Warspite

by Iain Ballantyne

  ‘Everybody was very cheery, and anxious for news which I couldn’t give as I hadn’t the faintest idea what was happening.’ Such was the feeling of being divorced from events beyond their own compartments, Commander Walwyn saw some members of the crew playing cards, seemingly without a care in the world. On the other hand, he was bothered by a pair of very anxious sailors. ‘Two stokers came to me when I was very busy and begged me to take watches. letters etc., found on men who had been knocked out.’ The Commander was not pleased at this distraction.

  It struck me as so incongruous, as if it mattered a damn as we might all of us go at any minute. I told them so but they were so insistent about it... .

  Commander Walwyn passed them on to a senior rate.

  Overall the Commander was very impressed with the crew’s resilience.

  Men everywhere were simply splendid, and all so cheery and although I confess it was mighty unpleasant and unnerving I myself had plenty to do, but for those who merely had to wait it must have been a thousand times worse. The noise was so perfectly appalling, and you couldn’t hear at all between decks and the worst of it was knowing nothing.

  There was always room for humour, particularly when a sailor fell down a shell hole in the main deck and cut himself. According to Commander Walwyn this raised ‘a good laugh’. Later the sailor would claim this injury as a ‘war wound’, displaying the appropriate stripe on his uniform until it was ‘forcibly removed’.

  Called to the bridge by the Captain, Commander Walwyn was a frightful sight, wet through from head to foot and covered in dirt.

  Captain Phillpotts was direct to the point of rudeness in his interrogation of his second in command. As Commander Walwyn went though his damage report the Captain cut him off mid-sentence.

  ‘I don’t care a damn about the damage,’ he snapped. ‘Can we join the line?’20

  Unaware of the state of play in the battle, Commander Walwyn felt the Captain must have thought him a bit of an idiot. He later confessed that, had the Captain been killed or badly wounded, and he had been asked to take control, he would not have had a clue what to do. Pressed to give a verdict by Captain Phillpotts, he stated: ‘If she gets another heavy hit the port side I don’t think she will stand it.’

  Captain Phillpotts was seething during his interrogation of Commander Walwyn because of another mishap his capricious battleship had inflicted upon him. She had fallen victim to a lethal steering problem at exactly the wrong moment.

  As the 5th Battle Squadron joined the Grand Fleet and turned into line, the Warspite narrowly avoided being squashed between the Valiant and Malaya. Turning hard, her steering jammed because it had already been damaged by the shell which hit near the port wing engine room. The after bulkhead of the centre engine room – to which the steering engine was fixed – had buckled. This had created a ‘hot bearing’ so that, when the wheel was rotated too quickly during the turn to avoid Valiant, the steering jammed. Like a car driver missing his turning on a roundabout, Captain Phillpotts decided it was better to go around again and keep moving than stop and reverse course while under fire from the entire German fleet. Control of the guns was immediately devolved down to individual turrets, it being impossible for the control tops to function in such wild circumstances. Captain Poland of Y turret later commented:

  My 2nd officer was howling for permission to fire at something, but I refused until there was something visible to fire at.21

  It was a frustrating interruption to the rhythm of Warspite’s main guns which had been doing a lot of damage to the enemy. One of the gunners noted:

  Suddenly for no reason at all we stopped firing. The trainers and gun layers looked into their telescopes and someone said ‘this ship is running around’. Then someone said ‘she is still turning around...she is going in circles ‘. And the word was then passed from the bridge that the rudder was jammed. That was the reason we were turning and the ship had stopped firing.

  The silence of temporary inactivity provided the same gunner with an opportunity to listen to the action outside:

  I kept hearing bangs which I thought might be our 6-inch guns firing, and repelling torpedo attacks, but it didn’t turn out to be that. It later transpired that the bangs I had been hearing were shells hitting the ship.22

  Captain Phillpotts, pictured here aboard Warspite with a faithful friend, was fuming with frustration when the Warspite ran out of control at Jutland. Franklin Collection.

  While Commander Walwyn may not have noticed the turns, fully absorbed in supervising damage control and firefighting, Surgeon Lieutenant Ellis and the Principal Medical Officer in the forward aid distributing station most certainly had.

  ...the ship suddenly took a list to port, and instead of righting herself as she would have done had it been an ordinary turn, kept heeling over indefinitely.

  The two men feared the end was nigh:

  ...as it persisted we concluded that she had been hit heavily somewhere, by a torpedo possibly, and that it was the beginning of her going right over... but after an appreciable length of time the list stopped, and she gradually got back onto an even keel again.

  In the centre of Warspite’s crazy circles was the badly damaged HMS Warrior which duly received salvation, German gunners deciding the out of control British super dreadnought was a much juicier target.

  Warrior’s crew believed the Warspite’s actions were a deliberate act to save them from certain death and were, for the rest of their days, grateful to the battleship. An officer in a nearby British cruiser saw the enemy’s barrage switch to Warspite:

  As she continued to plunge forward towards the Germans the tornado lifted from

  Warrior, hovered as it seemed in space and fell with a crash about Warspite.

  In the fire storm which enveloped Warspite, Signal Boy Chessman was wounded by small bits of shrapnel, his trousers shredded and flesh lacerated. He was amazed at his miraculous escape:

  To stand in the centre of a metal storm and to be cut as I was without a single piece lodging must surely indicate I was born of a miracle.23

  In the foretop, still recovering from the shock of witnessing the Defence blowing up, Sub Lieutenant Vaux felt as if he would die at any moment. He saw,

  ...about four or five German dreadnoughts firing at us for about twenty minutes and hitting us about once a minute. Why we weren’t sunk is a perfect mystery, personally, after seeing the Defence go. I thought we should go every minute. I was simply soaked with salt water from the splashes of their shells that fell short.

  The enemy shells thudded into Warspite with such a deafening noise that the Captain’s orders could not be heard on the conning tower. Warspite’s gun flashes had also blinded the Navigating Officer. Captain Phillpotts was forced to scream orders down the voice tubes. He told the engine room to steer with the screws. This they did, and after two circles, the battleship did an ‘S’ which prevented another circuit but threatened to take her back towards the Germans. Captain Phillpotts ordered the engines stopped and the ship was stationary for ten minutes, continuing to weather gunfire. Her steering gear was then repaired well enough for her to get underway again. Lady Luck truly rode with Warspite at Jutland.

  Fortunately for the Warspite the German ships broke contact because they were forced to turn away by the Grand Fleet finally bringing its substantial weight of fire into play. The British fleet could focus its full power against the Germans in a vast arc of death while they were in line astern and could only bring a small proportion of their guns to bear. Warspite’s Midshipman Bickmore recalled as each Grand Fleet battleship turned into line, he saw her ‘breaking into a ripple of flame from end-to-end...’24

  The smaller ships caught between the two battle lines reverberated to shock waves from the big guns.

  Still standing on the bridge, a little dazed from his experiences keeping the Warspite afloat, Commander Walwyn was at last able to absorb something of the bigger picture:

  There was a heavy pall of smoke everyw
here, terrific rumbling of heavy firing and the whole horizon lit by orange flashes everywhere, everything blurred and beastly. I saw Agincourt a long way off firing like blazes and remember thinking she was going pretty hard but that’s all I ever saw of the Grand Fleet.

  Agincourt was instrumental in saving Warspite, which was fitting for a warship which took the name of the cancelled sixth Queen Elizabeth Class battleship.

  The Grand Fleet thundering down from the north had regarded the battlecruisers as merely the opening act for their main performance and Beatty’s vessels had proved to be boxers with glass jaws. The demise of yet another battlecruiser – HMS Invincible, the victor of Battle of the Falklands in 1914 – in a horrific explosion, reinforced this harsh truth before the whole Grand Fleet.

  The light was fading fast as night came on, and the smoke and haze of battle was obscuring visibility. German telescopic sights – so deadly earlier – were increasingly affected by dampness in the air. Despite their problems, German gunners were lucky to have the British warships silhouetted against the sun setting in the west while the High Sea Fleet was hidden in the gloomy east.

  The Battle to Keep Afloat

  Warspite slipped away from an enemy which believed it had dealt her a death blow. But, despite her moment of maximum peril, the battleship had survived. Commander Walwyn went below again and was making another inspection of the damage on the port side when he received a message from the Captain asking: ‘What speed can we go?’ Commander Walwyn replied: ‘Sixteen knots’. This was probably needed for an exchange of signals between Captain Phillpotts, still desperate to get back into the battle, and Rear Admiral Evan-Thomas, aboard Barham. Evan-Thomas decided not to risk Warspite any further and ordered her home to Rosyth. Having been cocooned from the damage caused by German shells to the Spite, the 15-inch gun crews were shocked at what they found on being allowed out of their turrets.

  The massive broadside of HMS Agincourt helped to save HMS Warspite from destruction. Goodman Collection.

  The battlecruiser HMS Invincible. Goodman Collection.

  When the ship got out of range of enemy guns, the order was passed by telephone to us saying crews could stand easy but remain in the vicinity of the turrets. This meant you could come out and walk around the top of the turret. When I got out I was amazed. There were fires under the bridge where the lifebelts had caught fire, there were fires in the 6-inch battery where the cordite was alight. The funnels were holed – every boat in the ship had a hole in it. The ship looked really bad.25

  Ahead of the Spite in the night lay the battle to keep afloat, her engine rooms in danger of flooding. Leading this battle for survival, Commander Walwyn also faced the unpleasant job of clearing corpses from damaged areas. Rounding up a dozen sailors to help him, Commander Walwyn was worried even he might quail in the face of it. But no, he had become hardened. The corpses they retrieved were,

  badly knocked about but absolutely ‘dry’ and not bleeding at all. The thing that struck me was they were not nearly so frightening as I thought they would be somehow.

  About dusk, having checked his services were not needed for a while, Surgeon Lieutenant Ellis ventured up to the quarterdeck:

  We were moving through the water slowly, at almost six knots, heading back towards Rosyth and there was no other ship in sight, or noise of firing anywhere. There was still a dull red glow from the sun left in the sky, low down, but it was very hazy, and impossible to see any distance. The sea was still calm but there was just enough breeze to make its surface tumbly. As regards the ship it is difficult to say what one’s feelings were on looking at her.

  Only a few hours before she had been one of the cleanest and smartest looking ships in the fleet, her decks spotlessly white, and her light grey paint, freshly put on only recently, gleaming every where in the sunshine. Now her decks were filthy, littered with debris and in places torn up by shells, one of the quarterdeck ladders had been blown away, her funnels had ragged holes in them, the small iron ladder on X turret had been bent and twisted and broken away from its lower supports, whilst the side of the turret was covered with marks from glancing hits, and her general appearance was in about as absolute a contrast to what it had been before as well could be.

  Starting to feel a little numbed, Surgeon Lieutenant Ellis was glad to see the ship still flew her colours:

  A ragged White Ensign still flew from her ensign staff – which had been struck once and broken, so that it was now much shorter – however, at the main masthead there was flying the Union Jack.

  Overnight a 6-inch gun section and two of the 15-inch gun turrets were kept manned, just in case.

  The agony of the burns victims being treated by Surgeon Lieutenant Ellis and the Principal Medical Officer showed no signs of abating, one of the men dying before daylight. At 2.30 a.m. Surgeon Lieutenant Ellis took a break and went to the ward room. He settled himself in an armchair, which had suffered one of its legs blown off when a shell passed through. He lit up a relaxing cigarette. Surgeon Lieutenant Ellis had been sleepy at midnight but this had passed and he was now wide awake. After another spell tending to the casualties, he still found himself unable to sleep and decided to see if some fresh sea air would send him off. Emerging onto the forecastle deck he found:

  It, like the quarterdeck, was covered with debris of all kinds – bits of broken woodwork from boats, part of a damaged life-saving raft, half of a lifebuoy with the name of the ship on it and any amount of small odds and ends. The deck was holed by the starboard 6-inch gun, which had been struck by fragments of shell all over it. The spray shield was full of holes, the breech mechanism destroyed, and the barrel pitted all along its length, whilst from the muzzle, which was trained starboard, there blew out in the breeze the tattered remains of what had once been its canvas blast screen. The latter gave the gun a ludicrous appearance which it possibly was far from feeling – if guns have any feeling.

  Several other members of the crew were standing about chatting nearby but Surgeon Lieutenant Ellis decided not to join them and returned to his battered chair in the ward room.

  Limping Home Through U-boat Waters

  As 6.00a.m. on 1 June came around, Warspite was about to enter a danger zone off Scotland where German submarines traditionally lurked to attack British warships leaving, or returning to, Rosyth. Captain Phillpotts stood his crew by for an attack. They were completely frazzled by this time, their nerves shot to ribbons, many having worked through the night to keep the ship afloat. Commander Walwyn got the hands up and to work at daylight, with the threat from U-boats prompting him to get the ship’s carpenters repairing the only wrecked small boat capable of salvage – the 1st cutter. Mess tables and stools were also brought onto the upper deck to build rafts.

  At 7.00a.m. Captain Phillpotts sent for Commander Walwyn and said he was convinced a submarine attack would come very soon and everything possible should be done to prepare for it. Commander Walwyn decided to get the upper deck 6-inch guns at the ready. These weapons had been too exposed to man during the battle but now were an excellent means of attacking any U-boats unwise enough to show themselves.

  In the ward room a concerted attempt had been made to get things back to normal. On entering for breakfast, Surgeon Lieutenant Ellis found:

  the sight of white tablecloths amidst the somewhat dishevelled surroundings, and individuals, did look a little incongruous.

  Under his feet he could sense the Warspite had not enjoyed the rough weather:

  One could feel she was sluggish owing to her flooded compartments...any sea was bound to put the strength of her superstructure to a severe test.

  At just after 9.30 a.m. a U-boat fired two torpedoes which passed down either side of the battleship. Commander Walwyn reckoned: ‘...one missed across the bow, the other followed up astern alongside the starboard side.

  The Warspite increased her speed to twenty-one knots and zig-zagged away as vigorously as she could. Lookouts had already been doubled and officers not on
watch or otherwise engaged were ordered onto the upper deck to watch out for periscopes and torpedo tracks. Below decks Surgeon Lieutenant Ellis heard about the torpedo near miss from a sailor who stuck his head around the curtain of the Principal Medical Officer’s cabin to say it passed ‘only about some ten feet off.’

  Surgeon Lieutenant Ellis observed:

  This was a new complication and had the effect of making me feel I wanted to go up on deck at once – for what reason I don’t know – but the PMO went on writing with his usual imperturbability so that for sheer shame I felt bound to stay also.

  With evidence the threat was indeed high, Commander Walwyn ordered the wounded brought closer to the upper deck and watertight doors shut at all times. Having finished his reports and supervised the move of the wounded, Surgeon Lieutenant Ellis finally got to the upper deck.