North Sea Battleground: The War at Sea 1914-1918

by Bryan Perrett

  At 17:45 on 23 January, therefore, Hipper emerged from the Jade anchorage with Seyditz, Moltke, Derfflinger and Blücher, the light cruisers Graudenz, Rostock, Stralsund and Kolberg, the heavy weather damage sustained by the last during the December operation having been repaired. Also present was a screening force of nineteen destroyers. Unknown to Hipper, Beatty’s 1st Battle Cruiser Squadron, consisting of Lion, Tiger and Princess Royal, Rear Admiral Moore’s 2nd Battle Cruiser Squadron with the slower New Zealand and Indomitable, and Commodore Goodenough’s 1st Light Cruiser Squadron weighed anchor only minutes later and sailed for a rendezvous, timed for 08:00 near Dogger Bank, with a force of cruisers and destroyers based at Harwich under Commodore Reginald Tyrwhitt. Unfortunately for the Germans, the Admiralty’s radio intercept operators in Room 40 has listened with interest to the most recent exchange between Ingenohl and Hipper, with the result that the latter was actually sailing into a trap. The wisdom of Beatty’s moving his battle cruisers south to Rosyth now became apparent as they rapidly closed the gap separating them from their opponents.

  At first light next morning Kolberg, steaming to port of the main body of the battle cruiser fleet, spotted a strange cruiser coming up from the south. The stranger was the light cruiser Aurora, part of the Harwich force. She flashed an unfamiliar recognition signal, to which Kolberg replied by opening fire, scoring two hits. Aurora responded at once and also began scoring hits. Aboard Seydlitz, his flagship, Hipper ordered a general turn toward the firing in the belief that he had found the British light forces that Eckermann had reported to Ingernohl. Hardly had the turn been completed than Stralsund, to starboard of the battle cruisers, reported a large quantity of smoke approaching from the north-north-west. Believing that its origin was British battleships, Hipper was not unduly concerned as he knew he could outrun them, but it continued to approach at speed and was closing fast. By the time the range had closed to 25,000 yards he suddenly realised that he had Beatty’s much faster battle cruisers on his hands. At 07:35 he gave the order to head for home.

  What followed was a stern chase in which the Germans were at an immediate disadvantage. Hipper’s slowest ship was the Blücher, capable of 23 knots, and some of his coalfired destroyers were no better. The three ships in Beatty’s squadron worked up to 27 knots and although Moore’s squadron was a little slower the Germans were being steadily overhauled. The British battle cruisers were echeloned to the left rear with Lion leading, then Tiger, then Princess Royal, then New Zealand and finally Indomitable, so that they did not obscure each other’s targets during the pursuit. Likewise, Beatty ordered his lighter ships not to penetrate the space between the opposing battle cruisers because their smoke would obscure the target. Even in 1915, using the wind was as important as it had been in Nelson’s time. As Hipper’s line was to port of Beatty’s, the north-easterly wind would blow the Germans’ funnel and gub smoke in the direction of their target, and an intervening screen laid by destroyers was quickly dispersed. Conversely, the British smoke would be blown clear to starboard, leaving the enemy ships in full view. At 08:52 Lion opened fire at 20,000 yards, followed by the rest of Beatty’s battle cruisers as they closed the range. Hipper’s ships were running in the order Seydlitz, Moltke, Derfflinge and Blücher. After several salvos had been fired, Blücher was straddled at 09:00 and received repeated hits as she was overtaken by the leading ships in Beatty’s line, but it was not until 09:11 that the German guns, with their shorter range, could begin to reply.

  At this point, with the British steadily drawing level with their opponents, Beatty’s command and control of the battle began to fall apart. He ordered his ships to engage their opposite numbers in the enemy line, intending this to be interpreted from the front with New Zealand and Indomitable both engaging Blücher at the rear. Unfortunately, Captain H.B. Pelly, commanding Tiger, interpreted the instruction in precisely the opposite way. This meant that Lion and Tiger were both firing at Seydlitz, no one was firing at Moltke, Princess Royal was firing first at Blücher and then at Derfflinger, and New Zealand and Indomitable were both firing at Blücher as they came up. What made matters worse was that the recently commissioned Tiger had not completed her gunnery trials, a process sorely needed as her gunnery officer was so bad that he treated Lion’s shell splashes as his own, which were three miles beyond their intended target. Tiger’s contribution to the battle, therefore, amounted to very little.

  Nevertheless, at 09:40 a shell from Lion penetrated the barbette of Seydlitz’s D turret and exploded, setting fire to propellant charges waiting to be loaded. The flames not only roared up into the turret and down into the magazine, but also through a connecting door to C turret that should have been closed. Only prompt flooding of both magazines saved the ship from being blown apart, but 165 men died a horrible death in the inferno.

  Lion was herself taking steady punishment from the concentrated fire directed at her and at 09:40 received several hits from a salvo fired by Derfflinger. The worst of these contaminated her port feed tank with sea water and she began to take a list to port. The port engine had to be stopped and as her speed fell away to 15 knots she was overtaken by Tiger and Princess Royal. In total, Lion sustained 14 hits one of which penetrated A turret and caused an ammunition fire which was fortunately extinguished before it could spread. Lion’s generators were also put out of action, leaving her signal lamps without power, and her radio antennae had been shot away, as had all but two of her flag hoists, which now remained Beatty’s sole remaining means of communicating with his command.

  At 10:54 there occurred one of those unexpected incidents that can affect the course of battles. Beatty thought he saw a submarine periscope off Lion’s starboard bow and ordered a 90 degree turn to port to avoid entering a U-boat trap. This may have been a torpedo that had run its course and surfaced when its fuel was exhausted, having been launched by a German destroyer earlier in the engagement. Whatever the truth, Beatty now realised that the turn ordered would increase the range between his ships and the enemy. He therefore decided to halve the turn to 45 degrees by signalling ‘Course NE.’ By now, Lion was trailing well behind his other ships and to clarify his intentions he decided to repeat Nelson’s signal, ‘Engage the enemy more closely.’ This had been deleted from the signal book and replaced with ‘Attack the rear of the enemy.’ Both signals went up at the same time reading, ‘Attack the rear of the enemy course NE.’ In the present circumstances, this was gibberish and could only have referred to the Blücher, which Hipper had abandoned to her fate and was being steadily battered into a wreck.

  It was now up to Beatty’s Second-in-Command, Rear Admiral Moore, to recognise the fact and use his initiative by maintaining the pursuit of the enemy. Instead, he decided to stick to the Navy’s code of strict obedience to orders and concentrated all his efforts into sending Blücher to the bottom. The lowest estimate of hits sustained by the cruiser was 50, the highest 70. Blücher fought to the bitter end, scoring two hits with her main armament on the British battle cruisers and damaging the destroyer Meteor so badly that she had to be taken in tow. The coup de grace was administered by Aurora with two torpedoes. Reducing to a blazing wreck, Blücher turned over on her beam ends and finally sank at 12:07. Of her 792-strong crew, only 237 were picked up by British destroyers. The number would have been greater had not a patrolling Zeppelin, L5, and a German seaplane attacked the rescuers with their bombs and machine guns, forcing them to abandon their efforts.

  Beatty had transferred his flag to the destroyer Attack but by the time he caught up with the battle Hipper’s remaining ships had increased their lead so much that any further pursuit had become pointless. He turned for home with the heavily damaged Lion under tow by the Indomitable. He had scored an undoubted success in which the enemy had lost a major unit and sustained over 1,000 casualties, whereas no British ships had been lost and casualties amounted to only 15 killed and 32 wounded.

  Naturally, both sides held an inquest into what had taken place. The Kaiser’s
fury knew no bounds as he raged against admirals who committed his ships to action before his soldiers had won the war, a prospect that seemed well within the bounds of possibility for a while. Ingernohl and Eckermann were sacked immediately, the former being replaced by Admiral Hugo von Pohl, an unpopular, arrogant individual in poor health who strongly advocated submarine warfare and in particular a U-boat blockade of the United Kingdom in preference to surface operations involving the High Seas Fleet. Such a change of policy outraged Tirpitz, who objected strongly to his creation being sidelined, but he lacked experience of active command and people were becoming very tired of his plotting, so he was sidelined himself. For the Imperial Navy, the one good thing to come out of Dogger Bank was that when Seydlitz was repaired the open trunking between turrets and magazines was equipped with doors that closed automatically once the shell and charge had passed upwards from the magazine. The same modification was applied to the rest of the battle cruisers and some battleships. Likewise, dangerous ammunition-handling procedures were eliminated. These defects also existed in similar British ships and would become horribly apparent the following year. The German operational analysis also accepted that Beatty’s regular appearance whenever Hipper put to sea was no accident, but remained unaware that their wireless codes were in British hands. After some discussion, it was decided that a British agent was active in the area of Jade Bay and possessed the means to transmit his findings to England.

  On the British side, Beatty believed that he had been robbed of a major victory. He could not blame Moore openly as his Second-in-Command had simply carried out his own specific orders, although a display of initiative on Moore’s part might have produced results. On the other hand, it might not. Leaving the destruction of Blücher aside, German main armament gunnery had scored 22 hits with heavy calibre shells, including 16 on Lion, whereas the British battle cruisers had scored only seven, albeit that these had produced devastating results. The possibility existed, therefore, that if the engagement had continued the British could have sustained further serious damage and even lost a ship or two, given Tiger’s wretched performance. Against this, Hipper was running short of ammunition and was not interested in prolonging the engagement. A difficult situation was resolved when Moore was posted away from the Grand Fleet to less exacting duties, without loss of rank. Further operational analysis resulted in a better target allocation system and the issue of emergency radios to replace those that might be damaged in action.

  These matters apart, a new dimension had entered the battle for the North Sea. The senior officers of the Imperial Navy’s air arm believed that the bombs dropped by their Zeppelin airships on targets in England would inflict more damage on civilian morale than periodic raids by the High Seas Fleet, and in the week prior to Dogger Bank had carried out a raid against Sherringham, Kings Lynn and Yarmouth with Zeppelins L3 and L4. Four people were killed, 13 were injured and several houses were damaged. It was known that the Germans used their airships for naval reconnaissance, but deliberately targeting civilians from the air was regarded as just another example of the enemy’s ‘fright-fulness.’ The ability to shock had been lost during the attacks on Scarborough, Whitby and the Harlepools, and attitudes to the enemy had hardened even further. What did cause concern was the apparent lack of defence against this form of attack, a deficiency which had to be remedied quickly.

  CHAPTER 8

  Scheer Strikes Back

  For the High Seas Fleet, the immediate consequence of the failure at Dogger Bank was that, for the moment, all but a handful of offensive operations became the responsibility of the submarine branch. With effect from 4 February 1915 all merchant vessels in British waters, including those of neutrals, were at risk of being attacked by U-boats. The United States promptly lodged an objection to such a policy, despite which the American tanker Gulflight was sunk on 1 May with the loss of two of her crew. On 7 May the British liner Lusitania was torpedoed and sunk without warning off the southern coast of Ireland. No less than 1,189 passengers and crew lost their lives, including 124 Americans. Although feelings ran high in the United States, it was generally accepted that the strong diplomatic protest delivered lost some of its force as a result of the German Embassy in Washington having issued a prior public warning that Americans should not travel aboard the ship. Again, in addition to her passengers, Lusitania was carrying a war cargo that included a quantity of small arms, ammunition and bullion. However, when four more Americans died when another British liner, the Arabic, was sunk on 19 August, there were no such mitigating factors and such was the fury generated in the United States that the German Admirals were forced to abandon the ‘unrestricted’ aspect of the submarine campaign, instructing its U-boats that they must only deliver their attacks on the surface. Despite this, yet more American deaths resulted from the torpedoing of the cross-Channel ferry Sussex on 24 March 1916. Washington’s reaction stopped just short of an ultimatum and, to avoid the United States’ probable entry into the war, the submarine campaign was abandoned the following month. This process was made a little easier by Pohl’s death on 23 February and his replacement by Admiral Reinhard Scheer, who felt that the High Seas Fleet should be making a greater contribution to the war.

  While no major surface operations had taken place in the North Sea since Dogger Bank, there was constant naval activity that included patrolling, mine-laying and minesweeping. By the spring of 1915 the northern entrance to and exit from the North Sea was being permanently patrolled by the Royal Navy’s 10th Cruiser Squadron which consisted of no less than 26 armed merchant cruisers. These were medium-sized merchant vessels ‘taken up from trade’ as the ancient wording of the requisition put it, well-enough armed with guns to give a good account of themselves if they ran into trouble. In 1915 they intercepted no less than 2,555 vessels of various nationalities, 743 of which were sent in for detailed investigation; in 1916 the figures were, respectively, 3,390 and 889.

  Another type of vessel, the Q ship, was also entering service. They were small, harmless-looking craft that might resemble a tramp steamer or a schooner. When a U-boat surfaced nearby, some of the crew would enact a panic and run to lower their boats. The Q ship would then unmask its cleverly concealed guns and reduce the U-boat to a sinking wreck before its own crew could man their deck gun. Naturally, when taken aboard, the German survivors complained that this was not playing the game.

  The German equivalent of the armed merchant cruiser was the commerce raider. Again, these were medium-sized merchantmen, generally mounting a heavier concealed armament than their opponents, and they had the ability to change their appearance quickly to match genuine vessels listed in Lloyd’s Register of Shipping. Most of their kills took place far from the North Sea, the most successful being Moewe, a former banana boat that was credited with sinking 122,000 tons of Allied shipping; Wolf, a former liner, was credited with 120,000 tons; and Seeadler, a harmless looking sailing ship that sank 18,000 tons. For fuel and rations, these and other raiders lived off their victims before sending them to the bottom.

  On the morning of 8 August 1915 one such raider, the Meteor commanded by Captain von Knorr, was returning to Germany after laying a minefield in the Moray Firth. Flying the Russian merchant flag, she was pursued by The Ramsay (sic), a 1,600-ton armed boarding vessel that in peacetime had conveyed holiday makers from Liverpool to the Isle of Man. She ordered the Meteor to stop and prepared to send a boarding party across. Down came the Russian flag, up went the German ensign, hatches clanged open to reveal the muzzles of guns that opened fire immediately, and four minutes later, having additionally been hit by a torpedo, The Ramsay was on her way to the bottom. Knorr picked up her survivors, supplied them with tobacco and held a funeral service for those who had died. The Meteor was run down by a light cruiser and scuttled before she could reach home, with Knorr making certain that his British passengers were picked up while he and his men made good their escape in a commandeered Swedish fishing boat.

  Another raider to be
caught was the Greif (Vulture), armed with four 5.9-inch guns and two torpedo tubes. She left the Elbe on 27 February 1916 following an unfortunate blaze of publicity arising from a personal visit by the Kaiser’s brother, Prince Henry of Prussia. She was also sighted by a British submarine and clandestine radio traffic to the effect that a commerce raider was leaving the Skagerrak may all have contributed to her destruction. At 09:15 on 29 February she sailed straight into a carefully set trap to the north-east of the Shetlands.

  Stopped by the armed merchant cruiser Alcantara, she identified herself as the Norwegian Rena, on passage between La Plata and Trondheim. Although her appearance corresponded with that of the Rena it was decided to send over a boarding party. As the boat was being hoisted out a signal was received from another armed merchant cruiser, the Andes, some fourteen miles distant, to the effect that Greif was the ship they were looking for. This was almost certainly listened to by the enemy’s radio operator, for Greif opened fire immediately, wrecking the boat and seriously damaging Alcantara’s steering.

  The raider had chosen a bad opponent, for Alcantara’s commander, Captain T.E. Wardle, had not only made her the best gunnery ship in the 10th Cruiser Squadron, she had already cleared for action. Round after round was slammed into the German raider until her guns were silenced, her upper works were ablaze and she was seriously down by the bows. Through the smoke, her crew could be seen taking to such boats as remained. Clearly, she was doomed for Andes was heading for the scene at full speed, followed by the cruiser Comus and the destroyer Munster. Unfortunately, Alcantara had also sustained a mortal wound, almost certainly from one of the enemy’s torpedoes and had begun to list heavily to port. She had not been built to withstand that sort of punishment and her list increased steadily until, at 11:08, she rolled over and sank. The survivors from both ships were picked up and at 13:00 Greif, now a smoke-shrouded inferno, went down with her colours flying.