Castles of Steel (123 page)

Nothing better illustrates the difficulties facing Jellicoe at Jutland than the brevity of the first clash between the two battle fleets. Despite the skill with which Jellicoe and Beatty had enmeshed the High Seas Fleet,
Iron Duke
had fired only nine salvos when Scheer turned his ships around and vanished into the mist. Even so, Jellicoe remained hopeful. He retained the superior tactical position, and when the firing stopped, he and most men in the British fleet believed this to be only a temporary hiatus in the long-awaited day of reckoning. The High Seas Fleet remained out there somewhere, and the Grand Fleet was in position to prevent Scheer from returning to the Jade. Meanwhile, as ship after ship took stock, British admirals and captains realized that the Germans had not scored a single hit on any Grand Fleet battleship. The men in the fleet were cheerfully exuberant and, during the respite, those who were able came out to take a look. Prince Albert, whose A turret in
Collingwood
had been hammering away at
Derfflinger,
emerged to sit on the turret top and escape the cordite fumes inside. Later, the king’s second son wrote to his brother, the Prince of Wales, that, during the fighting, “all sense of danger and everything else goes, except the one longing of dealing death in every possible way to the enemy.”

For twenty minutes after reversing course, Scheer retreated to the west, managing to lose Jellicoe in the mist and smoke. The turn had reversed the order of the German line:
Westfalen
now led the dreadnoughts, and
König
brought up the rear. Battle damage was severe, although not equally distributed. The battle cruisers, except for
Moltke,
were badly hurt. Behncke’s battleship squadron, which had led the fleet, had been hard hit:
König
had heavy damage;
Markgraf
’s port engine was stopped and she was having trouble keeping her place in line. The other two ships of Behncke’s elite division were fighting fires, plugging holes below the waterline, and shoring up bulkheads. But Scheer’s other dreadnoughts were relatively unharmed, and Mauve’s six old ships had not been touched. Scheer could count his superbly executed
Gefechtskehrtwendung
a brilliant success.

Then, suddenly, Scheer did something even more extraordinary. At 6:55 p.m., the same signal soared again up the halyards on
Friedrich der Grosse:
“Gefechtskehrtwendung nach Steuerbord!”
The German Commander-in-Chief was calling for another simultaneous 180-degree turn. Scheer was reversing course again; he was abandoning caution, staking everything on a single throw and deliberately hurling his fleet at the center of the British battle line whose immense firepower he had already felt. For this move, no one—not even Scheer himself—ever offered a rational explanation. Certainly, the admiral was acutely aware that his fleet was still in danger, that with every mile he steamed west into the North Sea, he was farther from home. He may also have believed that Jellicoe’s scouting cruisers must have seen his turn and that the whole Grand Fleet would be steering westward after him. But now, twenty minutes had passed and there was no British vessel in sight. The enemy was not following him, and Scheer wondered why. Perhaps the relative situation was better than he had thought. Perhaps he could capitalize on this. By returning to the battle he had just broken off, by attacking head-on with his entire fleet, he might surprise his enemy and throw him into confusion. And, if the Grand Fleet had moved far enough to the south, his own fleet might, in the coming darkness, be able to cross Jellicoe’s rear and make for Wilhelmshaven. Along the way, he might even be able to do something for
Wiesbaden;
rescue survivors, at least.

After the battle and after the war, Scheer was asked about his decision. His answers varied. Reporting to the kaiser, he wanted William to believe that before making his extraordinary turn back to the east and exposing the kaiser’s beloved fleet a second time to the crossing of its T by a superior and practically undamaged enemy battle fleet, he had carefully calculated every possibility: “If the enemy followed us,” he wrote, “our action in reversing course would be classed as a retreat and if any of our rear ships were damaged, we would have to sacrifice them. Still less was it feasible to disengage, leaving it to the enemy to decide when he would meet us next morning.”

It was as yet too early to assume night cruising order. The enemy could have compelled us to fight before dark, he could have prevented our exercising our initiative, and finally he could have cut off our return to the German Bight. There was only one way of avoiding this: to inflict a second blow on the enemy by advancing again regardless of cost, and to bring all the destroyers forcibly to attack. Such a maneuver would surprise the enemy, upset his plans for the rest of the day and, if the blow fell really heavily, make easier a night escape. It also offered the possibility of a last attempt to bring help to the hard-pressed
Wiesbaden,
or at least of rescuing her crew.

After the war, Scheer, speaking candidly to friends, admitted: “The fact is, I had no definite object. . . . I advanced because I thought I should help the poor
Wiesbaden
and because the situation was entirely obscure since I had received no wireless reports. When I noticed that the British pressure had ceased and that the fleet remained intact in my hands, I turned back under the impression that the action could not end this way and that I ought to seek contact with the enemy again. And then I thought I had better throw in the battle cruisers in full strength. . . . The thing just happened—as the virgin said when she got a baby.”

Some historians refuse to believe that the German Commander-in-Chief knowingly and deliberately thrust the High Seas Fleet straight into the jaws of the massive British battle line. And, if he did so, they find it incomprehensible that he placed his battle cruisers—his weakest heavy ships, with the thinnest armor, already battered and two almost sinking—in the van. Scheer himself later admitted that “if I’d done it in a peacetime exercise, I’d have lost my command.” Whatever his reasons—or perhaps there was no reasoning, only impetuosity, instinct, desperation—the German admiral turned his ships around and steamed back through the same water they had just passed through.Scheer’s move did not, as he had hoped it would, catch Jellicoe by surprise. Once again, it was Goodenough in
Southampton
who discovered the German fleet and sounded the alarm. The commodore had faithfully and expertly followed Scheer’s retreat and then, suddenly, out of the mists he saw the German dreadnoughts coming toward him. His own ship immediately came under fire, which did not prevent him from signaling Jellicoe that the High Seas Fleet was coming back. Grand Fleet officers and seamen standing on deck or sitting on turret tops tumbled back into their battle stations, and soon the giant, light gray ships—first Hipper’s battle cruisers, then Behncke’s battleships—appeared out of the mist. Without speculating as to his opponent’s motive, Jellicoe took the offered gift.

No naval assault during the Great War was as useless as this second attack of Reinhard Scheer’s. Weather and visibility were against him; as the day neared its end, his ships stood out sharply against the glowing western horizon, while to the east the Grand Fleet was shrouded in mist. Initially the resumption of British fire was sporadic, but it swiftly mounted in volume. Soon, the Grand Fleet’s broadsides merged into a solid, unbroken wave of endless thunder.
Hercules
fired on
Seydlitz; Colossus
and
Revenge
on
Derfflinger; Neptune
and
St. Vincent
on
Derfflinger
and
Moltke. Marlborough,
ignoring her torpedo injury, fired fourteen salvos in six minutes and saw four of them hit.
Monarch, Iron Duke, Centurion, Royal Oak, King George V, Téméraire, Superb, Neptune
—all reported scoring hits. By 7:14 p.m., fire from the whole of the British line was sweeping the length of the German line at ranges from 10,000 to 14,000 yards. At 7:15, Beatty’s battle cruisers joined in. As always, the German battle cruisers suffered most, but the cannonade also further devastated the ships in the German van.
König,
with Rear Admiral Behncke wounded on the bridge, was hit repeatedly.
Grosser Kurfürst,
next astern, was hammered seven times in two minutes by 15-inch and 13.5-inch shells from
Barham, Valiant,
and
Marlborough. Markgraf, Kaiser,
and
Helgoland
were hit. Under this torrent of heavy shells, the German column wavered; ships “bunched together”; the battleships, surrounded by towering waterspouts, found themselves overtaking and overrunning the battle cruisers. Captains ordered helmsmen to turn out of line and engine rooms to slow down, stop, and back astern. Scheer’s fleet was disintegrating.

Meanwhile, the German reply to this deluge of British fire was ineffective. German gunners saw nothing but smoke and mist and, in the words of the naval historian John Irving, “an almost continuous flickering orange light right round the horizon ahead, from port to starboard.” The nearly invisible British dreadnoughts could be located only by these gun flashes; German spotters desperately attempted to take ranges and fire back at the orange flashes, but they had no means of seeing the fall of shot. Only two heavy German shells hit the British battle line, both striking
Colossus.
These two 12-inch shells landed on the forward superstructure, one of them failing to explode, neither doing significant damage or inflicting casualties. A third heavy shell—an observer saw that it was bright yellow—fell short, bursting when it hit the water thirty yards from the forward turret. “Splinters penetrated . . . unarmoured parts of the ship in about 20 places,” her captain reported after the battle. Two men were wounded in the foretop and three at a 4-inch-gun post. The most serious harm was done to a seaman manning a range finder on the foretop; his right arm was practically severed by a steel splinter. His life was saved by a marine captain who stopped the bleeding with a tourniquet; the arm later was amputated at the shoulder. Remarkably, these five men wounded were the only gunfire casualties suffered by Grand Fleet dreadnoughts during the Battle of Jutland.

Ten minutes of this—unanswerable salvos fired by huge guns hidden in the eastern mist—was all that Scheer could stand. He had gambled and steered a second time into the greatest concentration of naval gunfire any fleet commander had ever faced. He had lost. The attack had failed and he understood that if he persisted, his fleet would be destroyed. Now there was only one thing to do: quickly extricate as many ships as possible. The most valuable ships, the dreadnought battleships, the core of German sea power, the kaiser’s glories, the cause of the naval building race with England—these must be saved, whatever the cost. To cover their retreat, the battle cruisers, already badly damaged, could, if necessary, be sacrificed. The destroyers massed on his port bow could be flung in to attack with torpedoes and lay smoke. But if it was to be done, it must be done now.

Again, Scheer acted instinctively, giving three commands intended to save his battleships. The first, hoisted on
Friedrich der Grosse
at 7:12 p.m., and left flying from the halyard for six minutes, signaled the battleships to prepare for a third emergency turnaround; this command was to be executed the moment the flags were hauled down. At 7:13 a second dramatic flag sig-nal rose up the halyard:
“Schlachtkreuzer ran an den Feind, voll einsetzen,”
meaning “Battle cruisers, at the enemy. Give it everything!” At 7:21 p.m., the third of Scheer’s orders was hoisted: a mass destroyer attack on the Grand Fleet was to cover the withdrawal of the German battleships.

The charge of the German battle cruisers has come to be called a “death ride.” Although
Lützow
was out of action and the other four German battle cruisers were heavily damaged,
Derfflinger
’s Captain Hartog led the squadron at 20 knots toward the British line. Two of the ships were scarcely more than battered hulls, filled with thousands of tons of salt water, the sea rolling over their bows up to the forward turrets, more than half their guns destroyed or out of action, their compartments filled with dead and dying men. Yet they drove forward.

“We were steaming into this inferno,” said
Derfflinger
’s Hase;

the range fell from 12,000 to 8,000. . . . Salvo after salvo fell around us, hit after hit struck our ship. . . . A 15 inch shell pierced the armor of “Caesar” turret and exploded inside. The turret commander had both legs torn off and most of the gun crew was killed. The flames passed to the working chamber and then to the handling room and seventy-three of the seventy-eight men in the turret died. . . . Another 15-inch shell pierced the roof of “Dora” turret. The same horrors followed. With the exception of one man who was thrown by the concussion through the turret entrance, the whole turret crew of eighty men was killed instantly. From both after turrets, great flames were spurting, mingled with clouds of yellow smoke. . . . Then, a terrific roar, a tremendous explosion, then darkness. . . . The whole conning tower seemed to be hurled in the air. . . . Poisonous, greenish yellow gasses poured through the aperture into our control. I called out “Don gas masks” and every man put his gas mask over his face. . . . We could scarcely see anything of the enemy who were disposed in a great semi-circle around us. All we could see was the great reddish-gold flames spurting from their guns.

Derfflinger
was hit fourteen times during the “death ride.”
Seydlitz,
her bow already partially submerged, was hit five more times, bringing her total for the day to seventeen.
Von der Tann,
still keeping up although she could not fight, was struck again. Even
Lützow,
already hit nineteen times and now without Hipper, was seen struggling to get away. Five heavy shells in quick succession from
Monarch
and
Orion
battered the hulk again. Again, only
Moltke
escaped serious damage. The carnage ended at 7:17 p.m., when
Derfflinger
made out a new signal from
Friedrich der Grosse,
“Operate against the enemy’s van.” In effect, Scheer was saying that the battle cruisers had achieved their purpose and could be permitted to sheer off to starboard and draw away. Thus ended the “death ride” of the German battle cruisers, the bravest and, as it turned out, the last surface attack by dreadnoughts of the Imperial German Navy.