The First World War

by Hew Strachan

  Not that the British got it right all the time, as the missed opportunity of 16 December 1914 showed. British naval intelligence’s ongoing achievements were negative. It prevented the German navy from appreciating that its codes were compromised, although the captain of the Königsberg in East Africa in 1915 did realise as much, and its ability to give the fleet warning of a German sally enabled the British east coast to be defended despite the Royal Navy’s abandonment of the North Sea. What the Royal Navy found much more difficult was the integration of intelligence with operations, and doing so without compromising long-term security. Commanders at sea were told no more than the naval intelligence directorate felt they needed to know. In particular, they were refused permission to decode intercepts at sea. The evidence of their own eyes might be at odds with the incomplete and progressively obsolescent information fed them from the Admiralty. Intelligence created opportunities for the budding Nelsons of the Great War but then curbed their initiative.

  On 23 January 1915 Room 40 warned Beatty and his battle cruisers that Hipper’s Scouting Squadron was once again putting to sea. But the Admiralty assumed that the Germans planned to raid the east coast as before, and therefore put the weight on the defence of the British mainland and not on cutting Hipper off from his base. In fact, Hipper was instructed to reconnoitre the Dogger Bank, with a view to attacking fishing boats and to laying mines off the Firth of Forth. Consequently the battle which ensued took the form of a pursuit rather than an envelopment. At 7.05 a.m. one of Beatty’s destroyers reported contact with the enemy. At 8.34 Beatty ordered his battle cruisers to raise their speed to 27 knots, four knots faster than the maximum speed Hipper could maintain. Twenty-six minutes later his flagship, HMS Lion, opened fire at a range in excess of 20,000 yards. The wind was north-easterly, with the result, according to her captain, that ‘the smoke of the enemy coming almost straight towards us, combined with the gloom, made spotting very difficult. Flashes of the enemy’s guns were extraordinarily vivid, so that it could not be seen whether we were hitting the enemy or not.’4 They were: the leading German ship, Seydlitz, caught fire. However, she was saved by the deliberate flooding of her magazines. Ultimately, of four German ships, only the weakest and oldest, the Blücher, a so-called ‘five-minute’ ship in reference to her likely survival time in battle, was sunk. The restrictions of flag signals created ambiguity in Beatty’s orders. Greater use of wireless would not only have ensured the more effective distribution of his ships’ firepower, but also have prevented him breaking off the action prematurely. At 10.54, Beatty persuaded himself that he saw the wash of a periscope. Fearing that Hipper might be luring his battle cruisers over a submarine screen, he turned away rather than risk being torpedoed. There were no submarines in the vicinity, a fact known to Room 40 but not relayed to Beatty.

  Beatty blamed his disappointment on the problems of communication. But by focusing attention here he prevented a more thorough discussion of the design problems of the battle cruiser itself. The First Sea Lord, Jackie Fisher, is most often remembered as the mastermind behind the Dreadnought, the all-big-gun battleship, adopted in 1905. However, Fisher’s favourite project was not the battleship but the battle cruiser. He recognised as clearly as did the Germans that Dreadnoughts were vulnerable to torpedoes, launched from destroyers or more particularly submarines, weapons which might prove especially effective in confined waters like those between Britain and mainland Europe. His belief that lighter - and cheaper - vessels might be sufficient to protect Britain from invasion did not mean that he saw the capital ship as redundant. Its role, like Britain‘s, was global, and its task to dominate the world’s oceans. The Dreadnought was an evolutionary design, a staging post to the battle cruiser, a vessel which would have the speed of the cruiser but the punch of the battleship. The first Dreadnought mounted 12-inch guns and could maintain a speed of 21 knots; in December 1914 Fisher secured approval for battle cruisers with 15-inch guns and a speed of 30 knots. The victory at the Falklands seemed to vindicate Fisher’s designs. But in the pursuit of speed he had shed armour, particularly on the deck, which was rendered vulnerable to the plunging fire that long-range gunnery encouraged. The ship’s survivability depended on her speed and on the range at which she fought, but the pursuit of both these attributes militated in turn against effective gunnery. Gunnery was the most venerated specialisation of the Royal Navy, but it was not very good at it. At the Falklands Invincible and Inflexible achieved one hit per gun every seventy-five minutes, and took five hours and 1,174 shells to sink two inferior vessels. At the Dogger Bank, when confronted with more equal opposition (if the Blücher is discounted) only six heavy shells out of 1,150 had found their targets.5 The response was to stress the rate of fire over its accuracy, and therefore cordite charges, ready for use, were stored in the gun turrets themselves, and doors to magazines were left open. The safety of a ship was deemed to rest more on quick firing than on her formal protection.

  The loss of the Blucher convinced the Germans that quality was essential to survival in battle at sea After Dogger Bank, they would not put to sea for over a year, an interval they used to improve their armament and fire control arrangements

  The Germans concluded from the battle of Dogger Bank that relative technological advantage was more important than numbers. They did not come out again for over a year, but when they did - on 31 May 1916 - they deployed ships whose key characteristic was survivability. Armour was thickened, anti-flash precautions improved, and the quantity of ammunition ready for use in each gun turret was restricted. But in another sense the gap between the German navy and the Royal Navy only widened. The numerical difference in capital ships, having closed in the winter of 1914-15, increased again. The Grand Fleet contained thirty-seven capital ships to the High Seas Fleet’s twenty-seven, and its guns mounted a broadside that was twice as great. The German army’s needs for men and material eroded the navy’s ability to command resources, and the debate about the best use of the latter became even more heated. Those committed to the offensive were encouraged by the army’s success in the east to call for operations in the Baltic against the Russians, and others said that the submarine, not the capital ship, should be the principal weapon against the British.

  Reinhard Scheer, who succeeded to the command of the High Seas Fleet in February 1916, was a decisive, even impetuous, man, in stark contrast to his predecessors. He won the Kaiser over to a more aggressive use of the fleet, its guiding principle being that, as before, Hipper’s Scouting Squadron should lure Beatty’s battle cruisers out to sea. This time, however, both submarines and the battleships of the High Seas Fleet would be waiting. The Germans were the last of the major powers to develop submarines and in 1914 had only twenty-eight, compared with fifty-five in the Royal Navy and seventy-seven in the French navy. But their late entry to underwater warfare meant that they profited from the trials and errors of the pioneers, and they were therefore building better vessels at a faster rate. In September 1914 German U-boats sank four British cruisers, including three in a single action. The shock effect was considerable, but the long-term lesson misleading. If warships exercised basic precautions, above all those of steering a zig-zag course and of maintaining a reasonable speed, they were safe. The submarine had to submerge to attack but in doing so she restricted her speed to about 10 knots, half that of a warship. She therefore could not act in conjunction with surface warships unless she was already in position. Moreover, she had to reckon on engaging an enemy warship head on, and therefore from the angle at which the latter presented the smallest target. By the end of the war not a single Dreadnought had been sunk by a submarine. But Scheer did not know that in 1916, of course, and nor did his counterpart, Sir John Jellicoe, commanding the Grand Fleet. The latter was a worrier, a centraliser and a hypochondriac, only too well aware of the awesome responsibility he carried as the protector of British maritime supremacy. For him, the German U-boat was a potent threat: ‘It is quite within the bounds of possibility’, he
told the Admiralty on 30 October 1914, ‘that half our battle-fleet might be disabled by under-water attack before the guns opened fire at all, if a false move is made’.6

  To avoid that danger Jellicoe proposed to refuse action in waters of the Germans’ own choosing, however ‘repugnant to the feelings of all British Naval Officers and men’. On 17 May 1916 Scheer ordered nineteen U-boats to positions off the Firth of Forth. He planned to raid Sunderland, hoping that the Battle Cruiser Fleet would put to sea from Rosyth and using airships to warn him if the Grand Fleet left Scapa Flow. But bad weather prevented the airships from taking any part in the action, and he therefore concluded it would be too risky to approach the British coast. Instead, he ordered a sortie to the north, to the Skagerrak, the waters between Norway and northern Denmark, off the Jutland peninsula. Here his line of retreat would be more secure, but now the principal submarine danger, in contradistinction to Jellicoe’s fears, would be mines, not U-boats.

  Room 40 gave Jellicoe warning of Scheer’s intentions from 28 May, and late on the night of 30 May, over two hours before the Germans left their base in the Jade, the Grand Fleet and the Battle Cruiser Fleet both got up steam with a view to reaching positions off the Skagerrak. But on the following morning, at 11.10 Greenwich Mean Time, misreading of the German call-signs, and poor liaison between Room 40 and the operations division of the Admiralty, placed Scheer, and therefore the High Seas Fleet itself, still in Wilhelmshaven. The result was that the Grand Fleet advanced slowly, so conserving fuel but losing daylight. At 2.20 Beatty signalled that Hipper’s Scouting Squadron was in sight. He manoeuvred on a south-south-easterly course in order to cut the Germans off from their base, while Hipper also turned south, aiming to draw Beatty on to the approaching guns of the High Seas Fleet. In this ‘run to the south’, German gunnery proved more accurate than British. Beatty’s principal armament was the 15-inch guns of the latest Dreadnoughts of the 5th Battle Squadron, which had been detached from the Grand Fleet to support the Battle Cruiser Fleet in February. However, the yeoman on the battleship Barham could not read the flags signalling Beatty’s decision to turn south-south-east, and initially the 5th Battle Squadron drew away from the Battle Cruiser Fleet, assuming that the intention was to sail north-west to rendezvous with the Grand Fleet. The battleships were marginally slower than the battle cruisers, and fell behind. At about 4.00 they still had not opened fire, when a midshipman on one of them, Malaya, suddenly said to Sub-Lieutenant Caslon, “‘Look at that!”’ Caslon ‘thought for an instant that the last ship in the line had fired all her guns at once, as there was a much bigger flame, but the flame grew and grew till it was about three hundred feet high, and the whole ship was hidden in a dense cloud of yellow brown smoke. This cloud hung in the air for some minutes, and when it finally dispersed there was no sign of the ship.’7

  The battle cruiser Indefatigable had blown up within thirty seconds of being hit. All but two of her complement of 1,019 were killed. Lion, Beatty’s flagship, had dropped out of the line: she had already received a direct hit on one of her turrets, which set the cordite charges ablaze, and the ship herself had been saved only by the timely closing of the magazine doors. Now two German battle cruisers, Seydlitz and Derfflinger, were able to concentrate their fire on a third British battle cruiser Queen Mary. Following a hit on her centre turret, the explosives throughout the ship were detonated, and she sank in two minutes. ‘There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today’, Beatty famously remarked.

  Jutland the last moments of the British battle cruiser Indefatigable A German shell penetrated a gun turret. and the flash passed down the hoist to the magazine British gun crews, determined to maintain high rates of fire, stored ammunition ready to use in the turrets

  It was 4.24. Six minutes later light cruisers began reporting that they could see the High Seas Fleet. At 4.40, when within 20,000 yards of the German battleships, Beatty ordered the Battle Cruiser Fleet to turn about. His task was no longer to defeat Hipper but to draw the High Seas Fleet northwards, towards the Grand Fleet. The 5th Battle Squadron now brought up the rear, and for over half an hour bore the brunt of the German battleships’ attack. Its tactics were, according to Georg von Hase, the gunnery officer on Derfflinger, to keep ‘as much as possible out of our range, but ... within reach of their own long-range guns’. Declining visibility also militated against accuracy, but ‘when a heavy shell hit the armour of our ship, the terrific crash of the explosion was followed by a vibration of the whole ship, affecting even the conning tower’.8 Aboard his flagship, Friedrich der Grosse, Scheer could see even less. He had begun to consider breaking off the pursuit for fear of a night action, in which his battleships would be vulnerable to British light forces, when at 6.26 (7.26 German time) he received a signal that captured survivors from an enemy destroyer reported that there were over sixty large enemy warships in the area, and that twenty of them were new battleships. Minutes later the horizon over a six-mile arc erupted in a line of gun flashes.

  Beatty’s reporting to Jellicoe had been inadequate and misleading. As their two forces converged on but could not see each other, the commander-in-chief had to decide when to deploy the Grand Fleet into line, so that it could ‘cross the T’. This manoeuvre would set the British battleships at right angles to the High Seas Fleet, still in line ahead, and enable them to bring all their guns to bear. If he mistimed it, Scheer would be able to cross the T of the Grand Fleet. Jellicoe’s responsibilities at sea were very different from those of a commander on land. Here there was no arbitrary division between tactics and strategy: Jellicoe could see as much or as little of the battle as any other participant, and yet knew only too well that one moment of tactical miscalculation might result in the loss of British maritime supremacy for the remainder of the war.

  One of the signals intercepted and decrypted by Room 40 in the course of the night of 31 May-1 June 1916, but not passed on to Jellicoe at sea. The order to open the barrier suggested the German fleet was breaking off the action to return to harbour

  At 6.15 he began the deployment of the fleet to port, so putting the Germans to his south-west, and silhouetting them against the evening light. Each Dreadnought opened fire as she was free to do so, but because of the poor visibility could see only three or four enemy capital ships at a time. At 6.35 a third battle cruiser, Invincible, also struck in the turret, blew up and split in two. But the position of the High Seas Fleet was desperate: ranges were down to 12,000 yards, and the British could concentrate all their fire against portions of the German line. Scheer turned away to the south-west. But in so doing he was moving further from his base. Jellicoe could see less and less in the fading light, but he had the consolation of knowing that he lay between the Germans and their line of escape. This consideration was presumably what prompted Scheer to turn about and strike Jellicoe’s line once more. For twenty minutes, from 7.15, the whole of the Grand Fleet was engaged. Then again Scheer withdrew, and to cover his retreat ordered his destroyers to unleash their torpedoes. Fearful of further loss, Jellicoe turned the Grand Fleet away to port, and therefore to the east. In so doing he broke contact with the German fleet. His aim now was to avoid the dangers of night fighting, but to keep the High Seas Fleet to the west, so that it would have to seek a fleet action on the following day.

  At 11.30 Jellicoe received a signal from the Admiralty relaying an intercepted German signal, giving the course and speed of the High Seas Fleet two hours previously, at 9.14, when it was ordered home. But Jellicoe’s faith in the Operations Department of the Admiralty had been undermined: twice already that day, in the morning and again at 9.58 p.m., it had managed to place Scheer in the wrong place. Only three of the sixteen decrypts passed over by Room 40 between 9.55 p.m. on 31 May and 3.00 a.m. on 1 June were relayed to Jellicoe, and therefore he had no context into which to set the intelligence he did receive. But it was not only the Operations Division which was guilty of inadequate communication. Jellicoe knew that his greater speed would preve
nt Scheer cutting across his bow. Therefore the Germans’ most obvious escape route lay astern, via the Horns Reef. This was screened by destroyers. They duly found themselves in confused and sustained fighting throughout the night, but they failed to report to Jellicoe. By the morning Scheer was safely through.

  The High Seas Fleet claimed that the battle of the Skagerrak was a German victory. At first the British press tended to agree. At Scapa Flow the mood was despondent, a mixture of combat exhaustion and disappointed expectation. The battle of Jutland (as the British called it) engaged 100,000 men in 250 ships over 72 hours. It dwarfed Trafalgar in scale but not - it seemed - in outcome. The Royal Navy had lost fourteen ships, including three battle cruisers, and had sustained 6,784 casualties. The Germans had lost eleven ships, including one battleship and one battle cruiser, and had suffered 3,058 casualties. But ten of Scheer’s ships had suffered heavy damage, and only ten were ready for sea on 2 June. Jellicoe, with eight ships undergoing repairs, could have put twenty-four capital ships to sea. On 4 July 1916 Scheer renounced fleet action as an option. Jutland left the Royal Navy’s supremacy unimpaired and Britain’s strategy intact. ‘It is absolutely necessary’, Captain Herbert Richmond reminded himself, ‘to look at the war as a whole; to avoid keeping our eyes only on the German Fleet. What we have to do is to starve and cripple Germany.’9