Scheers planning ran into more difficulties: he had to postpone his operation because of machinery problems in the 3rd Squadron, then because of news that repairs to Seydlitz would take another week. This delayed the operation from the 17th to the 23rd, and finally until the 30th. Scheer had also planned extensive reconnaissance by Zeppelins but the date chosen, 29 May, turned out to be too windy. As a result of reconnaissance not going ahead, Scheer dropped his targeting of Sunderland, replacing it with a sortie to the Skagerrak, the stretch of water between the southern end of Norway and the northwestern tip of Denmark. With that decision, the fleet was informed by the coded signal ‘31 May GG 2490’. U.66 and U.32 alone received it.
Jellicoe had his own plans for the High Seas Fleet. He would send a squadron of British battleships and eight light cruisers to appear off the Danish coast, at Skagen, on 2 June and move into the Kattegat. He banked on the news getting to Scheer – with Scheer undoubtedly then sending units to try to cut them off. Jellicoe held the Grand Fleet south, at the Horns Reef, shallows about ten miles off the westernmost point of Denmark, and used the planes of Engadine, the Grand Fleet’s sole carrier, to deter Zeppelins and so keep Scheer in the dark about its presence. Jellicoe deployed British submarines north for his particular trap.
Fleet composition
The fleet that Jellicoe took to sea was numerically very strong. He had twenty-four dreadnoughts in the line, with varying degrees of hitting power. Two had 15in guns, one had 14in, eleven, including Iron Duke, had 13.5in and ten had 12in. But the fleet also had its weaknesses: Jellicoe had decided to keep with the current formation two squadrons of obsolete, pre-dreadnought, armoured cruisers.*
Jellicoe was missing the added punch of the thirty-five destroyers from Tyrwhitt’s Harwich Force. Rear Admiral Henry Oliver, chief of staff, was convinced that real danger lay in the Germans feinting and rushing the Straits of Dover. According to Correlli Barnett, ‘this is where [Jellicoe’s] … superiority was at its narrowest’.9 Tyrwhitt had actually set sail at 17:10 on his own initiative, only to be pulled back by terse instructions from the Admiralty: ‘Return to base at once and await orders’. They never came.
Fleet Composition August 1914
Ship Type
Royal Navy
Imperial Navy
Battleships in commission
22
15
Battleships under construction
13
5
Battle-cruisers in commission
9
5
Battle-cruisers under construction
1
3
Pre-dreadnought battleships
40
22
Old armoured cruisers
40
7
Small/light cruisers
20
16
Torpedo boats/destroyers
330
205
U-boats/submarines
73
31
Source: Wolz, Imperial Splendour, p17. Missing are the seaplane carriers.
Comparative Fleet Composition at Jutland
Ship Type
British (151)
German (99)
Dreadnought battleships
28
16
Pre-dreadnought battleships
0
6
Battle-cruisers
9
5
Armoured cruisers
8
0
Light cruisers
26
11
Destroyers
79
61
Seaplane carriers
1*
0
*HMS Campania should also have sailed with the battle fleet but did not receive her initial sailing orders and was ordered back to port by Jellicoe, who would not spare destroyers for a separate escort. She would have added ten aircraft.
On the German side, Scheer made errors of composition similar to Jellicoe’s, including in the 2nd Battle Squadron the six famously slow Deutschland-dass pre-dreadnoughts under pressure from his old friend, Rear Admiral Franz Mauve. Steaming at a maximum speed of 17 knots, these old models were known as the Fünf-Minuten-Schiffe (five-minute ships), their effect being seriously to reduce the German fleet’s overall speed – and there was not a single super-dreadnought in it when it sailed. The new 15in SMS Bayern would not be completed until a month after Jutland and the first 13.8in battle-cruiser, Mackensen, not launched for another year.
Scheers battle-cruisers were, by contrast, well-balanced ships – the force created, in Grove’s words, ‘excellent combinations of speed, power and protection’.10 Scheer was fortunate to have Seydlitz as part of the battle-cruiser squadron; water-tightness repairs had only just been completed on 29 May. She was a large vessel, having twenty-seven boilers, eighty-four furnace doors and 200 sq yds (170 sq m) of heating surface. ‘The bunkers hold 3,600 tons of coal, a railway train 380 wagons long.’11
The German fleet numbered 99 ships with 900 guns in total, against Jellicoe’s 1,700 guns on 151 ships. British firepower massively outweighed the adversary: the British would be fielding 324 heavy guns on each broadside, against 196 German heavy guns; the broadside weight ratio was approximately 400,000lbs (181,000kg) to the Germans’ 200,000lbs.
Battleship Design
In 1906, a revolutionary point in the middle of the naval age of steam, HMS Dreadnought was launched. Thereafter one talked of earlier ‘pre-dreadnoughts’ or ‘super-dreadnoughts’ with heavier guns that followed. Generally, the Dreadnought sacrificed armour in favour of speed and broadside weight.
She was a weapons platform, with a broadside of eight 12in guns, each capable of hurling an 8501b (350kg) shell 17,990yds (16,450m) across the sea while knifing through the water at over 20 knots, powered by the new Parsons turbines. This had replaced the old reciprocating engine, increasing her speed from 16 knots to around 21, but reducing maintenance. As a new weapons platform, she also demanded improved gunnery. It was another of Fisher’s protégés, Admiral Percy Scott, who revolutionised naval gunnery, introducing training with moving targets, spotting and director firing.
By contrast, the German fleet was primarily developed for short-distance operations. Short ranges meant less fuel. Less fuel meant more space, with lighter guns and more armour or armament weight. German ships tended to be lighter-gunned, slower but far more heavily armoured as a ratio to total displacement. And crews often slept ashore while in harbour. Even coaling spaces were used very effectively for increased protection. When they inspected many German ships at Scapa Flow straight after the end of the war, British commentators saw for themselves their strength of construction: after Jutland, Seydlitz limped back with 5,300 tons of water on board, Derfflinger with 3,000 tons.
So, one way to compare the relative strengths of British and German ships is to look at the ratio of total displacement to armour:
Queen Mary: 27,000 tons displacement, of which 3,900 tons was armour (a ratio of 14 per cent armour to displacement).
Seydlitz: 24,600 tons displacement, of which 5,200 tons was armour (a ratio of 21 per cent armour to displacement)
German ships were broader beamed, allowing more side armour as well as superior performance as a stable gun platform. Here are some examples of comparative beam (measured in feet):
Iron Duke: 90 König: 97 Lion: 88 Derfflinger. 95
The broader German beam came about because the British did not invest in the prize tool that was Britain’s protection in war: its Navy. In this particular instance, the issue was the many dry-dock facilities that would require widening.
At Trafalgar, Nelson had supreme confidence in his ships. He knew that at close quarters the Spanish and French ships would be no match. For Jellicoe, it was different. Technically, he was exceptionally knowledgeable about ship construction and had seen much of the German yards up close. Temple Patterson writes that ‘as Jellicoe was at
least in part aware, there were many matters in which the German Navy was the equal or superior of our own. Its capital ships had better armour protection and the more complete water-tight sub-divisions made possible by their lesser sea-keeping needs and by their broader beam which their roomy docks allowed them rendered them more difficult to sink, especially in view of the inferiority of British shells’.12 Jellicoe knew his ships’ weaknesses.
The initial deployment
At 17:40 on 30 May, after the Admiralty had learnt at around noon of a possible German sortie, a signal was sent to Jellicoe to warn him. The Grand Fleet was to deploy at ‘the Long Forties’, a hundred miles east of Scotland’s east coast.
Between 22:00 and 23:00 five British battle-cruisers passed from their base at Rosyth under the imposing arches of the Forth Bridge into the North Sea. The 1st Battle Cruiser Squadron was led by Beatty on Lion. With him were Princess Royal, Queen Mary and Tiger; the 2nd Battle Cruiser Squadron was commanded by Admiral Sir William Pakenham on New Zealand, along with Indefatigable. Kempenfelt and nine destroyers of the 11th Flotilla accompanied them. Australia was absent as she was in dry dock following a collision with New Zealand (which, unfortunately, led to a great feeling of bitterness between the two ships’ crews).13 Finally, the new 15in Queen Elizabeth-dass battleships of the 5th Battle Squadron, with Rear Admiral Evan-Thomas on the flagship Barham, led Valiant, Warspite and Malaya. Beatty’s force was accompanied by three light cruiser squadrons (1st, 2nd and 3rd) and twenty-seven destroyers of the 1st, 9th, 10th and 13th Flotillas, led by two light cruisers. One of Scheers submarines, U.32, fired a torpedo at Galatea, flagship of the 1st Light Cruiser Squadron under the command of Commodore Edwyn Alexander-Sinclair, as she put to sea, but without success.
Once at sea, Beatty’s battle-cruiser forces split into two components, the 5th Battle Squadron sailing slightly to the north, and the 1st and 2nd Battle Cruiser Squadrons to the west of it. As noted earlier, the Harwich Force was turned back by Rear Admiral Oliver, who believed that there was a threat to the Straits of Dover without it in reserve. Further south, Rear Admiral Horace Hood had the 3rd Battle Cruiser Squadron join up with Jellicoe’s fleet midway. Normally, Hood would have been with Beatty but his ships – Invincible, Inflexible and Indomitable – were at Scapa Flow on a gunnery exercise. They had switched places with Evan-Thomas’s battle squadron.
By 20:00 on 30 May Jellicoe was clear of Scapa Flow and heading out to sea. With the fleet were the 4th and 12th Destroyer Flotillas, Castor, and four destroyers of the 11th Flotilla. Passing the Hoxa Boom, the main anti-submarine net that barred the southern entrance to the anchorage at Scapa Flow, Gentian was fired on by a German submarine (U.32) but, as with Galatea, the torpedo missed.14 In fact, Scheers submarine deployment had not really yielded any really significant benefits or intelligence.15
Jellicoe’s Grand Fleet headed to the agreed rendezvous point in the Long Forties at a measured 15 knots, as ‘he wished to conserve the limited fuel carried by his destroyers’.16 At 12:48, an hour after an exercise ‘action stations’ had been called, and crews then sent off for painting and more training, Jellicoe received from the Admiralty the first of what was going to prove to be a long string of misleading signals: ‘No definite news of the enemy. They made all preparations for sailing early this morning. It was thought that the Fleet had sailed but “directionals” place Flagship in Jade [river] at 11:10 GMT. Apparently they have been unable to carry out air reconnaissance which has delayed them.’17
Captain Thomas Jackson, director of the Operations Division of the Admiralty, had gone to Room 40 and put one question to them: where were they picking up Scheers flagship Friedrich der Große’s call-sign, ‘DK’? He was told: in the Jade. Jackson assumed that this meant that Scheers flagship was still at anchor in what was known as the Jadebusen, the protected basin or bay of the Jade River that eventually opens out to the North Sea.
In fact, Scheers ‘harbour’ call-sign, when he went to sea, was transferred to land to disguise it. Room 40 knew about this practice, which Scheer had put in place during the Scarborough and Lowestoft raids, but either because of how Jackson was perceived by the Room 40 staff, and he had supposedly put the question, or because he had not actually asked the right one, Room 40 gave the misleading response that led Jellicoe and Beatty to think only the German battle-cruisers were at sea.
Jackson’s feelings, that ‘these chaps could not possibly understand’ the implications of all intercepted signals, were well-known to the Room 40 staff. One description of Jackson has him as ‘ridiculous’, ‘angry’, ‘blustering’, ‘insufferable’ and a ‘buffoon’.18 Jackson had been to Room 40 only twice before – both times to complain. He was not well-liked.
Jellicoe and Beatty were out on the North Sea ahead of Scheer and Hipper, but as a direct consequence of the information from Room 40, Jellicoe steamed on to the Long Forties meeting point very slowly, hoping, as just noted, to conserve fuel. This would cut down the fighting time, and on that particular day, time was what was most in need.
At around 03:00 on 31 May Hipper’s battle-cruisers had weighed anchor, after spending the night in the approaches to the Jade Bay and Wilhelmshaven, known as the Schillig Roads, beside the entrance to the Jadebusen. Having passed the island of Sylt and to the side of their protective minefield, the massed High Seas Fleet steamed north with Hipper’s battle-cruisers out ahead.
Hipper and Scheer knew from their intelligence sources that something large was afoot: Hipper’s war diary states that he was told at 03:56 by U.32 that it had spotted two dreadnoughts, two cruisers and many torpedo boats heading southeast (probably Beatty’s). Neumünster had also told Hipper at 08:00 that two dreadnought or battle squadrons had left Scapa Flow at 22:00 the night before, accompanied by destroyers. At 08:44 U.66 signalled from Quadrant 132B III that eight British dreadnoughts with cruisers and destroyers had been sighted heading northeast. That was the last information until Elbing, steaming out ahead of Hipper’s 2nd Scouting Group (under Vice Admiral Friedrich Bödicker), sighted British forces on the day of the battle itself. This should have been enough to alert Hipper and Scheer that this was going to be a sortie, in force, by the British. Probably, Scheer and Hipper’s mindset at this point of the war was that the High Seas Fleet had to do something to justify its existence.
At 14:00 on 31 May there was a long roll on the drums of the battle-cruiser Derfflinger, a signal to clean guns. Georg von Hase, the gunnery commander, inspected all the guns, along with his trusted warrant officer, Wlodarcszek, nicknamed ‘The Goblin’ (he had an uncanny knack for knowing what was needed before needing to be asked). The combined German and British forces, which were now unbeknownst to each other converging, constituted the biggest concentration of armoured shipping ever seen – 250 ships manned by 95,000 sailors. Each was planning to trap the other.
The Grand Fleet sailed in divisions: the 1st was led by King George V, followed by the 2nd and 3rd, with Jellicoe’s flagship, Iron Duke, followed by the 4th, 5th and 6th. A cable’s length19 separated each ship and about 1,000yds (900m) lay between the divisions themselves.
On one ship, St Vincent, there was a staff officer from the 4th Hussars, Major Claude Wallace.20 St Vincent’s captain, William Fisher, by now used to endless trawls through the North Sea with the Grand Fleet, made a plea: ‘We have tried to do this so often but without bringing the Germans to book; but today is a little different. We have a Staff Officer who has come direct from the trenches. Please God, may the shells follow him here: he may bring us luck.’21
Wallace had been having premonitions of a great sea battle for months. He was determined to be aboard for it – he was sure there would be action. For most it felt like yet another North Sea sweep, although Lieutenant Bowyer-Smith on the turret of Marlborough described how this time there was a feeling that it might actually be different: ‘The men were laughing and joking, but one could see that mixed with the relief of at last getting a rap at someone, there was a certain amount of n
ervousness and wondering what it would be like.’22
* The 1st Cruiser Squadron consisted of the last of the pre-Invincibles. Defence had been laid down almost ten years previously in February 1905, and was completed in 1909. Her two sister ships, Edinburgh and Black Prince were completed even earlier (in 1906). They were badly limited in armour and armament, and effectively obsolescent. The 2nd Cruiser Squadron was also outmoded: Minotaur and Shannon had been completed in 1908, while Cochrane and Natal were commissioned in 1907. These ships were the cruiser equivalents of pre-dreadnoughts.
7
The Battle-Cruiser Debacle
The disturbing feature of the battle-cruiser action is the fact that five German battle-cruisers engaging six British vessels of this class, supported after the first twenty minutes, although at great range, by the fire of four battleships of the Queen Elizabeth class, were yet able to sink the Indefatigable and the Queen Mary.
Jutland_The Unfinished Battle Page 17
