Jutland_The Unfinished Battle

by Nicholas Jellicoe

  That the German fleet was allowed to disappear with neither vital intelligence being passed on to Jellicoe, nor shots being fired by larger ships, speaks volumesabout both thestate of technology at thetimeand thestiflinglegacy of a Navy trained in Victorian values. The lack of initiative of some commanders was near-baffling, given what was at stake. The performance makes all the more valuable the vital role played by commanders such as Goodenough. In his look at the British Navy in Before Jutland, Goldrick makes two very key points about British naval officers’ pre-war operational experience: first, that it was almost always ashore (this was certainly the case for my grandfather), and, more tellingly, ‘the sustained demonstrations of initiative were in detached command, well away from authority’. For Goldrick, the appearance of WT on the scene ‘was moving this syndrome into virtual reality, with units on manoeuvres failing to exercise initiative because of their assumption that the remote authority knew better’.94

  At the head of Jellicoe’s line was Rear Admiral Trevylyan Napier’s 3rd Light Cruiser Squadron. It did nothing. Alexander-Sinclair’s 1st Light Cruiser Squadron was at the rear of the British battle fleet and, therefore, badly positioned to perform any useful function, but Charles Le Mesurier’s* 4th Light Cruiser Squadron did, in fact, move southwest to try to find the enemy, but was unable to see anything through the fog. The battle-cruisers, whose speed would have served them well for keeping contact, were effectively disabled through a gyro-compass failure and the loss of six critical minutes. This failure became the source of considerable tension after the war in the Harper record.95

  Goodenoughs 2nd Light Cruiser Squadron, on the other hand, was an exception. As the firing died out at 18:45 he steamed south and managed to catch the rear of the retreating enemy ships. He was heavily shelled but held his position and even saw Scheers second turn, around which he signalled back to Jellicoe at 19:00: ‘Urgent. Priority. Enemy battle fleet steering ESE. Enemy bears from me SSW. Number unknown. My position Lat. 57° 02′ N, Long. 0° 07′ E.’ All that Jellicoe could do was order a 34-degree turn towards the last known enemy position.

  In such circumstances Jellicoe ordered the Grand Fleet to bend around, turning 3 points to starboard a minute after Goodenoughs signal was received on Iron Duke, hoping to catch Hipper. He then ordered a second bend to starboard, realising that Hipper must have made a wider and larger turn-away. The course was now altered 45 degrees with the fleet heading on a southerly bearing in echelon formation, one division blanketing the other. Jellicoe was still cautious – he did not want to chase either Hipper or Scheer into the mist and leave the outcome to chance – but his southerly course meant that he was better positioned to cut Hipper off from a return to his base.

  The second German battle turn: the turn back and the run east

  A quarter of an hour later at 18:55 Scheer ordered a second battle turn to starboard. His ships surged back to the line of British dreadnoughts to try to get across where he imagined the end of the line to have been.

  At this point a curious incident occurred. Beatty’s ships had raced ahead again, and in fact, were probably too far ahead of the main battle fleet to serve as the function of the van. Harper would insist that the battle-cruisers turned a full circle. In the post-war debate, Beatty was most concerned to represent the manoeuvres of his command in the best light. He countered Harper’s supposition by saying that the charts were muddled and confused, and that the actual manoeuvre was a double ‘S’ rather than a full 360-degree circle: in other words, he and Lion did execute 360 degrees of turn but not as a continuous, unbroken turn in one direction. There was also, apparently, a gyro-compass failure on Lion, but Beatty vociferously denied that the 360-degree turn took place at all and then produced track reports that appeared to have been doctored.

  But effectively Beatty denied the evidence, always maintaining that he had done two semicircular turns, one to port, followed by another to starboard. Much doubt was cast on his word when he produced what he represented as the charts drawn up and signed by him in 1916; on closer inspection, they turned out to bear the signature that he had started to use later, in 1920.

  Lions navigator, Commander Strutt, referred to the 360-degree turn in his voice-pipe commentary to Lieutenant Chalmers in the chart house below the compass platform.96 New Zealand also reported – in Andrew Gordon’s words, ‘defiantly’ – the full turn on her track chart.97 And behind Beatty, Napier’s 3rd Light Cruiser Squadron apparently followed the manoeuvre. On Tiger, Captain Rudolf Bentinck, Beatty’s chief of staff, was allowed to take the conn as he was about to take over the ship’s command from Henry Pelly. Gordon succinctly summarised the event: ‘The battle-cruisers astern [of Lion] followed her round, while the two ahead [Inflexible and Indomitable] turned in imitation and took the opportunity to tag onto the end of the line. Napier’s 3rd Light Cruiser Squadron, also ahead, copied the circle.’98

  Most commentators today maintain that Beatty lied, but the reasons are still not clear. Maybe it added to the impression that Beatty had lost contact with the enemy. He certainly would not have made such a turn if it were still in sight. In any case, the ‘full, lazy 360 degree circle … allowed the Battle Fleet to reduce the gap with the Battle Cruiser Fleet, and caused the latter to lose bearing on the enemy’.†

  Why did Scheer suddenly change course again? Many find the decision to place the battle-cruisers in the van, given their low armour protection, incomprehensible. Scheer himself said that what he had done would have been frowned on in peacetime. His comments on his own actions at the time and later, after the war, are worth quoting. He wanted neither to be seen to retreat nor to have fought a stern-chase action that had nearly destroyed the 5th Battle Squadron earlier in the day.99 ‘If the enemy followed us, our action in reversing course would have been classed as a retreat and if any of our rear ships were damaged, we would have to sacrifice them. Still less was it feasible to disengage, leaving it to the enemy to decide when he would meet with us in the morning.’100 His post-war comments were slightly different:

  The fact is I had no definite objective … I advanced because I thought I should help the poor Wiesbaden, since the situation was entirely obscure because I had received no wireless reports. When I noticed that the British pressure had ceased and that the fleet remained intact in my hands, I turned back under the impression that the action could not end in this way and that I ought to seek contact with the enemy again. And then I thought that I had better throw in the battle-cruisers in full strength … The thing just happened – as the virgin said when she got a baby.101

  Scheers explanations lack credibility. If he was going for a full-out attack on the British fleet, there are questions as to why he would place his weakest elements in the van, and why he would allow Jellicoe to cross his ‘T’ once again. Would this have made ‘disengagement for the night’ any easier? Going back for the crew of Wiesbaden seemingly ‘defies common sense’.102 Apart from putting the whole fleet in danger for a single ship, it is also clear that Scheer did not want to get pushed progressively further west. That would only have meant a longer passage back to Wilhelmshaven and the higher likelihood that he would get caught on the open seas in daylight the following morning. Scheer did send torpedo boats back in an attempt to rescue Wiesbaden’s crew, and two of them, V.73 and G.88, took the opportunity to let loose their torpedoes on the British.

  By now, Lützow had taken a tremendous beating:

  The bow is crushed and is entirely submerged. The four screws are already sticking out of the water so that the Lützow can only make 8 to 10 knots an hour, as against the normal 32… The Lützow is now a complete wreck. Corpses drifted past. From the bows up to the first 30-centimetre gun turret the ship lay submerged.103

  Hipper was forced to leave his flagship. He was visibly affected. At first, he resisted Chief of Staff Erich Raeder’s attempts to persuade him to transfer ship but eventually he gave in: Raeder had at one point even suggested that Hipper move his flag to a König-class battle
ship, but he declined, saying that he felt it would be badly viewed by the squadron. Raeder later recalled:

  A kind of paralysis seemed to descend on Hipper … [He] issued no orders. It was the first time that he had nothing to say. ‘We can’t lead the squadron from Lützow any more, your excellency.’ ‘But I cant leave my flagship.’ ‘We’re unable to signal by wire and anyway our speed isn’t enough.’… ‘The squadron needs your excellency.’ Finally Hipper succumbed to the inevitable. ‘You’re right.’104

  Hipper signalled G.39 to take him off and as soon as he was clear, Lützow broke out of line and headed south, back to German waters, with torpedo boats of the 12th and the 1st Half-Flotillas forming a smokescreen to protect her. Just as Leutnant von Löffen on G.39 took Hipper off the stricken vessel and left in search of another flagship, Lützow wash it again on B turret. She then received four more hits from Rear Admiral Leveson’s Orion-class battleships of the 2nd Division.

  Hipper first tried to transfer to Derfflinger, but she was in no condition to act satisfactorily in the flagship role. She had taken around twenty heavy shells and two plates had been ripped off her bow, putting her under a real threat of flooding. Hipper quickly changed his mind and decided on Seydlitz. To cover her escape south, the remainder of G.39’s half-flotilla and the 12th laid a smokescreen. Von der Tann was in equally bad condition as none of her turrets were fit for firing. Even so, Kapitän Zenker felt that he had to remain in the line. In spite of defining this battle damage a ‘failure’, the commander decided to keep with his division ‘to prevent the enemy from noticing anything and redistributing his fire so that the other ships would come in for worse punishment’.105

  Led by Kapitän Hartog on Derfflinger, the German battle-cruisers started the steam south. They ran into problems almost immediately, steering too close to the battle fleet, and causing a considerable amount of bunching up: ‘in some cases they were forced to stop their engines and even to go astern to avoid collision’.106 It was not long before Scheer was back in as fatal a position as he had been before, in a British ‘T’. By 19:15 the fire from the British line was deadlier and more effective than before. Scheers leading battleship was only 12,000yds (10,900m) away, his leading cruiser 10,000yds (9,100m) from Colossus.107

  Within five minutes, no less than seventeen of Jellicoe’s battleships and four of Beatty’s battle-cruisers had opened fire on the enemy van at ranges from 9,000 to 14,000 yards. To make things worse, there were now several 15-inch-gunned super-dreadnoughts of the Royal Sovereign class in action to add to Evan-Thomas’s Queen Elizabeths … Fifteen of the British battleships managed to score at least one hit on an enemy ship, while none of Scheers battle fleet made a single hit.108

  The leading ships of Behncke’s 3rd Squadron – König, Großer Kurfürst, Markgraf and Kaiser – were all hit, as was the 1st Squadron’s Helgoland. Monarch, Iron Duke, Centurion, Royal Oak, King George V, Temeraire, Neptune and Superb all registered hits. As she was engaged with Seydlitz, even the damaged Marlborough saw four of her fourteen salvos hit.

  During this action, German gunners could see hardly a thing, let alone find an aiming point. Only one British battleship, Colossus, was hit twice by Seydlitz’s fire. Five of her crew were wounded. Seydlitz was fighting it out not only with Colossus, but also Hercules, though she was sustaining little overall damage from British fire. Derfflinger was under fire from four British ships: Hercules, Neptune, St Vincent and Revenge. This last was also engaging Moltke.

  König had been hit just under her midships turret, and was full of gas and smoke as a consequence. Großer Kurfürst was hit four times in two minutes. Helgoland, the fourth ship in line, was also hit as the fusillade reached further down the German line. Derfflinger’s entire port side was badly damaged and no 5.9in casemate guns were working. After that, another heavy 15in shell ripped into one of her aft turrets. Lützow, with her four escorting destroyers, carried on but was hit again in rapid succession. With her main battery dead, she could no longer fight back. For a second time the line started to buckle at the van.

  British Gunnery Performance at Jutland

  The British relied more on speed than careful calculation, and even if Jellicoe himself was not of the ‘speed school’, Beatty was. Dreyer and Madden probably were too. In late 1915 Jellicoe spoke about the constant push for gunnery speed, telling Beatty that he felt that it was ‘being carried to excess’. His fears that the system of anti-flash doors would be compromised by this obsession with speed were justified.

  The first time that the German ‘T’ was crossed saw very effective gunnery. Within minutes of transferring fire to König, Iron Duke scored seven hits. By 18:30 five out of the six divisions were engaged with the German line. In the next short ten minutes, collectively they managed to land twelve heavy shells on the leading German battleships and battle-cruisers. Badly mauled already, Lützow by now had taken twenty heavy-calibre hits and König was left with a bad list.

  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 shooting of Hood’s battle-cruisers. One devastating hit by either Invincible or Inflexible 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.109

  Despite the sinking of Invincible, Defence and Warrior, the punishment following Jellicoe’s first successful tactical bottling of the German line, and the fact that Scheer now realised the danger of the position he had got his fleet into, directly led to Scheers decision for the first battle turn-away.

  The second crossing of the ‘T’ was even more effective. Scheer realised by now that pushing west could be a bad decision. He was steaming further away from the German coast and, in his eyes, this action could in later years be looked on as a German retreat. That he went back for Wiesbaden was pure fantasy (although attempts to rescue her crew were made), but there is certainly some strength in the idea that this took Jellicoe by surprise. Scheers second turn-away was covered by his destroyers and battle-cruisers in the ‘death ride’ that was to come. Once again the Grand Fleet’s gunnery was overpowering and the damage to Scheers battleships heavy. Markgraf was hit five times, Großer Kurfürst eight and König ten times. Markgrafs damage was critical; this would reduce Scheers overall speed. König then shipped 200 tons of water, Großer Kurfürst more than 800.

  In the hour before sunset, British hits on German ships were forty-nine (versus three). In the battle-cruiser action’s first hour it was four against fourteen. The Grand Fleet’s gunnery performance was – during its limited engagement – demonstrably better than that of the 1st or 2nd Battle Cruiser Squadrons. This was successfully buried at the time. Some of Beatty’s ships’ performance was lamentable. New Zealand and Tiger collectively fired 723 rounds. Tiger made five hits, New Zealand fewer. In contrast some of the best shooting ships were Invincible, Inflexible, Barham, Valiant and Jellicoe’s flagship, Iron Duke.

  At Scapa Flow a protected gunnery range was available for the Grand Fleet battleships. The battle-cruisers at Rosyth had none. The elements of the Grand Fleet that did open fire were able to concentrate their fire not once but twice on the German ‘T’, and also fire significantly more accurately than many of Beatty’s ships.

  The third German battle turn: the battle-cruiser ‘death ride’

  The pressure on Scheer was tremendous. While he claimed that his actions took the British by surprise, the truth is that it was he who was surprised
, not Jellicoe:

  Admiral Scheer had realised the danger to which we were exposed. The van of our fleet was shut in by a semi-circle of the enemy … There was only one way to escape the unfavourable tactical situation: to turn the line about and withdraw on the opposite course. Before everything else, we must get out of the dangerous enemy envelopment.110

  Scheer now prepared for a third battle turn by hoisting the signal on Friedrich der Große at 19:12. It was held on the signals halyard for a full six minutes. As soon as it was lowered, all captains complied and executed the flagship orders. Again, the ships at the head of the line taking the concentration of British fire slowed down, with a severe concertina effect on the battle line. At least one of Scheers subordinates, Ostfriesland’s Vice Admiral Erhardt Schmidt, commanding the 1st Squadron from the centre of the line, decided to turn his ship around without waiting for Scheers order to become executive, rather than risk annihilation. Even Friedrich der Große, the flagship, was forced to circle to port in order to give herself enough space. There was not enough sea room for such a manoeuvre and the risk of a serious collision loomed large; Kaiserin was actually even squeezed out of the line. Markgraf – followed by Großer Kurfürst – headed off south to try to avoid the concentration of British fire, while out in front König laid down as much thick smoke as she could to protect the others.

  It did not take long for Scheer to react to the extreme danger. At 19:13 he ordered his torpedo boats and the four remaining battle-cruisers to race forwards at the Grand Fleet as a diversion. The action became known as the ‘death ride’, ‘the most splendid and least intelligent moment in the short history of the Imperial Navy’.111 Four badly damaged German battle-cruisers were sent against thirty-three capital ships, but Scheer signalled his obedient commanders to hold nothing back. ‘Größe Kreuzer. Ran an der Feind. Voll einsetzen!’ (‘Battle-cruisers at the enemy. Give it everything!’).* With Hipper still on G.39 looking for a new flagship, Hartog led Derfflinger from the van, courageously attacking at 20 knots together with all except Lützow, by now too badly damaged to join any concerted action.