Considering the amount of signals traffic that came from Iron Duke in the hours of darkness, it was extraordinary that so little intelligence had been passed back by officers of either the Grand Fleet or Beatty’s battle-cruisers. In fact, according to Harper, between 21:17 (when the last flag signal was made by Iron Duke) and 02:20 (when it was light enough again for flag signalling), no fewer than forty-two WT and eighty-five lamp signals were sent out.
To the northeast of Beatty, just before Invincible was to turn south to join her old squadrons, Indomitable signalled Rear Admiral Hood that she had picked up ‘very loud’ Telefunken signals.25 It was a sure sign that the Germans had heavy ships in the area. Hood’s first reaction to the earlier Galatea sighting was to turn his own three-ship squadron east-southeast and increase speed to 22 knots.26 If there were to be any German ships using the Skagerrak as a fast way home, he thought, his squadron-some of the best gunners in the Navy – would be waiting.
Jellicoe had another idea. He signalled Hood to join Beatty to the south with the 3rd Battle Cruiser Squadron. Just after 16:00, Hood, fifty miles away, moved the squadron onto a south-southeast course.27 Fifty minutes later, racing to support Beatty at 26 knots, he sent a message to Lion asking for position, course and speed to tighten up his planned RV point.28 He did not receive a reply.
As the ‘action stations’ was sounded on the ships of the Battle Cruiser Fleet, well-rehearsed drills sprung into action.* The routines started with all decks being hosed down so that hot splinters and shrapnel would have less chance of starting fires. Steel doors were closed up and ‘dogged’ – clamped from both sides to make them absolutely watertight.29 Emergency medical preparations were put underway to receive the wounded. Fire hoses were unwound, and boxes of sand prepared and placed near ammunition stores. The glass panes from the bridge windscreens were removed. Shoring-up spars and reserves of electrical and hydraulic gear were readied. Inside the turrets, urinal buckets were taken out. If they had the time, sailors donned clean clothes to avoid contamination if wounded. All over the ships of the battle-cruiser force, white ensigns were strung from all available points, on halyards and behind funnels. The sight was magnificent.
Going into battle also brought out all sorts of superstitions. On New Zealand her captain, John ‘Jimmy’ Green, donned the traditional Maori costume and put the greenstone tiki around his neck. This, he had been assured, would protect the ship and her crew if worn during battle. It was quite a sight: a Royal Navy captain on the bridge dressed in a black and white piu-piu skirt over his navy blues. But Green had done this before, at Dogger Bank, and New Zealand had come out unscathed. He was not one to take any chances. New Zealand would also emerge from Jutland with neither death nor damage.
Accessing the Battle Maps on Jutland1916.com
This is the point at which the reader may find it helpful to access accompanying materials on the Jutland1916.com website. You will not only find useful animations of the battle showing the movements of the main forces, but also other resources such as the official German maps as well as Harper’s own maps, marked-up copies of which are in the British Library (these are clean ones, the BL’s not). For those more interested in following the gunnery or signals, you can do so, minute-by-minute. Either use the Jutland.com link on a Google search (in Germany, Skagerrakschlacht.com will get you there) or capture the QR code below on a tablet device to access these resources.
The distance between Hipper’s and Beatty’s ships closed to around ten miles. It was 15:40. The British had formed a single line of six battle-cruisers steaming south on a course that was slowly but surely converging on their five German counterparts. Then something strange happened. Beatty held off from opening fire, even though he had the range advantage. The 13.5in guns could manage ranges of up to 24,000yds (22,000m); the German battle-cruiser guns, depending on the ship, up to something like 19,000–21,000yds (17,400–19,200m). It is often said that this was when Beatty could have exercised his range superiority over Hipper, or at least ‘try ranging shots as he had done successfully at Dogger Bank’.30 Instead, the British guns stayed silent. Everyone on board was expecting them to open up but nothing happened.
This has always been a curious point in the opening battle-cruiser action. As a midshipman on Lions compass platform observed: ‘I could not bring myself to realise that we were in the presence of the enemy. What struck me as being rather strange was that while the range of the enemy on sighting them was only about 23,000 yards, we did not open fire until the range was 18,500 yards on the gun sights.’31 There was, however, considerable confusion about what exactly the range was.*
From the bridge of Lützow, Hipper saw that he was outnumbered, outrun, outranged and outgunned. His fastest ships were one or two knots slower than Beatty’s fastest. On the conning tower on Derfflinger, Hase described what he could see:
How menacing they appeared, magnified fifteen times … It was a stimulating, majestic spectacle as the dark-grey giants approached like fate itself. The six ships, which had at first been proceeding in two columns, formed one line ahead. Like a herd of prehistoric monsters, they closed on one another with slow movements, spectre-like, irresistible.32
Lion was leading, followed each at 500yd (450m) intervals, by Princess Royal, Queen Mary, Tiger, New Zealand and Indefatigable. The wind direction did not favour the British: with the breeze blowing from the west, gun smoke would be pushed to the front of the British battle-cruisers’ turrets. Beatty ordered a deployment ‘on the right echelon’, meaning that each successive ship would be slightly pulled back on the starboard quarter of the ship in front. This would present a narrow torpedo profile and would still allow the following ship a clear view of the enemy targets. The British ships were also better silhouetted for Hipper’s guns, while Hipper’s ships were not clearly outlined for the British gunners.
So much of the gunnery achievement on the day – British or German – owed its success as much to the weather conditions, as to range-finding and targeting methods. As seen (albeit a little later) from Southampton, the leading ship of the 2nd Light Cruiser Squadron, the weather conditions generally really favoured the German gunners: ‘The Germans were almost entirely merged into a long, smoky cloud on the eastern horizon, the sort of cloud that presages a thunderstorm, and from this gloomy retreat a series of red flashes darting out in our direction indicated the presence of five German battle-cruisers’.33 Indeed, Erich Mahrholtz, Von der Tann s gunnery officer, specifically said that the ‘hazy weather conditions’ were strongly in favour of his own side’s gunners.
The British line also still had a number of destroyers on what would become the engaged side, the ones that were too slow for the rapid speed increase to 26 knots – Lydiard, Liberty, Landrail and Laurel.34 Their presence on the wrong side of the battle line – or at least in the wrong place – would add another obstacle to British firing and block clean gunnery views. Kapitän Harder on Lützow actually thought that the destroyers might have been there specifically to interfere with German spotting:
At 6pm SMS Lützow received the first hit but I was not informed of its location. The enemy now stationed a destroyer on the engaged side of each ship: the former generated dense smoke and thus spotting was at times impossible. I gained the impression that this smoke cloud was made each time after we fired and that it then gradually disappeared. Only the fire control top of the opponent was visible above this smoke.35
Beatty himself was frustrated by the funnel smoke, even if the presence of destroyers possibly helped protect the British line from torpedoes: ‘It would appear that at this time [16:08] we passed through a screen of submarines … Though causing considerable inconvenience from smoke, the presence of Lydiard and Landrail undoubtedly preserved the Battle-cruisers from closer Submarine attack’.36 By contrast, the breeze had the opposite effect for the German gunners. It cleared before their guns and drifted to their non-engaged side.
Seven miles behind – the gap had only slightly reduced – were
Evan-Thomas’s four ships, Barham, Valiant, Warspite and Malaya, impatient to engage but not able yet to support Beatty.
The Germans open fire
Across the gap stood Hipper in the armoured conning tower of Lützow, calmly smoking a cigar as he looked through the periscope at the British line. He gave the order to open fire. It was 15:48. The thunderclap of the first German shells sounded the opening of the Battle of Jutland.
Günther Paschen, the gunnery commander on Lützow,37 described the countdown to the moment:
Our range-finders gave us good ranges commencing at 240 Hm* and it seemed an eternity; actually it was twenty minutes before we had reached our range of 190 Hm. Even then we had to wait for the Seydlitz until the range was further reduced. 5 points – 57 degrees is the enemy’s bearing. Estimated speed 26 knots; course 110 degrees.† This made the rate of closing four Hm a minute. At a range of 167 Hm by our calculations the first turret salvo from A and B turrets was fired at 4.48. Time of flight: twenty-two seconds.38
This meant that the Germans had waited and closed in from 26,000yds (23,800m) to 20,700yds (18,900m) while finally firing at 18,200 yards (16,600m). Both Lion and Princess Royal’s guns had been ranged at 23,820yds (21,780m). If 18,200yds is taken as the distance at which Lützow opened fire, Beatty had lost the advantage of around 5,620yds (5,140m). Beatty’s hesitation in opening fire meant that the Germans’ opening salvos were all well within their operating ranges: Moltke the shortest, at 15,500yds (14,200m), Derfflinger and Seydlitz at 16,400yds (15,000m), Lützow, only slightly longer, at 16,800yds (15,400m) and Von der Tann the longest, at 17,700yds (16,200m).39
Range-finding
British coincidence range-finding equipment was supplied by Barr and Stroud The most common model was the 9ft (2.7m) FQ2 while the larger 15ft (4.6m) FT24 was more suitable for the longer ranges of which British guns were increasingly capable. The FT24 was first mounted on the 1912 Queen Elizabeth-class ships whose powerful 15in guns could range up to 24,000yds (22,000m). By 1915, forty-five had been delivered; by the following year, eighty-four. But in the Grand Fleet, only Orion’s 13.5in guns were supported by the FT24.
It is difficult enough to use a hand-held coincidence range-finder, even in ideal conditions in sunlight, stationary, with no interfering cordite smoke blowing across your view. Imagine being on a rolling, pitching battleship in the mists or low cloud conditions of the North Sea, with spray and shell splashes drenching you, with engine vibration thrown in for good measure.
The Karl Zeiss stereoscopic optics used by the Germans had – as is still the case – a formidable reputation for quality. For an operator to focus on a hazy object without hard defined edges, Zeiss reputedly performed better, but the Barr and Stroud split-screen system – if provided with a hard, well-defined edge – also worked well but caused less eye strain for the operator. It was often remarked that at Jutland the Germans were better at finding the initial range, but this fell off as the engagement wore on.
Now comes the second part: testing the ranges. The German ‘ladder’ system of ranging salvos proved extremely effective and seemed, in the initial engagements, to find an adversary’s range more quickly. The approach required salvos being rapidly fired from successive turrets while the shells from the previous turret were still in flight at ranges that were purposely separated by around 400 yards (370m). They were then able rapidly to ‘ladder’ up or down depending on ‘spotting’: the reading and plotting of the fall of shot by the shell splash.
After Jutland the British were quick to adopt a variation on the ‘ladder’. The British system was changed to allow for two salvos to be in flight simultaneously towards a target – the first spread for deflection, the second for range. Later, director-firing methods were implemented for secondary armament and the equipment also fitted with gyro-stabilisation to counteract a ship’s roll. There is a wealth of technical literature on the related issues of course plotting and fire control. For how these came into play at Jutland see John Brooks, Georg von Hase, Arthur Pollen, Dreyer and Jon Sumida.40
Hipper was very clear about the benefit that he had been given by Beatty’s decision to let the gap close:
The fact that the English battle-cruisers, (possibly) on account of bad light conditions or perhaps forming the line of battle too late, delayed opening fire allowed us too to withhold our fire until the enemy was in effective gun range (15,000–16,000 yards). The possibility of obtaining a rapid gunnery superiority … is principally to be attributed to this delay in opening fire which compelled the enemy to remain a longer time within effective gun range.41
Each German battle-cruiser was instructed to target its British counterpart, meaning that Beatty’s first five ships (Lion, Princess Royal, Queen Mary, Tiger and New Zealand) were each individually targeted; Indefatigable was not.
Fire distribution in the British line was a problem: Beatty had been misunderstood. He had intended that the first German ship of the line, Lützow, be engaged by two ships, then that every ship of the line take its opposite number counting from the rear. What happened was otherwise. Lion and Princess Royal both correctly engaged the Lützow, but the others that received the message counted from the front of the line. Queen Mary fired on Seydlitz rather than the second in line, Derfflinger. As a result Derfflinger was allowed to fire unmolested for a full ten minutes.‡ Tiger and New Zealand fired on Moltke, made a little easier to identify as the latter ‘had her second funnel painted bright red, a great blessing, as it made her very easy to distinguish from the other enemy ships’.42
Indefatigable and Von der Tann got into a gunnery duel at the rear of the line. Korvettenkapitän Erich Mahrholtz, first artillery officer on Von der Tann, complemented Hase’s vivid descriptions of the battle from the turrets. When fire opened on Beatty’s line, Von der Tann was supposed to have fired at both the two last British ships of the line, Indefatigable and New Zealand. ‘Since the secondary artillery was still out of range, I had to consider splitting my main artillery, two turrets fore, two aft. But this would mean only two splashes for each salvo which I wanted to avoid. So I decided to keep my battery together and annihilate one ship after another.’43
The order to fire came at 162 hectometres (hm), extreme long range (17,700yds). The fire and observations were directed at the bow section, so that, first, course changes could be more easily detected and, secondly, ‘longs’ that were also ahead of the ship could also be ‘spotted’. Every time Indefatigable veered off course, range was lowered or increased by 1hm, about 110yds.
On Derfflinger Hase was amazed at his good fortune:
What astonished me was that so far we had apparently not been hit once. Only quite rarely did a shot stray near us. I observed the gun turrets of our target more closely and established that the ship was not firing at us. She too was firing at our flagship. I observed the enemy ship for a moment; by some mistake we were being left out. I laughed grimly and then I began to engage our enemy with complete calm, as at gun practice, and with continually increasing accuracy.44
This was a repeat performance of Dogger Bank. There, Tiger’s captain, H B Pelly, fired on Seydlitz leaving Moltke free, on that occasion, to fire at will. The British seemed doomed to repeat a large number of errors made in January 1915. It is ironic that the German ships actually hitting at the start were Moltke and Lützow. Both of these German battle-cruisers had been mistakenly double-targeted by the British. But both German ships, in the midst of heavy shelling from two enemy ships, were still able to target very effectively.45
Paschen’s first shells from Seydlitz landed just 300yds (275m) short, according to a gunner in Lion’s Q turret. For an opening salvo at more than 16,000yds (14,600m), it was an incredible feat of gunnery. The same high standard was true of Derfflinger, which targeted Princess Royal and within six salvos had successfully straddled her.46 Lion was hit twice within three minutes of fire being opened.
Eventually, it was Ernie Chatfield, Lion’s captain, who gave the command to fire from t
he British side, thirty seconds after the Germans themselves had fired. He ordered that the ‘five flag’ be hoisted – the signal to ‘engage the enemy’.47 Beatty was apparently off the bridge at the time and sending a signal to Jellicoe. The flag was raised by Lions signals officer, Ralph Seymour.48
The enemy battle-cruisers were rapidly closing us steering south-westerly. The range receiver on the bridge showed 20,000 yards. I was on the compass platform … Beatty … was on his own bridge below me with his staff … I wanted him to come to the compass platform and sent a message … [to him] that the range was closing rapidly and that we ought almost at once to open fire … But I could get no reply: the Vice-Admiral was engaged in an important message to the Commander-in-Chief. Eighteen thousand yards. I told Longhurst [Lions gunnery officer] to be ready to open fire immediately. The turrets were already loaded and trained on the leading enemy ship, the Lützow. At 3.45, the range was 16,000 yards. I could wait no longer and I told Longhurst to be ready to open fire. At the same time the enemy did so … [Then] Beatty came on to the compass platform.49
Generally speaking, incredible gunnery from Lützow aside, German opening fire was too short, British too long.* British gunnery was also inaccurate compared to the Germans’, with some salvos going over their targets by as much as three miles. Shells from the British battle-cruiser line were even falling close to Regensburg, which was some distance off, on Hipper’s port wing.
Jutland_The Unfinished Battle Page 19
