85 Ibid, p205.
86 Stern refers to the number of rounds fired, not the time, but differs substantially from Tarrant: ‘The Westfalen engaged her with around 40 rounds of 3.5-inch and 5.9-inch fire’ (see Stern, p70).
87 Taffrail, p169.
88 Ibid, pp167–9.
89 Tarrant, Jutland: The German Perspective, p205.
90 Ibid, p207, quoting Der Krieg in Nordsee.
91 Tipperary was the leader of the 4th Destroyer Flotilla; Stirling himself was on Faulknor, the 12th Destroyer Flotilla leader.
92 Taffrail, p177, quoting Official Dispatches.
93 Ibid, p178.
94 Tarrant, Jutland: The German Perspective, p211.
95 Taffrail, p182; twice at 01:52 and 02:12.
96 Signals Faulknor to Iron Duke 01:56, 02:08 and 02:13. Even if Faulknors position was wrong it would have given Jellicoe an important indication of what was occurring astern of the fleet (see Macintyre, p179).
97 Ibid, p219.
98 Report from one of Obedient’s officers. Quoted (slightly differently) in Massie, p648. ‘Amidships on the waterline of the Pommern there appeared a dull, red ball of fire (said an officer of the Obedient). Quicker than one can imagine, it spread fore and aft, until, reaching the foremast and mainmast, it flared up the masts in big, red tongue of flames, uniting between the mastheads in a big, black cloud of smoke and sparks. Then we saw the end of the ship come up as if her back had been broken.’
99 Tarrant, Jutland: The German Perspective, p221.
100 Ibid, p220.
101 Taffrail, p183, footnotes.
102 Nessus had been badly hit and had suffered severe casualties, with two officers and five men killed, and a further seven men wounded.
103 Quoting Sir David Beatty’s official dispatch (p139), which was critical of Champion’s lack of communications: ‘If, as was probable, they were the enemy, an excellent opportunity was missed for an attack in the early morning light. More important still a portion of the enemy might still have been located’ (see Tarrant, Jutland: The German Perspective, p185).
104 It seems that the detonation was around 02:15. So it must have been a mine or maybe V.4 hit a submarine.
105 Kemp, p102.
106 Groos, p184.
107 Steel and Hart, p293.
108 Steel and Hart, p293, Private H Wilsons, Royal Marine Light Infantry, HMS Lion.
109 ‘Flotillas to return to Kiel around the Skaw, should return journey to German Bight appear inadvisable’ (see Tarrant, Jutland: The German Perspective, p215).
110 Tarrant, Jutland: The German Perspective, p237.
111 Earlier in the night Burney had been taken off with his staff and signalman, transferring to Fearless (the scout cruiser/flotilla leader attached to the 1st Battle Squadron) and then to Revenge.
112 Different sources give different totals. The Record of the Great War cites 1,003 survivors, Wikipedia 1,150.
113 Massie, p652, also Tarrant, p195.
114 Tarrant, Jutland: The German Perspective, pp195–6, quoting Marlborough’s gunnery officer, Lieutenant Commander Guy Royle.
115 Yates, p199, referring to Seydlitz being spotted by Boadicea and Fearless.
116 Steel and Hart, pp398–9, quoting Able Seaman William Cave, HMS Dublin, 2nd LCS.
117 Steel and Hart, p402, quoting Boy 1st Class Henry Hawkins, HMS Barham, 5th Battle Squadron.
118 Steel and Hart, p409, quoting Signalman John Handley, HMS Barham, 5th Battle Squadron.
119 Gibson and Harper, pp254–5.
120 Ibid, p254; see above quotation.
121 Ibid, p237.
122 Steel and Hart, p397, quoting Asst Clerk Gilbert Blakemore, HMS Warspite, 5th Battle Squadron.
123 Ibid, p392, quoting J J Hazelwood, HMS Warspite, 5th Battle Squadron.
124 Ibid, p413, quoting Private John Harris, Royal Marines Light Infantry, HMS Malaya, 5th Battle Squadron.
125 Ibid, p421, quoting Midshipman John Crawford, HMS Valiant, 5th Battle Squadron.
126 Winton, p215.
127 SLGF Archives, Churchill College, Cambridge.
128 Wallace, p252.
129 Gibson and Harper, p238.
130 Sir Shane Leslie says that after Beatty had written up his dispatches when back in Rosyth, he then wrote to his sister and to the family chaplain who later became Dean Baillie of Windsor. None of the letters survived, but Bailie was quoted in a letter dated 22 June 1948, as saying that even in this confidential letter, Beatty did not attribute any blame: ‘David’s letter after Jutland is one of the tragedies of my life. It would certainly have been one of the most remarkable historical letters you could find. On the evening of the day when his emotions were stirred partly by the disappointment and partly by the loss of his dearest friend before his very eyes, I think he must have wanted to let off steam. So he sat down and wrote an account of the battle and his own feelings. In fact, he poured out his whole heart to me. But the letter was so confidential that I felt that at that moment I could not possibly show it to anybody. I didn’t even show it to my wife, and I locked it into a cupboard in which I kept nothing else. Not very long after came the move to Windsor and my first thought was the letter. When I opened the cupboard it was empty. I searched everywhere but it has never turned up … I liked to remember in view of the controversies that followed that he cast no blame for his disappointment on Jellicoe. He said that Jellicoe had, as he thought, made a wrong cast. We had always talked together in terms of hunting so it was a natural simile to me. But the impression it made on me was not an impression of bitterness’. Beatty’s sister’s letter did not survive simply because she felt it was so confidential that she herself destroyed it (The Leslie papers, Churchill Archives. The reference to when Beatty finished his report is from Gibson and Harper, p264).
131 Steel and Hart, p430.
132 Gibson and Harper, p264.
133 Brownrigg, p54.
134 Gibson and Harper, p270.
135 Ibid, p272.
136 Ibid, pp271–2.
137 Jellicoe, Narrative, p6.
138 Lord Louis Mountbatten was the son of Louis, Prince of Battenberg, who was the second son of Princess Victoria, Queen Victoria’s granddaughter (‘Vicky’). He served in the Grand Fleet as a midshipman, but missed the Battle of Jutland. Apparently, his brother Henry, who was at Jutland, was not allowed out of the turret in which he was stationed to get his cine camera. It is a great shame that the chance of some real footage of the battle was never shot. See Gordon p564, quoted in Adrian Smith’s Mountbatten: Apprentice Warlord. After Mountbatten met Jellicoe in Malta, shortly before the latter’s death in 1935.
139 Hough, Mountbatten, p36.
140 Beatty to Cowan, 28 November 1916, SLGF Archives, Cambridge.
141 Goldrick, Before Jutland, p19.
11 Opening Pandora’s Box: Unrestricted Submarine War
1 Scheer, p248.
2 The exact numbers of submarines available, as has been noted elsewhere, is always difficult to calculate. Terraine uses the figure of 111. That makes the starting submarine number exactly 50 per cent of what Blum had estimated as being needed (see following note). Of these, he estimates forty-nine belonged to the North Sea Flotillas (vs forty-six estimated by Karau), and thirty-three to the Flanders Flotilla (vs twenty-three from Karau who puts the number at thirty-two in February).
3 Depending on the source, there is some variation in the numbers of submarines that Germany was bringing into service. The figures quoted are from Macfarlane’s 2014 thesis on Jellicoe’s dismissal.
4 Terraine, p44.
5 Black, pp189 and 191.
6 McKee, Fraser, ‘An Explosive Story: The Rise and Fall of the Common Depth Charge’, Northern Mariner, vol 3, no. 1, Jan 1993, 45, quoted in Macfarlane, p57.
7 Redford, The Submarine, p102.
8 Jellicoe, Memorandum to War Cabinet, 21 Feb 1917, NA, PRO ADM 1/8480.
9 Memorandum Admiral Sir Henry Jackson to Balfour, 29 Oct 1916, BL A
dd MSS 48992.
10 Gordon, Rules of the Game, p519.
11 Letter, Jellicoe to Beatty, 25 Jan 1917, Temple Patterson, TJP, vol 2, p140.
12 Colvin, p217.
13 Gordon, p519.
14 Rear Admiral Duff had been second in command of the 4th Battle Squadron at Jutland. Grigg says (p50) that when Jellicoe became First Sea Lord ‘he brought with him as Anti-Submarine chief an officer who shared his scepticism. Admiral Alexander Duff’. As far as I know there is little evidence to support this particular assertion that suggested that Jellicoe himself was sceptical of convoy. Geddes did not like Duff and objected to Jellicoe’s request for a KCB for Duff ‘as he did not like his manner on the wording of some minutes’ (Temple Patterson, p201). Jellicoe replied that ‘he was being recommended for his services, not his manner’.
15 Marder, FTDTSF, vol 4, p70.
16 Jellicoe, Crisis of Naval War, p50.
17 Macfarlane, p62; Jameson, The Most Formidable Thing, p204.
18 Colvin, p225
19 For a quick discussion on the barrage’s construction see Admiral Sir Reginald Bacon, The Concise Story of the Dover Patrol (Hutchinson, 1932), pp151–5.
20 The Flandern Marine Korps was set up as an integrated military command with air, land and sea assets on the coast of Belgium using the ‘triangle’ ports of Ostend, Zeebrugge and Bruges as harbour facilities for the destroyers and pens for the submarines. It was under the command of Admiral Ludwig von Schröder.
21 Karau, p118.
22 Macfarlane, p58.
23 When Jellicoe arrived at the Admiralty each ASW vessel had around four ‘depth charges’ (John Terraine, Business in Great Waters, p27). By the end of 1917, the number per vessel was between thirty and forty per ASW vessel (Jellicoe, The Crisis of Naval War, p60). The availability had been achieved by steadily increasing production from around 140 per week to 500 per week in October and 800 per week by the end of year 1917.
24 Jellicoe (The Crisis of Naval War, p61) gives some figures for the distances of an exploding charge from a submerged submarine and the expected damage: ‘It is necessary to explode within 14 feet of a submarine to ensure destruction; at distances of up to 28 feet from the hull the depth charge might be expected to disable a submarine to the extent of forcing her to surface, when she could be sunk by gun-fire or rammed, and at distance of up to 60 feet the moral effect on the crew would be considerable and might force the submarine to surface’.
25 Terraine, p28.
26 Jellicoe, The Crisis of Naval War, p57.
27 Marder, FTDTSF, vol 4, pp77–8.
28 Ibid.
29 Because there was some initial concern that balloons aloft over a convoy would actually attract U-boat attention, Beatty at first experimented with an independent submarine-hunting group of balloon-equipped destroyers. It achieved its first success on 19 July 1917 when a balloon tethered to the destroyer Patriot (with an observer, F/L O A Butcher) spotted U.69 from a distance of twenty-eight miles, which Patriot then successfully sank.
30 Jellicoe, Crisis of Naval War, p69.
31 Duncan Redford, former head of research at the NMRN in Portsmouth, described Jellicoe’s book as ‘remarkable for its lack of emotive language’ (Redford, The Submarine, p116).
32 Terraine, p34.
33 Temple Patterson, Jellicoe, p150.
34 Jellicoe, Paper to the War Cabinet on the Influence of the Submarine upon Naval Policy and Operations, 18 November 1917, NA, PRO ADM 116/1806.
35 Muir, p267.
36 Jellicoe, The Crisis of Naval War, pill (‘forty destroyers and sloops’) and Terraine, p25 (283 in ‘home waters’).
37 Colvin, p228.
38 Ibid, p260.
39 Jellicoe, The Crisis of Naval War, p114.
40 Although Sims has also been described as being too diplomatic with the British and letting his friendships cloud his judgement. Morrison’s book on Sims (Admiral Sims and the Modern American Navy) was dedicated to my grandmother, Gwendoline, in 1949 with the words ‘affectionate good wishes and happy memories’. In the same book, Morrison writes that although ‘Jellicoe was mistaken in believing that the convoy system was impossible without American assistance, it was true yet that the complete success of the plan rested upon the number of anti-submarine craft our country could send to the dangerous area’ (Morrison, p353).
41 Oliver, 20 April 1917, NA, ADM 137/1322.
42 David Wragg, The First World War at Sea, Dr Andrew Gordon, The Rules of the Game, quoting from the 2015 BBC Scotland programme, Scotland at War.
43 On 13 April Admiral Sims promised the immediate delivery to Beatty of seven destroyers. They arrived in May with a promise of more to come. Sims was shown confidential information by Jellicoe revealing the real level of tonnage lost to be ‘four’ times as that released in the press.
44 Johnston, Rawlins, and MacFarlane, p546.
45 Winton, p245.
46 Jellicoe’s approach was always to try and look at the anti-submarine challenge as multifaceted: (a) Q-ships to lure enemy submarines into armed traps; (b) howitzers firing shells that would explode under water, depth-charge throwers; (c) coastal motor boats, fast antisubmarine chase boats; (d) mine development; (e) improved smoke-making screening; and (f) hydrophones (Altham, p140).
47 Jellicoe, The Submarine Peril, p96.
48 Colvin (Carson, p228) actually goes as far as to talk of America as ‘the neutral who refused to allow arrangements to be made by the Admiralty in her home waters’.
49 Temple Patterson, TJP, vol 2, p150.
50 Unfortunately, Sir Charles Cayzer died September 1916 otherwise I could well have imagined that there would have been extensive conversations and advice from the shipowner to his two sons-in-law, John Jellicoe and Charles Madden. Nevertheless, before his death John Jellicoe had visited many of his shipyards and been on enough of his ships to know his way around sufficiently well. After the outbreak of the First World War, sailings of Clan Line ships had carried on ‘as normal’ as far as possible, although conscious of the new risks the ships now faced as they transported civilian and wartime commodities across the globe. The enemy threat to merchant shipping duly claimed its first company victim, SS Clan Matheson, in September 1914. Additionally, ships could be requisitioned by the Admiralty at any moment: SS Clan Stuart was wrecked while on Admiralty business, delivering coal to the naval base at Simonstown in November 1914. Having been unexpectedly requisitioned at Cape Town, she had been forced to transfer her commercial cargo to another Clan Line ship before taking up official duties. HMS Clan Macnaughton was commandeered in London by the Admiralty that same November, and lost with nearly three hundred hands in February 1915. Eleven of these were Clan Line ratings who had volunteered to remain with their ship in its naval duty. Soon merchant ships were fitted with defensive guns, but in the earlier years there were rarely enough guns to go round. The brave fight put up by Clan Mactavish in July 1916 against the infamous Möwe, one of the deadliest German raiders, was made with only one gun. Mactavish’s second gun was a wooden dummy, intended to give the outward appearance of a well-armed vessel. At the end of the war, twenty-eight Clan Line ships had been sunk by enemy action, out of a fleet that in 1914 had stood at fifty-six, with the loss of nearly three hundred officers and men. Eleven Clan Line men were decorated, and five received the Lloyd’s Medal. The captains of Clans Macgillivray and Macphee were mentioned in dispatches during the times their steamers were employed as transports, as too was one of Sir Charles’ own sons, Major H R Cayzer, for his work in France (Archibald Hurd, The Clan Line in the Great War, privately printed for The Clan Line Steamers Ltd, c1921 [commercial edition published by Cassell & Co, 1924]).
51 Captain Mahan, The Life of Nelson (Simpson, Low Marston, 1899), p611.
52 Captain Bertram Hornsby Smith, CBE RN (1874–1945) was actually on the retired list in 1915 but became director of the Mercantile Movements Division of the Naval Staff. Smith’s calculations were based on the total sailings anticipated
for January 1917 of 304 ships (see Smith memorandum, 4 January 1917 NA ADM, 137/1322).
53 Colvin, p229.
54 Admiralty pamphlet, January 1917.
55 Macfarlane, Dismissal, p74.
56 Colvin, pp228–9.
57 Temple Patterson, Jellicoe, pp163–4.
58 Sims must have been specifically referring to the all-important transatlantic trade routes.
59 Winton, Convoy, p64.
60 Winton, p65.
61 Grigg, p50.
62 See Jellicoe, The Submarine Peril, p111.
63 Colvin, p260.
64 After the first six on 4 May, another six arrived on the 17th and a further six on the 24th (Dreyer, Sea Heritage, p216).
65 Terraine, p67.
66 Ibid, p59.
67 Ibid.
68 Dreyer, Sea Heritage, p220.
69 By the end of July, thirty-four American destroyers were available in British waters, while British shipyards could also produce another fifteen.
70 Massie, p740; Jellicoe to Beatty, 30 June 1916.
71 Ibid, p741.
72 Ibid, Beatty to Jellicoe, 2 July 1916.
73 Arthur Pollen had, unsuccessfully, lobbied the Navy for his fire-control equipment He later wrote his side of events in The Great Gunnery Scandal and followed up with another book, published two weeks after the end of the war, entitled The Navy in Battle. Ethel openly schemed with him about Jellicoe: ‘I telephoned Mr Pollen to come and see me which he did. He told me that he had declared open warfare and is going to have him removed from office in a month’. Jellicoe was removed from office six months later (see Massie, p742). In some of his later writings he suggested that the Grand Fleet deployment ‘must have been dictated, either be some general principle of tactics … as given by the Vice-Admiral (Beatty), or it must have been part of a plan suggested by the Vice-Admiral’ (Massie, p677). Massie cites Temple Patterson as describing Pollen’s book (The Navy in Battle) as ‘full of errors, some of them ridiculous’ and Winton as saying that his work was ‘almost unreadable’.
74 Letter from Lady Beatty, 10 July 1916. Ranft, TBP, vol 1, p369.
75 Marder, FTDTSF, vol 4, p277.
76 Additionally, these forward bases allowed the Germans to use larger numbers of the smaller and cheaper UB and UC classes of coastal submarines in the 1917 campaign.
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