Jutland_The Unfinished Battle

by Nicholas Jellicoe

  In conclusion, as Massie summed up:

  All of this vital information made it plain where Scheer was going, yet incredibly none of it was passed on to the Commander-in-Chief by the Operations Department. The tragic result of this lamentable performance – criminal neglect is not too strong a term – was that Jellicoe was left completely in the dark, when he might have turned north to intercept Scheer at daybreak and inscribed another Glorious First of June in the Annals of the Royal Navy.30

  The first night encounter: small boat action between the British 4th Flotilla and the German 7th Flotilla

  Lieutenant Commander Gottlieb von Koch pushed the eastern reconnaissance wing of torpedo boats, the 7th Flotilla, further east. On the British side, Captain Charles Wintour on Tipperary was in the process of leading the destroyers of the 4th Flotilla around to take them up north to protect the rear of the British fleet as Jellicoe had instructed. The time was 21:59. From Garland, the fourth ship in the British destroyer line (which also included Contest and Fortune), Koch’s nine-boat flotilla was spotted coming in at a slow 17 knots.31 The British did not see them immediately, but at 500yds (460m) S.24 flashed the recognition signal. Getting nothing in return, the British opened fire. Four boats (S.24, S.16, S.18 and S.15) each launched one torpedo.32 Nothing came of the encounter, as the British turned away, though Garland opened fire and was only narrowly missed by a torpedo passing her stern by 10ft.33 Contest’s captain, Lieutenant Commander Master, reported the encounter, but no further signals were made. Garland, at the rear of the line, had also seen the four torpedoes pass harmlessly behind the destroyer line and had similarly reported to Wintour.34

  Koch fell back to avoid fire and eventually, later in the small hours, decided that there was nothing better for him to do than go directly to the Horns Reef rendezvous point. Many other German destroyers gave up the search as well and also proceeded to the same destination.

  The second night encounter: German cruiser engagement with the 11th Flotilla

  The next flotilla to see action was Hawksley’s 11th Destroyer Flotilla. Hawksley, on Castor, was also proceeding north as Wintour had done, aiming to take up position at the extreme west of the destroyer flotilla line behind the fleet. At around 22:05 Castor and Kempenfelt (the 11th DF divisional leader, captained by Commander Sulivan) spotted and were spotted by, two cruisers of Bödicker’s 2nd Scouting Group, the Frankfurt and the Pillau. From around 1,200yds (1,100m), the Germans fired two torpedoes, thinking that they had spotted cruisers rather than destroyers. The torpedoes harmlessly passed the five-destroyer flotilla and the Germans turned away so as not to reveal their own positions.35

  Bödicker was biding his time, but after ten minutes he came in closer, supported by Elbing and Hamburg. This time the German boats tried a different tactic. From Castor, Hawksley saw two dark silhouettes on his starboard. They flashed the correct ‘UA’ British recognition signal, but followed it with some erroneous letters. When Hawksley saw the two random letters in the ‘UA’ flash, he knew that something was not right. The Germans closed in to around 1,000m (1,100yds) and then, in one second, the German searchlights pierced the moonless night.* From the back, behind the 4th Scouting Group, Hamburg and Elbing opened fire on Castor.36 It was around 20:13.

  In the dark we saw, in an easterly direction, the shadows of English ships, the Castor with the 11th Flotilla. We showed them English recognition signals, which they acknowledged. As we were sure it was the enemy, we opened up heavy fire from around 1,000 metres distance. The Castor returned fire immediately and turned back.37

  Castor was caught in a blizzard of shell at point-blank range.38 She was by herself. Her accompanying destroyers thought that these were, indeed, other British ships and did not open fire, so convinced were they ‘that a mistake had been made and that we were firing upon our own ships’.39 It was an example of how terrifyingly confusing night fighting could be.

  Castor hit back with her 6in guns, managing to score some hits, but within minutes she had suffered severe loss and damage, twelve killed and twenty-three wounded.40 Her electrics were smashed up and, more importantly, her wireless shot away. The very first hit had set the motor barge on fire and brightly illuminated her as a very easy target for her assailants.

  Before turning, Castor, as well as the two following destroyers, Marne and Magic, had fired off torpedoes at Elbing, only missing her when the weapons ran too deep. Again, the unreliability of British torpedoes was to blame. Marne nearly got into trouble, which she avoided as, instead of accelerating forward, she came to a dead stop. Intense enemy fire opened up but mostly fell ahead of her, over-anticipating her intended course. None of the British torpedoes hit but, then, neither did the single torpedoes from Pillau or Frankfurt. Coming back to help Marne, Castor fired off a torpedo and opened up with her 6in guns. For her troubles, she ended up getting holed forward.

  When the action was reported to Scheer, he pulled back the main fleet and angled off slightly more by turning one point to starboard at 22:06, even though the two fleets were still converging. But Jellicoe misinterpreted Hawksley’s 23:00 signal telling him they had engaged enemy cruisers. He thought it meant that these were likely to have been supporting the destroyer attacks, not the main body of the German battle fleet itself.

  The third night encounter: 2nd Light Cruiser Squadron engagements

  Commodore Goodenoughs 2nd Light Cruiser Squadron was at the rear, in the westernmost position, far behind Hawksley’s 11th Flotilla group. At around 20:15 the Light Cruiser Squadron spotted five unknown ships to starboard, at around 1,500yds (1,400m) and to their front.41 The ships were Commodore Reuter’s 4th Scouting Group – Stettin, München, Hamburg, Frauenlob and Stuttgart.

  In their push to the front of the van, the two battle-cruisers Moltke and Seydlitz had cut far too close to Stettin, forcing her to slow and in turn forcing München, Frauenlob and Stuttgart to pull away to port. In doing so they become visible to Goodenoughs ships. The two adversaries steamed in parallel to each other, only slowly converging from a gap of around 1,500yds to a minimal one of 800yds (730m). To starboard were five German light cruisers; on the port side four British equivalents. Each side must have been looking at the other and wondering: ‘Friend or foe?’. ‘The Commodore looked at them through night glasses, and I heard a whispered discussion going on as to whether they were the enemy.’42

  Despite the uncertainty, Goodenough ordered ‘open fire’, but as soon as Dublin’s captain, A C Scott, gave the same order, both ships were caught in the fierce dazzle of German searchlights and instantaneously caught in the witheringly concentrated fire of Reuter’s ships. But British fire was also on target. Dublin’s shells burst on the side of the enemy ship with such effect that one officer on Southampton had ‘a nightmare glimpse of her interior’43 – a scene that ‘remained photographed in my mind to this day. I said to myself, “My God, they’re alongside us!”’44

  Dublin and Southampton received most of the enemy’s fire while the two rear ships, Nottingham and Birmingham, wisely kept their searchlights off and escaped unscathed. They could add their firepower without being fired upon. Both Commander Rebensburg’s cruiser, Stettin, and Commander Böcker’s München were each hit twice, the latter before she could even get her torpedo tubes to bear. Stettin had a gun put out of action and her steam pipe was fractured. The escaping steam scalded and blinded the torpedo team. Even though Hamburg was only hit once, ten of Commander von Gaudecker’s men were killed, including the captain and navigating officer, while others on the signal platform were badly wounded.

  The British ships were thoroughly peppered by enemy shell. In the five-minute encounter, Southampton alone was hit by twenty 4.1in and 5.9in shells. Three guns and two searchlights were knocked out, and the ship’s radio destroyed; on her decks lay the bodies of thirty-five dead and forty-one wounded, and on Dublin there were a further three dead and twenty-four wounded. Both ships were on fire.

  Dublin had managed to avoid heavier casualties beca
use she had turned 3 points to port when she had taken the first hit. Nevertheless, she was to be hit thirteen times and the navigating officer killed, along with two other men. It was sheer bad luck that all her charts and WT equipment were also destroyed. However, as Southampton turned, her torpedo officer was able to fire one salvo from the bridge firing position, aiming for the searchlight sources. The torpedo ran true and hit Frauenlob in the port auxiliary machinery space.

  The German cruiser’s engines stopped the moment she was hit, ‘probably owing to damage in the propeller shafts’.45 At 20:40 all the lights went out. The confusion was overwhelming. The scene was as hellish for one midshipman, Stolzmann, as it was for the sailors on Southampton: ‘I at once switched on both available searchlights at the cruiser opposite us. The guns immediately opened fire. This was followed by such a furious rain of shell, which nearly all hit the after part of the ship, that it looked as if several enemy ships were concentrating their fire on us.’46

  The torpedo detonation caused pandemonium. Stuttgart swerved out of the German line and only just managed to avoid a collision. As a result she became separated but Frauenlob’s crew bravely fought on:

  The electric lights went out, the ammunition hoist machinery failed, and while the cruiser heeled so far over to port that the projectiles in the shell room were dislodged, shells hitting the ship started a fire aft. But nothing could daunt the ship’s company. Up to their waists in water, the crew of the No. 4 gun, under Petty Officer Schmidt, continued to engage the enemy until fire and water put an end to the fighting. The Frauenlob capsized, and with three cheers for the Kaiser and the German Empire, the captain [Georg Hoffmann], eleven officers and 308 men attested with their deaths their loyalty to the Fatherland.47

  Somewhere in the five minutes before 22:30 she sank. Between the two British light cruisers, Southampton and Dublin had also managed to hit Stettin twice, München five times and Hamburg four. After her fight to the death, Frauenlob left only seven survivors.48 For Southampton, the torpedo had been an extremely lucky launch, as it had been fired from one of her submerged tubes, which did not have the capability for flexible aiming, but a launch from her deck tubes would probably not have been possible because of the amount of damage from earlier German fire.49

  Without radio, Goodenough was unable to contact Jellicoe directly and the latter only had an inkling of what was going on. The commodore relayed a message back to the flagship through Nottingham, but given Goodenoughs previous record of regularly updating his commander-in-chief, the radio damage could not have come at a more critical moment in the battle. Goodenoughs message, via Nottingham’s, reading, ‘Urgent. Have engaged enemy cruisers 22:15 bearing west-south-west (10.40)’, did reach Iron Duke but not until 23:38.

  The action may only have lasted a bare three and a half minutes but in that short time the carnage had been terrible and one of Southampton’s officers commented: ‘The general effect was as if a handful of splinters had been thrown at the upper works of the ship’.50 As Stephen King-Hall remembered, 75 per cent of the upper deck men on Southampton had been killed or wounded. It had been point-blank engagement. Southampton was burning so badly that ‘a friend of mine … who was five miles away on one of the 5th Battle Squadron ships read a signal on the bridge by the light of our fires’.51 Thirty-five men had died outright or later from wounds, while fifty-five more were wounded. The ship herself had sustained around eighteen hits and her five broadside 6in guns had been reduced to two.

  King-Hall was sent down the so-called ‘tuppenny tube’, a passage running down the centre of the ship above the boilers and engine rooms.* He had been asked by Goodenough to check on the number of dead and wounded. The carnage he found left him profoundly shocked. He found the surgeon operating in the stoker’s bathroom, a small room only 8ft high and 12ft square. The doctor would continue his vital work to help save whomever he could for eleven hours straight.

  An hour after Goodenoughs signal had gone off, Birmingham spotted enemy battle-cruisers heading west by south around 23:15, but her report conflicted with Admiralty signals suggesting the course was east-southeast.

  Another effect of the near collision between Stettin and Moltke was that she and Seydlitz had now lost contact with each other. Moltke headed towards her port, Seydlitz starboard. Kapitän von Karpf on Moltke edged his ship progressively closer to the British line but had to turn back three times, and only finally passed the line at around 01:00.

  The fourth night encounter and 4th Destroyer Flotilla actions: Tipperary, Broke, Spitfire and Sparrowhawk – and the loss of SMS Elbing

  Some time around 23:00 the German van was approaching the rear of the Grand Fleet. Imagine two lines of ants moving down from the top of the two sides of a large X, steadily converging on each other. This is what was happening. The German main battle fleet sailing down from left to right; at the top, the rear, on the extreme east, was the 6th Division (of the 1st Battle Squadron) running roughly parallel with HMS Marlborough, which was steaming at reduced speed as a result of the earlier torpedo damage. And further east still of the 6th Division was Farie’s 13th Flotilla, along with the 12th, the 9th and the 10th. As the two forces converged, it could have been a monumental collision of armoured steel.

  Six miles southwest of the 12th Flotilla, and slightly to the east of Hawksley’s 11th Destroyer Flotilla, Captain Wintour on Tipperary was leading the eleven remaining K-class destroyers of the 4th Destroyer Flotilla.52 The 4th was aware something was afoot. They had heard the sounds of the battles involving Hawksley’s flotilla and Goodenoughs 2nd Light Cruiser Squadron. Wintour was closest to the German van.

  At 21:58 the 4th Flotilla encountered nine destroyers of Koch’s 7th Flotilla approaching from the west at 17 knots. All but one were of the same class as the lead boat, S.13. S.24 was followed by S.15, S.17, S.20, S.16, S.18, S.19 and S.23. The last, V.189, was an older, bigger class. The German commander assumed that the 4th Flotilla’s line of destroyers was actually part of Bödicker’s 2nd Flotilla and flashed his recognition signal.53 When no response was received, four of the line, S.24, S.16, S.18 and S.15, attacked with a single-tube launch. Wintour had not seen the German signal and was turning his flotilla southwards and, as a result, three of the four torpedoes streamed past harmlessly behind their wake. The Germans fell back.

  Half an hour later at 22:35 Garland, the fourth ship in the line, sighted an enemy vessel on her starboard quarter and reported the sighting of a Graudenz-class cruiser to Tipperary. At 22:40 Boadicea, one ofjerram’s attached light cruisers, also spotted what she believed to be an enemy cruiser. Then five minutes later (at around 22:45), Unity, the last in line, spotted a another group of destroyers on her starboard. The leading German destroyer launched torpedoes and then turned away. Lieutenant Commander Arthur Macaulay Lecky on Unity turned the ship straight into the direction of the torpedo attack and avoided a hit. Fire on the German line, now fast disappearing from sight, was only opened up from Garland, from whose bridge Lieutenant Commander R S Goff had seen the attack.

  Scheer, now armed with Neumünster signals intelligence, felt that he had found the approximate point in the British line at which his ships could be pushed through to safety. Contacts with the destroyers and the lack of enemy British battleships, coupled with the knowledge that the destroyer screen was five miles behind the Grand Fleet, had led Scheer to conclude that this was the spot for which he had been searching. Jellicoe, on the other hand, had received no reports of any of these actions and concluded that he was correct to stick to his original plan.

  Between 23:15 and 23:20 a lookout on Garland, Torpedoman Cox, saw what he thought to be enemy ships on the starboard quarter. Tipperary, the flotilla leader, thought that they might actually be British, ships of Hawksleys 11th Flotilla. After ten minutes the recognition signal was flashed 700yds (640m) out and, almost immediately, Tipperary was lit up like a Christmas tree. She was caught in the searchlights of Westfalen, Nassau and Rheinland, plus those of the light cruisers Ha
mburg, Rostock and Elbing. The German line opened up very heavy fire. A young sub lieutenant on Tipperary commented on the intensity:

  They were so close that I could remember the guns seemed to be firing from some appreciable height above us… The three ships of the enemy that were firing … could not have fired more than four salvos before they gave us up as done for, and the whole thing had happened so suddenly and was over so quickly that I think we were all quite dazed.54

  Tipperary was very badly hit. The bridge was damaged, communications were cut and just about everyone up forward was killed or wounded. But she still managed to fire both starboard torpedoes and the acting sub lieutenant, N J W William-Powlett, ordered fire from the aft guns. But when the steam pipes were also hit, the ship was literally hidden in a cloud of steam, at a dead stop. In just over four minutes, Westfalen, accompanied by Nassau, had together fired 150 5.9in shells at Tipperary (Westfalen alone, ninety-two rounds of 5.9in and forty-five of 3.5in).55 The British ship had ‘defended herself with noteworthy heroism’,56 but the oil that had spilled soon ignited and she was caught in a ghastly inferno. Later at around 02:00 Tipperary was abandoned and eventually sank. Throughout actions like these, the strain on ships’ captains and the lookouts must have been enormous. Despite the hail of enemy fire, there was still hesitation whether it was a friend or foe in your own gun’s sight; Broke’s captain had held fire until he could see with his own ship’s searchlight that these really were Germans.