Castles of Steel (130 page)

It did not take long for this public “cock-crowing,” as Weizsäcker called it, to subside. The truth about the loss of
Lützow
leaked out and traveled through the country by word of mouth. On June 7, the German Naval Staff was forced to reveal its additional losses and a month later, on July 4, Scheer sent the kaiser his confidential report on the battle. The High Seas Fleet would be ready for sea by mid-August, he wrote, and he hoped to inflict serious damage on the enemy. “Nevertheless,” he continued, “even the most successful outcome of a fleet action in this war will not force England to make peace.” Citing “the disadvantages of our military-geographical position and the enemy’s great material superiority,” Scheer told the emperor that “a victorious end to the war within a reasonable time can only be achieved through the defeat of British economic life—that is, by using the U-boats against British trade.”

During the morning and afternoon of Thursday, June 1, the British Admiralty waited for news from Jellicoe. London had been monitoring wireless messages between Jellicoe, Beatty, and other commanders, referring to losses, strayed ships, and their search of the battlefield; from these, it was clear that the German fleet had returned to port and that Jellicoe held command of the field. By nightfall, the Admiralty also knew that the Grand Fleet would be arriving back in its harbors the following morning. By then Jellicoe would surely report; meanwhile, the Admiralty was prepared to wait. There seemed no immediate harm in this; because of strict censorship in Britain, no one beyond a small official circle knew that the Grand Fleet had been in action.

That same Thursday evening, Reuters in Amsterdam picked up the official communiqué from Berlin and cabled it to their London bureau. The bureau sent the text to the Admiralty for the required censorship review prior to release to the British press. At the Admiralty, however, the claims in the communiqué appeared so damaging that there could be no question of revealing them to the public unless confirmed by Jellicoe. Now impatient for news, the Admiralty signaled
Iron Duke
at 9:40 p.m., summarizing the German communiqué and stressing the need for “prompt contradiction.” Jellicoe did not reply. The Commander-in-Chief, passing a second night with little sleep, was preoccupied with the problems of rounding up, safeguarding, and shepherding his fleet, especially his damaged ships, back to harbor.
Warspite
and
Marlborough,
limping home, had been attacked by submarines.
Black Prince, Warrior,
and several destroyers were missing; many other destroyers were dangerously low on fuel. Further, until he had received reports from his own admirals and commodores, Jellicoe really did not know enough about what had happened during the battle to make a report. And on this day of all others, concern about an Admiralty press release was at the bottom of his list of priorities.

For these reasons, when daylight came on Friday, June 2, the Admiralty still had not heard from Jellicoe. By 8:00 a.m., ominous rumors were spreading across Britain. Some originated in Rosyth dockyard, which was preparing to receive a number of damaged ships. The arrival of other ships and the despatch of more than 6,000 uncensored messages from men coming ashore to tell loved ones they were safe spread the news that a battle had been fought. Further concealment was impossible; at 11:00 a.m., with the news from Berlin spreading around the world, the Admiralty decided to let the German communiqué be published in Britain.

To the British public, unaware even that a sea battle had taken place, it came as a bombshell. Within an hour, London newsboys were on the streets shouting, “Great naval disaster! Five British battleships lost!” Flags were lowered to half staff, stock exchanges closed, theaters darkened. Overseas, on breakfast tables in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, the headlines read, “Britain Defeated at Sea!” “British Losses Great!” “British Fleet Almost Annihilated!” Still, the Admiralty issued no communiqué. Why not? Surely there must be another side to the story. Or had there been a spectacular defeat? Beginning that day, a tide of suspicion flooded up that would not subside for many years.

Meanwhile, at 10:35 that morning, as
Iron Duke
was entering Scapa Flow, Jellicoe signaled his first report to the Admiralty. A brief, sober summary of British losses, giving only the most conservative estimates of damage to the enemy, it seemed, taken at face value, almost to confirm the German communiqué. With the newspapers clamoring for an official statement, Balfour, Jackson, and Oliver sat down at the Admiralty during the afternoon to produce a document, which they released to the press at 7:00 p.m.:

On the afternoon of Wednesday, May 31, a naval engagement took place off the coast of Jutland. The British ships on which the brunt of the fighting fell were the Battle Cruiser Fleet and some cruisers and light cruisers supported by four fast battleships. Among these the losses were heavy. . . . The battle cruisers
Queen Mary, Indefatigable,
and
Invincible
and the cruisers
Defence
and
Black Prince
were sunk. The
Warrior
was disabled . . . and had to be abandoned. . . . No British battleships were sunk. . . . The enemy’s losses are serious. At least one battle cruiser was destroyed, one battleship was reported sunk by our destroyers during a night action; two light cruisers were disabled and probably sunk.

Balfour was the primary author of this document. The First Lord, a former prime minister, a philosopher, and a man little interested in public favor, had chosen candor: “I desired to let the people know the best and worst that I knew,” he said. The communiqué, therefore, was a simple, honest recital of British losses. There was no mention of Scheer’s double turnaway or of his desperate nocturnal lunge to escape. There was no explanation of the significance of British sea control after the battle.

The Admiralty’s brief statement reached the public in Saturday morning newspapers on June 3. To most British readers, schooled to believe that whenever the Royal Navy encountered an enemy, the foreigners must in-evitably go to the bottom, it gave a shocking impression of mishap, even disaster. The press, inherently suspicious of official pronouncements, was convinced that something was being hidden. If Jutland had been a British victory, why not say so? If it was not a British victory—and the Admiralty steadfastly refused to claim it as such—then it must have been a British defeat. Newspaper editorials struck an attitude of suspicious mourning. “The result could not be viewed with satisfaction,” said the
Daily Telegraph.
“Defeat in the Jutland engagement must be admitted,” agreed the
Daily News.
Newspapers in hand, Jacky Fisher, now at the Board of Invention and Research, paced up and down his office, repeating, “They’ve failed me, they’ve failed me! I have spent thirty years of my life preparing for this day and they’ve failed me!”

By Saturday afternoon, Jellicoe had read the British communiqué and had signaled a vigorous protest, saying that it magnified his losses, minimized Scheer’s, and gave a misleading picture of the battle. The Admiralty then issued a second communiqué redistributing the balance of lost ships, but still not saying which side had won the battle. To strengthen the Admiralty’s case, Balfour asked Winston Churchill, his predecessor and friend, famous for his gifted pen, to come in, examine the confidential reports of the battle, and publish his own opinion. Churchill came and was handed all dispatches from the fleet commanders. His commentary, appearing on Sunday morning, placed the battle in a larger context. He brought out the crucial fact that the High Seas Fleet had escaped destruction only by flight. He stressed that sea control depended on dreadnought battleships and that British supremacy in this respect was unimpaired. Britain had lost a first-line battle cruiser,
Queen Mary,
but the Germans had lost
Lützow,
an equivalent vessel.
Invincible
and
Indefatigable
were second-line vessels; their loss was regrettable, but far from crippling. Overall, the Royal Navy’s margin of superiority continued undiminished. Churchill’s essay calmed the public, but further enraged the press. Why had the Admiralty given secret information to a politician, but not to them? London journalists now were convinced that the original German communiqué had been substantially correct and that the Admiralty, in dribbling out the story, was concealing the truth.

Accordingly, a third Admiralty communiqué, appearing in the Monday morning newspapers, gave a higher estimate of German losses: two battleships, two battle cruisers, four light cruisers, and at least nine destroyers. Jellicoe, it declared, “having driven the enemy into port, returned to the main scene of action and scoured the sea in search of disabled vessels.” Then, bending over backward to please, the Admiralty announced that it was lifting censorship on all official dispatches from the sea commanders concerning the battle. Learning this, Jellicoe vehemently protested that many of the details in these reports, if released to the public, would give valuable information to the enemy. Immediately on Jellicoe’s telegram reaching London, censorship was reimposed—and journalistic suspicions flared higher. The Admiralty was partially vindicated the following day when the German Naval Staff admitted the loss of
Lützow
and
Rostock;
and by the end of the week, public opinion began to shift. Now there was talk of a “substantial victory”; there were reminders of the continuing blockade; there was a description of the High Seas Fleet sealed up in Wilhelmshaven while the victorious British fleet was “sweeping across the North Sea in its unchallenged supremacy.”
The Naval and Military Record
announced that “the Navy’s prestige stands higher today than at any period for a hundred years.” The
Globe
asked: “Will the shouting, flag-wagging [German] people get any more of the copper, rubber and cotton their government so sorely needs? Not by a pound. Will meat and butter be cheaper in Berlin? Not by a
pfennig.
There is one test and only one of victory. Who held the field of battle at the end of the fight?” Arthur Balfour laconically noted, “It is not customary for a victor to run away.” And a New York City newspaper told its readers: “The German fleet has assaulted its jailor, but it is still in jail.”

The British public was just recovering from the Jutland “defeat” when newspaper headlines on Tuesday, June 6—six days after the battle—sent them reeling again. Field Marshal Lord Kitchener, the nation’s military idol and the secretary of state for war, had drowned at sea aboard a British cruiser only a few miles from Scapa Flow.

The tragedy that stunned the nation came almost as a release for the hero. Kitchener, aging, tired, and fractious after twenty-two months of war, had found himself in an anomalous position: his reputation with the British public remained as high as ever, but within the Cabinet it had shrunk to a point where he was treated with almost contemptuous indifference. Lloyd George said privately that Kitchener “talked twaddle” and constantly urged Asquith to remove him from the War Office. The visible cause was the army’s failure at Gallipoli; as failure at the Dardanelles had toppled Churchill and Fisher, so now failure at Gallipoli had left Kitchener tottering. Underneath lay concerns over Kitchener’s remote, sometimes inexplicable behavior. One night over dinner, Balfour explained this view to his niece, who was to become his biographer:

“K. knows nothing,” the First Lord said. “He does nothing right.”

“He is a stupid man?” the niece asked.

“That’s it; he is,” Balfour replied. “He is not a great organizer, he is not a great administrator, nor a great soldier. And what is more, he knows it. He is not vain. He is only great when he has little things to accomplish.”

“And yet,” the niece said, “I feel as if he were rather a great man.”

“You are not wrong. He is in a way. But our language has no word for the subtleties I would like to express about K. I must call his greatness
personality.
He has that in the highest sense.”

Kitchener knew what his colleagues were saying, but, as he told a friend, “Rightly or wrongly—probably wrongly—the people believe in me. It is not, therefore, me the politicians are afraid of, but of what the people would say if I were to go.” Early in May, an invitation from Tsar Nicholas II to visit the Russian army and confer with the Russian government on questions of military cooperation provided an excuse, as welcome to Kitchener as to his detractors, for him to leave England for three weeks. On June 4, he said good-bye to the prime minister and the king and left London from King’s Cross Station for northern Scotland. From Thurso, a destroyer carried him across the Pentland Firth to
Iron Duke
in Scapa Flow. His visit was secret, but as he came up the flagship’s ladder, the crew recognized the familiar figure and began to clap. Already, an unseasonable northeasterly storm had the flagship bucking at its mooring cables, and while Kitchener had lunch with Jellicoe, the weather grew worse; one officer would call it “the dirtiest night we had seen in Scapa.” The Commander-in-Chief recommended that his guest postpone sailing for twenty-four hours, but the field marshal insisted that he had “a timetable and not a day to lose.” Jellicoe thereupon personally changed his visitor’s course out of Scapa Flow; the armored cruiser
Hampshire,
instead of taking the usual route to the east through Pentland Firth, was to take the less-used western route around the Orkneys. His intention was to give Kitchener, whose sea legs were rubbery, more comfort by putting him in the lee of the islands during the first hours of his voyage.

Just after 4:00 p.m., the towering field marshal reached out across
Iron Duke
’s spray-swept deck and clasped the hand of the small admiral. At 5:00 p.m.,
Hampshire
and two escorting destroyers sailed for Archangel, turning west out of the Flow and keeping close to the sheer black cliffs of the Orkney coast. The cruiser’s captain, fearing submarines, called for 18 knots, but the storm had moved from the northeast around to the northwest and the three ships, burying their noses in enormous green waves rolling in from the Atlantic, were unable to make this speed. By 6:30 p.m., the seas were so high that the destroyers had to be sent home. At 7:40 p.m., about a mile and a half off Marwick Head,
Hampshire
struck a mine, one of twenty-two laid on the night of May 27–28 by
U-75
in hopes of harming the Grand Fleet when it came out in response to Scheer’s planned thrust into the Skagerrak. The cruiser heeled over and within fifteen minutes went to the bottom. No boats could be lowered in the heavy seas; and of the more than 650 men on board, only twelve survived on small float rafts to reach the base of the Orkney cliffs. Kitchener was not among them. He was last seen immediately after the explosion wearing his heavy greatcoat and heading for the bridge.