By this time, however, Beatty had lost whatever contact he thought he had with the German fleet.

  Then, just as the sun was setting, Beatty found the German battle cruisers only 10,000 yards away. At 8:12, all six British ships opened fire and all four German ships were hit, Seydlitz the hardest. A 13.5-inch shell from Princess Royal exploded on her open bridge, killing half the men there and covering the navigation charts with blood. The gyrocompass was smashed; as a result, Seydlitz, lacking charts and compass, her steering system failing, was blind and nearly helpless. The engagement also affected Hipper, still trying to resume command of his shattered squadron. Just before Beatty opened fire, Hipper had ordered his battle cruisers to stop engines so that his destroyer could come alongside Moltke. He was ready to board when suddenly 13.5-inch and 12-inch British shells plunged down nearby. The boarding attempt was instantly suspended so that Moltke and her sisters could begin to move. Once again, Hipper was forced to watch his squadron steam away.

  At 8:30 p.m., the plight of the crippled German battle cruisers attracted a group of Samaritans. Rear Admiral Mauve, seeing the helplessness of Hipper’s ships, seized his chance to be useful and steered his six old battleships into the fight. Beatty’s gunnery officers recognized the distinctive silhouettes of the predreadnoughts and shifted fire from the German battle cruisers to the obsolete ships. Three were hit: Schleswig-Holstein, Pomm
ern, and Schlesien; Posen, in turn, struck Princess Royal with an 11-inch shell. Then, their intervention having permitted the German battle cruisers to slip away, the old “five-minute ships” turned into the gloom. Beatty did not follow.

  The sun had set at 8:19 p.m. and the light was quickly fading. There was no chance of further fighting between the dreadnought fleets that day, but Jellicoe was certain that he would be able to finish the battle in the morning. That time would come soon; sunrise would arrive in five hours. Meanwhile, Scheer was trapped. The High Seas Fleet had reversed course three times and still found itself in the wrong place. Now, as darkness fell, 143 British warships lay between 93 German vessels and their safe return home.

  CHAPTER 33 Jutland: Night and Morning

  As darkness fell, Jellicoe was pleased with his situation. “I went back to the bridge from the conning tower at about 8:30 p.m.,” said Frederic Dreyer, captain of Iron Duke, “and spoke to Jellicoe and [Rear Admiral Charles] Madden [the Grand Fleet Chief of Staff], both of whom expressed satisfaction at the good firing of the Iron Duke. I found that they agreed that everything that had happened had been according to expectation.” In fact, things were far less rosy than Jellicoe supposed. The British battle cruiser force had been depleted by considerably more than the admiral actually knew; he had seen Invincible’s severed bow and stern sections rising from the water, but no one had informed him of the loss of Queen Mary and Indefatigable. Lion and Princess Royal each had one turret out of action and three turrets able to fire. Still, the British battle cruisers had served their essential purpose: they had brought Scheer to the Grand Fleet and had assisted in the reduction of their own natural enemies, Hipper’s battle cruisers, to floating wreckage. Warspite was returning to Rosyth, but the 5th Battle Squadron still carried twenty-four 15-inch guns. Marlborough had been torpedoed and had lost 4 knots of speed, but was still in action. Two armored cruisers had been lost—Defence blown up and Warrior disabled—and three destroyers had been sunk, with three others damaged and out of action. Otherwise, the Grand Fleet’s immense dreadnought battle line was almost untouched. Adding the three Queen Elizabeths and the surviving six battle cruisers, British supremacy was even more preponderant than when the battle started.

  Jellicoe’s purpose now was to preserve this supremacy through the night. Keenly aware that German ships were better equipped and trained for night fighting, the Commander-in-Chief at once decided to postpone renewal of the battle until morning. A battleship night action, he believed, “must have inevitably led to our battle fleet being the object of attack by a very large German destroyer force throughout the night.” To repel destroyer attacks at night required a coordinated effort by battleship searchlights and secondary armament (6-inch and 4-inch guns), aided if possible by a counterattack by friendly destroyers. The Germans were trained to do this. Searchlights and gun crews worked together: first, a thin, pencil beam would locate an enemy ship; then an iris shutter would snap aside, focusing the full beam of light on the target and, instantly, the guns would fire. Jellicoe had little confidence in the British fleet’s ability to match these techniques. “It was known to me that neither our searchlights nor their control arrangements were at this time of the best type,” he said. “[And] the fitting of Director Firing Gear for the guns of the secondary armament of our battleships had only just begun, although repeatedly applied for.” Further, he continued, “our own destroyers would be no effective antidote at night since . . . they would certainly be taken for enemy destroyers and fired on by our own ships.” In sum, Jellicoe believed that “the result of night actions between heavy ships must always be very largely a matter of chance as there is little opportunity for skill on either side. Such an action must be fought at very close range, the decision depending on the course of events in the first few minutes.” Later, he put it more bluntly in a letter to the First Sea Lord: “Nothing would make me fight a night action with heavy ships in these days of destroyers and long-range torpedoes. I might well lose the fight. It would be far too fluky an affair.”

  Having rejected a night battle with Scheer, Jellicoe turned to the question of where he would be most likely to find the German admiral at first light. Which of several escape routes was Scheer most likely to use? Four were possible. The first, the 344-mile voyage around the northern coast of Denmark into the Baltic, Jellicoe dismissed as being too long and dangerous for the numerous ships of the High Seas Fleet he knew to be seriously damaged. That left three routes within the North Sea that would bring Scheer back safely through the minefields, British and German, in the Bight. One was southeast to the Horns Reef light vessel, then back to the Jade behind the minefields of the Amrum Bank—a reversal of the path by which Scheer had come north the previous night. Although this route was the closest to the 9:30 p.m. position of the two fleets, Jellicoe doubted that Scheer would choose it. The Grand Fleet already blocked a German passage to Horns Reef, and Scheer’s fleet lacked the speed to get ahead and cut across in front of it. Was it likely that Scheer would attempt to force his way to Horns Reef through the middle of the British fleet? Jellicoe thought probably not. Twice that afternoon, Scheer had collided with the Grand Fleet battle line and both times he had immediately reversed course to get away. Jellicoe did not believe that he would try it again, even at night, and especially not when two other routes back to Germany were available. One of these lay southwest, toward the Ems, then east to Wilhelmshaven behind the German minefields; the other was due south, straight for Heligoland and the Jade Bay. Estimating that Scheer would choose one of these two, Jellicoe made his decision: “to steer south where I should be in a position . . . to intercept the enemy should he make for . . . Heligoland or towards the Ems.”

  Soon after nine o’clock, the British Commander-in-Chief closed up his battle fleet into night cruising formation and signaled a fleet speed of 17 knots. The dreadnoughts shifted out of their single line ahead and formed in three columns abreast, one mile apart; this was to ensure that the battleship divisions remained in sight of one another and to prevent ships mistaking one another for enemy vessels. In making these dispositions, Jellicoe did not exclude the possibility of some sort of night engagement; indeed, as Scheer was to his northwest, he expected torpedo attacks on his fleet from destroyers in that quarter. To shield his battleships from this threat, Jellicoe placed all of his own flotillas—fifty-eight destroyers—five miles astern of the battle fleet. He put them there, he said later, to “fulfill three conditions. They would be in an excellent position for attacking the enemy’s fleet should it turn . . . [toward Horns Reef] during the night. They would be in a position to attack enemy destroyers should the latter search for our fleet with a view to night attack on our heavy ships. Finally, they would be clear of our own ships, and the danger of attacking our battleships in error, or of our battleships firing on them, would be reduced to a minimum.”

  His dispositions made, Jellicoe signaled the fleet, “No night intentions,” leaving his admirals and captains to assume that they could expect four or five relatively quiet hours and a renewal of the battle at first light. The signal was welcome, although most men remained at action stations through the night. Sandwiches and tins of corned beef and salmon were handed out, along with mugs of traditional Royal Navy cocoa “made from dark slabs of rich chocolate of such a thick consistency that a spoon would stand up in it.” And on Iron Duke, an exhausted John Jellicoe lay down fully clothed to rest for a few hours on a cot in a shelter just behind the bridge.

  Surrounded by darkness on his own bridge, Reinhard Scheer was in a perilous situation. He was opposed by the entire Grand Fleet; he understood that if there was a battle in the morning, the Imperial Navy would be annihilated. The corollaries were plain: there must be no battle; somehow, he must escape. But there was little time; dawn would arrive at 2:00 a.m., and 3:00 would bring full daylight. Scheer knew other things about his enemy: he was aware that British warships, unlike his own, had not been trained to fight at night, and, therefore, that Jel
licoe probably would prefer to postpone battle until dawn. He knew that the British battle fleet was southeast of him, somewhere between eight and twelve miles away, in a position to block his fleet from returning home by that route. In Jellicoe’s course, Scheer saw his own impending doom—but also an opportunity. Jellicoe obviously had won the race to the south; if he, Scheer, continued in that direction, the British fleet would be able to deliver a terminal blow at dawn. But, Scheer conjectured, suppose he did not follow Jellicoe to the south. The nearest sanctuary, the entrance to the Horns Reef swept channel, lay to the southeast, only eighty-five miles away. Suppose, in the darkness, he were to turn southeast and somehow manage to avoid—or, if necessary, break through—the Grand Fleet and reach the Horns Reef lightship by daybreak. If this could be done, the High Seas Fleet could retreat down the Amrum Channel between the minefields and the sandbanks, and Jellicoe would be unable to follow.

  Scheer decided to try. He would turn southeast for Horns Reef, keeping his battle fleet in close order, hoping to pass unnoticed in the darkness astern of the Grand Fleet, but accepting the possibility of a night action if he failed. He would maintain this course regardless of losses. Meanwhile, his own destroyer flotillas would attack the British at every opportunity, sacrificing themselves so that his dreadnoughts could escape. At 9:10 p.m., Scheer initiated this plan with a signal sent out from Friedrich der Grosse: “Battle fleet’s course southeast by a quarter east. This course is to be maintained. Speed sixteen knots.” At the same time, he sent an urgent request to the Naval Staff asking for airship reconnaissance of Horns Reef at daybreak. Repeatedly during the night, the urgent command came from the flagship: “Durchhalten”—“Maintain the course.”