To Arms

by Hew Strachan

  However, the principal British problem was self-inflicted. At 9.35 a.m. Lion signalled, ‘Engage the corresponding ship in the enemy’s line’. With Indomitable not yet in the battle, the two battle cruiser squadrons were equal in number. But HMS Tiger, immediately behind Lion, assumed that there were five British ships to the German four, and that therefore both Lion and Tiger should engage the leading German ship, SMS Seydlitz. Thus Moltke, the second ship in the German line, was able to fire without impediment, and joined Seydlitz in concentrating her attentions on Lion.104 At 9.50 a shell from the Lion penetrated the deck of the Seydlitz and set alight the charges in one of the after gun-turrets. The fire spread into the adjacent turret and downwards into the magazines, thus threatening the whole ship; she was saved by the prompt flooding of the magazines, and although her after guns were now silenced, her steering gear was only temporarily disrupted and her speed and stability continued unimpaired. Two minutes later Beatty reduced speed to 24 knots to allow his squadron to close up. Tiger now shifted her fire to Blücher, the last ship in the German line; the first three, Seydlitz, Moltke, and Derfflinger, concentrated their attentions on Lion. Beatty’s flagship was struck by two shells from the Derffinger at 10.18; by 10.50 the Lion had taken fifteen hits, had lost electric power, was listing 10 degrees, and was reduced to a speed of 15 knots.

  Throughout this period Beatty’s signals created confusion; the wind pulled his flags dead astern and were hard to read—particularly given the smoke—by vessels also dead astern. At 10.54 Beatty himself was sure he saw the wash of a periscope on his starboard bow; the correct Grand Fleet procedure for dealing with torpedoes was to turn away; without giving any explanation as to the reason Beatty ordered the entire squadron—not just the Lion—to turn eight points to port. The other ships, already perplexed, could not understand their commander’s apparent wish to break off the action. Hipper, equally bemused, called off an attack by his torpedo boats which he had just ordered. Beatty attempted to recover the situation by bringing his three effective battle cruisers, Tiger, Princess Royal, and New Zealand, back into the battle between the Blücher and Hipper’s main force. He signalled ‘Course North-East, and then added ‘Attack the rear of the enemy’. The expression of Beatty’s wishes was limited by the choice available in the signal book; there was no order to attack the enemy main body, which was the intention Beatty wished to convey. The two signals were read together to mean ‘attack the rear of the enemy, bearing north east’. Blücher, brought out as a replacement for the damaged Von der Tann, was the only enemy ship to the north-east. Her armour was thinner than that of the fully fledged German battle cruisers, and she had a central ammunition supply placed amidships; these vulnerabilities meant that a salvo down near her water-line disrupted the shell supply to her guns, and her speed— which, though marginally lower, had at first enabled her to keep pace with the group—was steadily clipped by the ensuing fire. By the time of Beatty’s order Blücher had already swung out of the German line and most of her main armament had been rendered useless. In any case her 8.2-inch guns were no match for those of the British. In an absurdly one-sided contest the battle cruisers circled the stricken vessel, pouring in fire, until she went down. Hipper’s remaining ships were free to pull away.

  The Dogger Bank was the first battle between Dreadnoughts; it was the second frustration for Beatty’s battle cruisers in just over a month. Naturally the Royal Navy’s attention focused on the errors which had repeated themselves. The division between intelligence and operations persisted: Room 40 knew that there were no U-boats within the area, but Beatty did not. Subordinate commanders had again failed to exercise their initiative: Admiral Archibald Moore, to whom the command of the battle cruisers fell when Lion was disabled, was shunted off to the Canary Islands, and Captain Henry Pelly of the Tiger was blamed for not taking up the attack when Lion left off. But the real problem of tactical control was that British naval command was having it both ways. The advent of wireless allowed tight and centralized direction, the Admiralty at Whitehall being able to determine the operations of individual ships at sea, and so frustrated the exercise of independence. But signals between ships in contact with the enemy were made by flag, and with this Nelsonic means of communication came a false expectation of Nelsonic styles of command. ‘Engage the enemy more closely’ was restored to the signal book, but there was no overall revision of the book and too little effort to dent its underlying assumptions. As Beatty’s signals officer wrote to his mother: ‘Signals went through like clockwork. . . when I say they went like clockwork I mean until the clock stopped.’ Without electricity and reduced to two pairs of halliards, Lion had been unable to communicate, so as to break the logjam of excessive dependence. Beatty was anxious that the battle cruisers at any rate should realize that doctrine was more robust than reliance on the mechanisms for the transmission of orders: ‘The Admiral’, he instructed in the immediate aftermath of the battle, ‘will rely on Captains to use all the information at their disposal to grasp the situation quickly and anticipate his wishes.’105

  The fact that the prospect of a major victory had been denied by the problems of command and communication meant that insufficient attention was paid to gunnery. After all, in one sense a torpedo that was not there had proved more decisive than all the big guns that were. This was the first true test of Fisher’s theories about long-range gunnery and speed. The battle had been fought at distances of between 16,000 and 20,000 yards; apparently the virtues of the British heavy gun had been proven, Lion scoring a hit with one of its opening rounds at 20,000 yards, Blücher having been sunk, and Seydlitz being badly damaged. The rate of range change had been sufficiently low not to expose the deficiencies of the Dreyer tables. But of 1,150 heavy shells fired by Beatty’s cruisers, only six (excluding a further seventy poured into the hapless Blücher) had found their targets, and only one out of 355 fired by Tiger. Tigers deficiencies were attributed to her scratch crew, and for the rest the speeding up of the installation of directors and the increase in range of practice firing to 16,000 yards were deemed sufficient. The inadequacy of the armour-piercing shells, particularly against the German side-armour, was neither recognized nor corrected.

  In this, there was bitter irony. Beatty reported after the action that ‘German shell, for incendiary effect and damage to personnel are far inferior to ours’.106 He was right, in so far as the German 12-inch shells too lacked penetrative power, and included a good proportion that failed to explode on impact. But the concentration on this German deficiency relieved the British of the need to attend to their own corresponding vulnerability. The consequences of Fisher’s neglect of armour had been exposed by the gunnery of Derffinger. In particular, the Lion’s experience had shown the need to limit access to the guns’ magazines and so prevent flash passing from the turrets. But, although the structural problems were attended to on the Lion, they were not dealt with on her sister ships.

  Moreover, rapidity of fire now became more important than accuracy. Even before the war, in 1913, Sir George Callaghan had demanded more ammunition for the Home Fleet, anticipating that, if rapid fire was to be opened at long ranges, it must be done without fear of compromising shell stocks. In 1915 Jellicoe pointed out that a quick-firing ship was itself a hard target to hit. Partly as a result of the limited opportunities at Rosyth, the battle cruisers spent more time practising their rate of loading than in live firing. Ready-use cartridges were kept in the gun turrets and stowed close to the magazine doors. Neglect of safety procedures compounded the lack of armour in highlighting the vulnerability of the British battle cruiser when confronted by her own kind.107

  For their part, the Germans were totally taken aback both by the range at which the battle had been fought and by the number and weight of shells fired. A major reason why they did not venture out for over a year after Dogger Bank were the implications for ship construction consequent upon the battle. The loss of the Blücher persuaded them that quality was all, and that pre-Dread
noughts—’five-minute ships’, in reference to their anticipated survival time—had no place on the open seas. The Germans increased the elevation of their major armament, revised their fire-control arrangements, and expedited the introduction of heavier guns. More crucially, the damage to Seydlitz showed the importance of protection against the plunging fire of long-range gunnery. Deck, turret, and magazine armour were all thickened. Anti-flash precautions included the removal of ventilation ducts from the magazines, and the adoption of topside vents to channel flames upwards rather than downwards. The amount of ‘ready-use’ ammunition in each gun turret was limited.

  For British observers, what is striking is the systematic way in which the Germans analysed the tactical and constructional implications of the battle for the whole fleet. No comparable programme followed in Britain; the improvements to the Lion were not universally applied. This failure of operational analysis has rightly been used in criticism of the Royal Navy and of Fisher’s Luddite opposition to the development of a proper naval staff.108 But strategically the battle of Dogger Bank was a major setback for Germany.

  Hipper had lost an armoured cruiser that arguably should never have been taken out; that was the sole margin of British victory. Moreover, his guns, excluding Blücher, had scored twenty-two hits out of 976 rounds. If, as Hipper subsequently advised, U-boats had been in position, the Lion at least might have gone down. And yet the essence of the action on 24 January, as it had been on 16 December, was Germany’s flight, the escape of Hipper’s scouting groups. Rather than seek action the Germans were shunning it. The effect of such a policy was to consolidate British sea-power, not threaten it.

  German defensiveness suited Fisher admirably. The day after the battle he wrote to Churchill: ‘Being already in possession of all that a powerful fleet can give a country, we should continue quietly to enjoy the advantage.’109 In December 1914 he secured approval for a new design of oil-fired battle cruisers, with a speed of 32 knots and six 15-inch guns. Already by 1 May 1915, with his three battle cruisers returned from the Atlantic, Jellicoe could count on thirty-two Dreadnoughts to the Germans’ twenty-one. But, as one member of the cabinet, Charles Hobhouse, noted on 27 November 1914, ‘One thing is certain and that is that “command of the sea” can no longer be assured by number, speed or size of your battle fleet’.110 Fisher’s determination not to deploy Dreadnoughts in the North Sea, and the renewed fear of invasion that was its consequence, revitalized his ideas on flotilla defence. More important in the long run in his 1915 programme than its five battle cruisers and two light cruisers were its fifty-six destroyers and sixty-five submarines; perhaps more revealing in the short term were its 260 landing craft. Fisher was set on a lengthy war, and a long-term programme to accompany it: in October 1914 he spoke of an armada of 600 smaller vessels.111

  German construction, by comparison, fell into disarray. The army’s need for manpower challenged the building programme. What labour there was had to divide its energies over new building and refits and repairs; the tactical lessons of Dogger Bank had to be incorporated into this schedule. The Imperial Naval Office continued in its old ways, although now at least aiming for parity with Britain: in January 1915 its target was a doubling of the naval budget to produce a fleet of eighty-one capital ships by 1934.112 But Tirpitz’s own strategic confusion, as well as his loss of influence, meant also a lack of continuity as to priorities. Battle cruisers capable of independent action, of great speed and heavy armament, and similar in conception to Fisher’s found advocates in the Kaiser and Hipper; U-boats were supported by Pohl. The opportunity for a decisive fleet action had presented itself in the winter of 1914–15. The Germans, for all their talk, had failed to take it; by the following winter the chances of a battle which would create a sufficient dent in British capital ship numbers to represent a real challenge to the Entente’s naval mastery were virtually nil. Although in a tactical sense it was possible for the Royal Navy to lose a battle in 1916, it had become strategically impossible for Germany to win one.

  The battle of the Dogger Bank was therefore more decisive than was apparent to Jellicoe or Beatty. It gave full rein to the already fissiparous tendencies in the German navy. Tirpitz’s plot to oust Ingenohl now received fresh momentum from within the fleet itself. The battle cruiser captains of Hipper’s scouting groups (who increasingly saw themselves as yet another naval staff) felt that the commander of the High Seas Fleet had twice let them down, and they wanted Reinhard Scheer, commanding the 2nd battle squadron, to have the job. On 2 February 1915, when Ingenohl struck his flag, he was replaced by Pohl. ‘A more unlikely choice could not have been made’, was Hipper’s reaction.113 Tirpitz appeared to have got his way, but his success was illusory. Not he, but Admiral Gustav Bachmann was the new chief of the Admiralty Staff. Tirpitz could console himself with the thought that he got on well with Bachmann, but Bachmann was not a strong man and from the outset Pohl asserted the High Seas Fleet’s independence of the Admiralty Staff. Pohl himself had become increasingly critical of Tirpitz.114 Neither Bachmann nor Pohl, Müller concluded, ‘was entirely welcome . . . At the time there were no better alternatives’.115

  With Ingenohl’s departure the advocates of an offensive use of the fleet in the North Sea were reduced to relative silence. Tirpitz, of course, continued to advocate action, but still within reasonable range of Germany’s bases; Pohl himself argued that eventually the British would appear once again off the Bight; and Hipper, who by now was the most battle-hardened admiral in the navy, was opposed to a fight in British waters.

  Those who chafed at the inactivity which this implied looked to the Baltic. Admiral Wilhelm von Lens, commanding the 1st battle squadron, wanted the High Seas Fleet concentrated against Russia. The navy could cut the Entente’s links with its ally, secure Germany’s trade with Scandinavia, and check any British amphibious landings on the north German coast.116 Pohl was prepared to go along with this, at least in so far as planning amphibious operations against Memel were concerned. Tirpitz and Bachmann were opposed: the perversity of a battle in the Baltic was that here Germany reigned supreme, as Britain did in the North Sea; there was no need to fight; the maintenance of an intact fleet was the most effective, as well as the least costly, way of proceeding. Lens, in any case, had been bypassed for the fleet command, allegedly through ill-health, and in due course lost the 1st battle squadron as well.

  A more offensive, if somewhat ambitious, slant to his thinking was developed by one of his staff in the 1st battle squadron, Wolfgang Wegener. Wegener had served on the Admiralty Staff between 1908 and 1912, and had imbibed the thinking of Baudissin, Fischel, and Holtzendorff. He was the author of a memorandum designed to promote the Baltic option for 1915, and countersigned by Lens on 1 February. But by June and July Wegener’s pursuit of the offensive had swung his focus back to the west. He argued that Tirpitz’s pre-war construction policy had been founded on a sense of implied German naval inferiority, that the object had been to match Britain, not to be superior to her; thus, although the fleet’s units looked the part of a major sea-power, in reality the fleet’s philosophy was still wedded to coastal defence. The military and continental traditions of Bismarckian Germany had only endorsed this defensiveness. But with Britain as Germany’s major opponent a continental strategy had proved insufficient; indeed, it had markedly failed to meet Germany’s needs as a world power and as a sea-power because, by virtue of the defeat on the Marne, it had not secured for the fleet the Atlantic bases of Brest or Cherbourg. And access to the Atlantic and to the world’s sea routes, not battle per se, was for Wegener the essence of the offensive application of sea-power. Nothing could be achieved in the North Sea while Britain’s geographical position enabled the Royal Navy to control its exits. Geography, not numbers of ships, was the nub of naval strategy. The task of the navy, therefore, given the fact that the French and British armies barred the way to the Atlantic ports in the south, was to open the route through Skagerrak, ‘the gate to the Atlantic’. But
the Danes’ mining of the Belts, encouraged by Germany in order to secure the defences of the Baltic, had closed off its most obvious offensive exit into the North Sea. The neutralization of the Belts freed the Royal Navy from itself guarding Skagerrak, while further confining Germany.117

  Wegener’s ideas embraced the fundamental challenge to German naval strategy: as the power without maritime supremacy it had to attack the power in possession. They circulated through the fleet in 1915. But they suffered from three major limitations: they were bitterly opposed by Tirpitz, their implications for Danish neutrality were horrific for a foreign ministry searching for allies and for an army already heavily committed on two fronts, and— most immediate of all—Wegener remained vague on their operational application.