Castles of Steel

by Robert K. Massie

  The news reached London on the morning of June 6 and was on the street by noon. Kitchener—the blue-eyed, scarlet-faced soldier with the rampant mustache; the omnipotent war lord beckoning (“Your Country Needs You!”) from recruiting posters—was gone, drowned in the care of the navy. Jellicoe, struggling to deal with the repercussions of Jutland, sank into despondency. “I feel in a measure responsible as I ordered her movements,” he wrote to Jackson. “My luck is dead out for the present, I am afraid.”

  Beyond communiqués and headlines, who won the Battle of Jutland? Scheer and the Germans claimed victory by comparing the number of ships sunk and of seamen killed and wounded. Here, indeed, they had the advantage: Britain had lost fourteen ships (three battle cruisers, three armored cruisers, and eight destroyers), while the German navy had lost eleven (one battle cruiser, one predreadnought battleship, four light cruisers, and five destroyers). British casualties were much heavier: 6,768 men were killed or wounded, while the Imperial Navy lost 3,058. But significant footnotes must be appended to these figures. British personnel losses were higher because five large British ships suddenly blew up, each explosion destroying almost 1,000 men. Only one big German ship, Pommern, blew up in this manner; by contrast, the crippled battle cruiser Lützow sank only after her crew of more than 1,000 had been safely taken off. Further, there was the matter of proportional loss. The British had lost three battle cruisers and Germany only one, but two months after the battle Britain had seven battle cruisers ready for sea and Germany only two. The newest and best battleships of the High Seas Fleet had been heavily damaged and took weeks to repair. But of the twenty-four dreadnoughts of the British battle fleet, only one, Marlborough, had been sent to dry dock; of the other twenty-three, only one, Colossus, had been hit by two heavy German shells. The battle fleet’s casualties were two men from Marlborough killed and the arm lost by a leading seaman on Colossus. Nor, aside from the loss of the men on board, did the Admiralty mourn every one of its lost ships. The armored cruisers, especially, were not missed. Slow and vulnerable, as Fisher had predicted, able neither to fight nor to run, after Jutland the remaining ships of this species were scrapped.

  Besides, Jellicoe quickly made good his losses When Warspite went into dock at Rosyth, Queen Elizabeth came out. When Malaya went into the floating dock at Invergordon, Emperor of India came out. Barham was gone for a while, under repair at Devonport, but the dreadnought battleship Royal Sovereign, held back at Scapa Flow from Jutland, now was ready, and her sisters Resolution and Ramillies soon would join the fleet. Dreadnought herself, sent to join the Channel Fleet, could be brought back north. Among the battle cruisers, Princess Royal and Tiger went into the dockyard, but Australia came out. Repulse and Renown were completed in August and September. Across the North Sea, Scheer enjoyed no such quick replacement of his losses. His best three dreadnoughts, König, Grosser Kurfürst, and Markgraf, remained in dry dock for weeks; two of his four surviving battle cruisers, Derfflinger and Seydlitz, were not ready for sea until December, six months later. German light cruiser strength had been cut to six against Britain’s thirty. In sum, when ships available were added up on both sides, Britain’s superiority was as overwhelming as ever.

  What caused the disparity in ship losses at Jutland? After the war, the official German naval history declared that during the battle “the superiority of German gunnery is clearly evident.” Hipper’s battle cruisers did shoot well in the opening stages when visibility was much in their favor, but they became less accurate once they came under fire from the 15-inch guns of the 5th Battle Squadron. The gunnery of Beatty’s six battle cruisers was never more than mediocre, but when Jellicoe’s battle squadrons came into action, a few minutes of their massive cannonade was sufficient to make Scheer turn and run. Even so, given a rough balance in gunnery efficiency, why did the British fleet suffer losses so much heavier? Why was it unable to sink Seydlitz despite twenty-two hits with heavy-caliber shells? Or Lützow with twenty-four? How was it that Derfflinger got home, having been struck twenty-two times? In short, why were German ships nearly unsinkable? And, on the other side, why did three British battle cruisers blow up?

  From the beginning, Alfred von Tirpitz, who believed that “the supreme quality of a ship is that it should remain afloat,” had set out to build ships that would be unsinkable. Tirpitz had been willing to accept smaller-caliber guns for his battle cruisers and battleships in order to allow more weight for armor; accordingly, Derfflinger, a battle cruiser, was as well protected as Iron Duke, a battleship, and better protected than Tiger, a contemporary battle cruiser. Tirpitz’s approach was in direct contrast to Jacky Fisher’s philosophy that dreadnoughts of all types must be built to “Hit first!” and “Hit hard!” Fisher’s battle cruisers were built to overtake and destroy an enemy at long range with heavy guns. If, to achieve superior speed and striking power within a fixed tonnage, armor in British ships had to be sacrificed, so be it. And so it was: Queen Mary, of 27,000 tons, devoted 3,900 tons to armor, whereas Seydlitz, weighing 25,000 tons, carried 5,200 tons of armor. And, at Jutland, Queen Mary blew up while Seydlitz came home.

  But heavier armor was only one reason damaged German warships survived at Jutland. German armor was penetrated during the battle; the vessels remained afloat because designers and builders had subdivided their hulls into an extraordinary number of small watertight compartments. Seawater entering one compartment was contained and prevented from spreading to others. Bayern, a new German dreadnought battleship about to join the fleet, had six engine rooms and six boiler rooms, whereas Royal Sovereign, a new British battleship, had three of each. The price of this honeycomb of small, watertight compartments was paid in cramped living quarters for the crew; officers were packed in four or six to a cabin, and the men lived like tinned sardines. But the ships, even when battered into wreckage, remained afloat.

  Not all—or even most—of the blame for British losses at Jutland should be placed on thinner armor. There is no evidence that Indefatigable, Queen Mary, and Invincible blew up because German 11-inch or 12-inch shells penetrated their armored hulls and burst inside their magazines. Rather, the almost certain cause of these cataclysmic explosions was that the turret systems of British battle cruisers lacked adequate flashtight arrangements and that, in each of these ships, a shell bursting inside the upper turret had ignited powder waiting to be loaded into the guns, sending a bolt of flame flashing unimpeded down the sixty-foot hoist into the powder magazines. Assuming this to be true, blame lay not with the design of British ships but with the deliberate decision by captains and gunnery officers to discard the flashproof scuttles originally built into British dreadnoughts. The Royal Navy made a cult of gunnery. To win peacetime gunnery competitions, gun crews were encouraged to fire as rapidly as possible. Quick loading and firing required a constant supply of ammunition at the breech of the gun, and thus a continuous flow of powder bags moving out of the magazines and up the hoists to the guns. Safety became secondary; gunnery officers began leaving magazine doors and scuttles open to facilitate movement; eventually, in some ships, these cumbersome barriers were removed. But for this weakness none of the three battle cruisers might have been lost.

  If, before Jutland, the British Admiralty did not realize the importance of protecting magazines from powder flash, the Germans did. Both German and British turrets were penetrated by enemy shells during the battle; indeed, nine turrets on Hipper’s battle cruisers were pierced by British shells. Some of these turrets burned out as a result, but there were no magazine explosions.

  The Germans had profited from grim experience. At the Dogger Bank, sixteen months before Jutland, a 13.5-inch British shell had penetrated Seydlitz’s after turret. Powder in the turret caught fire, flashed below, and killed everyone in the two after turret systems, sending flames 200 feet above the ship. Only quick flooding of the magazines saved the ship. The Germans learned from this lesson and German warships were provided with antiflash protection for the hatches between handli
ng room and magazines. Thus, at Jutland, powder exploded and fires wiped out turret crews on Derfflinger and other ships, but the flames did not penetrate to the magazines and the ships did not blow up. Belatedly, the British understood and caught up. The navy rapidly installed flashtight scuttles, which operated like revolving doors, in magazine bulkheads and turret systems throughout the fleet.

  Seeking other reasons why German dreadnoughts would not go to the bottom, the British navy discovered one that was as unexpected as it was embarrassing: the ineffectiveness of its own armor-piercing shells. These heavy projectiles were designed to penetrate, but all too often at Jutland they broke up on initial impact with armor rather than piercing it and exploding inside a ship’s vitals. Bad fuses were to blame: they triggered the shell into bursting prematurely, on first hitting enemy armor. The Royal Navy knew nothing about this flaw until German gossip reached it by way of a neutral naval officer two months after Jutland. In August 1916, Beatty gave a lunch party aboard Lion anchored at Rosyth. One of the guests was a Swedish naval officer who until recently had been attached to the Swedish embassy in Berlin. In conversation, he told Ernle Chatfield that German naval officers considered British shells “laughable”; heavy shells had not penetrated their armor but had “broken to pieces” on it. Chatfield, “hardly able to restrain myself till the guests had gone,” hurried to tell Beatty. The Admiralty ordered the design of a new armor-piercing shell with a thicker head and a better fuse, which would reliably carry the bursting charges through ten and twelve inches of armor plate and then burst fifteen to twenty feet beyond. These shells, called the “green boys” for the color of their paint, doubled the power of the Grand Fleet’s heavy guns, but they did not arrive in numbers until April 1918, seven months before the end of the war. None of the 12,000 eventually produced was fired at an enemy ship.

  Suppose that Jellicoe had won the annihilating victory the nation and the navy expected. What might this have led to? The extreme assertion—that if the German fleet had been destroyed at Jutland, the war would have ended then and there—ignores, among numerous other considerations, the fact that the annihilating British victory at Trafalgar did not prevent France and Napoleon from continuing to make war for another ten years. As a practical matter, an absolute victory at Jutland in 1916 would have released thousands of British soldiers held in England by fear of a German invasion or a small-scale landing. Elimination of the High Seas Fleet might conceivably have opened the way into the Baltic, as it was the German battle fleet that barred the Kattegat to British surface ships. A British Baltic expedition probably would have suffered heavy losses to mines and submarines, but an open supply route to the hard-pressed Russians might have affected the events leading to the 1917 revolution. In addition, a British fleet in the Baltic would have tightened the blockade of Germany by preventing iron ore and other war materials from crossing from Sweden. In the North Sea and the Atlantic, annihilation of the High Seas Fleet would have deprived the U-boats of their main support; Scheer himself admitted that without the surface fleet to shield Germany’s ports and coastline, the U-boats might have been mined into their own harbors.

  Reversing the question, what did failure to eliminate the German surface fleet cost Great Britain and the Royal Navy? It meant that the Grand Fleet had to continue to be maintained in enormous strength, absorbing thousands of trained seamen and dozens of destroyers that otherwise could have been released to fight submarines. Without the need to build more warships, the shipyards of the Clyde and the Tyne would have been free to produce the merchant shipping essential to replace the heavy toll being extracted by U-boats. And so on, as in all of history’s ifs. But the High Seas Fleet escaped.

  In the months and years after Jutland, a curious thing happened in Britain. Because of the blurred nature of the British victory, a bitter, divisive argument arose as to which British admiral, Beatty or Jellicoe, was responsible. The Jutland Controversy, as it came to be called, began immediately after the battle, when some London journalists trumpeted that Beatty had practically won the battle before Jellicoe came up and lost it. The fact is that if any British admiral had been “defeated” at Jutland it was Beatty, who led ten capital ships into action against Hipper’s five and suffered the loss of two with heavy damage to others. But for the press, Beatty could not become a scapegoat. Beatty was “Our David,” the dashing, victorious admiral, the hero of the Bight and of the Dogger Bank, always willing, even eager, to welcome journalists on board his flagship. If Beatty’s forces had suffered the heaviest British losses, then Beatty must have been an underdog, facing tremendous odds. He had brilliantly delivered Scheer’s vessels into the jaws of the Grand Fleet only to see the opportunity to annihilate them thrown away. Beatty had achieved a historic victory, he was the man of the hour, another Nelson. Once this legend was established, the culprit was easy to find: the overcautious, defensive-minded Commander-in-Chief, famous for his antipathy toward journalists and dislike of their visits to the fleet at Scapa Flow.

  For the men in the fleet, the result of the battle had been a terrible disappointment. The enemy had appeared before their guns, they were in a position to annihilate—and then, the Germans had disappeared. Still, the faith of the fleet in the Commander-in-Chief remained unshaken. Captain William Fisher of the dreadnought St. Vincent wrote to Jellicoe the day after the battle, “May I go outside strict service custom and say that every officer and man in St. Vincent believes in you before any one.” William Goodenough, commodore of Beatty’s light cruisers, wrote, “God bless you, Sir. I have never felt so bound to you in affection and respect than at this moment.” Many retired admirals, including the mutual antagonists Fisher and Beresford, sent congratulations. “Your deployment into battle was Nelsonic and inspired,” Fisher wrote, “and in consequence you saved Beatty from destruction and in one hour—given vision—you would have ensured Trafalgar.” From the Admiralty, Balfour consoled him: “You were robbed by physical conditions of a victory which, with a little good fortune, would have been complete and crushing and I feel deeply for your disappointment. But . . . you have gained a victory which is of the utmost value to the Allied cause.” Jellicoe himself, having eaten only half a loaf, refused to be cheered up. To the First Lord, he offered to submit to an investigation: “I hope that if my actions were not considered correct, you will have no hesitation in having them enquired into,” adding, “I often feel that the job is more than people over fifty-five can tackle for very long.” On his way south to visit the Admiralty, he stopped at Rosyth and came on board Lion where, according to Beatty, Jellicoe put his head in his hands and confessed, “I missed one of the greatest opportunities a man ever had.”

  Beatty’s behavior toward Jellicoe after the battle operated on two levels. On the surface, he was supportive and condoling. “First, I want to offer you my deepest sympathy in being baulked of your great victory which I felt was assured when you hove in sight,” he wrote on June 9. “I can well understand your feelings and that of the Battle Fleet, to be so near and miss is worse than anything. The cussed weather defeats us every time. . . . Your sweep southward was splendid and I made certain we should have them at daylight. I cannot believe now that they got in the northeast of you. . . . It was perhaps unfortunate that those who sighted the enemy to the northward did not make reports. . . . I do hope you will come here in Iron Duke soon, it would do us from top to bottom great honour to know that we have earned your approbation. . . . We are part of the Grand Fleet and would like to see our Commander-in-Chief. . . . Please come and see us and tell us that we retain your confidence.”

  Beneath the surface, however, Beatty was seething. Convinced that, through excessive caution, Jellicoe had robbed him of the victory he thought he had won, he raged about his superior. Dannreuther of the Invincible saw Beatty at Rosyth after the battle: “I spent an hour or more alone with him in his cabin on board the Lion, while he walked up and down talking about the action in a very excited manner and criticising in strong terms the act
ion of the Commander-in-Chief in not supporting him. I was a young commander at the time and still regard that hour as the most painful in my life.” Six months later, when Beatty succeeded Jellicoe as Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Fleet, his feelings had not subsided. A farewell letter to Walter Cowan, captain of Princess Royal, contained a nasty innuendo: “As you well know, my heart will always be with the battle cruisers who can get up some speed, but I’ll take good care that when they are next in it up to the neck that our Battle Fleet shall be in it too.”

  Some of Jellicoe’s Grand Fleet supporters responded in kind. A lieutenant complained to his diary of the “arrogant, slipshod” battle cruisers. Rear Admiral Alexander Duff of the 4th Battle Squadron wrote: “There is no doubt that before May 31, the Battle Cruiser Force were swollen headed and truculent and their own idea was to annihilate the High Seas Fleet . . . with just sufficient support of battleships, all to be under the command of Beatty. The game was to be kept in their hands, we were not even to be spectators. With this end in view, Beatty persuaded the C-in-C to give him the 5th Battle Squadron. Then came May 31 when the German battle cruisers severely mauled ours and Beatty did not make use of the 5th Battle Squadron as support; in fact, he left them to their own devices.”

  Eventually, Beatty’s feelings percolated high enough to deny Jellicoe immediate promotion to Admiral of the Fleet, the usual reward for a successful admiral.

  [In a letter to a friend, Ethel Beatty wrote, “Now that it is all over, there seems very little to say except to curse Jellicoe for not going at them as the battle cruisers did and never stopping until we had annihilated them. I hear he was frightened to death in case he might lose a battleship. I think the real truth [is] he was in a deadly funk and of course it makes one perfectly sick with the Admiralty trying to make out he is a great man and did all he could and that he is a great leader. He failed hopelessly. . . . It makes one so furious. I feel I can’t bear it.”