Jellicoe had recently been appealing to the Admiralty to return Beatty’s ‘Cat Squad’ to Cromarty in order that it would work more closely with the rest of the Grand Fleet, and in order to provide opportunities for combined gunnery exercises, Jellicoe being profoundlv suspicious of the accuracy and discipline of the Battle Cruiser Squadron’s gunnery. But it was as well that he had not got his way. As Wilson explained, from ‘the conclusions which we had formed from the intercepted German message which our cryptographers had translated’, it was clear that it was going to be a very close race.
‘Those fellows’, of course, were Hipper’s battle-cruisers, towards which the Grand Fleet and the general public felt a special antagonism. This time there were only four of them. On Christmas Day seven Royal Navy seaplanes had made a daring bombing and reconnaissance raid on the Cuxhaven Zeppelin sheds. They were frustrated by fog and dropped their bombs on various targets, including a German cruiser. Their presence over Schillig roads on the way home had an important result. Seven battleships and three battle-cruisers were among the vessels spotted, and the presence of the aircraft created so much alarm that anchors were weighed and the ships made for the open sea in such haste that there was a serious collision between the von der Tann and another cruiser. The damage was the first in naval history to be caused by air power, albeit indirectly.
Hipper, then, was without this important unit and had to make do with only the Seydlitz (flag), Moltke, Derfflinger, and the smaller Blücher. The newest, Derfflinger, was armed with eight 12-inch guns all on the centre line; the Seydlitz and Moltke had ten 11-inch guns, all of which could be fired, two of them through a relatively narrow arc, on either beam.
The purpose of the operation was not evident from the intercepted signals. But it was clear that Hipper would leave the jade at 5.45 p.m. on 23 January to reconnoitre at least as far as the Dogger Bank. Churchill later claimed that the Admiralty reading of the situation was that another coastal raid could be expected, but does not explain how this conclusion was reached. No cryptographic nor other intelligence had been received to suggest this. But dispositions were made and orders given just as if this was to be a repeat Scarborough raid. The shortsightedness was compounded by making the same errors as before, too. Again, it was reasoned that Hipper’s battlecruisers would be unsupported by the main High Seas Fleet. Again, Jellicoe was not ordered to sea at once as a back-up to Beatty to ensure the destruction of the enemy battle-cruisers if they were alone, or as protection to Beatty if the High Seas Fleet was out and sprung the surprise it had come so near to achieving during the Scarborough raid. Later on the 23rd the Admiralty appears to have changed its mind, for it suddenly ordered Jellicoe to sea. In the event, Jellicoe weighed at 9 p.m., his three battle squadrons clearing Scapa Flow and speeding south to a rendezvous with Beatty.
Beatty had reorganized his force into two squadrons, his 13.5-inch gunned newer ships forming the 1st Battle Cruiser Squadron, and Rear-Admiral Archibald Moore, with his Hag in the older New Zealand, with the Indomitable. When Jellicoe proceeded to sea, Beatty, with his earlier news and prompter orders, had already been out for three hours. Filson Young recalled the sense of expectation and the drama on board the flagship that night. ‘I had the first watch; very quiet, as wireless was practically unused while we were at sea on an operation of this kind, and nothing likely to come in. As his custom was, the Admiral [Beatty] looked in upon his way to his windy sea cabin, and we talked over the chart and the possibilities of tomorrow. For some curious reason we were confident on this occasion, in a way we had never been before, that we should meet the enemy on the morrow. No one had any doubts about it and there was an air of suppressed excitement which was very exhilarating… The ship drove on calmly and stiffly through the dark surges. Midnight came, and with it the brief commotion incident on the changes of the watch; a slight aroma of cocoa was added to the other perfumes below deck, and I departed to turn in. In my cabin I stowed away everything movable and breakable, saw that the door was hooked back, that my swimming waistcoast was on the bed, looked at my watch… and fell asleep.’(13)
Beatty, accompanied by Goodenough’s First Light Cruiser Squadron, was clue to meet Commodore Reginald Tyrwhitt’s Harwich force of light cruisers and destroyers at 7 a.m. 24 January. It was still dark, but the rendezvous was completed with precision. The first light confirmed the unusual calmness of the sea and perfect visibility. ‘The day was so clear,’ Goodenough recalled, ‘that only the shape of the earth prevented one from seeing everything on it.’
Twenty minutes later, gun flashes suddenly lit in spasms the south-eastern horizon, and at almost the same time the light cruiser Aurora signalled, ‘Am in action with High Seas Fleet.’ Beatty and his Staff had a good laugh. If this had been the case. it would almost certainly have been the ship’s last signal, and Beatty would have been forced to reverse course and fall back until Jellicoe arrived. In fact the cruiser’s contact was with the port wing of Hipper’s screening cruisers, as became evident when, with the improvement in light, first Goodenough and then Beatty himself made out Hipper’s squadron.
Admiral Drax, then a thirty-four-year-old commander on Beatty’s Staff, recorded in his diary his impressions of this first-ever meeting of dreadnoughts: ‘Climbing to the bridge I found that they [Hipper’s force] were running for home, while we were working up to hill speed as quickly as possible. On the horizon ahead could he seen indistinctly a number of smaller vessels and beside them 4 dark patches with a mass of smoke overhead. These 4 patches, each containing more than 1,000 men, were our long-destined prey, but alas they were on such a hearing that to cut off their retreat was quite impossible.’(14)
Instead the operation now rapidly developed into a stern pursuit and running battle. Beatty had not, as the Admiralty hoped, got between Hipper and his base, but there still remained a good chance of catching him before he reached safety. There was a breeze from the north-east, which promised Beatty the advantage of relative freedom from smoke, and there was good reason to believe that Hipper could be outstripped, especially as he had brought along the slower Blücher. Moreover, unlike Scarborough, the advantage of five to four this time lay in Beatty’s favour.
Progressively the speed of the battle-cruisers built up, from 24 to 25, then to 26 knots, and finally, just before 9 a.m. Beatty ordered 29 knots, but only as confirmation that the utmost was required. None of his ships had ever made this speed.
As Drax’s narrative continues: ‘We discussed on the bridge the best moment for opening fire, the Admiral sagely remarking that if we started too soon it might make them fly the faster. For an hour and a half we chased, greatly hampered by the urgent necessity of never crossing the track of our enemy. Occasionally he altered course and at times his destroyers or cruisers hauled out on his starboard bow. As any of these might have been laying mines, we had to use the utmost care to avoid ‘treading on the tail of his coat’.(15)
Hipper’s intelligence from intercepted W/T call-signs was that his adversary was the British 2nd Battle Squadron, over which he had a wide margin of speed, and, like von Spee in retreat, he had therefore not hurried until he saw to his dismay the big ships rapidly gaining on him. He immediately ordered full speed, which was around 27 knots for the newer ships but only 23 knots for the Blücher. Hipper flew his flag in the Seydlitz as before, and behind him in loose line ahead steamed the Moltke, Derfflinger, and Blücher, in that order.
At last, at 8.52 a.m., Beatty decided to try a ranging shot. Commander Drax recorded: ‘We fired the B turret at 20,000 yards and it fell short. A second, fired 2 minutes later at 20,200 appeared to fall over. This fortunate occurrence gave us the range pretty accurately and we continued firing very slowly, 1 gun at a time. Our 3rd or 4th shot produced a very faint cloud of yellowish smoke and seemed evidently, by peculiar luck, to have scored a hit, certainly the longest range at which a hit has ever been made between 2 ships in action. The Tiger then commenced slow firing and Lion’s rate of fire was slightly increa
sed, time being g. 10 a.m.’(16)
Almost a year earlier, Beatty had ordered experimental firing at the then unprecedented range of 16,000 yards. Now, within ten minutes of that first shot, and while still at 20,000 yards, Beatty signalled his other ships, ‘Open fire and engage the enemy.’ Like the older Blücher, Beatty’s rearmost ship, the Indomitable, was no longer able to hold the pace and was dropping astern. But the other four battle-cruisers were soon in action. ‘By this time others of the German ships had opened fire; the sea between the two forces was becoming alive with spouting columns which were now coming very near, and as the Lion had apparently straddled her target, the duel would at any moment develop into a general action.’(17)
It did so, shortly after 9.30 a.m., when the British flagship made another signal whose ambiguity was to have a serious bearing on the outcome of the battle. ‘Engage the corresponding ships in the enemy’s line’, it ran. The ships were not identified by name, and this signal took no account of the fact that there were five British heavy ships and only four of the enemy. Beatty intended that his Lion would fire on the Seydlitz, the Tiger on the Moltke, the Princess Royal on the Derfflinger, and the New Zealand on the Blücher, the Indomitable not yet being within range. But in part because of the loose wording of the signal, and in part because the captain of the Tiger, Henry Pelly, believed that the whole squadron was now in action, he concluded that his ship and the Lion were to concentrate on the German leading ship, this being correct practice, leaving the three rearmost ships to engage their opposite numbers.
This interpretation led to the Moltke becoming free of enemy fire at a crucial time when hits were being made by both sides. Clear of ‘splashes’, unapprehensive of being struck, the Moltke made highly effective practice with her 11-inch guns on the Lion. Both the Derfflinger and the Seydlitz were also concentrating on the Lion in accordance with the age-old principle of going for the head of the line. Soon after 10 a.m. the Lion began to suffer grievously from accurate enemy shooting, and at 10.18 a.m. was struck simultaneously by two 12-inch shells from the Derfflinger. One of these drove in the (insufficiently thick) water-line armour plate, letting water into the feed tank of the port condenser. Unlike other hits, the damage was not at once evident: ‘The Lion here received a blow so violent that we thought we had been torpedoed [wrote Filson Young of his experience in the fore-top]. The ship seemed to stop, and the mast, to which the fore-top was secured, rocked and waved like a tree in a storm, and the ship seemed to be shaking herself to bits. We looked at one another and prepared to alight from our small cage into whatever part of the sea destiny might send us; but nothing happened, and the old Lion seemed to pick herself up and go on again.’
Below on the bridge, Beatty awaited news of the damage. ‘We had a shell in our submerged torpedo tube’, recalled Signal Boatswain Edwin Downing. ‘The next that happened was that the Engineer Commander appeared on the bridge and reported he would have to draw fires from the boilers as a shell had got into the condenser, letting salt water in. So we had to stop, with an 11-degree list.’(18)
Beatty’s Staff commander described vividly these minutes when three of the enemy battle-cruisers were concentrating on the Lion and all three had got the range: ‘From 10.30 to 10.50 the Lion received heavy damage… the whole ship seemed to lift and shake violently as the projectiles struck us. From these reports, of armour belt pierced on the waterline in several places, switchboard room flooded, port engine reducing speed and shortly to stop, ‘A’ turret magazine on fire, ship making water heavily along port side, all lights gone out, it was clear that we could not long continue in action, while it was more than possible that within a few minutes we should be projected heavenwards by the magazine exploding.
The Admiral gave the order to flood it and turned to me saying, ‘I wonder what we should do next?’ Not liking to suggest hauling out of the line, but feeling that we ought to do so, I replied, ‘Reduce speed and repair our damage, get the fires put out, and then resume our place in the line.’ The Captain was accordingly ordered to do this and we slowly dropped back, still wondering when the magazine was going to explode. It was a great relief to sec the enemy’s shells gradually falling further away, and then, finding us no longer in range, being all directed at the Tiger… ’(19)
In the short time since the opening of the duel, the Lion had been hit by no fewer than fifteen heavy shells, which says much for the German shooting and also for the resistance and strength of the British battle-cruisers, which were to be so severely dealt with by future historians. Hits numbers five and fourteen had done the worst damage. The heavy-shell hit below the water-line had put the dynamos out of action from 10.01 a.m. until 10.50 a.m., depriving the flagship of all light and electric power. Temporary light and power was regained at 11 o’clock, but it was this single hit which had knocked the Lion out of the battle. Earlier, a single 8.2-inch shell from the Blücher on the Lion’s ‘A’ turret had put the left-hand 13.5-inch gun out of action.
The Lion had fired in all 235 rounds of heavy shell, ‘A’ and ‘B’ turrets being in action from 8.52 a.m. until 10.50 a.m., ‘Q’ and ‘X’ turrets from 9.25 a.m. until the same cease fire time. Chatfield reported later in his ‘Remarks on the Action’ that a mistake was made in firing too slowly during earlier stages, one reason being an order of 3 September 1914 warning of extravagance and what Chatfield described as ‘a general impression that ammunition expenditure must not be excessive’.
It was the end of the chase, and the end of the battle for the Lion. ‘Close the enemy as rapidly as possible consistent with all guns bearing’, Beatty signalled as the Tiger, Princess Royal, and New Zealand tore past, leaving the slower Blücher to be dealt with by the trailing Indomitable.
In the German line, the first and last ships had been worst hit. The Blücher, down to 17 knots now and falling far behind, had been hit in her ammunition supply system. Her foremost turrets were set on fire, and her upper works and steering gear were also damaged. The Seydlitz was struck by a 13.5-inch shell from the Lion at 9.50 a.m. It penetrated the quarterdeck and the 9-inch armour protecting the barbette of the aftermost turret. Waiting charges in the working chamber were set on fire and the flames raced into the ammunition chamber. A few survivors struggled to open the door into the adjoining ammunition chamber for the superimposed turret farther forward, allowing the flames to spread. Flames from this second turret reached up high into the sky. Some 160 men, the entire gun crews of the two turrets, perished in the fire and explosion. The ‘great glowing mass of fire’ was seen, with mixed awe and satisfaction, from all the British ships, and seemed to spell the end of the German flagship. This grave injury certainly cut down the volume of enemy fire but did not affect the Seydlitz’s speed, nor Hipper’s ability to handle his squadron.
By 10.45 a.m. it appeared possible that the Germans would lose all their heavy ships. There were still 200 miles of clear sea with clear weather ahead for the five British battle-cruisers to deal with Hipper’s three surviving ships, the Blücher now clearly doomed. Then came the disabling blow on the Lion, followed by two highly questionable decisions by Beatty, which together would deprive him of the annihilating victory he had felt in his grasp. ‘I had made up my mind that we were going to get four, the lot,’ Beatty wrote soon after the battle, ‘and four we ought to have got. There is no blinking it, we had them beat.’(20)
As the mighty Lion lost way and assumed a list shortly before 11 a.m., a lookout reported a periscope on the starboard bow. ‘I personally observed the wash of a periscope 2 points on our starboard bow’, wrote Beatty in his dispatch. As Captain Creswell has commented, ‘Only a badly handled submarine would have allowed its periscope to be sighted before it was quite close to its target. And a well-handled one would never been seen at all.’(21) Periscopeitis, that nervous ailment which had dogged many commanders since the outbreak of war, had struck again. Beatty believed that Hipper had sprung his trap, that his ships had been lured onto a shoal of submarines, as he had so
often feared. He at once ordered all his battle-cruisers, ‘Turn together eight points to port.’
A 90-degree turn at this juncture served to open the range, and at the same time unknowingly foiled a German destroyer attack which Hipper had just ordered in desperation, and now cancelled. The German C.-in-C. was at once mystified and relieved on observing this manoeuvre by the enemy, and sped on south-east, thankful to have left only the Blücher to her fate.
The turn, which aroused hot controversy later, was strictly in conformity with Grand Fleet principles of turning away from a torpedo attack rather than heading towards the enemy. ‘If for instance, the enemy battlefleet were to turn away from an advancing Fleet,’ Jellicoe had stated, ‘I should assume that the intention was to lead us over mines or submarines, and should decline to be so drawn. I desire particularly to draw the attention of Their Lordships to this point, since it may be deemed a refusal of battle, and indeed, might possibly result in failure to bring the enemy to action as soon as is expected and hoped.’(22)
In making this sudden turn, Beatty was also taking into anxious consideration the possibility of minelaying by the German destroyers, and having evaded the threatened submarine attack, intended that Admiral Moore should haul round to starboard and re-engage the fleeing enemy, this time on their starboard bow. The fact that there was not a U -boat within sixty miles on that day, and that none of Hipper’s ships was equipped for minelaying does not affect the argument – adding only a note of irony – as to whether or not Beatty should have ordered the turn. He had been frequently warned by his C.-in-C. of the dire threat mines and torpedoes from U-boats posed to dreadnoughts. His own flagship was crippled and at best, if she could be towed home, would be under repair for some time. If mines or torpedoes claimed even one of his battle-cruisers, the Grand Fleet, with a heavy scouting force inferior to the enemy’s, would be severely handicapped, and further raids on the east coast could be carried out by Hipper with relative impunity. Beatty could not forget how a single mine sent to the bottom the relatively stronger Audacious, and how only three torpedoes were needed to despatch three armoured cruisers.
The Great War at Sea: 1914-1918 Page 18
