As soon as the Forth Bridge was cleared the 5th Battle Squadron increased to twenty knots, keeping that speed up throughout the night and heading more or less due east. Aboard the Warspite there was no feeling among the crew of going to meet a date with destiny, rather one of dull routine. Midshipman Fairthorne - new to all this and therefore excited - was amazed at how calmly the crew of Warspite went about their business.
His new shipmates explained they found it hard to believe this would be anything other than another wild goose chase. One of Warspite’s gunners enjoyed the freedom of the sea:
We sailed along through the night zig-zagging to avoid submarines. Eventually dawn broke and it was a wonderful sight - all these ships twisting and turning, with the battlecruisers ahead and we astern of them.10
The seventh Warspite had several mascots during her life, none more exotic than this lemur which lived in the foretop and may well have dodged enemy shrapnel up there during Jutland. Franklin Collection.
The Germans were trying to spring a trap. Their battlecruiser force, under Vice Admiral Franz von Hipper, was making speed parallel to the Norwegian coast, with the express purpose of luring Beatty’s force out to play. The main High Sea Fleet, under Vice Admiral Reinhard Scheer, would then appear as Hipper’s ships turned the British south. The Germans hoped to have a substantial part of the Royal Navy at their mercy, obliterated by their overwhelming force of sixteen dreadnoughts, five battlecruisers and seven pre-dreadnoughts. What the Germans were most anxious to avoid was any intervention by the immensely powerful Grand Fleet. Strange then, that they allowed themselves to walk right into its arms.
By the afternoon of 31 May 1916, Warspite and her sister ships of the 5th Battle Squadron were trailing behind Beatty’s impatient battlecruisers. At around 2.30p.m., the cruiser HMS Galatea, far out in front of the fleet, sent a general signal: ‘Cruiser in sight bearing N.E., probably hostile.’ Not long after, a signal from Galatea to Beatty’s flagship, HMS Lion, reported five plumes of heavy smoke on the horizon. A copy of this signal was brought to the Spite’s bridge where it was realized they could only be German capital ships. ‘It was pretty plain there was something serious doing,’ Warspite’s Executive Officer, Commander Humphrey Walwyn later recalled of this moment.11
Admiral Beatty’s flagship, the battlecruiser HMS Lion, viewed from Warspite in the Firth of Forth shortly before Jutland. Franklin Collection.
Another view of HMS Lion from Warspite. Franklin Collection.
Another of Beatty’s battlecruisers, HMS Tiger, again pictured from HMS Warspite on the Forth shortly before Jutland. Franklin Collection.
Captain Phillpotts decided Warspite should go immediately to Action Stations. Having ensured the Actions Stations order had been passed - that all watertight doors were closed, all fragile objects and potentially fatal loose items secured or stowed away, the wooden weather-decks dampened to decrease the likelihood of fire - Commander Walwyn made his way back to the bridge to report to the Captain. As he climbed up he looked for signs of the enemy, but could only see the Valiant and Barham ahead and Malaya behind.
HMS Warspite leaves Scotland astern as she sails out with the rest of the 5th Battle Squadron, headed for the mighty clash at Jutland in May 1916. Franklin Collection.
The Battle Cruiser Fleet was well beyond reach of the protection afforded by the squadron’s 15-inch guns. The gap had earlier increased to ten miles, because a signal from HMS Lion instructing the 5th Battle Squadron to turn south-east towards the enemy cruiser sighting had been missed, due to funnel smoke obscuring the flags. As a result the four battleships had proceeded east for another ten minutes before realizing the Battle Cruiser Fleet had made off in another direction. They then followed with all haste. Had the gap between battlecruisers and battleships not been so wide thousands of British sailors might not have lost their lives.
Commander Walwyn decided it was time to go to B turret. On his way down he went to his sea cabin and put on his custom-made Gieves and Hawkes life jacket, his flash hood and protective gloves. It would be the last time he ever saw his cabin, for a German shell would soon blow it to pieces.
Inside B turret Commander Walwyn found everyone in excellent spirits. Their good cheer was provoked by the prospect of some action after so many frustrating sweeps into the North Sea with nothing to show for them. They wanted to load the guns immediately. Commander Walwyn told them to calm down and await ‘the usual routine orders’.
A Running Fight
Ahead of Warspite and the 5th Battle Squadron the opening shots of the first big fleet action involving the Royal Navy since Trafalgar, nearly 111 years earlier, were being traded. For the Germans it was the long awaited Der Tag (The Day) when their much smaller and younger fleet, with a history of barely thirty years, would be pitted against the Royal Navy’s several centuries.
Among Warspite’s gunners the desire for battle was also high:
We were looking forward to a chance to have a crack at the enemy. We were keen. This was the day we were waiting for.12
But the German Navy had one crucial advantage over the British – by starting from scratch the Kaiser’s fleet had been able to build dry docks wide enough to enable construction of broad-beamed battleships and battlecruisers which were, for their size, much tougher than the Royal Navy’s equivalents. The British – advanced in so many ways – were restricted by older dry docks built to more modest dimensions, allowing length but not the width which made the German ships so tough.13 Unfortunately for the British battlecruisers, unwisely leaving their heavyweight fast battleship protectors trailing ten miles behind, Winston Churchill’s description of a battle ‘between egg shells striking each other with hammers’ would prove tragically accurate.
The 5th Battle Squadron steams hard to try and catch up with Beatty’s impatient battlecruisers at Jutland. Goodman Collection.
At 3.58p.m. the five German battlecruisers – von der Tann, Moltke, Seydlitz, Derfflinger and Lutzow – opened fire, answered instantly by the British battlecruisers. The May haze was soon thickened by gun smoke mixed with dirty clouds belching from the funnels of warships at full speed.
Aboard Warspite, Signal Boy John Chessman, high up in the crow’s nest, could hear the thunder of guns but see nothing of the fight. He later wrote:
Although out in the open sea there was maximum visibility and a bright sun shone down warmly on a sea smooth as a pond, the eastern horizon was shrouded in a sea mist, and, even with the aid of a telescope, no movement was discernible.14
Calamity on an epic scale was to descend with terrifying speed on the rearmost British battlecruiser – HMS Indefatigable – which rolled over and blew up after being hammered by the von der Tann, leaving two survivors from her 800 crew. When the 5th Battle Squadron later carved through her remains, sailors aboard the four fast battleships cheered, believing a German vessel had gone. The idea that a British capital ship had succumbed so easily was unthinkable.
Twenty minutes after battle was joined, the 5th Battle Squadron battleships could at last weigh into the fray. Their initial targets were to be three German scouting cruisers – Frankfurt, Pillau and Elbing which had fallen behind the battlecruisers.
Ensigns flying, Warspite would face great peril during the Jutland encounter. Franklin Collection.
In Jutland The German Perspective V.E. Tarrant comments:
Konteradmiral Bodicker, on the bridge of Frankfurt, observed the masts of the four battleships gradually rise above the Western horizon, which he soon identified and reported to Hipper as being battleships of the Queen Elizabeth Class.
The first sighting of the Queen Elizabeths caused a mixture of fear and professional fascination – back in their base ports the Kaiser’s officers had speculated endlessly about the Warspite and her sisters, somewhat in awe of the eight 15-inch guns. Now they were about to find out what it felt like to be on the receiving end of Mr Churchill’s and Admiral Fisher’s monsters. In their official history of the battle, the Germa
ns lamented the British fleet appeared to be ‘as many headed as the hydra’. They had blown apart HMS Indefatigable only to see her replaced by four more powerful super dreadnoughts.
With their fire controlled by the directors high up on masts, most of the sailors in Warspite’s turrets followed instructions unable to see what their guns were aimed at. In B turret, Commander Walwyn was at least able to see something, if not very much, through the observation hood: ‘I made out five columns of smoke in the mist, and that was all I could see, no masts or anything else.’
The Spite’s gunners strained at the leash but were still not allowed to fire:
Eventually the order to load had been passed. That meant that the shells and the cartridges had to come up from the bottom of the ship where there were shell rooms and magazines. It was all mechanical – the shell came up first, then the rammer operator pushed the shell into the gun followed by four quarter charges of cordite. We stayed in this position until the order to bring the guns to the ready was passed.
The battlecruiser HMS Indefatigable which was blown apart at Jutland. Goodman Collection.
The experience of being inside the huge metal box that was a 15-inch turret was a peculiar mixture of invulnerability and claustrophobia.
There are three ways of getting out – one is out through a manhole at the top of the turret, another exit is through a manhole at the bottom. It is also possible to leave the turret by going down through the trunking down to the magazines and shell rooms.
While you are in these turrets you are naturally cut off from anything going on outside except you are in telephone communication with the bridge and the gunnery control towers. It is a feeling of being fastened in a big box.
The atmosphere is good and the crew numbers some sixteen people. Everyone has their individual jobs which they attend to and work as a team. At Jutland the guns being loaded, the next order passed was ‘Guns to the Ready’. When the guns are brought to the ready you simply wait for the bang – when it happens the gun comes back three feet and then it goes out again. With a good turret crew you can actually fire about one round per minute.15
The initial range was extreme and, as Commander Walwyn observed, most shots appeared to miss:
Opened fire on light cruisers, range about 21,000 yards. Could see the fall of shot well but could not see at all what we were firing at.
Fired a few rounds by director and saw Barham and Valiant were firing too; light cruisers were getting clearer now. Suddenly saw the number two column of smoke break into a bright flame; this dropped astern and at first I thought she was hit but later I thought it was a smoke box, as it looked like an enormous calcium life buoy, bright flame and huge white smoke cloud drifting astern.
Down below decks at his post in the Forward Aid Distributing Station, Surgeon Lieutenant could ‘feel the shock to the ship with full charges for each salvo.’
Warspite made a fast turn to starboard and now Commander Walwyn caught his first glimpse of the five German battlecruisers:
They were steaming the same way as we were and going very hard. A mass of black smoke, and I could only see their masts and the tops of their funnels above the horizon....
He also saw the mountainous stern wave kicked up by their propellers ‘showing up white and very high.’
On sighting the 5th Battle Squadron, Derfflinger’s Gunnery Officer, Georg von Hase knew a testing time was ahead for his battlecruiser.
There had been much talk in our fleet of these ships. They were ships of the line with the colossal armament of eight 15-inch guns.
He added, perhaps recalling his foreboding at the time: ‘They fired a shell more than twice as heavy as ours.’16
The 5th Battle Squadron switched fire to the German battlecruisers at 23,000 yards, with maximum elevation on the guns. Barham and the Valiant concentrated on the Moltke while Warspite’s and Malaya’s guns were initially laid on the von der Tann, the rear-most German battlecruiser. Their shells fell short.
Commander Walwyn was disappointed: ‘...I could not make out what was the matter.’ But he had to turn away in some pain from the observation hood when the blast from Warspite’s A turret blew salt water and dust into his eyes. German shells were also creating their fair share of turbulence, falling short, but tight together, and ricocheting spectacularly right over the Warspite. They passed a few feet from Sub Lieutenant P.E. Vaux, a gunnery officer in the foretop. Another new member of the crew, Vaux had served aboard HMS Lion at the battles of Heligoland Bight and Dogger Bank and was meant to have gone to the destroyer Ardent. However, he somehow missed his berth on her and was sent to Warspite instead. It was a stroke of good luck which he would come to appreciate after Jutland, as Ardent was destroyed during the battle.
‘We had a rather thrilling time in Warspite,’ he later remarked in a letter to his brother. ‘To start with it was extremely nice, with the odds in our favour and a very interesting spectacle to boot.’17
Vaux was fortunate in being able to see the action, but for many of Warspite’s 15-inch gunners there was no sight except the mechanisms of their gigantic weapons.
...they were kept firing as quick as possible. It was just a normal routine to the men in the turret having done it so often in practice. Things just clicked.18
At this stage only the Barham suffered a hit, which caused modest damage. Commander Walwyn, back at his viewing position, saw her straddled by enemy fire. It now occurred to him that this mad dash in pursuit of the German battlecruisers might open out into something more daunting.
I realized we were steering south and it crossed my mind whether we should meet the High Sea Fleet.
The Germans had now straddled the Warspite with heavy shells, but had yet to hit her. Their accuracy may have been affected by the fact that they were zig-zagging hard to avoid the British battleships’ return fire.
Then, success for the Spite’s gunners with a hit on the von der Tann, which cheered Commander Walwyn tremendously:
I distinctly saw one salvo hit No5 and she turned away six points to port and went away in a cloud of black and white smoke.
Commander Walwyn was entranced by the awful beauty of war, which made even the enemy’s attempts to kill him fascinating: ‘It was a wonderful and rather horrible sight to see the constant orange flicker of flame along the line when they fired.’
However, for the British battlecruisers ahead, the true horror was hitting home. Warspite and the other Queen Elizabeths were just too far back to distract Derfflinger and Seydlitz from concentrating a deadly barrage of killer blows on HMS Queen Mary, which had been shooting with deadly accuracy and inflicting real pain on the enemy. The Queen Mary exploded, her wreckage falling all around HMS Tiger and HMS New Zealand as they raced through the smoke and offal. The dead battlecruiser’s stern poked above the water, screws still turning. Some of her seventeen survivors clung to this surreal tombstone. For their part, the members of Warspite’s crew who saw more evidence of a destroyed vessel assumed, again, that she must be German. But, above the North Sea, a mushroom cloud of smoke nearly 1,000ft tall was dissipating and with it the legend of absolute British naval invincibility established by Horatio Nelson.
The Royal Navy’s mighty 15-inch guns made the Germans recoil with fear at Jutland. Goodman Collection.
Having left the heavy protection cloak of the 5th Battle Squadron trailing too far behind, Beatty was discovering reckless bravery provided a paper thin shield for inadequately armoured and internally protected British vessels, especially facing better constructed opponents blessed with superb gunners. The final bitter truth of the Queen Mary’s demise was that her own fantastic shooting was largely in vain, as defective British shells used at Jutland frequently broke up on the outside of the German armour without causing significant harm.
Sixteen minutes later the British met the vanguard of the High Sea Fleet. Aboard the cruiser HMS Southampton, Commodore William Goodenough, commanding 2nd Light Cruiser Squadron, was greeted, despite overcas
t weather in the south-east, with first their heavy smoke on the horizon, then tall masts, and finally the ships themselves. A series of coded wireless transmissions to Beatty culminated at 4.37p.m. with the urgent declaration: ‘Have sighted the enemy battlefleet bearing approximately SE. Course of enemy N.’ Collision course.
Now Beatty very sensibly laid aside his lust for personal glory. He did the only logical thing to save his ships from destruction and attempt to lure the enemy to theirs – he ordered a turn to the north, leading the Germans into the jaws of the Grand Fleet which was now fifty miles away. As the Battle Cruiser Fleet ships reversed course at 4.45p.m., German shells were falling short and now they piled on the speed again to try and stay ahead of the enemy fire. Eight nautical miles astern of the Battle Cruiser Fleet, the 5th Battle Squadron continued to hurtle south towards the main German force, still engaged with the enemy battlecruisers.
HMS Queen Mary blowing up at Jutland, a sight the crew of HMS Warspite cheered, for they believed they were seeing a German battleship’s destruction. Taylor Library.
The Queen Elizabeths were plainly unable to see the signal flags on Beatty’s flagship giving the instruction to turn north. As the British battlecruisers approached from the south it was noticed for the first time that two ships were missing from the Battle Cruiser Fleet line.
Warspite Page 5
