Castles of Steel

by Robert K. Massie

  In the harsh arithmetic of war, the loss of two light cruisers to one side and four destroyers to the other meant little. For the Germans, it was the price of success. Scheer intended to ram his battle fleet through to Horns Reef at any cost and if this could be done in exchange for two light cruisers, the bargain was an excellent one. For the British, the destruction of a destroyer flotilla might have been acceptable had its sacrifice been made useful by someone telling the Commander-in-Chief whom the destroyers were fighting. But this did not happen. Extraordinarily, as the dark horizon was lit by gun flashes and rent by the noise of the cannonade, these battles were witnessed from many British ships, but no one reported the presence of German battleships to Jellicoe. For this failure, it is easier to forgive the destroyer captains. Desperately attempting to handle their small ships so as to keep formation, avoid shellfire, and aim and launch torpedoes, they had little time to compose and send messages. But the engaged destroyers were not the only witnesses. Between 11:15 p.m. and 1:15 a.m., others could have told the Commander-in-Chief that the High Seas Fleet was crossing in his wake. Seven battleships in the rear of the British battle line were only 6,000 yards from these engagements, and three of those battleships were the most powerful dreadnoughts in the British navy.

  The situation was this: by 10:00 p.m., Marlborough, wounded by a torpedo and no longer able to maintain the 17-knot fleet speed ordered by Jellicoe, had gradually slipped astern of the main body of the Grand Fleet. The other three dreadnoughts of her division, Revenge, Hercules, and Agincourt, remained behind with Marlborough, as did the three Queen Elizabeths of the 5th Battle Squadron, assigned to keep station on Marlborough. All of these ships were within point-blank range of Scheer’s battleships when they passed only three miles astern. No one had a better view than Malaya, the last ship in the British battle line, which saw and identified the German dreadnought Westfalen. According to Malaya’s captain: “At 11.40, [we] observed what appeared to be an attack by our destroyers on some big enemy ships steering the same way as ours. . . . The leading ship of the enemy . . . had two masts, two funnels and a conspicuous crane—apparently Westfalen class.” All of Malaya’s guns trained on the enemy battleship, and the gunnery officer asked permission to open fire. Captain Algernon Boyle refused. Like Arbuthnot during the Scarborough Raid, Boyle argued that what he could see must also be visible to the flagship Barham, two ships ahead, and that he must await orders to fire from his rear admiral, Evan-Thomas. A few minutes later, Boyle changed his mind and reported what he had seen to Evan-Thomas. But not to Iron Duke; Boyle believed that a captain should respect the chain of command and pass his observations to his own rear admiral, not directly to the Commander-in-Chief.

  In fact, Barham already had witnessed “constant attacks by torpedo craft on ships first to the west and then to the north.” So had Valiant, the third of the three Queen Elizabeths: “At 11.35 p.m., we observed heavy firing on our starboard quarter. . . . They appeared to be two German cruisers with at least two funnels and a crane amidships [the profile of German dreadnoughts] steering eastward at high speed. These cruisers then evidently sighted an unknown small number of British ships ahead of them, possibly a light cruiser and a few destroyers. . . . Both Germans switched on top searchlights and opened a very rapid and extraordinarily accurate fire on our light cruiser. She replied but was soon in flames fore and aft.” Evan-Thomas, watching these attacks from Barham’s bridge, had seen heavy firing behind him, “which I surmised to be attacks by enemy destroyers on our light cruisers and destroyers. . . . At 10.39, heavy firing was observed . . . and destroyers appeared to be attacking the cruisers. At 11.35 p.m., a further attack was seen . . . right astern.” Despite these observations, Evan-Thomas, who had twenty-four 15-inch guns at his command, did nothing. Years later, Barham’s captain attempted to justify his admiral’s behavior. He doubted “whether the various observations of enemy ships made by ships of our battle fleet ought to have been reported to the Commander-in-Chief. I was on the bridge all night with my admiral and we came to the conclusion that the situation was known to the C.-in-C. and that the attacks were according to plan. A stream of wireless reports from ships in company with the Commander-in-Chief seemed superfluous and uncalled-for. The unnecessary use of wireless was severely discouraged as being likely to disclose our position to the enemy. . . . This may have been an error in judgement but cannot be termed ‘amazing neglect.’ ”

  Still another British destroyer, Turbulent, was sunk—blown to pieces by twenty-nine 5.9-inch shells from the dreadnought Westfalen—during the High Sea Fleet’s continuing charge to the southeast. In all, two German light cruisers and five British destroyers were sunk during this phase of the battle, but not all of these ships went down suddenly; in most cases, the crews were taken off first by friendly vessels. This was not the case with two other warships, both large, one British and one German. Near the end of this dreadful night, two sudden, cataclysmic explosions obliterated these vessels, each with its entire crew of almost a thousand men. The first of these disasters occurred about midnight, during an intermission in the dreadnought-versus-destroyer battles. In the darkness, a solitary, large, four-funneled ship, the 13,500-ton British armored cruiser Black Prince, blundered smack into the center of Scheer’s battle line. After the turmoil at Windy Corner near 6:00 p.m. when the 1st Cruiser Squadron was scattered and Sir Robert Arbuthnot had led two of his four ships, Defence and Warrior, into a cataract of gunfire, Black Prince had turned northwest, traveled too far, and lost contact. Ever since, she had steamed south through the mist, hoping to find the British fleet. At last, near midnight, she discovered a group of dreadnoughts; but they were not English. Thüringen, Ostfriesland, and Friedrich der Grosse saw and recognized her, and their gunners prepared. Black Prince kept coming and, less than a mile away, flashed the British recognition signal. The reply was a dazzle of searchlights and a storm of shells at point-blank range. Black Prince’s two central funnels were shot away, and lurid red and yellow flames rose 100 feet in the air. But her engines still worked and, roaring like a furnace, she staggered back along the length of the German line, so close, said Scheer, watching from the bridge of Friedrich der Grosse, “that the crew could be seen rushing backwards and forwards on the burning deck.” Finally, the fire reached her magazines. She blew up with an incandescent white light and a gigantic thunderclap of noise; “a grand but terrible sight,” said Scheer. Her entire crew perished, 900 men.

  As dawn was breaking on the morning of June 1, this British disaster was matched by one equally dreadful for the German navy. By 1:45 a.m., Scheer’s battleships, still plowing relentlessly to the southeast, had worked their way around to the port quarter of the British fleet and now were crossing the path of another—and as it happened, the last—group of British destroyers between themselves and Horns Reef, twenty-eight miles away. In the early gray light, Captain Anselan Stirling of the destroyer Faulknor, leading the 12th Flotilla, sighted a shadowy line of large, dark ships on his starboard beam. They were battleships, the rear of the German battle line, where, in the confusion and darkness, Behncke’s battered superdreadnoughts had intermingled with Mauve’s fragile predreadnoughts. When one of these ships flashed the letter “K” in Morse code—the wrong recognition signal—Stirling knew that they were German. He did not make the same mistake other British captains had made that night. He wirelessed Jellicoe. At 1:56 a.m., Faulknor signaled, “URGENT. PRIORITY. Enemy’s battle fleet steering southeast. . . . My position ten miles astern of 1st Battle Squadron.” Not only did Stirling send this message; he sent it three times: at 1:56, 2:08, and 2:13 a.m. Unfortunately, Iron Duke received none of these signals, perhaps because of efficient German jamming. But informing the Commander-in-Chief was only half of Stirling’s duty, and he initiated the other half as well, signaling, “URGENT. I am attacking.” Conditions at that hour were nearly ideal for destroyer torpedo attack: it was too light for enemy searchlights to be useful, but still sufficiently dark to make it difficult
to aim at fast-moving targets. At 2:02, Stirling fired his first torpedo; two minutes later, the second; within a few minutes, he and his six destroyers had fired seventeen torpedoes at ranges of 2,000 to 3,000 yards. The torpedoes missed the big, important targets—König, Grosser Kurfürst, Kronprinz, and Markgraf—but a violent explosion shook the old predreadnought Pommern. “Amidships on the waterline of the Pommern appeared a dull, red ball of fire,” said an officer of the destroyer Obedient. “Quicker than one can imagine, it spread fore and aft, until, reaching the foremast and mainmast, it flared up the masts in big, red tongues of flames, uniting between the mastheads in a big, black cloud of smoke and sparks. Then we saw the ends of the ship come up as if her back had been broken.” Pommern was now in two sections; as her sister Hannover passed by, the stern was upside down, propellers and rudder high out of water. Part of the bow was still afloat ten minutes later, but there were no survivors. Eight hundred and forty-four men were lost.

  This was the last of the Jutland night actions in which British destroyers fought German battleships and light cruisers. In these fierce, chaotic struggles, the small British ships had done the best they could and had sunk one German battleship, three light cruisers, and two German destroyers at a cost of five of their own number. What they could not do was to bar or even seriously delay the High Seas Fleet in its determined lunge to escape.

  Through the night, the flicker of gunfire and the glare of distant searchlights were seen and heard throughout the British fleet. Some had no idea what was happening. “Every now and then out of the silence would come bang, bang, boom, as hard as it could go for ten minutes,” said a destroyer officer whose ship was not involved. “The flash of guns lit up the whole sky for miles and miles and the noise was far more penetrating than by day. Then you could see a great burst of flame from some poor devil, the searchlights switched on and off, and then perfect silence once more.” In their official reports after the battle, the captains of the dreadnoughts Hercules, Conqueror, Colossus, Superb, Thunderer, Téméraire, Bellerophon, Vanguard, and Canada all told of hearing gunfire and seeing the glare of searchlights, first to the northwest and then, as the night progressed, in an arc across the rear of the fleet. “A cruiser on fire . . . searchlight beams from her turned quite red by flames. . . . After midnight, there was intermittent firing on the port quarter, but otherwise the night passed without incident,” reported Bellerophon. Forty-five years after Jutland, Lieutenant William Jameson of Canada remembered that “violent action flared up in the darkness to the northwest, passed across our wake and died away towards the east. Something tremendous was going on only a few miles away, but to our astonishment (it surprises me still) the battle fleet continued to steam south.”

  As the hours passed and these scenes of fire and destruction were enacted and witnessed, their significance was universally misunderstood on the large British ships. The Commander-in-Chief and his senior officers all interpreted the commotion to the north to mean that, as expected, enemy destroyers were attacking from astern and were being beaten off by the British destroyers stationed there for that purpose. Jellicoe certainly did not wish to involve his own dreadnoughts in this battle; indeed, he wanted them as far from German destroyers as possible. The irony is that the German destroyer flotillas, the element of the High Seas Fleet that Jellicoe most feared and that had loomed so large in his night dispositions, played no part in the nighttime battle. Ten German destroyers actually left the battlefield early and returned to Kiel around the northern tip of Denmark. Through the rest of the night, the remaining German destroyers searched in vain for the British battle fleet. They found nothing, suffered no losses, and might as well not have been there.

  But Jellicoe did not know this. A destroyer battle to the rear of the fleet was what Jellicoe had said would happen—presumably it now was happening. And so, on board the flagship, no need to awaken the exhausted admiral to tell him that his expectation was being realized. Therefore, as his admirals and captains stood on their bridges, watching the fireworks and sipping their cocoa, the Commander-in-Chief lay resting undisturbed on his cot. And as daylight began to appear around 2:00 a.m., Reinhard Scheer completed his breakthrough across the wake of the British fleet.

  At dawn, the sea was calm, with a heavy mist and visibility under two miles. On the bridges of German warships, still sixteen miles away from Horns Reef, binoculars swept the horizon for the British fleet. To everyone’s surprise and enormous relief, it was not there. A great weight fell from Scheer’s shoulders, but he and his staff remained anxious. They appeared to have succeeded, but they were not yet home; the protection of the minefields was at 2:30 a.m., still an hour’s steaming away. When the head of the German battle line reached the Horns Reef light vessel, Scheer paused, waiting for Lützow, which had not been heard from. Then came the news that the battle cruiser had been abandoned; Scheer resumed his retreat. He had no choice. The battle cruiser squadron could no longer fight. In the 3rd Battle Squadron, three of the fleet’s most powerful dreadnoughts were heavily damaged and König, with a hole in her bow, was drawing so much water that she could not pass through the Amrum Bank channel until high tide. Only three fast light cruisers, Frankfurt, Pillau, and Regensburg, remained available. “Owing to the bad visibility, further scouting by airship could not be counted on,” Scheer wrote in his after-battle report. “It was therefore hopeless to try to force a regular action on the enemy. . . . The consequences of such an action would have been a matter of chance. I therefore abandoned any further operations and ordered a return to port.” This was postbattle bravado. Scheer had no intention of “forcing an action” on anyone; twice he had reversed course when faced by the might of the Grand Fleet, and he had no desire to face it again. His only wish was to get away, and his exhilaration after the battle stemmed not from any feeling of triumph but from thankfulness that he had escaped. Relieved and exhausted, Scheer ordered his battle cruisers south into the swept channel, followed fifteen minutes later by the old predreadnoughts and, after another fifteen minutes, by the rest of the fleet.

  On the way in, the High Seas Fleet passed safely over three British submarines lying on the bottom. The submarines, sent there as part of Jellicoe’s original plan for drawing the enemy out, had left Harwich on May 30 with orders to remain submerged until June 2. No one thought of amending these instructions and, as they received no news of the battle in progress, the submarine captains knew nothing of Jutland until they returned to Harwich on June 3. Despite avoiding this danger, the German fleet did not reach home without mishap. At 5:20 a.m., the dreadnought Ostfriesland struck a mine five miles from Heligoland. One man was killed and ten wounded, but the torpedo bulkheads held and, after sheering out of line, the battleship managed to limp into port.

  The main body of the High Seas Fleet reached the mouths of the Jade and the Elbe between 1:00 and 2:45 on the afternoon of June 1. Five battleships were left on outpost duty in Schillig roads, while damaged ships passed through the locks into the inner harbor. Already, the mood was becoming festive; as the flagship passed by, the crews of other ships lined their decks to cheer the admiral. In the flag cabin of Friedrich der Grosse, Scheer received reports that strongly indicated that three British battle cruisers had blown up and that Warspite also had been sunk. Exultant that he had inflicted these losses on a superior enemy, Scheer invited his officers to the bridge, where the tired admiral raised a glass of champagne to survival, to escape, and to what, by the following day, the German kaiser, press, and nation would be calling victory.

  Not every vessel in the High Seas Fleet returned with Scheer. Early light on June 1 found the giant battle cruiser Lützow sinking into a gray sea. Battered by twenty-four heavy shells, able to make only 7 knots, she had wandered away from the fleet. By 12:30 a.m., with more than 8,000 tons of water gurgling inside her hull, her bow was so low that waves washed over the fore turret. The dynamo room was flooded, eliminating electrical power and leaving the crew to work by candlelight. An attempt to mov
e the ship backward, stern first, in order to relieve pressure on forward internal bulkheads, had to be abandoned when, as the bow continued to sink, the stern and the propellers rose out of the sea. Fearing that his ship was about to capsize, Captain Harder called four accompanying destroyers alongside and ordered his crew of 1,040 men to board the small ships. Then, from a few hundred yards away, Harder ordered G-38 to fire two torpedoes. Lützow received the blows, rolled over, and went down while the ship’s company, watching from the destroyers, gave three cheers for the kaiser, three for Hipper and Scheer, and three for their ship. Then, across the empty water, they raised their voices in “Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles.”

  There were no cheers when Wiesbaden sank. Stubbornly afloat long after the Grand Fleet had passed her by, she lay rising and falling in a desolate sea. Twenty men hoping for rescue huddled together on deck in a cold northwestern wind. As the sea rose higher, the ship rolled ominously; at some time during the night, she rolled too far and went down. Everyone on board went with her except the chief stoker, who was picked up, delirious, thirty-eight hours later by a Norwegian steamer.