Castles of Steel

by Robert K. Massie

  To prepare for the nocturnal breakthrough, Scheer realigned his ships. Westfalen and her undamaged sisters, Nassau, Rheinland, and Posen, were in the van; Scheer’s flagship, Friedrich der Grosse, remained in the middle. Mauve’s slow predreadnoughts were ordered to the rear, out of the way. For the same reason, the mangled battle cruisers also were sent to the rear. By now, Lützow and Seydlitz were incapable of renewing action. Lützow had received forty large-caliber hits, Seydlitz twenty-four shell hits and a torpedo. Steering erratically with a broken gyrocompass, she fell behind Moltke in the dark and was left on her own. Derfflinger, with 3,400 tons of water aboard and only one turret ready for action, trailed the toothless Von der Tann. Of Scheer’s battleships, König had been hit by ten heavy projectiles, while Grosser Kurfürst, Markgraf, and Kaiser had received fifteen hits among them. Wiesbaden was sinking and four destroyers had been sunk.

  Meanwhile, at 9:32 p.m., Lion—so a number of historians have written—unintentionally handed the Germans a valuable gift. Out in front of Jellicoe’s battle fleet, Beatty’s flagship signaled by flashing lamp to Princess Royal, her next astern: “Please give me challenge and reply now in force . . . as they have been lost.” Princess Royal obediently signaled back the current identification signal. That much is certain; Lion’s request and her sister’s compliance are both recorded in The Battle of Jutland Official Despatches. What, if anything, happened next is less certain. It is frequently said that because neither British battle cruiser knew that two miles away in the darkness, a sharp-eyed signalman aboard the German light cruiser Frankfurt was watching, the British signal was intercepted and immediately distributed to the whole German fleet: “First sign of enemy challenge is UA.” If true, this would have given the Germans a second advantage: not only were their ships and crews equipped and trained to fight at night while the British were not, but they also would have been able to recognize and use the British challenge. Andrew Gordon considers German interception “implausible” for a number of technical reasons. And neither of the official naval histories of the war, British (Corbett) or German (Groos), mentions that the Germans saw this exchange of signals.

  As Jellicoe steamed south and Scheer drove relentlessly southeast for Horns Reef, the two fleets were converging, their tracks forming the two sides of a long, narrow “V,” with the British fleet, moving 1 knot faster than the German, drawing slowly ahead. Because the British battleships reached the bottom of the “V” and passed through it about fifteen minutes before Scheer’s battleships arrived, “the ‘V’ became an ‘X’ . . . neither side was conscious of what was happening,” and the two lines of dreadnoughts did not meet and engage. Nevertheless, with each side unaware that their pathways were crossing, spasms of sudden, ferocious violence erupted between smaller ships. The first came at 10:15 p.m. when Commodore William Goodenough and others on the bridge of the light cruiser Southampton became aware of the presence of unknown ships in the darkness to starboard. For a few moments, four British light cruisers and five German light cruisers steamed parallel to each other, only 800 yards apart, each side uncertain of the identity of the other. Finally, Goodenough said, “I can’t help who it is. Fire!” Dublin fired, and almost simultaneously a dozen brilliant German searchlights illuminated the head of the British line. “Those who have not experienced it cannot possibly understand the overpowering effect of searchlights being in our face with gunfire at what was really point-blank range,” said a young officer. Four German light cruisers concentrated on Southampton, smothering Goodenough’s flagship with shell bursts and carpeting her decks with dead and wounded men. Despite this damage, the beleaguered British vessel managed to fire a torpedo, which hit the old light cruiser Frauenlob, a survivor of the Battle of the Bight. Frauenlob sank with her entire crew of 320 men.

  After the war, Lieutenant Stephen King-Hall of Southampton gave this account of the action:

  A signalman suddenly whispered: “Five ships on the beam.” The Commodore looked at them. . . . From their faint silhouettes, it was impossible to discover more than the fact that they were light cruisers. . . . We began to challenge; the Germans switched on coloured lights at their fore yardarms. A second later, a solitary gun fired from Dublin. . . . I saw the shell hit a ship just above the waterline 800 yards away. . . . At that moment, the Germans switched on their searchlights and we switched on ours. Before I was blinded by the lights in my eyes, I caught sight of a line of light grey ships. . . . The action lasted three and a half minutes. The four leading German ships concentrated on Southampton. . . . The range was amazingly close. . . . There could be no missing . . . but to load guns there must be men, flesh and blood . . . and flesh and blood cannot stand high explosives. . . . The German shots went high, just high enough to burst on the upper deck around the bridge and after superstructure. . . . Another shell burst on the searchlight just above us. . . . Fragments scoured out the insides of the gun shields of the two 6-inch guns manned by Marines. Then . . . the flash of an exploding shell ignited half a dozen rounds of powder. It became lighter than day. I looked forward. Two pillars of white flame rose aloft. One roared up the foremast, the other reached above the tops of the second and third funnels. This, then, was the end. . . . It was bad luck, but there could be no doubt; the central ammunition hoist was between those two funnels. What was it going to feel like to blow up? What ought one to do? . . . The two pillars of flame wavered and decreased in height. . . . I ran to the boat deck to get to the fire and tripped over a heap of bodies. I got up, tried not to tread on soft things, and arrived at the boat deck. The firing had ceased. . . . Everything was pitch black . . . nothing but groans from dark corners. The Germans had fled. They fled because our Torpedo Lieutenant had fired a 21-inch torpedo. At forty-one knots, the torpedo, striking the Frauenlob, had blown her in half.

  Southampton had lost thirty-five killed and forty-one wounded, and she had also lost her wireless, the means by which Goodenough had tried to keep Jellicoe informed. In any case, this phase of the battle—in which Southampton was severely damaged and Frauenlob sunk—had occurred more or less between equals: light cruisers against light cruisers. The desperate clashes that followed would pit unequal adversaries: 900-ton British destroyers against 20,000-ton German dreadnought battleships.

  Through the night, Room 40 continued to intercept and decode German signals and pass them along to the Admiralty Operations Staff, where ignorance and incompetence held firm. Messages, accurate and inaccurate, were sent to Jellicoe during the night; it was left to the Commander-in-Chief to sort out which was which. Worse, vital and accurate information available in London was never sent at all. At 9:55 p.m., the Admiralty supplied Jellicoe with accurate information: “Three [German] destroyer flotillas have been ordered to attack you during the night.” This signal buttressed Jellicoe’s view of what was likely to happen and when, as the night progressed, he heard the sounds of battle astern of his main fleet, he believed they were the result of these German destroyers trying to break through his own destroyer screen to the rear. Then, three minutes later, the Admiralty sent Jellicoe information that the Commander-in-Chief knew to be false. The German battle fleet, London advised, was ten miles southwest of Iron Duke. This message increased Jellicoe’s already substantial distrust of Admiralty intelligence. He knew that Scheer’s fleet lay northwest of him, not southwest, and, he said, “I should not for a moment have relied on Admiralty information of the enemy in preference to reports from ships which had actually sighted him to the northwest.”

  Meanwhile, the Admiralty had deciphered Scheer’s 9:10 p.m. signal and at 10:41 p.m., Jellicoe was informed—accurately—“German battle fleet ordered home. . . . Battle cruisers in rear. Course south southeast. Speed sixteen knots.” “South southeast” clearly pointed to Horns Reef. If this was true and if Scheer was to Jellicoe’s northwest—as Jellicoe knew he was—the German fleet must somehow cross the track of the Grand Fleet to reach this sanctuary. By now, however, Jellicoe’s confidence in intelligence coming fro
m the Operations Division was so thoroughly shaken that he did not believe the Admiralty signal. Thus, later that night, when the sounds of heavy gunfire astern reached Iron Duke, the Commander-in-Chief assumed that they emanated from the expected German destroyer attacks on his screen, not from Scheer’s main fleet attempting to force its way through the rear of his own huge formation. In any case, if German battleships were engaging his destroyers, he assumed that reports of battleship sightings would come pouring in to the flagship. And there were no such reports.

  The crucial message that never came from the Admiralty that night was one telling Jellicoe that Room 40 had intercepted and decoded Scheer’s request for zeppelin reconnaissance over Horns Reef at dawn. Coupled with the previous message giving Scheer’s southeasterly course, this could have left no doubt as to the path by which the High Seas Fleet was returning home. Jellicoe said later, “The lamentable part of the whole business is that, had the Admiralty sent all the information which they acquired . . . there would have been little or no doubt in my mind as to the route by which Scheer intended to return to base. As early as 10:10, Scheer’s message to the airship detachment . . . was in the possession of the Admiralty. This was practically a certain indication of his route but it was not passed to me.” Elsewhere he said, “Of course, if the Admiralty had given me this information, I should have altered in that direction during the night.” As it was, assuming that he was keeping between Scheer and his base and that the British fleet would finish the battle in an all-day gunnery duel beginning at dawn, Jellicoe continued south forty miles in the wrong direction.

  The message requesting airship reconnaissance was only one of seven German operational signals revealing Scheer’s course or position between 10:43 p.m. and 1:00 a.m. that were intercepted that night by Room 40, but not forwarded to Jellicoe. Another signal containing crucial evidence was that from the commodore of all German destroyers, ordering his flotillas to assemble at Horns Reef by 2:00 a.m. This too was intercepted, but not passed to Jellicoe. Personal responsibility for this gross Admiralty failure—Arthur Marder calls it “criminal neglect”—was never officially assigned. Captain Thomas Jackson—he of the general contempt for cryptographers and signals intelligence—was not present in the War Room that night. Admiral Oliver, the Chief of Staff, charged with approving Admiralty messages sent to the Commander-in-Chief, “had left the War Room for some much-needed rest and had left in charge an officer who had no experience of German operational signals.” Seeing no special significance in these decoded messages, this officer carefully placed them in an Admiralty file.

  In the hour before midnight, when the darkness was intense and neither side knew where the other was, the leading battleships of the High Seas Fleet began to converge on the British destroyers screening the rear of the Grand Fleet. At 11:20, the lead vessels of Jellicoe’s 4th Flotilla became aware of unknown ships approaching on their starboard quarter. Some appeared to be light cruisers, some larger. Believing the ships were British, Tipperary, the flotilla leader, waited until they were only 700 yards away and then flashed the recognition challenge. Instantly, three German battleships, Westfalen, Nassau, and Rheinland, and three light cruisers, Hamburg, Rostock, and Elbing, switched on an array of searchlights, most aimed at Tipperary. Then, the battleships’ secondary armament burst out; within four minutes, Westfalen alone fired 150 5.9-inch shells. Tipperary burst into flames. Every new hit stoked the fires, and for several hours the misshapen but still floating mass of wreckage continued to burn.

  As the British destroyers astern of Tipperary swerved to avoid the blazing wreck, they used their 4-inch guns to rake the superstructures of their massive opponents, hitting bridges, searchlight stations, and signal flag positions. The destroyers also launched torpedoes; one, they believed, hit Elbing, which nine hours earlier had fired the first shot in the battle. (Afterward, the Germans declared that the cruiser was never torpedoed.) In accordance with High Seas Fleet procedure when under torpedo attack, the German dreadnoughts turned away, from southeast to southwest. The German light cruisers, avoiding the torpedoes as well as they could, steered for the gaps in the line of their own battleships. Elbing misjudged and was rammed by the dreadnought Posen. The bow of the battleship sliced into the light cruiser, flooding both engine rooms, stripping Elbing of power, and leaving her adrift.

  The destroyer Spitfire, which had been just astern of Tipperary, found herself confronting the dreadnought Nassau. Tormented by the torpedoes, Nassau turned at full speed to ram. The two ships collided port bow to port bow, the impact rolling the destroyer over, almost, but not quite enough, to swamp her. Then, alongside her little antagonist, Nassau fired her two huge forward turret guns. She was too close; the gun barrels would not depress sufficiently to hit the destroyer with shells, but even so, Spitfire bore the weight of Nassau’s rage. The concussion of muzzle blasts at close range and maximum depression swept away the destroyer’s bridge, foremast, funnels, boats, and searchlight platform. Everyone on the bridge except the captain and two seamen was killed. Then, with a screech of tearing metal, the dreadnought surged down the destroyer’s port side, bumping, scraping, and stripping away everything including boats and davits, “and all the time she was firing her guns just over our heads.” Eventually Nassau cleared Spitfire’s stern and disappeared into the darkness, leaving twenty feet of upper deck plating on the destroyer’s forecastle. Spitfire had lost sixty feet from the side of her hull, but remained afloat and was able to make 6 knots. Thirty-six hours later, she reached the Tyne.

  Scheer was undeterred by these episodes. When the British torpedo attack forced the German battle line to turn away, the Commander-in-Chief immediately signaled Westfalen to resume course southeast for Horns Reef. Nothing must be allowed to divert the fleet from this course. Swinging back, the leading German battleships once again clashed with the 4th Flotilla. With the destruction of Tipperary, leadership of the flotilla had passed to the destroyer Broke, which almost immediately sighted a large ship on a crossing course half a mile away. Uncertain of the ship’s identity despite its two funnels and a massive amidships crane—the distinctive profile of German dreadnoughts—Broke’s captain gave the order to challenge by searchlight. As he spoke, the stranger switched on a vertical string of colored lights, a signal unknown in the British fleet. Then the terrible sequence repeated itself and the 4th Flotilla was further dismembered: “A blaze of searchlights straight into our eyes . . . so great was the dazzling effect that it made us feel helpless,” said Broke’s navigating officer. Then came a hurricane of shells, this time from the light cruiser Rostock and the dreadnoughts Westfalen and Rheinland. Broke managed to fire one torpedo before she was smashed. Everyone on her bridge was killed. The wheel was shattered, jamming the rudder to port, leaving the ship out of control and turning in a circle, still at high speed. Sparrowhawk, just astern, was about to fire her own torpedoes when she saw Broke careening toward her at 28 knots. There was no time to get out of the way; Broke’s bow rammed Sparrowhawk just in front of the bridge. The force of the blow catapulted twenty-three men from the Sparrowhawk across onto the forecastle of Broke’s embedded bow. With the two destroyers locked together and each ship believing that she was sinking, men from each ship were sent across to the other to save their lives. As Broke began backing astern to disengage, the destroyer Contest appeared out of the dark and could not avoid the entangled pair. Sparrowhawk was rammed again, this blow slicing off six feet of her stern. Eventually, Broke and Contest both extricated themselves and limped away. Sparrowhawk, now lacking both bow and stern, lay where she was, lit by the flames of the burning Tipperary. Around 2:00 a.m., Tipperary, abandoned by her crew for life rafts or the open sea, foundered and sank. Twenty-six of her survivors were taken aboard the mutilated Sparrowhawk, which after the failure of an attempt by the destroyer Marksman to tow, continued to drift until the following day she too was abandoned and sunk. The survivors of both ships were taken aboard Marksman and eventually reached Scotland. Meanwhile,
Broke, with a crumpled bow, heavy shell damage, and half her crew dead or wounded, managed in Spitfire’s wake to creep back to the Tyne. Four of the 4th Flotilla’s destroyers were out of action, but the survivors extracted revenge when a torpedo from the destroyer Achates hit the light cruiser Rostock. She limped away and, with her crew taken off by a destroyer, sank at 4:25 a.m.

  A second time, Scheer’s battle fleet had swung off course, and once again the stern command “Durchhalten!” went out from the flagship. As a result, the German line again rammed through the 4th Flotilla, or what remained of it. Again, the British destroyers used their 4-inch guns against the searchlights and superstructures of Westfalen, Rheinland, Posen, Oldenburg, and Helgoland. Every man on Oldenburg’s bridge was hit. Captain Hofner, bleeding heavily, staggered forward and took the wheel himself until help came.

  Back on course, the ships in the German van hoped that the torpedo danger was over. It was not. Ardent and Fortune, separated from their 4th Flotilla consorts in the first attack, were searching for them. Now, Ardent’s captain said, they found “four big ships on a nearly parallel, but slightly converging course. They challenged several times and their challenge was not an English one. They then switched on their searchlights, picked up Fortune and opened fire. . . . Fortune was hard hit. . . . We caught a last glimpse of Fortune on fire and sinking but fighting still.” Separated again, searching again, Ardent discovered “a big ship steaming on exactly the opposite course to us. I attacked at once and from a very close range our remaining torpedoes were fired, but before I could judge the effect, the enemy switched on searchlights and found us. . . . I then became aware that Ardent was taking on a division of German battleships. . . . Our guns were useless against such adversaries, our torpedoes were fired; we could do no more but wait in the full glare of the blinding searchlight for the shells. . . . Shell after shell hit us and our speed diminished and then stopped . . . all the lights went out. I could feel the ship was sinking.” Of Ardent’s company, only two men, one her captain, survived. This marked the end of the 4th Flotilla’s part in the battle. The twelve destroyers had done their best; now four were sunk or sinking, three others were heavily damaged, and the rest were scattered. In effect, the flotilla had ceased to exist.