Jutland_The Unfinished Battle

by Nicholas Jellicoe

  The loss of Invincible

  At 18:13 Invincible’s captain, Arthur Cay, turned the great ship hard to starboard, away from the torpedo attack. But in doing so, her helm jammed and she had to come to a full stop to clear the problem. Up in the conn, Commander Hubert Dannreuther saw some of the torpedoes heading in his direction, to pass by harmlessly. But they were close; one was within six yards of the port side.

  Seven minutes later Hood spotted Beatty’s ships almost head-on, around 4,000yds (3,700m) off. Cay swung Invincible around through a 180-degree turn to starboard, which brought her neatly into position around 3,000yds (2,700m) ahead of Lion on a southeasterly course. Beatty made a final dash at Lion’s rated 26 knots and got his battle-cruisers across the front of the Grand Fleet to take up position behind Hood (if Hood had taken station astern of Beatty, Jellicoe’s fire would have been obstructed again).

  Invincible was now running parallel with Hipper’s battle-cruisers, divided by a gap of around 9,000yds (8,200m). At 18:26 Invincible opened fire on Lützow. Inflexible supported her firing while Indomitable completely focused her 12in guns on Derfflinger. And from astern, Beatty’s ships engaged the rear of the enemy’s line. Lützow was soon in deep trouble. She started to flood severely and had lost radio communications: ‘Several 38-centimetre shells squarely hit their mark, wreaking terrible havoc. The first hit the wireless department. Of the twelve living men who a moment ago were seated before the apparatus there is nothing more to be seen.’68

  The pounding from the head of the British battle-cruiser line ‘riddled her forward part, reduced her bows and her forecastle to a waste of crumpled, battered metal – her ability to stay afloat was a tribute to her design and construction’.69 Invincible’s second shot had pierced the fore part of the ship and the entire space, as far as the diesel motor room, was wrecked. Hipper sheered off to his starboard, giving up any attempt to reach the crippled Wiesbaden.

  From his observation position on Derfflinger, Hase recorded the moment they first saw their adversary:

  At 18:29 the veil of mist in front of us split like a curtain at a theatre. Clear and sharply silhouetted against the horizon, we saw a powerful ship … at an almost parallel course at top speed. Her guns were trained on us and immediately another salvo crashed out, straddling us completely.70

  With the damage that British guns had inflicted, Derfflinger was herself in difficulties. Kapitän Johannes Hartog then did the unthinkable. He ordered a complete stop so that the riggers could get to her trailing torpedo nets and cut them off, as they were in grave danger of fouling her propellers. Every second counted. They would have been sitting ducks had they been spotted. It gives the reader an idea of how heavy the fog must have been lying, that Hartog could even have contemplated such a dangerous decision.

  At around 18:30 Invincible was firing flat out and pumping shells, about fifty, at Lützow. Below the gun turrets the silk cordite bags had been taken out of their containers so that the gun crews could keep up with the firing rate and avoid ‘starving’ the guns. Invincible’s performance was superb. She scored eight hits in eight minutes at a range of around 9,600yds (8,800m). Two of the eight hits punched holes in Lützow’s bow section below her waterline. The massive strikes caused instant flooding and she took on around 2,000 tons of water. These were the most damaging hits on Lützow in the whole day. As a flagship, Hipper’s Lützow had become useless. At 18:37 he ordered her ‘out of action’ and to return to Wilhelmshaven.

  Hood was pleased with Invincible’s gunnery and wanted to let his gunnery officer know. Through the voice pipe he complimented him: ‘Your firing is very good. Keep at it as quickly as you can. Every shot is telling.’71 His praise was justified but terribly timed. Lützow swung her own guns on to target Invincible, already under fire from Derfflinger: the tables were turned. With Captain Hubert Dannreuther on the foretop was the range taker, Able Seaman Ernest Dandridge, and Chief Petty Officer Walter Thompson, who recalled the moment: ‘The first German salvos fell about 1,200 yards short, but they gradually fell closer until they were straddling the Invincible, deluging the ship with shell splashes while pieces of shrapnel buzzed over the ship’.72

  The first hit, in Captain Francis Kennedy’s recollection from the bridge of Indomitable, was on the ship’s aft, with little damage. Ninety seconds passed and after Derfflinger’s third salvo Hase successfully scored hits against Invincible’s Q turret at 18:31.73 Bryan Gasson, on the range-finder in Q turret, was sure that the shell hit the turret between the guns. It penetrated the 7in armour, killed all Gasson’s fellow marines and blew off the turret’s armoured roof.

  Either this shell set up a flash that penetrated the magazines or another shell landed: the ship exploded in a huge fireball. In the one photograph of the actual explosion the ship can be seen totally enveloped, with only her bridge and the director platform silhouetted against the wall of flame; to the front, it looks as if fire is shooting up from the ship’s foremost turret, A turret. Dannreuther, another officer and three ratings, up on the fire-control platform, survived only because the huge explosion severed the tripod and they were hurled from the ship. All that was left were the two hull sections, each reaching up into above the water, hanging there vertically, each section resting the bottom of the North Sea. As the depth there was only 180ft, the 567ft hull section was split in two, each visible 100ft above the surface.

  The few survivors cheered their fellow countrymen as Indefatigable and Indomitable surged past, as did, unwittingly, the sailors from the Grand Fleet: they could not believe that one of their own had been blown up. They assumed it was a German ship:

  [We] could have almost chucked a heaving line aboard her. She was broken in two with her bows and stern sticking out of the water. Benbow’s men jumped up and down on top of their turrets and cheered heartily. The idea that it could be any other than a German ship had never entered their heads. Then we passed about half a cable distance and saw her name, and the cheering ceased suddenly … our Admiral [Sturdee] was very upset about it – she was his flagship in his last great fight off the Falklands.74

  A nineteen-year-old midshipman on Bellerophon talked of the horror of the sudden realisation:

  During the lull we came out of the turrets to get some fresh air and there, floating around us, was a whole mass of bodies and debris – some of our sailors were cheering because they thought they were Germans, but unfortunately they were from the Invincible. It was a terrible experience and my first experience of death.75

  As St Vincent passed the wreck her crew, like the others before, had no idea of her identity. They too assumed that the ship was German. For her captain, William Fisher, the realisation was of a profound, personal sadness. His brother Charles, whom he worshipped, had been a young lieutenant on Invincible. He would carry ‘this poignant memory of that quarter of an hour’ before ‘he realised it was the wreck of the Invincible’ with him for the rest of his life. ‘He closed his binoculars knowing he would never see his brother again.’76

  For the British, the latest phase of battle of Jutland had not got off to a good start.

  At 18:40 Badger was ordered aside by Beatty to pickup the survivors. Hood and Captain Cay, along with 1,019 crewmembers, were dead.* There were only six survivors. Colossus saw two of them in the water by one of the propellers as she passed by at 19:02.77 One of these was Hubert Dannreuther. He later talked of his narrow escape: he merely ‘stepped off into the water when the foretop came down’.78 He was uninjured and the water was ‘quite warm’ with ‘no shortage of wreckage to hold on to’, and he was soon safely aboard Badger.79

  With Dannreuther were Lieutenant Cecil S Sandford, Gunner Private Bryan Gasson, Able Seaman Ernest George Dandridge and Chief Petty Officer Walter Thompson. Another was Yeoman of Signals Walter Maclean Pratt, who had also been on the director platform. Gasson in Q turret was the only one not in the fire-control top, at the top of the tripod foremast. In another photograph, Badger is hove-to off to the north, forlornly l
ooking for more survivors, with Invincible’s two broken hull sections standing vertical in the water.

  The last man to see the wreck floating was probably not an Englishman. More likely it was the Kapitän of U.75, Lieutenant Commander Curt Beitzen. He had seen the bow section through his periscope after the Grand Fleet had passed by. Jellicoe had, in fact, following British success in recovering secret documents from SMS Magdeburg earlier in the war, ordered a British submarine out, if necessary, to torpedo the still floating sections when at 18:55 he [Jellicoe] passed the wreck.

  Even though Invincible was not the only casualty of this engagement – Princess Royal was hit by two 12in shells from Markgraf – the German torpedo-boat commander, Commodore Michelsen, understood, from his post on the bridge of Rostock, the danger of the position into which Scheer and Hipper had led their ships. Grouping together the 3rd Torpedo-Boat Flotilla with the 1st Half-Flotilla, Commodore Wilhelm Hollmann led the combined forces through the German lines to launch another torpedo attack and had approached to within 7,000yds (6,400m) of the British lines when he was recalled by Michelsen. Scheer had decided to pull his ships out and needed Michelsen’s boats to cover the manoeuvre.

  The first German battle turn: the turn-away to starboard

  Even with the German success against Invincible, Scheer clearly understood that his fleet was in a perilous situation and courting certain destruction if he continued to be pulled further into Jellicoe’s ‘T’:

  It was now obvious that we were confronted by a large portion of the English fleet. The entire arc stretching from north to east was a sea of fire. The flash from the muzzle of the guns was seen distinctly through the mist and the smoke on the horizon, although the ships themselves were not distinguishable.80

  Despite – maybe because of – the horror of facing an extended six-mile line of British battleships, the Germans fought back hard. Prince Albert, the future King George VI, was in A turret of Collingwood, a fact that would, as the Prince of Wales wrote, ‘buck him up a lot’, despite the possibility of death.81 ‘The shell was plainly visible, a reddish brown, probably an armour-piercing. When I saw the shell flying towards us I remarked to Midshipman Stoneham, “That shell is going to hit A turret”. It did not. It passed over the forecastle and fell into the sea close on the port side.’82

  Right at the head of the ‘T’, König was taking a heavy pounding. She was in the sights of not one but twelve British dreadnoughts: Agincourt, Bellerophon, Conquerer, Thunderer, Hercules, Colossus, Benbow, Iron Duke, Orion, Monarch, Revenge and Royal Oak. Rear Admiral Behncke saw Hipper’s battle-cruisers sheer off to the southeast and followed suit. He did not need much encouragement. Way back in the middle of the line, Scheer on Friedrich der Große had a different picture. He could not see what was happening, but had just received reports from the interrogation of the rescued prisoners from Nomad, who talked about sixty dreadnoughts being in the area, and feared the worst. Nomad’s commander, Paul Whitfield, and seventy-two men had been plucked from the icy waters by their adversaries.

  At around 16:34 Scheer signalled from Friedrich der Große for his forces to make the first of his famous battle turns, the Gefechtskehrtwendung nach Steuer-bord (battle about-turn to starboard), a manoeuvre practised many times by the High Seas Fleet for just such an occasion, but which supposedly took the Grand Fleet by surprise.83 Each German ship turned 180 degrees immediately on its own axis. Westfalen, last in line, commenced the manoeuvre, then all remaining twenty-one turned, each initiating the turn once the ship astern was seen to move out of line. With a simple signal Scheer had, without losing speed, managed (in one description) a ‘hand-brake turn. It was probably close to what a skidding turn would have looked like, and as the line turned Michelsens torpedo boats crossed their sterns laying a thick smokescreen.84 The British were blinded.

  Observers on Canterbury and Falmouth witnessed some part of the turn-away but did not think to report it to the bridge of Iron Duke. Iron Duke herself could not during the engagement see more than four ships at any time. Four minutes later there was no sign of the German fleet; the battle turn-away had happened so fast. Jellicoe’s deployment of the Grand Fleet took twenty-five minutes: Scheers of the High Seas Fleet, four. The confusion was understandable but also unforgivable. The Navy was still trained not to think but only do what it was told to do. While the British had used the short engagement to its fullest potential, it was a bitter pill to swallow.

  During this brief encounter the British scored twenty-three heavy shell hits on the enemy’s leading ships. König was hit eight times by 13.5in shells from Iron Duke and Monarch, and suffered severe damage. Markgraf received only two hits, but one of these was a near-miss by Orion that bent a propeller shaft and put one of her engines out of action. Lützow was hit no fewer than ten more times, due mostly to the superb gunnery of Hood’s battle-cruisers. It was one devastating hit by either Invincible or Inflexible that led to her eventual loss. The already battered Derfflinger and Seydlitz also received more damage, mainly from Indomitable. In return, Scheers battleships had only been able to register a single hit on any of Jellicoe’s battleships, and only two on Princess Royal. Even Hipper’s accurate gunners could only manage five hits, all of them on Invincible during those brief moments of clear visibility.85

  In terms of materiel, the British losses were not significant. Defence and Warrior were obsolete: both had been in service for the critical decade in which battleship design was revolutionised by the arrival of the Dreadnought. With 9.2in guns both were badly under-gunned for their role at Jutland. Invincible was, meanwhile, the ‘oldest and weakest of Beatty’s battle-cruiser force’ and was, therefore, a ‘sustainable loss’.86 The loss of life – the death of almost 2,000 sailors – was another matter entirely.

  To cover the turn-away Hipper ordered a torpedo attack. It was a relatively small-scale affair and did not cause Jellicoe to turn away.87 Nevertheless, when at around 18:40 lookouts on the British line started spotting torpedoes running, it seemed that Jellicoe’s nightmare was about to become reality. Indeed, on Revenge a loud, heavy shock was felt, but the weapon failed to explode and bounced off the waterline armour. By 18:45 firing had ceased altogether. The German fleet had successfully disappeared right in front of their antagonists behind a smokescreen into a seemingly impenetrable North Sea mist.

  The British were now fully deployed in a line of thirty-three capital ships: six battle-cruisers followed by the twenty-four ships of the Grand Fleet itself and, at the rear of these, the three operational 5th Battle Squadron Queen Elizabeth-class super-dreadnoughts. At the very point that Jellicoe had completed his own deployment, there was no sign of his opponent.

  Jellicoe explained: ‘I imagined this disappearance of the enemy to be due merely to the thickening of the mist, but after a few minutes had elapsed, it became clear that there must be some other reason and at 18:44 I hauled up one point to south-east’.88 His critics need to imagine – for a moment – what might have happened if he had received just a titbit of information from Canterbury or Falmouth. The later debate centred on his supposed lack of Nelsonian aggression: his failure to chase Scheer into the mists and to stay close to the enemy. Having no clue as to what had happened, Jellicoe would have been foolhardy to do the latter. Bacon did not mince his words:

  If he had chased the German fleet by turning straight towards where they had last been seen, as some lunatics have suggested that he should have done, not only would he have seriously endangered the Grand Fleet, without a prospect of damaging the enemy, but he would actually have been further from the German fleet at dark than he eventually was.89

  More to the point (Bacon added), little would be gained by listening to arguments from people who failed ‘to grasp that an enemy who [ran] away [could not] be overtaken unless the ships chasing him [had] great speed and sufficient time in which to overtake’.90 Had Jellicoe charged into the mist in hot pursuit of the German battle fleet, as his critics would have liked him to have done, the resul
ts would have most likely been disappointing. The distance that Jellicoe would have had to cover to catch Scheer would have simply been too great without a significant speed advantage.91

  With no German battle-cruisers or battle fleet in view, the guns of the Grand Fleet were retrained on the one target still there for the taking: the wreck of Wiesbaden. The sheer courage of her remaining crew was inspiring, even to the British. Surrounded by the dead and wounded, with carnage and everything in flames, the crew somehow managed to load and fire one torpedo tube. Marlborough’s track and the missile now whizzing through the water were on a convergent destiny. She was hit at 18:54. A huge 20ft foot gash was torn in her side, 25ft below the deep waterline right by the boiler room and the starboard diesel and hydraulic engine rooms.92 A further 70ft of framing was distorted by the blast. It was just abaft of the B-turret magazine.

  The fire in the four boilers was put out almost immediately within ten minutes. By 19:30 the boiler room had been pumped and the flooding brought under control. But with the flooding came an increasing 7-degree list to starboard. Her speed was cut dramatically. Miraculously, only two men were killed: Stokers 1st Class Edgar George Monk and William Rustage. Theywere the only casualties on any of the Grand Fleet dreadnoughts at Jutland. Just after Marlborough was hit St Vincent also spotted a torpedo in the water:

  I observed the wake of one, about 300 yards away, coming dead for the St Vincent. Instantly, on my telling him, the officer in command reported its presence to Captain Fisher, with the result that the ship turned to port to avoid it… Hit though she was, and listing badly, the Marlborough was by no means out of action … i saw her guns being elevated to counteract the list, and she continued to fire broadside after broadside so long as there was anything to fire at.93