Jutland_The Unfinished Battle

by Nicholas Jellicoe

  Six weeks later they got their chance. Again the British were waiting, having received advance warning through radio intercepts, this time off the Dogger Bank. This is a large, elongated stretch of shallow waters, sixty miles off England’s northeast coast, that stretches 160 miles towards the northern Danish coast. The Germans were caught by surprise, turned away, and were immediately involved in a prolonged stern chase from Beatty’s ships.

  The older, slower, armoured cruiser Blücher was badly damaged and clearly not far from her end but due to a mix-up on the heavily damaged Lion, caused by Beatty’s signals officer, Ralph Seymour, the British stopped to finish off Blücher rather than continue the chase. Beatty felt that only two of his battle-cruisers, New Zealand and Indomitable, were needed to do the job. Blücher sank with 880 lives lost, but Beatty was bitterly disappointed. The bigger prize had got away: Hipper had been on Seydlitz, which was badly battered and suffered a turret explosion. Ingenohl, holding off at distance with the battle fleet, did not come to Hipper’s aid. Rather, he turned tail. He was replaced as commander-in-chief by his chief of staff, Hugo von Pohl; this should have happened after the Scarborough raid.

  Submarines: the short-lived gentlemen’s war

  At the outbreak of war, neither the British nor the Germans knew the potential power of a relatively new weapon: the submarine. At first, British merchantmen losses were minimal. The war was fought with chivalry. A U-boat would surface, fire a warning shot or threaten its target ship. Papers would be exchanged, and the crew taken off and usually towed to safety. These were the accepted rules of the sea. In fact, when the first merchant ship Glitra was sunk by U.17, her commander, Kapitänleutnant Feldkirchner did not know whether he would be reprimanded or treated as a hero. Yet it was as a result of his actions that the British declared the war zone that triggered unrestricted submarine warfare. In January 1915 the Germans sent out three submarines, U.19, U.20 and U.21, specifically to target merchant shipping. While the conduct of U.19 and U.21 was impeccable, Kapitänleutnant Droeschers on U.20 was not. His third target, SS Oriole, was torpedoed with the loss of all her crew.

  At first, submarines were not thought of by the British as easily employable against commerce at all, and their operating range had been badly underestimated. The British soon woke up. The war was only four days old when Monarch reported spotting a U-boat five hundred miles north of Heligoland, south of Fair Isle. The next day, on 9 August, the same U-boat (U.15) was rammed and sliced in two by HMS Birmingham. Another U-boat failed to return home from this first sortie across the North Sea.

  The toll on the Germans was high, but the British were alarmed. Up until now it had not been thought that the fleet anchorages this far north could be threatened. Now, without adequate countermeasures such as depth-charging, or even adequate detection, such as sonar, the British felt vulnerable. On 3 September HMS Pathfinder was struck by U.21 not far from the mouth of the Forth River after her commander, Kapitänleutnant Otto Hersing, had reached the Forth Bridge without detection a few days before. However, as detailed earlier, the real shock came three weeks later, on the 21st, when Kapitänleutnant Otto Weddingens U.9 sank Aboukir, Cressy and Hogue.

  Jellicoe was unnerved and decided to keep the Grand Fleet moving for much of the time, out of the unprotected, tempting, but still dangerously open waters of Scapa Flow until the anchorage was protected. He moved the fleet to Loch Ewe in the west of Scotland and to Lough Swilly on the northwest coast of Ireland in County Donegal, so when Kapitänleutnant von Hennigs U.18 managed to enter Scapa Flow by following a steamer through the Hoxa Sound boom, the British were not there.

  It was clear that U-boats could be used effectively, but the force was tiny (Germany started the war with around twenty-four) and losses since the start of war were heavy (seven; four were replaced). On 4 February 1915 Pohl put the world on notice by declaring that the Germans now considered ‘the waters around Great Britain and Ireland a military area’, and that ‘every enemy merchant vessel encountered in this zone will be destroyed’ and ‘neutral vessels also will run the risk in the war zone’: any merchant shipping in these areas might be fired upon. As Pohl put it, neutral vessels might be ‘destroyed without it being always possible to avert the dangers threatening the crews and passengers on that account’.

  The British reacted a month later. On 11 March the Reprisals Order in Council said that now ‘commodities of any kind’ would be prevented from ‘reaching or leaving Germany. As the prime minister declared, Britain was not going to allow its efforts at survival to be ‘strangled in a network of judicial niceties’.

  On 27 March an act by a German submarine commander, Kapitänleutnant Freiherr von Forstner on U.28, fundamentally changed the course of the submarine war. After sinking a merchantman, Aguila, he then fired on crew and passengers. The next day he sank a 5,000-ton liner, Falaba: in the 104 lost was an American. The accusation that the baron and his crew jeered at the dying burnt a deep scar into the American public conscience.

  Thus with potentially grave political consequences, this early sortie into unrestricted submarine warfare did not last long. On 25 April Germany announced that such warfare, directed at neutral shipping, would be halted and that ‘before an enemy or neutral vessel could be torpedoed, she must be stopped and searched, and the presence of contraband in her cargo definitely established’.17 The German politicians had learnt something important: actions of this kind would almost inevitably lead to immense diplomatic tensions. The navy had not. The ‘fears of the Reich Chancellor that neutral ships might become involved were brushed aside by the Chief of the Admiralty Staff, and later fleet commander, Admiral Hugo von Pohl, in the mistaken belief that U-boat commanders would be able to tell neutral ships from British ships without stopping them’.18 In the year 1915 only 21 per cent of German submarine sinkings were without warning.19

  One such case – but one that would echo around the world – was the sinking of the Lusitania. The passenger ship had received numerous warnings of U-boat activity south of Ireland and had taken precautions, such as sailing dark, having lifeboats ready in the davits and closing watertight doors. But the liner’s captain, William Thomas Turner, went in too close to shore, thinking that he was safer there than further out to sea. Enhancing the risk of the captain’s chosen course, the Navy had not provided the escort support promised.

  Late in April, U.20 lay in wait. The submarine’s commander, a thirty-year-old Berliner named Walther Schwieger, was well-respected (even Tirpitz would ask for his opinion), and he had been given orders to expect ‘large English troop transports’. On the morning of the fateful attack, 7 May, U.20 was actually lost. There was a thick fog and so she used the opportunity to surface and pull fresh ocean air into the dank and putrid bowels of the boat. Soon, however, the weather improved. U.20 now had clear blue skies and a calm sea. Schwieger tried to get a shot in against an old cruiser, Juno, that came temptingly close; he failed. But his disappointment vanished when at 13:30 petty officer Max Valentiner spotted a ‘forest of masts and stacks’. The first thought was that this meant several ships, but then the great prize came fully into his sights, steering directly for him, in fact. Schwieger fired a torpedo at 700m (770yds). The battle diary recorded the event: ‘Unusually great detonation with large white cloud of smoke and debris shot above the funnels. In addition to the torpedo, a second explosion must have taken place.’

  Schwieger’s pilot, Lanz, is said to have exclaimed as he was closing the periscope, ‘My God, it’s the Lusitania.20 But, on closer examination, the scene feels rewritten for public consumption. One historian, Diana Preston, holds that ‘there is good reason to suspect that U.20 s war diary was doctored after Schwieger returned to port’.21 Unlike his other diaries, this report was neither on a printed form nor double-sided as was common practice. The style somehow felt different and, strangely, only on one day – 7 May, the day of the sinking – was Kapitänleutnant Walther Schwieger’s signature missing.

  Among the 1,134 liv
es lost there were 128 Americans, including Alfred Vanderbilt, reportedly last seen helping children into lifeboats. It was a huge affront to the American public, but the outcry was not yet powerful enough that Woodrow Wilson, a pacifist at heart and a man who wanted to be seen as the peace broker for Europe, could be persuaded into risking war. A hundred years after the event, it is clear that the British had exceeded their rights, as there were Canadian soldiers on board, as well as ammunition stowed below decks. The sinking nonetheless had huge propaganda value for the Allies and contributed to America’s eventual entry into the war. Theodore Roosevelt scorned Wilson: ‘For many months our government has preserved between right and wrong a neutrality which would have excited the … admiration of Pontius Pilate’.

  The Lusitania incident led to another important change in how the Germans employed submarines in the commerce war. In future, the submarine would destroy a vessel only while on the surface, by torpedo or gunfire from newly fitted deck guns. This allowed the crew to disembark in lifeboats and survive. Neutral ships would be spared if they were not found to be carrying ‘contraband’.

  It was an extremely unpopular decision for the U-boat crews. First, it gave away their most important weapon: concealment. Secondly, the Allies increasingly used the opportunity that this gave to fight back with defensive weapons now added to merchant ships or, even more dangerous to the Germans, with ships specially made to appear like unarmed merchant ships: they were in fact naval-manned vessels called Q-ships, which carried a heavy concealed armament.

  Scheer was furious with the policy reversal and protested to Berlin that a most important element in German sea power was being thrown away. He had always believed that a well-laid torpedo trap could cut down an enemy’s forces before surface ships joined battle. As a demonstration of German power, he now wanted to ring the British bases with submarines, and use Zeppelin reconnaissance to avoid serious entrapment of the High Seas Fleet and battle-cruisers.

  In 1917, when Scheer was able to reinstate the unrestricted type of warfare, the inevitable reaction was kept in mind, and it was fully understood that this time it might lead to America’s entry into the war. That outcome was a calculated risk. Germany banked on the hope that, with a concentrated effort, it could finish off Great Britain before the benefits of American participation could be felt. However, the unrestricted submarine warfare lobby would have to wait until 1916 to gain momentum. Immediately following Jutland, Scheer knew that a fleet engagement would never bring Britain to its knees, so he returned to thinking about the weapon, the U-boat, that he would eventually and fully unleash against the British. With increased production and the British unable to find effective means of destroying them, Germany was able to reach a force of around 130 U-boats by the time that unrestricted submarine warfare was launched on 1 February 1917. Though only roughly a third would be available for patrol duty around Britain at the start of this policy, this was enough in the first month to yield a doubling of tonnage sunk and by the third month a staggering 811,000 tons.

  The U-boat was a far deadlier threat to Britain than a battle fleet. It was a weapon of total war. Not one only aimed at a military victory, its aim was – like the British blockade – to starve the nation of both military resources and food.

  * The Greg Bemis expedition was filmed on the National Geographic Channel (Dark Secrets of the Lusitania), while The Week under an equally uncreative heading (2 May 2015 ‘Secrets of the Lusitania’) made the allegations about carrying ammunition.

  THE BATTLE

  6

  Prelude to Action

  The British and German fleets finally met at the Jutland Bank, eighty miles west of the northern coast of Denmark. The meeting came about through a curious series of events. To start with, each admiral planned to lure the other into the same trap on the same day. It was the culmination of a pattern that had begun earlier in the year.

  On 22 February 1916 the terminally ill and ageing commander of the German High Seas Fleet, Hugo Pohl, died. On 18 January the frail commander had been replaced by a new man, Reinhard Scheer. Until that point Scheer had been commanding the 3rd Squadron, consisting of the High Seas Fleet’s most modern ships. An eager anticipation was in the air. His views were known. He wanted to get out and bring the fight to the British. During Pohl’s command the fleet had sortied eight times only and never more than 130 miles north of Heligoland. Scheer was known for his orientation towards action and an immediate shift in German naval policy was up for discussion.

  Life at Anchor: Scapa, Rosyth and Kiel

  The morale of sailors at anchor was a critical factor in their performance at sea. Conditions for the officers and men of the ships – great and small – of the two navies could not have been more different.

  For both sides life quickly became dull. The much hoped-for ‘Entscheidungstag’ that the Germans had been waiting for drifted out of sight and imagination. ‘Es wird mächtig langweilig. Man stellte sich den Krieg immer so vor, also er nach der Kriegerklärung, gleich Hurrah käme, Angriff und dann Schluß … ein Feind finds nichts su zehen.’1 (Rough translation: ‘It was unbelievably boring. One imagined that with the declaration of war there would be cheers, battle and then an end … but we can’t even find the enemy.)

  One officer, Knobloch, even started to question why Germany had built a navy: ‘Wozu eigentlich haben wir die dicken Schiffe?’2 (Rough translation: ‘By the way, why on earth do we even need these big, fat ships?’)

  There was utter joy felt by the German sailors when the British were spotted. They had been champing at the bit for this day. As the commander of Seaman Richard Stumpf’s ship, SMS Helgoland, Korvettenkapitän Walter Zaeschmarr described it: ‘Es herrschte bei uns am Bord aufrichtige Freude, also die erstenfeindlichen Mastzeichen über der Kimm auftauchten’.3 (Rough translation: ‘When the first characteristically shaped enemy mast was seen over the horizon, all on board had a real sense of joy.’) Stumpf himself spoke of the mix of feelings: ‘Ich müßte lügen, wenn ich sagen würde, daß ich Angst gehabt habe. Nein, es war ein undefinierbares Gemisch von Freude, Angst, Neugierde, Gleichgültigkeit und noch etwas, das mit dem Worte Tatendrang vielleicht nicht ganz richtig ausgedrückt ist’.4 (Rough translation: ‘I’d be lying if I said that I was afraid. No, it was an indefinable mix of joy, fear, inquisitiveness, indifference and something which I can’t adequately put into words.’)

  For the German navy, technology, ship design and armaments had all strongly advanced. But its very heart, the ship’s crew, was to become the source of the navy’s destruction. The social divisions were more extreme than on British ships where, at least, the back-breaking ritual of coaling brought officer and rating together. The food in the German navy was already of low quality and significantly declined as the war continued, while in the British Navy this was never a cause for conflict or resentment.

  Life in Scapa Flow – a place that is hauntingly beautiful in the late spring and the summer months – was dismal in the winter, when it became a grey, cold and windy prison for the sailors. As inventive as the officers and men were in entertaining themselves with sports, crafts, theatre, opera and the like, it became numbingly boring. What made it worse was that the Grand Fleet crews knew that the battle-cruiser life was so much better in Rosyth, with all that near-by Edinburgh could offer.

  See Malcolm Brown and Patricia Meehan, Scapa Flow: The Reminiscences of Men and Women who Served in Scapa Flow in the Two World Wars (Allen Lane, 1968).

  Up to the early spring of 1916, German strategy had been to tie up the Royal Navy, holding back resources that could have been released elsewhere. Scheers decision was to upset the balance of naval power with the combined weight of his scouting forces and his dreadnoughts, the High Seas Fleet. As we have seen, Scheer believed he had contrived the perfect trap for the British Navy. ‘The fatal flaw in Scheers reasoning,’ Eric Grove writes, ‘was that surprising the Grand Fleet was much more difficult than he thought. Thanks to the feats of the cryptanalysts in Room 40 at
the Admiralty, the British had prior warning of many of Scheers intentions.’5

  In April 1916 Scheer had put his strategy into play with the attacks on Lowestoft and Yarmouth. The image of the Royal Navy, for which the public had been asked to spend today’s equivalent of billions of pounds over a decade, was badly tarnished. Scheers major lesson from the raids was that he would be better off moving the scouting group target just far enough north to tempt Beatty out of Rosyth, but not so far that it would make it easy for Jellicoe’s forces, coming from the far northern Orkney base in Scapa Flow, to get there in time as effective support.

  Scheers third attempt was to coincide with the Irish Easter Rising; he was looking for a point of maximum political and military distraction for the British. His top priority was to keep his ‘fleet in being’, posing a significant enough threat to the British that they constantly had to guard against any German action, resulting in the tying up of significant British resources in men and materiel. He was not looking for any major naval action, but rather one in which he could lure out a small group of British ships and safely overpower them. Scheer was a great believer in integrated naval operations and prepared a number of strategically located submarine traps. These were deployed to critical points where ships could be torpedoed by U-boats.

  Scheer had ordered two boats, U.34 and U.44, to lie in wait for Jellicoe’s forces to sortie from the Pentland Firth separating Caithness and the Orkneys; eight U-boats were to wait for Beatty in the Firth of Forth to the south. On 20 May U.27 was sent to the latter to head in as far as the Isle of May. Three U-boats were to lay mines. On 13 May U.72 was to lie off the Firth of Forth, on 23 May U.74 off the Moray Firth and, the next day, U.75 off the Orkneys; another was off Peterhead. U.21 and U.22 were off the Humber, as British warships had been (incorrectly, as it turned out) reported there and two more, U.46 and U.47, were west of the island of Terschelling off the Dutch coast, to guard against a possible intervention by Commodore Tyrwhitt’s Harwich Force. The submarines could be operational until 31 May.6 Scheer had ordered ten to be deployed to the North Sea, with orders to patrol from 17–22 May.7 The British picked up on this and responded with increased patrols. Three U-boats turned back.8