Jutland_The Unfinished Battle

by Nicholas Jellicoe

  Beatty’s feeling might have been that at the greater distances British fire would be so inaccurate as not to warrant the waste of ordnance. He might have also lacked confidence in British ability to score decisive hits. The delay has been questioned ever since.

  British accounts seem to give a longer opening distance. Chatfield reported fire opening at 18,500yds (16,900m), but the description of Beatty being off the bridge talks about the range having been at 16,000yds (14,600m) at 15:45. This must have either widened or been a mistake. Queen Mary probably opened at around 17,500yds (16,000m); according to a survivor (of the latter’s sinking), Tiger and New Zealand did so at 18,100yds (16,550m). Tiger was almost immediately straddled by two salvos from Moltke, one ‘long’, the other ‘short’.50 The very next minute she was hit, twice: once on the forecastle and the other on the shelter deck: ‘A blinding flash through our gun port and the rattle of a hail of shell splinters on our ship’s side told us that Jerry was already straddling us with a near miss.’51

  Three minutes later at 15:54, when Moltke had increased her rate of fire to a salvo every twenty seconds, Tiger was hit again, this time more critically. The hit took off the sighting hood on Q turret,52 killing one officer and three men, badly wounding another officer and many men. It was only through the skill of the turret officer, Petty Officer Fitzgerald, that the turret could be brought back into action. ‘Very suddenly, amidst deafening noise, our ship heeled over to the hammer of a tremendous shock and my mind rolled and spun like quicksilver. Then she seemed to shake herself like a dog with a bloody nose and then belted on at the speed of the fleet.’53

  Victor Hayward, who served on Tiger, described the feeling, saying that the ship seemed to ‘lift bodily sideward’:

  We received the worst hit we had until then. Just one shell had exploded underneath the warrant officer’s mess, through the ship-side armoured belt, and into a storeroom below. A great fire raged around the ammunition passages and the port after a 6-inch magazine had to be flooded to save the ship from blowing up. The German 12-inch shell did an immense amount of damage and almost brought the ship to a standstill.54

  After Tigers Q turret was put out of action, she was hit again at 15:55, as was X turret. At the same time, German fire from Lützow had started to straddle Lion from 15:54, the salvos bunched into close groups of four projectiles each. One shell hit the inboard side of Lions 4in (10cm) armour, the other the upper deck causing casualties in the 4in-gun crew. Derfflinger hit Queen Mary three times with 12in (30.5cm) fire; Von der Tann scored a number of hits on Indefatigable; Seydlitz likewise on Queen Mary (although Derfflinger claimed the hit). While it had taken Lützow just five salvos to get on target, Lion took nine.55

  Course Plotting

  Fed into the fire-control tables was data on the range and bearing of a target. With the firing ship’s course and speed, these tables would compile the critical input, known as a ‘firing solution’, required to set the constantly changing gun elevation and bearing needed to hit moving targets.

  This was one of the supporting dramas of Jutland, mostly played out in the pre-war years: the battle between the rival systems of Arthur Hungerford Pollen, who offered his services in monopoly to the Royal Navy, and Jellicoe’s flag captain on Iron Duke, Frederic Dreyer, considered one of the Navy’s top gunnery experts. Dreyer copied many of Pollen’s ideas, but in Dreyers system range and bearing were plotted separately, simultaneously in Pollen’s. The Dreyer Mark II system used Pollen’s Argo Clock Mark IV This instrument mechanically combined target and firing ship’s courses, bearing and speeds to present the firing solution but, by the time of Jutland, only six Argo clocks were on British ships.

  All British ships’ gunfire was controlled by a single master sight on the director tower, hence the system’s name, ‘director firing’. Here was mounted a Barr and Stroud coincidence range-finder system. On the platform itself were four petty officers and twenty men; in the transfer room there were one petty officer and twelve men; in the switch room, one warrant officer and three gunnery mechanics; in the magazines, one petty officer and eighteen men; and in the cartridge magazine, one petty officer and around fourteen men.

  The Dreyer tables were slow to enter service. At the outbreak of war only one was fitted in a 12in dreadnought, although they were then quickly installed in the rest. However, the Dreyer Mark I (actually a variant that used a Vickers rather than an Argo or Dreyer clock) was less reliable. Its simplicity made it easier to produce, but the same characteristic made it less reliable and particularly problematic at longer ranges. So by Jutland, while all the 15in dreadnoughts had the superior Dreyer clock, one-third of the Grand Fleet battleships and half the battle-cruisers used the less reliable equipment type.

  Turning to the German systems, Hase wrote a very useful description of how gunnery was organised on Derfflinger. She was equipped with four 30.5cm (12in) guns, mounted two aft and two forward, and, as was the practice in the German navy, they were named, from bow to stern, Anna, Bertha, Caesar and Dora. (On a British ship, the equivalents were the rather less romantic A, B, X and Y, with the occasional Q thrown in for good measure; A and B were the fore and X and Y the aft turrets; Q was a midship turret.)

  The secondary armament consisted of fourteen 15cm (5.9in) guns, mounted in equal numbers on each side of the ship. Ammunition was stored in around fifty separate magazines scattered throughout the ship. Organisationally, Hase had three lieutenant commanders, three lieutenants, four sub lieutenants, four midshipmen, six warrant officers, and around 750 petty officers and men: around 50 per cent of the entire complement of Derfflinger, in fact. Each turret was under the command of a turret officer, normally a lieutenant commander or lieutenant, a Stückmeister, to work the turret, and seventy-five petty officers and men.

  The guns were controlled from what Hase described as an ‘armoured chamber’, forming the rear portion of the ship’s conning tower. During action Hase worked the main guns from this position using an observation periscope to afford him some protection, while the three gunnery officers were responsible for the secondary batteries, with a sub lieutenant and three petty officers manning the range-finder, and a further three petty officers on the director, and five men who were responsible for getting the orders to the various points of the ship. They did this through the transmitting stations that were directly below the conning tower, but below Derfflinger’s armoured decks.

  Range-finding equipment was provided by seven Zeiss stereoscopic finders that could measure accurately up to 200hm. Each finder had two Basisgerät men (BG Manner), one to read the range, the other to set the figures in hectometres on the gunnery telegraph. This was then sent to the BG-transmitter that took an average from all the reports. The German Zeiss 3m range-finder system hugely magnified targets and could more accurately be used in hazy conditions. Combined with efficient ‘ladder’ bracketing, the German system tended to find enemy targets more quickly, but in time, as operators reputedly tired faster with eye strain, German range accuracy fell off during engagement.

  Derfflinger also carried a new invention called the Entfernungs-unterschieds Peilschreiber (EU Anzeiger) that the first gunnery officer of Lützow, Commander Günther Paschen, had designed, the equivalent to the Royal Navy’s Dumaresq. Ranges from separate stereoscopic range-finders were averaged, passed to the transmitting station, combined with elevation data and sent to the gun layers to calculate the required ‘deflection’ for a successful shot. A clock, the AW-Geber C12, was used to keep the range-rate data.

  Being on the receiving end of heavy fire was a horrifying combination of expectation, noise, paranoia:

  With each salvo fired by the enemy, I was able to see distinctly four or five shells coming through the air. They looked like elongated black spots. Gradually they grew bigger, and then – crash! They were here. They exploded on striking the water or the ship with a terrific roar. After a bit I could tell from watching the shells fairly accurately whether they would fall short or over.56


  An officer on New Zealand talked of the same feeling, almost that you were in the cross-hairs of a sniper’s rifle:

  I was surprised to find that, in addition to being able to follow the flight of one’s own projectiles with spotting glasses, the enemy’s projectiles also appeared as dots getting larger and larger, till they burst short or droned past and fell beyond us. They always seemed to be coming straight for one’s eye. Ricochets were also clearly visible, turning end over end, and making a noise like the rumbling of a distant train.57

  Not until 15:55 did Queen Mary – third in the British line and considered a crack gunnery ship – finally score the first hit from the British side, two on Seydlitz, one just in front of the foremast.58 Seydlitz and Queen Mary started to duel, but at the very moment that Queen Mary scored her hit, she was herself hit in the aft 4in battery. Two minutes later Queen Marys shooting scored another hit, this time on her opponent’s barbette armour in the aft super-firing gun. The turret was holed and an ammunition fire broke out, but it was not as serious as at Dogger Bank. There, a small burning splinter had ignited 13,000lbs (5,900kg) of cordite and killed 190 in the turret; this time, the damage was limited to twenty dead and the turret being put out of action.59

  Seven minutes had passed since action had been engaged: seven minutes in which German gunnery had been accurate from the first ranging shots. Beatty signalled ‘increase the rate of fire’ and let Jellicoe know that he was engaged with the enemy but gave no further detail.60 This penchant for an increased rate of fire plagued the Royal Navy during this period. Its requirements – feeding the guns with propellant and shell as fast as possible – produced lax and dangerous munitions-handling procedures; it led to cordite-stacking outside the magazines and to flash-proofing precautions being over-ridden.

  Two minutes before four o’clock, Princess Royal was hit by two 12in shells from Derfflinger. The latter had just laid down a heavy barrage of five salvos in three minutes. The second ‘caused the electric training of the Argo Tower to fail, and the hand gear was found to be set up. Control was turned over to B turret for ten minutes, and then resumed by the Argo Tower’ where the range-finder was out of action. The switch of director command to the Princess Royal’s B turret was ordered till 16:14.61

  At this point, the British destroyers passed up the line on the engaged side of the battle-cruisers. As if the battle-cruisers were not having enough problems, now their gunnery was even more obscured by belching funnel smoke. To lessen the effect and regain his balance, Beatty slightly altered course to the south-southeast to open the range with the Germans. The move was not signalled and, as a consequence, seemed to cause some confusion among the destroyers.

  The sudden switch to the south-south-east threw the destroyers out of station. We had been assembled ahead of the Lion but the rapid 70 degree change turn to starboard left us trailing and there was a mad scramble to regain our battle position in the van. Most of our flotilla mates steamed up the disengaged side of our battle-cruisers, but Obdurate and Morris found themselves on the engaged side and as we crept up between the battle lines we were much inhibited by the necessity to moderate our speed so that excessive funnel smoke would not obscure the big ships’ view of the enemy.62

  Beatty wanted to run ahead of Hipper, but he also wanted to get out of range of the Germans’ smaller secondary armament, the lighter 5.9in guns that Seydlitz had been using for six minutes after opening up main weapons fire. He felt that if he could successfully out-run his opponents, he could also swing back over to his port to cross their ‘T’.

  Hipper also turned off to the southeast and – with Beatty already turning away – this put considerably more distance between the two lines than either commander might have intended. However, a minute later, after the turn-away, at 15:59 both Derfflinger and Lützow were hit. Lion, who struck the latter, was finally able to avenge some of the harsh treatment that she had received earlier. Although both hits landed on the forecastle, little damage actually resulted. Lions hit was the final of the first eleven minutes of the action in which five German battle-cruisers, outnumbered by Beatty’s six, managed to land twice as many hits on their opponent: at least fifteen against eight, and probably many more. Tiger herself had probably taken nine hits by this point.

  Lion continued taking heavy fire. Lieutenant Chalmers saw a lifeboat explode ‘in a cloud of splinters’. He could not tell through the ‘white mist’ what was happening with the enemy.63 At 16:00, as she was trying to close the gap caused by the double turn-away, Lion received a critical hit. Lützow had managed to land a 12in shell on Q turret’s weakest point. The turret top was ripped wide open, killing all but three of the turret crew instantaneously. Had the shell hit 6in (15cm) either side, it would have glanced off or exploded on the exterior.

  The destructive power of a shell hit is described by an eyewitness on Lion in Massie’s Castles of Steel:

  No further confirmation was necessary: the armoured roof of Q turret had been folded back like an open sardine tin; thick yellow smoke was rolling up in clouds from the gaping hole, and the guns were cocked up in the air awkwardly. All this happened within a few yards of where Beatty was standing and none of us on the bridge had heard the detonation. The destructive power was enormous but, oddly, in the maelstrom of the battle, completely unregistered on the bridge.64

  The comment is extraordinary in its attempt to convey the noise and mayhem of a sea battle. The explosion must have been violent, like a thunderclap and yet nothing was registered. From Birmingham the hit looked terminal:

  She was heavily hit and I saw a large plate which I judged to be the top of the turret, blown into the air. It appeared to rise very slowly, turning round and round, and looking very much like an airplane. I should say it rose some 400 or 500 feet and looking at it through glasses I could distinctly see the holes in it for the bolts. My attention was drawn from this by a sheet of flame in her second funnel, which shot up about sixty feet and soon died down but did not immediately disappear.65

  On Lion, her crew felt that they had just had an extremely close escape, though Chalmers noted that it was ‘strange that this should have all happened a few yards from where Beatty was standing and none of us on the bridge [had] heard the explosion’.66

  Then, between the flashing lines, came the strangest sight. During this hell-fire, a large sailing barque with all sails set lay becalmed between the two fleets, amidst this firestorm of steel and death. It was all the more extraordinary as the very same thing had happened a year earlier at the Dogger Bank action.

  On Lion one disaster had been narrowly averted only for another quickly to follow. A shell that had been in the breech fell back out with the powder charge. About ten minutes after the initial shell had landed, the cordite ignited. The explosion was strong enough to flatten some of the marines who were cleaning up after the initial turret hit. Marine H Willons takes up the story:

  And then the chief gunner came along to see if everything was in order. Finding the turret out of action, he ordered several of us to put out fires on the mess deck. Just as he and I got clear, the ignition of the cordite occurred and the blast pushed us along.67

  The turret fire had ignited the charges that were in the loading cages. The flash went right through the handling room but, because it found a way through the ‘escape trunk’ onto the deck, the explosion was not mortal. It was only because of the Royal Marines turret officer, Major Francis Harvey, that Lion survived. He had lost both legs, but he had somehow crawled to the voice pipe and ordered the magazines to be flooded and doors closed; it was just in time. Three of the turret crew survived. Harvey had sent his marine sergeant, his face ‘black from fire, his hair singed, his clothes burnt’, directly to the bridge to report in person to Chatfield and Beatty.68 Later, Harvey’s body was found by the voice pipe. His action saved the ship and his shipmates. He was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross.

  Now severely wounded, Lion staggered out of the line and Princess Royal, which
had also just received another close hit from Derfflinger, took over the van.69 The Germans were throwing everything that they could at the British, including Moltke, which loosed four torpedoes. The torpedoes had no effect, but the steadily overwhelming pace and accuracy of German gunnery, and now the addition of torpedoes, must have substantially shaken the British. On the German side, Lützow was also hit, but out of the thirty-one salvos in the seventeen minutes of action, Günther Paschen counted six hits. By contrast the Germans had been hit just three times.70 It was a sign of how badly things were developing.

  The loss of Indefatigable

  Princess Royal shifted her fire onto Derfflinger and successfully hit her. Von der Tann continued to target Indefatigable at the rear of the British line. The latter’s forty or so 12in shells seemed to have had no noticeable effect on the German battle-cruisers ferocious rate of fire. After she found the British battle-cruisers range, Von der Tann registered three consecutive hits from a four-gun salvo, her 11in shells hitting the forward A turret and forecastle. Encouraged by her success, Von der Tann laid down a massive barrage. Fifty-two 11in and thirty-eight 5.9in shells were fired, at ranges varying from 14,000–18,000yds (12,000–16,500m); four salvos straddled Indefatigable. Finally, at 16:02, at a range of around 16,000yds, the German shells tore through the thin plating just above the armoured belt by X turret and exploded in the magazine. A second salvo hit A turret and may have caused a cordite fire. Thirty seconds after the superstructure was hit, a ripple of fire seemed to race from the bows right the way back down the 19,000-ton battle-cruiser as her magazines exploded.

  Beatty pulled away a second time, but Indefatigable was unable to follow New Zealand and, instead, started slowly to sink by the stern. Fourteen minutes after opening fire, ‘the deadly blow struck the enemy’. Looking through the direction finder (Richtungs-weiser Rohr), Mahrholtz ‘saw the arrival of a salvo, followed by a gigantic explosion in the aft turret.’71