10 Kelly, p42.
11 Steinberg, p69.
12 Kelly, p48.
13 Jameson, p97.
14 Jameson, p98.
15 Kelly, p52.
16 Hough, First Lord, p66.
17 Kelly, p76.
18 Alfred Tirpitz: ‘Reasons for the Retention of an Oberkommando with a Powerful Competence’, ‘Our Further Maritime and Military Development’ and ‘Manuscripts about the Organisation of our Armoured Fleet’.
19 The German Admiralty was divided into two main branches, one executive, the Oberkommando der Marine (OK), the other administrative, the Reichsmarineamt (RMA). When Wilhelm ascended the throne, he immediately took steps to dismantle the unified power of the navy so that he could direct policy. The operational command of the navy had till then been unified under the chief of the Admiralty, who was answerable to the emperor and liaised with the Reichstag while at the same time being its military head. Wilhelm now split the organisation into three parts – the Oberkommando (OK), the Reichsmarineamt (RMA) and the Marinekabinett (MK). His overriding objective was to bolster his power of decision-making – Kommandogewa.lt – in the development of his navy.
20 Woodward, p19.
21 Kelly, pp92–3.
22 As Fisher had asked the Director of Naval Construction, William White, in 1892 (Wragg, p95).
23 Tirpitz, My Memoirs, pp118–19.
24 Ibid, p126.
25 Ibid, p126.
26 The new news section was officially called Section for News and General Parliamentary Affairs (M II) under the leadership of Korvettenkapitän August von Heeringen.
27 Kelly, p11.
28 Steinberg, p145.
29 Kelly, p134.
30 German personnel who had served in the torpedo arm of the Imperial Navy in the formative years came to be known as the ‘torpedo gang’. There were many prominent names on the list: Tirpitz, Scheer, Hipper, Ingenohl, Heeringen, Müller, Pohl and Bachmann.
31 Within the conservatives were various factions of the agrarian parties and the Catholic centre parties, the latter formed in 1870 to counter the Prussian state’s attacks on the Catholic Church.
32 Kelly, p171.
33 Ibid, p277.
34 Wragg, p99.
35 Hough, p115.
36 Wragg, p100.
37 Jamieson, p106.
38 Massie, Dreadnought, p438, quoting Lord Hankey.
39 Kelly, p179.
40 Hawkins, p2.
41 Kelly, p166.
42 Ibid, p166.
43 Ibid, p167.
44 Ibid, p168.
45 Massie, Dreadnought, p184, quoting Lord Selborne.
46 Ibid.
47 Wragg, p177.
48 MacMillan, p. 360
49 Hough, First Lord, p238, and Morris, p146.
50 Morris, p146.
51 Ibid, p152.
52 Ibid, p148.
53 Herwig, p39.
54 Kelly, p261.
55 Ibid, p257.
56 Furthermore, Arthur Marder maintained that there was not ‘a scrap of evidence’ indicating that Fisher had pushed the dreadnought project because it would mean that Germany would have to widen the Kiel Canal.
57 I am indebted to Peter Schenk for signposting a discussion on the Nassau class in Warship International by Dirk Nottelmann. The German building of wider beam ships was to provide added protection against torpedo attack and, as a secondary consideration, a more stable gun platform. The hexagonal distribution of the turrets, according to Dieter Thomaier of the Groener group, was also chosen because of the battle doctrine which included a possible melee during the battle requiring firepower to both sides.
58 Kelly, p280.
59 The cry came about because of a mounting fear in the Admiralty that Germany was accelerating her shipbuilding programme. According to a memo from the Sea Lords to Sir Reginald McKenna, the First Sea Lord, ‘we concur with the statement of the First Lord that there is a possibility that Germany, by the spring of 1912, will have completed 21 dreadnoughts (including large cruisers) and that there is a practical certainty that she will have 17 by that date; whereas, presuming we lay down six in the coming year, we shall only have 18 … We therefore consider it of the utmost importance that power should be taken to lay down two more armoured ships in 1909–1910, making it eight in all.’ (Memorandum, Sea Lords to McKenna, BL, Add MSS 48990).
60 Massie, Dreadnought, p618, quoting Churchill.
61 Wragg, p197; Asquith to Fisher, 26 October 1909.
62 The second Moroccan Crisis, known as the Agadir Crisis (or, to the Germans, the Panthersprung), had its roots in Wilhelm’s continued efforts to split France and Great Britain, although it was set off initially by the French deploying troops to the interior in April 1911 to quash a local rebellion against the new sultan, Abdelhafid. It was a perfect opportunity, Wilhelm thought, to show that Germany must protect its citizens and trade interests. The French action in sending troops was against the terms of the 1906 Treaty of Algedras, and German Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg and Foreign Secretary Alfred von Kiderlen-Wächter decided to state an objection to the French move. The Kaiser agreed. Tirpitz, however, was not informed and would probably have been opposed to such ‘sabre-rattling’. A gunboat, Panther, was diverted to Agadir. She arrived on 1 July 1911, supported a few days later by the cruiser SMS Berlin. It turned out that there was a sole German civilian, an employee of the Warburg Bank (who, at the time, was nowhere near Agadir but seventy miles away), to be picked up. France reacted sternly and sent troops to Fez, despite the British foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, trying to restrain them. Fisher feared that the Germans would build a naval base or, at the very least, a coaling station opposite Gibraltar. The Germans were stopped by a run on their banks: the market lost 30 per cent of its value in a single day (see Liaquat Ahamed, Lords of Finance, p43). They demanded compensation from France in the form of a territorial exchange and France’s promise to allow equal commercial access to the Germans to Morocco. Eventually, Germany backed down when the British started sending signals of their intention to back the French. With the signing of the Treaty of Fez in November 1911, Germany accepted territories from France that became part of Neukamerun. Four months later, the French extended a full protectorate over Morocco. Far from splitting the British and the French, once again Germany’s clumsy threats had only succeeded in solidifying the Entente Cordiale.
3 A Contradiction, Not a Team: Jellicoe and Beatty
1 Yates, p232.
2 Other biographers included Stephen Roskill and Admiral Chalmers.
3 Less reverently, Jellicoe’s flagship was later known as the ‘Iron Duck’ or ‘Tin Duck’, after the 1922 Washington Treaty prompted her conversion to a fleet training ship, with her 13.5in guns and armour belt removed.
4 Herwig, p48.
5 Roskill, p21. There is some contusion here, as Beatty’s nephew Charles Beatty, and biographer, talks about him ‘passing in’ ‘10th out of 32’.
6 Lambert, p338.
7 Roskill, p21.
8 Monarch was ‘as successful combination of sails and turrets as could be obtained but most of her 12-inch muzzle-loading rifles would have been a significant professional challenge to Jellicoe.’ (private correspondence with Prof Eric Grove).
9 Lambert, p338.
10 Temple Patterson, Jellicoe, p23.
11 In seamanship, gunnery and pilotage Beatty took a second and in navigation a third.
12 Hough, Admirals in Collision, pp98–9.
13 Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949).
14 Beatty, p23.
15 Sir Michael Culme-Seymour, the commander of Ramillies, was, as Jellicoe wrote in his autobiographical notes, ‘a great sportsman, a keen game shot, a good fisherman, fond of boat sailing and a good rackets player. He and I spent many hours playing rackets in Malta while the fleet lay in the Grand Harbour, and one year, playing as partners, we won the Fleet Rackets Cup.’
16 Massie, p85.
17 Lambert, p339.
18 This was a smaller type of battleship specially built for overseas stations in general and to navigate Chinese rivers in particular (private correspondence: E Grove).
19 Roskill, p28.
20 Ibid, p110.
21 Massie, p94.
22 Lambert, p343.
23 Fisher to Lord Selbourne, First Lord of the Admiralty. See letters dated 25 and 29 October, quoted in Marder (Fear God and Dread Nought, pp45–7).
24 Roberts, p28.
25 Proceedings of the Ordnance Board, 28 October 1910. ‘DNO 18.10.10 states that the trials recommended by the board are approved. He asks them to consider the possibility of increasing the chance that AP shell carry their burster through armour plates when striking obliquely by increasing the thickness of the walls of the shells, or by carrying out trials with shell of various shaped cavities, i.e. ribbed, which might be stronger than the cylindrical cavities, observing that the introduction of Lyddite seems to render this question more feasible than formerly’.
26 Massie, p61.
27 Temple Patterson, Jellicoe, p38.
28 Lambert, p345.
29 Temple Patterson, Jellicoe, p49.
30 Temple Patterson, Jellicoe, p46, quoting Marder, Fear God and Dread Nought.
31 For an interesting account of the first tests on Thunderer, see John Winton’s Jellicoe, pp127–8.
32 Massie, p63.
33 BL, MSS 49038.249 Jellicoe Autobiographical Notes.
34 Lambert, p337.
35 Hough, Mountbatten. p. 36.
4 Men From the Same Mould:Scheer and Hipper
1 Tolbin, thesis, p23.
2 Waldeyer-Hartz, p27. The Admiralty orders for Leipzig are produced in full to show the almost pedantic level of detail that Admiral Stosch had included.
3 Waldeyer-Hartz, p56.
4 Tolbin, p11.
5 Ibid.
6 Waldeyer-Hartz, p60.
7 Sweetman, essay by Gary Weir, ‘Rheinhard Scheer: Intuition under Fire’, p391.
8 Waldeyer-Hartz, p80.
9 Tolbin, p18.
10 Waldeyer-Hartz, pp85–6.
11 Tolbin, p25.
12 Ibid, p27, quoting Erich Raeder.
13 Massie, p339, quoting von Ingenohl.
14 Massie, p339.
15 Massie, p339, quoting Rear Admiral James Goldrick, RANR.
16 Massie, p359.
17 Sweetman, essay by Gary Weir, p394.
18 Tolbin, p124.
19 Gibson and Harper, pp79–80.
20 Massie, p555, quoting von Trotha.
21 Sweetman, essay by Gary Weir, p394.
22 Ibid.
23 Ibid, p400.
24 Hough, p295.
5 The Naval Non-War
1 Sweetman, essay by Gary Weir, p394.
2 Churchill, The World Crisis, quoted in Marder, FDTSF, p358.
3 For a quick summary see Hawkins, pp14–15.
4 Hawkins, p15.
5 Osborne, p61; see also Hawkins, p25.
6 Spain and the Netherlands also signed, although they had not had a sitting participant.
7 Hawkins, p85.
8 Ibid, p86.
9 Ibid, p87.
10 Ibid, p89.
11 Grebler, Leo, The Cost of the World War to Germany and Austria-Hungary, Yale University Press (1940), p78.
12 Hawkins, p38, quoting Bennett.
13 The fastest of the class, HMS Indomitable, burnt around 500 tons of coal a day as well as 120 tons of oil (Hawkins, p41).
14 Hawkins, p46.
15 Ibid, p59.
16 Ibid, p66.
17 Gibson and Harper, p92.
18 Wolz, From Internment to Scapa Flow, p122.
19 Terraine, p10.
20 Hawkins, p106, quoting Thomas, p87.
21 Preston, Wilful Murder, p423.
6 Prelude to Action
1 Wolz, Lange Wart, p100, quoting Firle’s Tagebuch.
2 Ibid, p100, quoting Knobloch’s Tagebuch.
3 Ibid, Hafen, p148.
4 Ibid.
5 Grove, p53.
6 U.46 was originally ordered to patrol the Sunderland coast but after mechanical problems was replaced by J.47. U.46 never left harbour.
7 The ten boats were U.24, U.32, U.43, U.44, U.47, U.51, U.52, U.63, U.66 and the U.70.
8 U.72 turned back after an oil leak and J.27 after she had fouled her propellers on fishing nets. It was U.75’s decision to lay mines that later had terrible consequences as HMS Hampshire, with Kitchener onboard, struck one.
9 Barnett, p157.
10 Grove, p67.
11 Plivier, p218.
12 Temple Patterson, TJP, vol 1, p44.
13 Gibson and Harper, p91.
14 Kemp, p68.
15 During the morning of 31 May, Scheer received a number of reports giving intelligence on his foe, Jellicoe: (a) 05:29. U.32 reported spotting two battleships, two cruisers and destroyers in 56° 15′ N, 0° 43′ W. (b) 06:00. The signals intercept station at Neumünster reported that a decoded British message indicated that two battleship squadrons had just left Scapa. (c) 06:47. U.66 spotted and reported eight battleships and light forces 57° 45′ N, 0°, 7′ W. and (d) 10:00. Neumünster reported that a Scottish wireless telegraphy (WT) station had sent out a weather report normally used when the British fleets were at sea (see Koervner, p174.)
16 Massie, p579.
17 Sent at 00:30 by Admiral Oliver in his own hand after Jackson’s erroneous conclusions on the ‘DK signal. Jellicoe received the signal at 00:48 (Beesly, p155).
18 Massie, p582.
19 A cable’s length equals around 202yds.
20 See Wallace, From Jungle to Jutland.
21 Wallace, p237.
22 Thompson, p297.
7 The Battle-Cruiser Debacle
1 On board Galatea was Commander Frank Marten, father of Tim Marten, my father’s oldest childhood friend, They remained friends till their deaths in 2007.
2 Yates states that Galatea opened at the maximum range of her forward 6in gun, ie at 14,000yds (p127).
3 Macintyre, p92 (15:31 GMT, 14:31 local German, Feindliche Panzerkreuzer in Sicht in WzN).
4 Time of fire 14:34.
5 Letter, Commander Frank Marten, HMS Galatea.
6 Beatty signalled Engadine before Galatea had even sent the second, more detailed signal at 14:51, asking them to ‘Send up seaplanes to scout NNE. Am sending two destroyers to you.’ Onslow and Moresby were the two destroyers that Beatty selected to cover her.
7 For interesting film footage on Engadine search ‘HMS Engadine’ on YouTube; see also Harper, The Truth, p57.
8 In an interview with Grahame Donald, the pilot who was sitting in the Short ready to fly the first recce mission, Rutland was described as having been ‘outstanding’, ‘quite outstanding’ and a ‘very good pilot’, but Donald, interestingly, remained adamant in refusing to answer what kind of person he was, while he described Trewin as ‘a very nice Cornishman’ (source: Imperial War Museum Archive, CAT No 18,1972–09–27, Reel 9).
9 Squadron Leader Frederick Rutland was finally arrested in 1942 and was interned in Britain for twenty years but he was never prosecuted, as the British authorities did not want to make public the scandal of a British officer turned enemy spy. It was said that that his aid helped to develop the aircraft carrier force that the Japanese navy used so effectively in their attack against Pearl Harbor in 1941. The MI5 file contained a report from 1922 which states: ‘Reliable information was received from a very delicate source to the effect that the Japanese government were communicating regularly with an officer in the RAF’. ‘He is an officer who has a unique knowledge of aircraft carriers and deck landing and his experience gained in the RAF will be invaluable to the Japanese,’ the file says. In his book Rutland of Jutland (1963) Desmond Young made a strong case for Rutland. He concluded, ‘The circumstances of his arrest and prolonged “detention”, without trial and without charge, in World War II, as well as the refusal of the then Home Secretary to give any ex
planation in the House of Commons to so senior a member of his own service as Admiral Sir Roger Keyes, were so strange that they make his story as disquieting as it is distressing’. The DSO that Rutland won was rather economically phrased, given the outstanding courage he and Trewin had shown, The citation read, ‘Squadron Leader Rutland was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross “for gallantry and persistence in flying in close range of four enemy light cruisers” at the Battle of Jutland’ (Independent, 10 November 2000: ‘Another MI5 file reveals that an RAF First World War hero became a spy for the Japanese’).
10 The time of the turn is put at 15:32–15:33.
11 Gordon, p35. In the ensuing run to the north the assumption proved to be wrong and the Queen Elizabeths had a tough time keeping ahead of their pursuers.
12 Bacon’s biography of Jellicoe is written as much as a friend as a biographer. Jellicoe defended the vice admiral (as he was then) when he was attacked for his command of the Dover Patrol.
13 Bacon, Scandal, p90.
14 Yates, p131.
15 Jellicoe to Jackson, 5 March 1916, Temple Patterson, TJP, vol 1, p225.
16 Gordon, p49.
17 The order for Rear Admiral Pakenhams 2nd Battle Cruiser Squadron to fall in behind the 1st was described as being delivered ‘somewhat belatedly’. Signal at 15:45: ‘Alter course together to ESE’ (Steel and Hart, p78).
18 Gordon, p87.
19 Dr Quintin Colville’s (of the National Maritime Museum) grandfather was Egerton’s flag lieutenant on the bridge of HMS Barham on the day of the battle. In 1989 some of the survivors would get together for lunch. Present were Michael Craig-Waller (Arthur Craig’s son), Evan-Thomas’s two nephews (Martin Bourdillon and his brother), the daughter of the midshipman of the watch and the chief yeoman – who now lives in New Zealand. Also there was Rear Admiral Royer Dick who had been a midshipman on Barham at Jutland and had then served on HMS Valiant after Barham was torpedoed. Sadly, I’ve been told, there was not any discussion of that crucial moment before the run to the south. Martin very kindly gave me full access to many of the Evan-Thomas papers and photographic records while Quintin has been a constant supporter of the Jutland Centenary Initiative since its first presentation at the NMM in 2011.
20 Rawson, p152.
21 Chalmers, p225: ‘the prescribed distance between the battle-cruisers and the 5th Battle Squadron, while cruising as part of the Grand Fleet, was 10 miles’.
Jutland_The Unfinished Battle Page 54
