Castles of Steel (124 page)

Scheer was able to reprieve his battle cruisers because, given a moment’s respite from the Grand Fleet’s overwhelming gun power, the German battleships were beginning their turn to the rear. For the third time that afternoon, the High Seas Fleet executed
“Gefechtskehrtwendung nach Steuerbord!”
This time, however, the emergency turn had none of the precision of a peacetime drill in the Baltic, none of the cool efficiency of the first course reversal forty minutes before. This time, captains turned their ships as well as they could, some to starboard, some to port, some finding their neighbors so close that collision seemed inevitable, then just missing. As they turned, the beleaguered ships fired an occasional defiant salvo from their after turrets; no shell came close to a British ship.

Nevertheless, Jellicoe soon faced another threat. The battle cruiser “death ride” had been a kamikaze charge without success, but the destroyer torpedo attack that followed helped to save the High Seas Fleet. When it came, the attack was delivered in less strength than Scheer would have wished. Only fourteen destroyers, carrying a total of fifty-eight torpedoes, were in position to obey his order, but they set out for the British line at 30 knots. They were met by a wall of fire from the 4-inch and 6-inch secondary batteries of the British battleships, by heavy shells from numerous dreadnought main battery turrets, and by the shells of British light cruisers and destroyers sent out by Jellicoe to blunt the attack. One German flotilla managed to come within 8,000 yards of the British battle line, where it launched eleven torpedoes before turning back and laying down smoke. The next flotilla, plunging into the same firestorm, launched more torpedoes, but one of its destroyers was sunk. A third wave attacked, but was out of range and fired only a single torpedo before retreating behind another smokescreen. In all, the fourteen German destroyers fired thirty-one torpedoes.

Even as the enemy destroyers were disappearing back into their own smoke, Jellicoe knew that their torpedoes were in the water. To escape this oncoming danger, the Commander-in-Chief ordered the standard Grand Fleet Battle Order response to approaching torpedoes: he turned his battleships away so that their sterns, rather than their broadsides, would be presented as targets. At 7:22 p.m., the battle fleet turned 2 points [22 degrees] away to port; then, to make sure, at 7:25, Jellicoe ordered the fleet to turn again another 2 points; in all, he now had turned a total of 44 degrees, onto a new course of southeast. Jellicoe’s turn away, putting hundreds of additional yards between the launch tubes and the intended targets, may have been responsible for ten torpedoes’ running out of fuel short of the Grand Fleet. Nevertheless, twenty-one torpedoes kept coming and reached the British line, forcing a number of battleships to maneuver independently to avoid them. It helped that the white torpedo tracks were visible in the water and that it was relatively easy for the men in the foretops to spot them and alert the bridges. The first torpedoes were sighted at 7:33 p.m., and separately the battleships began turning and twisting.
Marlborough,
already carrying a torpedo wound in her hull, saw and avoided another three torpedoes. She “altered course to starboard so that one track passed ahead, another passed so close astern that we should certainly have been hit if the stern had not been swinging under helm, while number three must have been running below depth because it went right under the ship.”
Revenge,
next behind
Marlborough,
swung hard to port to avoid two torpedoes; one passed ten yards before her bow and the other twenty yards from her stern.
Hercules
and
Agincourt,
the third and fourth ships behind
Marlborough,
saw torpedoes and escaped by putting their helms over to port and sheering out of line.
Agincourt
then watched one torpedo pass up her port side and the other up the starboard side. A torpedo ran between
Iron Duke
and
Thunderer,
while
Colossus
eluded another. A torpedo came very close to
Collingwood
’s stern; at least four passed through the line not far from
Barham. Neptune
was pursued from dead astern with what almost appeared to be a conscious malevolence. A torpedo “following exactly in our course, but going faster than our fastest speed . . . [kept] coming closer and closer. . . . We could do nothing but wait and wait, mouths open. . . . Nothing happened.” Afterward, the battleship’s Action Report conjectured that the “torpedo was either deflected by the wash from
Neptune
’s propellers or ran its range out. The latter is more likely.” Probably, other torpedoes went unnoticed before the danger passed. Twenty-one torpedoes had reached the British line, but none had found a victim. Meanwhile, the German battleships and battle cruisers and, now also, the destroyers had disappeared. And, for a while, the firing ceased.

Measured by his own hopes, Scheer’s three desperate offensive thrusts—with his battle fleet, his battle cruisers, and his destroyers—had failed: they had cost him the remaining fighting capability of his battle cruisers, additional punishment of his battleships, the expenditure of many torpedoes, and the loss—by sinking or damage—of five destroyers. But, although Scheer could not have known this, he had managed something critically important: he had forced Jellicoe to turn away at a moment when the German fleet was in a desperate position and a little more pressure might have produced a rout. And by the time Jellicoe returned to the pursuit, Scheer and the German battle line were out of sight and out of range, ten or eleven miles distant. The fact was that for seventeen critical minutes while the fate of the High Seas Fleet hung in the balance, Scheer had been given time to disengage his battle fleet—and thereby to avoid its annihilation.

Turning large ships away from an oncoming torpedo attack was a tactic then approved by the British, German, French, Italian, and American navies. To protect a fleet, or even a single ship, turning away from torpedoes rather than toward them offered substantial advantages. The greatest was relative speed. The torpedoes would be approaching at 30 knots, but the ships would be steaming away from them at 20; the relative speed of the approaching missiles, therefore, would be 10 knots. By the same arithmetic, turning toward approaching torpedoes could mean that the underwater missiles were approaching at 30 knots plus 20; thus, 50 knots. Anyone could see that dealing with an enemy approaching at 10 knots was preferable to dealing with one approaching at 50 simply because the slower relative speed gave the targeted ship a better opportunity to maneuver out of the way. In addition, turning away would put more distance between the attackers’ torpedo tubes and the intended victims, and this added distance might mean that some of the torpedoes would—as they did in this attack—run out of fuel before they reached their targets.

As a defensive measure against this German destroyer attack, Jellicoe’s turnaway at Jutland was a complete success: no torpedo hits were scored on British dreadnoughts. But the maneuver shocked some officers in the fleet and later became the most heavily criticized British decision of the entire battle. Beatty, who at the Dogger Bank had turned away because he believed he had seen a single periscope, was privately scornful, and three of Jellicoe’s squadron vice admirals had misgivings. The argument turns both on tactics and timing: at the moment Jellicoe turned away, the High Seas Fleet was beaten, in disarray, and in headlong flight. Had Jellicoe turned toward the torpedoes and pursued, rather than turning away, he might have lost some ships—so the argument goes—but he must have inflicted further heavy damage on the Germans and perhaps even brought about their total destruction. Instead, time and range were sacrificed—seventeen minutes and over 3,000 yards—and Scheer made good his escape. Jellicoe, by this decision, was said to have forsaken the Royal Navy’s chance for a new Trafalgar. This view would hover over Jellicoe’s reputation for the rest of his life.

Jellicoe was not left defenseless by his friends. The turn away was defended after the battle as vigorously as it was attacked. Admiral Sir Reginald Bacon, the first captain of the
Dreadnought
and eventually Jellicoe’s biographer, pointed out that Jellicoe had no way of knowing how many German destroyers would attack him, how many torpedoes they would launch, or from what directions the torpedoes would come; in the event, Bacon argued, Jellicoe’s turn away had saved at least six British battleships. John Irving puts this figure at “eight or even more.”

But the ultimate issue, beyond questions of timing and of potential losses to the British and German fleets, was one of grand strategy. The High Seas Fleet, as it was employed by the kaiser and his admirals in the Great War, never posed a mortal threat to Britain’s survival. Accordingly, the Admiralty and Jellicoe held the destruction of the German fleet to be infinitely less important than the preservation of the Grand Fleet, and thereby of overall British naval supremacy. Fervently though Royal Navy officers might yearn for a new Trafalgar, the naval status quo in May 1916 was acceptable to Great Britain; sea supremacy permitted the Allies exclusive use of the ocean highways while the blockade of Germany continued its corrosive work. Jellicoe, therefore, saw his primary duty as the preservation of the Grand Fleet. He was not afraid to risk his ships in a long-range gun battle because, as a gunnery expert, he knew the awesome weight of metal the British fleet could bring down on an enemy battle line. But he was agonizingly wary of exposing his fleet to any underwater ambush by torpedoes or mines. Jellicoe knew that Scheer was a torpedo specialist who believed that this weapon could be as decisive as the big gun and who would use it whenever he could. Moreover, he knew that the primary duty of German destroyers was to execute a massed torpedo attack; beating off enemy destroyers was their secondary duty. Finally, Jellicoe’s own torpedo experts had told him that in peacetime exercises, 35 percent of torpedoes fired indiscriminately at a line of battleships would find a target. The German navy had eighty-eight destroyers; if all were present, they could launch up to 440 torpedoes. The numbers were sufficient to deprive John Jellicoe of hours of sleep.

Jellicoe, therefore, saw turning away simply as an exercise of a fundamental Grand Fleet battle tactic in use throughout his command. Long before, in his letter to the Admiralty of October 30, 1914, he had made his intentions clear. He had explained that he meant to assume the defensive against all enemy underwater weapons while attempting to conserve his ships for offensive action with their more numerous, heavier guns. If the Germans attempted to retreat or escape from a fleet action, he was determined not to pursue; if he were confronted by a concentrated torpedo attack, he would turn away. The Admiralty had approved, expressing “full confidence in your contemplated conduct of the fleet in action.” On May 31, 1916, therefore, John Jellicoe simply did what he had said he intended to do.

For thirty minutes after Scheer’s second turnabout, the guns were silent. For the first ten of these minutes, Jellicoe steered southeast, approximately 135 degrees off Scheer’s course to the west. Then, feeling that the torpedo threat had evaporated, Jellicoe turned back expecting—once the dense clouds of black smoke spewed out by the retreating German destroyers had blown away—to find the High Seas Fleet where he had left it, still within gun range. But there was no sign of the Germans and, again, as with Scheer’s previous turnabout, Jellicoe did not know where his enemy was. Five minutes passed and Jellicoe turned south. Still the sea was empty. At 7:40 p.m., he ordered another turn, this time to the southwest. Still nothing. Then, at 8:00 p.m., a signal from Goodenough confirmed that the Germans were heading west. Jellicoe turned farther west. By then, Scheer was fifteen miles away, out of reach. Yet the British Commander-in-Chief remained optimistic: steaming south, he was actually nearer to Germany than was Scheer.

Meanwhile, Scheer, after two encounters with Jellicoe and two emergency course reversals, found himself in an appalling situation. He now knew that he was facing the entire Grand Fleet and that this superior force lay between him and his base. He knew that he could not afford to be driven farther west and he changed course, first to the southwest. His ships now were in reverse order to that in which they had twice assaulted the British line: Mauve’s old predreadnoughts were now in the van; the modern dreadnoughts were bringing up the rear. The half-demolished battle cruisers were a mile to port. Scheer’s overriding purpose now was to get away: to save as much of his fleet as he could, and, above all, the dreadnought battleships. At 7:45 p.m., knowing that he must get these ships into friendly waters by daybreak, he altered course to south. The single factor now in his favor was that sundown and twilight were approaching. Perhaps night would hide him.

Beatty’s six remaining battle cruisers, six miles ahead and to the southwest of the British battle line, had been too distant to have been affected by the German destroyer torpedo attacks that had caused Jellicoe to turn away. To Beatty at 7:45 p.m., Scheer’s position was a mystery, but he was anxious to press forward and find the High Seas Fleet before daylight failed. However, he did not wish to find them by himself, without the support of at least some British battleships. The eight dreadnoughts of Jerram’s squadron, now in Jellicoe’s van, were 12,000 yards to his northeast and would serve admirably. On the spur of the moment—perhaps annoyed to the point of cheekiness by what he saw as the excessive caution of Jellicoe’s turnaway—Beatty offered to take matters into his own hands. At 7:47 p.m., he signaled the Commander-in-Chief, “Submit van of battleships follow battle cruisers. We can then cut off whole of enemy’s battle fleet.” Jellicoe’s supporters later described this message as typical of Beatty’s “posturing”; even the modest Commander-in-Chief eventually declared, “To tell the truth, I thought it was rather insubordinate.”

Beatty’s signal took fourteen minutes to reach Jellicoe’s hand and by this time the Commander-in-Chief saw no need for urgency. He had already turned the fleet, including Jerram’s squadron, to a westerly course—nearer the enemy, in fact, than Beatty’s course. Nevertheless, coming from Beatty, the signal demanded consideration. But what did the signal mean? Where was
Lion
? What could Beatty see? Jellicoe assumed that, before sending this message, Beatty must have recovered visual contact with some German ships. But what ships? The German battle fleet? The German battle cruisers? If Beatty could see Germans, Jerram, leading the van of the battle fleet in
King George V,
also must see them. Therefore, the Commander-in-Chief responded by signaling Jerram: “Follow our battle cruisers.” Jerram, who received the order at 8:07 p.m. and who at that moment could see neither Beatty nor Germans, turned to the south hoping to find one or the other. By this time, however, Beatty had lost whatever contact he thought he had with the German fleet.