A cumulative error inherent in navigational plotting by dead reckoning meant that the two fleets were probably between eleven and thirteen miles apart.* The error was inevitable. Dead reckoning meant calculating one’s current position by relying on a fixed, known point, then calculating one’s relative position, given speed, elapsed time, course and currents. Beatty was still engaged. Navigational precision always suffers in action.
Finally, at 17:56 Beatty sighted the Grand Fleet itself. For over an hour, since 16:45, he had been out of contact with Jellicoe and even during the lulls between the shooting he had not thought it worth his while to pass on information needed by his commander-in-chief so that he could plan the most appropriate deployment of the fleet from the bridge of Iron Duke. Beatty had failed in the important mission of acting as the eyes of the Grand Fleet. At that moment, he had actually lost contact with the main German battle fleet.
Chester’s lucky escape
Ahead of his three battle-cruisers, Hood’s scouts pushed on to report back to their admiral, who was now rushing to back up Beatty. Chester was out on the starboard beam, Canterbury on the port, with four destroyers directly ahead of the fleet as a protective submarine screen. By 17:00 light was failing fast and the additional onset of mist made visibility increasingly difficult. In some directions, it stretched eight miles, in others only two. It was typical North Sea weather where, on average, visibility can be anywhere between three to eight miles.2
By 17:30 the rapid-fire sound of the guns from Hipper and Beatty’s fierce engagement carried north. Aboard Chester all ears were cocked, eyes strained. Robert Lawson, her captain, signalled Invincible while he turned for a closer investigation. Six minutes later the silent silhouettes of enemy ships were spotted in the murk around 11,000yds (10,000m) off. One was a three-funnelled cruiser, the other two ships, destroyers.
Chester did not know it but the cruiser was Frankfurt, of the 1st Scouting Group. She was steaming five miles northwest of Hipper’s battle-cruisers’ disengaged side, grouped together with Wiesbaden, Pillau and Elbing. Working with Hipper’s main force, they had been chasing Evan-Thomas’s 5th Battle Squadron and Beatty’s battle-cruiser force. Chester signalled a challenge. She thought that she had received the correct response, so, innocently unsuspecting, she had approached, cutting the intervening distance down by 5,000yds (4,600m). She was a newly commissioned ship, not completely battle-ready, so was entirely unprepared for the withering fire let loose by what turned out to be Germans. Within three minutes most of her ten guns had been hit. Three were out of action; the forward one was the first to go.
Many of the men in her guns’ crews had their legs shorn off at the ankles as they stood behind the un-turreted guns. An officer reported that in the central ammunition passage these wounded men – cheerful Cockneys, for she had a Chatham crew – sat smoking cigarettes, the bloody stumps of their tourniqueted legs out in front. An hour or so later most of them would be dead from shock.3
On duty by the 5.5in gun was a boy, first class. The sixteen-year-old Jack Cornwell held great responsibility.4 Firing orders from the bridge came to him through his headphones and with that information he set the gun’s sights. In these opening moments, despite what turned out to be mortal wounds, the young boy – in our age, not yet old enough to smoke or drink – refused to abandon his post. Later, in his dispatches, Beatty wrote about his exemplary courage: ‘Boy (1st Class) John Travers Cornwell of the Chester was mortally wounded early in the action. He nevertheless remained standing alone at a most exposed post, quietly awaiting orders till the end of the action, with the gun’s crew dead and wounded all round him.’
His mother had him buried with a simple headstone, a wooden peg with the number 323 in Square 126 in Manor Park cemetery. The Daily Sketch picked up the story and launched the campaign that would bring Cornwell the recognition his courage warranted: ‘England will be shocked today to learn … that the boy-hero of the naval victory has been buried in a common grave’.5 In July Boy Cornwell was reburied in a public ceremony in Manor Park. His coffin was carried by six other Chester boy seamen his age, and the grave heaped high with wreaths and flowers from both the community and the ship’s company. The Admiralty was represented by the financial secretary, Dr E J Macnamara. It was a ceremony designed to capture the nation’s imagination and win back some honour for the Navy after the battle.6 Today, YouTube footage gives a sense of national loss as the coffin made its way to Cornwell’s final resting place, the pall-bearers shouldering his small coffin through huge, thronging and visibly upset crowds of mourners. Cornwell was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross, Britain’s highest military award for valour.
Severely wounded, Chester turned and made a dash back up northeast to rejoin Hood’s main force. It had been a very uncomfortable nineteen minutes, the British ship defending herself against four attackers. But somehow she had survived.7 Chester eventually got back to the port of Immingham on the Humber. She had been hit seventeen times, and came out of the action with two officers and thirty-three men dead. A further three officers and thirty-nine other men were wounded. Jutland had been, in the most literal sense, a mortal baptism of fire.
After receiving the earlier reports, Horace Hood had, meanwhile, largely closed the gap and had turned to starboard at 17:40.
The loss of Defence
Back with the main body of Jellicoe’s battle fleet, the horde of British ships of all types were going through the deployment to port. It was a manoeuvre that risked disaster at any moment, either from collision or from being hit by the earlier than anticipated arrival of the Germans.
Without warning, Rear Admiral Sir Robert Arbuthnot’s 1st Cruiser Squadron – Defence, Warrior, Black Prince and Duke of Edinburgh – steamed ahead of Iron Duke and raced dangerously across Beatty’s speeding path. During the same moments, Beatty was heading up the battleship line to get across east with his own four remaining battle-cruisers (Lion, Tiger, Princess Royal and New Zealand) to join forces with Hood’s 3rd Battle Cruiser Squadron (Invincible, Inflexible and Indomitable). Hood had been ordered earlier at 16:05 to join up with Beatty. In the event, neither Duke of Edinburgh nor Black Prince could make it through the line fast enough and would spend the rest of the day trying to join up with friendly ships.
The track that Arbuthnot chose to steer was so tight that Lion actually came close to ramming the second ship in the line, Warrior. She only avoided a collision by abruptly heading off to starboard. Arbuthnot, who had promised not to turn in a ‘dull’ performance on the day, was described by Keith Yates as a ‘pugnacious individual who was itching to get into action. He had missed one splendid opportunity to come to grips with the enemy when his ship had been too late to join Sturdee at the Falklands in 1914, and he was determined not to miss another.’8
From his vantage point on the flagship Defence, Arbuthnot spotted Frankfurt and her accompanying ships. He opened fire, but Defence’s firing was short. Friedrich Bödicker’s forces fell back into the safety of the mists and fog. Arbuthnot also saw Wiesbaden (already seriously wounded by Invincible’s gunnery and now burning) and was able, as he passed, to land a few more salvos onto the crippled German cruiser, setting her on fire and leaving her listing heavily.
On Wiesbaden Kapitän zur See Harder ordered his guns to fire and, with a 5.9in salvo, he hit Defence’s turret at around 18:16. Adding to Wiesbaden’s own limited but surprisingly effective fire, given her dire circumstances, many ships from Scheers own line, including Friedrich der Große and Lützow, opened up on Defence with all that they had. At least three large shells seemed to land true. Nothing was visible from Derfflinger, except the fires raging fiercely on Wiesbaden, but she added her weight of fire to that of Lützow. After two salvos, her shells struck home, although some say that the final salvo was from Lützow. At 18:20 it seemed as if one of Defence’s magazines exploded. She was done for. An eyewitness described the scene of devastation, the third large British loss of the day: ‘She blew sky high, her picket
boat performing a giant Catherine wheel right above a gigantic mushroom cloud of flame and smoke’.9 There was, however, quite some confusion on Derfflinger and one of Hase’s gunnery officers, Lieutenant Commander Hausser, asked if she was indeed an English ship, as her four-funnelled appearance closely resembled that of SMS Rostock. After Hase’s assurance that she was indeed British, Derfflinger’s secondary armament, which had until that point been concentrating on repelling the destroyer attacks, joined with their added fire. Derfflinger turned away. The combined fire of Derfflinger and Lützow eventually blew the 14,800-ton armoured cruiser out of the water. Hausser’s concern was very much the same as Iron Duke’s gunnery officer, who not soon after, had the same concerns as to whether König (the British flagship’s target), was not a friendly.
Not one of the Defence’s 903 crew survived. Defence’s grim death took place right before the eyes of the Grand Fleet, though not much detail could be seen, the weather had become so poor. On Iron Duke it must have been particularly painful for Jellicoe, a close friend of Arbuthnot. In fact, it was almost surreal: ‘Twenty-four hours earlier Arbuthnot had been playing tennis at Cromarty with Lady Jellicoe’.10 An eyewitness on Warrior said that Defence ‘suddenly disappeared completely in an immense column of smoke and flame, hundreds of feet high. It appeared to be an absolutely instantaneous destruction, the ship seeming to be dismembered at once.’11 Nevertheless, archaeological inspections on the site have shown that what was seen of the explosion on the surface was misleading.12
As an opening to the great meeting of fleets it was not an encouraging sight.
The slow death of Wiesbaden
As the sounds of Chester’s engagement with Wiesbaden and the 1st Scouting Group was carried through the mists across the water, Hood’s 3rd BCS came to her scout’s rescue. At 17:53 Invincible’s 12in guns opened fire at 8,000yds (7,300m) and two minutes later Inflexible and Indomitable joined in at 12,000yds (11,000m).
Wiesbaden, last ship in the line, was hit as she turned to run: one of Invincible’s massive shells had burst through the side in the engine room, riddling the steam pipes and turbine casings with shrapnel. Both engines were badly enough damaged that Wiesbaden came to a dead stop; the same for Pillau, whose speed had already also been reduced to 24 knots when four of her boilers were badly damaged by a shell from Inflexible’s 12in guns.
Wiesbaden was now a sitting duck: every ship that passed took a shot. First, the 3rd Light Cruiser Squadron, then Onslow, on Lions starboard bow, pumped another fifty-eight salvos into her before moving on. An astonishing 200 shells would be fired at the fiery wreck of Wiesbaden before her end. Why she had not already sunk was anybody’s guess, but the British fire was really wasted effort: a massive over-kill and needless ammunition expenditure. She needed no more attention. Even later, when the Grand Fleet passed her by, Iron Duke also fired on her.13 On Onslow, Captain Tovey ‘decided to attack [Wiesbaden] to endeavour to frustrate her firing torpedoes at [Beatty’s] battle-cruisers’. He fired one and succeeded – at 3,500yds (3,200m) – in putting it just below the conn. Tovey now turned his attention to the larger prize.
Five miles off was the brunt of the German battle-cruiser fleet, coming up northwards leading Scheers battleships. Hipper ran into within 8,000yds but then turned away, avoiding both of Onslow’s torpedoes. Lützow’s secondary armament damaged both Onslow and Acasta, which both abandoned their attacks. The poor Wiesbaden, which had only come into service the previous August, courageously fought on. When she did eventually go down, she took 543 ratings and twenty-seven officers with her. One of those who escaped the wreck was Chief Stoker Hugo Zenne, who was set adrift on a raft and not picked up till thirty-six hours later.14 Zenne, who had started out with ten other sailors who had also managed to leave the stricken ship, was the sole survivor after all his companions slowly gave in to death’s embrace.15
The fate of Johann Kinau, better known by the name he used as a writer and poet, Gorch Fock, was very different: his body eventually washed up on the shores of a small Swedish town, Fjällbacka, just north of Gothenburg. It is the same small town where Ingrid Bergman’s ashes were also scattered. Today, Fock’s body lies interred next to the graves of British sailors on the small island of Stensholmen, but his spirit lives on in the training ship of the Bundesmarine named in his memory.
The decision to deploy to port
Jellicoe was confused by Beatty’s appearance on his starboard beam. It was the same for Hood. Between Beatty and Hood the distance was around eighteen miles out.16 Not only were Lion’s calculations wrong, so too were those on Iron Duke. On Beatty’s part, one would certainly have expected some inaccuracy, as he had been heavily engaged. This was not so much the case for Iron Duke.
At this point the latter’s dead reckoning after crossing the North Sea, initially zigzagging to avoid the expected submarine trap, was out by around four miles. Lion’s reckoning was around seven miles off: this meant eleven miles total error in position. It was not surprising that eithers position was out in the first place. There was little celestial navigation available because of the very poor light conditions. But Beatty’s over-sensitivity to any form of criticism obliged him to comment on the issue in Harper’s writing:
Owing presumably to errors in either ciphering or deciphering, or to operators’ errors, and also owing to the small unavoidable discrepancies in the dead reckoning of the ships making the reports, and also those receiving the reports, the actual position of the enemy’s fleet relative to Iron Dukes position must have been somewhat conjectural.17
The lack of accuracy in dead reckoning meant that reported enemy positions sighted from Beatty’s ships – and unseen from Iron Duke – were not easy to use or depend upon for the deployment decision that was now facing Jellicoe. It was better to be able to see the reporting ship. This gave him more confidence in her reports.
Jellicoe had received some information at 17:40 from Southampton stating her position and estimating that the enemy was north-northwest, but then, ten minutes later at 17:50, north. Differences in dead reckoning also put Southampton further east of Iron Duke. And again, other destroyer reports seemed to be contradictory. As a result, Jellicoe was not sure if the enemy battle fleet was on his starboard beam or, in fact, dead ahead in the Grand Fleet’s path.
This was the critical moment of the second phase of the battle. Jellicoe was not in the best of positions to be able to calculate accurately how to deploy to their greatest advantage the huge forces he commanded. In any manoeuvre now, he would want to maximise the number of heavy guns that his twenty-four dreadnoughts could bring to bear on the enemy. Otherwise, he could be caught without effective broadside firepower and himself over-powered. He calculated that it would take him a minimum of around eighteen minutes to deploy the dreadnoughts from cruising formation to battle line if he were to choose an unequal speed manoeuvre. So the manoeuvre’s timing was absolutely critical. Here, Jellicoe lacked just about all the essential data.
What about Beatty? His two roles were to act as fast reconnaissance for his commander-in-chief and to attack the enemy’s battle-cruiser scouting force. Between 16:38 and 17:00 Jellicoe received a number of reports of Scheers position: two from Commodore Goodenough, one from Champion, one from Beatty and one from the Admiralty. The two from Goodenough (at 16:48 and 17:00) were misleading on three counts. First, and most importantly, they did not give an accurate picture of the actual enemy position, because Southampton’s calculation of her own position was between nine and ten miles out. Secondly, the course was reported as 347 degrees, whereas it was actually 325. Lastly, the reports were received in reverse order. The 17:00 report came in before the 16:48 signal. With the different positions given for the Southampton it was clear that she must have miscalculated her position.
The signal from Beatty was sent through at 16:45, though Princess Royal’s was muddled. It was wrong on the enemy disposition as well as its location (‘26–30 battleships, probably hostile, bearing 145 degrees, steer
ing 122 degrees’). It also sounded as if the Germans were at full disposition, in other words with eighteen dreadnoughts and ten pre-dreadnoughts. Lion’s own position was erroneously reported as seven miles too far to the east. By contrast, the German 1st Scouting Group requested and received, within twenty-four minutes, its own battle fleet’s precise grid location after informing it of the disposition of Beatty’s battle-cruisers.
The 16:48 message from Champion, leader of the 13th Destroyer Flotilla, strangely gave the enemy course as east-northeast, in other words heading off. The last signal, the one from the Admiralty, was sent at 17:00 and referred to a directional intercept at 16:09 (an hour before). It was discarded by Jellicoe after the fiasco of the false morning signal still putting Friedrich der Große in the Jade. It was a pity, because the Admiralty information turned out to have been only four miles out. Between these reports and 17:40 there were no updates.
At around this time the two British fleets, Jellicoe’s Grand Fleet and Beatty’s Battle Cruiser Fleet, sighted each other.18 From Benbow, leading the 4th Division, Midshipman Roger Dickson (whose brother had been on Queen Mary) described the scene:
[They] suddenly burst through the mist. They were a wonderful sight, these great ships, tearing down across us, their huge funnels silhouetted against a great bank of red cordite smoke and lit up by sheets of flame as they fired salvo after salvo at the enemy whose flashes could be seen in the distance between the ships.19
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