Castles of Steel (132 page)

For the men in the fleet, the result of the battle had been a terrible disappointment. The enemy had appeared before their guns, they were in a position to annihilate—and then, the Germans had disappeared. Still, the faith of the fleet in the Commander-in-Chief remained unshaken. Captain William Fisher of the dreadnought
St. Vincent
wrote to Jellicoe the day after the battle, “May I go outside strict service custom and say that every officer and man in
St. Vincent
believes in you before any one.” William Goodenough, commodore of Beatty’s light cruisers, wrote, “God bless you, Sir. I have never felt so bound to you in affection and respect than at this moment.” Many retired admirals, including the mutual antagonists Fisher and Beresford, sent congratulations. “Your deployment into battle was Nelsonic and inspired,” Fisher wrote, “and in consequence you saved Beatty from destruction and in one hour—
given vision
—you would have ensured Trafalgar.” From the Admiralty, Balfour consoled him: “You were robbed by physical conditions of a victory which, with a little good fortune, would have been complete and crushing and I feel deeply for your disappointment. But . . . you have gained a victory which is of the utmost value to the Allied cause.” Jellicoe himself, having eaten only half a loaf, refused to be cheered up. To the First Lord, he offered to submit to an investigation: “I hope that if my actions were not considered correct, you will have no hesitation in having them enquired into,” adding, “I often feel that the job is more than people over fifty-five can tackle for very long.” On his way south to visit the Admiralty, he stopped at Rosyth and came on board
Lion
where, according to Beatty, Jellicoe put his head in his hands and confessed, “I missed one of the greatest opportunities a man ever had.”

Beatty’s behavior toward Jellicoe after the battle operated on two levels. On the surface, he was supportive and condoling. “First, I want to offer you my deepest sympathy in being baulked of your great victory which I felt was assured when you hove in sight,” he wrote on June 9. “I can well understand your feelings and that of the Battle Fleet, to be so near and miss is worse than anything. The cussed weather defeats us every time. . . . Your sweep southward was splendid and I made certain we should have them at daylight. I cannot believe now that they got in the northeast of you. . . . It was perhaps unfortunate that those who sighted the enemy to the northward did not make reports. . . . I do hope you will come here in
Iron Duke
soon, it would do us from top to bottom great honour to know that we have earned your approbation. . . . We are part of the Grand Fleet and would like to see our Commander-in-Chief. . . . Please come and see us and tell us that we retain your confidence.”

Beneath the surface, however, Beatty was seething. Convinced that, through excessive caution, Jellicoe had robbed him of the victory he thought he had won, he raged about his superior. Dannreuther of the
Invincible
saw Beatty at Rosyth after the battle: “I spent an hour or more alone with him in his cabin on board the
Lion,
while he walked up and down talking about the action in a very excited manner and criticising in strong terms the action of the Commander-in-Chief in not supporting him. I was a young commander at the time and still regard that hour as the most painful in my life.” Six months later, when Beatty succeeded Jellicoe as Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Fleet, his feelings had not subsided. A farewell letter to Walter Cowan, captain of
Princess Royal,
contained a nasty innuendo: “As you well know, my heart will always be with the battle cruisers who can get up some speed, but I’ll take good care that when they are next in it up to the neck that our Battle Fleet shall be in it too.”

Some of Jellicoe’s Grand Fleet supporters responded in kind. A lieutenant complained to his diary of the “arrogant, slipshod” battle cruisers. Rear Admiral Alexander Duff of the 4th Battle Squadron wrote: “There is no doubt that before May 31, the Battle Cruiser Force were swollen headed and truculent and their own idea was to annihilate the High Seas Fleet . . . with just sufficient support of battleships, all to be under the command of Beatty. The game was to be kept in their hands, we were not even to be spectators. With this end in view, Beatty persuaded the C-in-C to give him the 5th Battle Squadron. Then came May 31 when the German battle cruisers severely mauled ours and Beatty did not make use of the 5th Battle Squadron as support; in fact, he left them to their own devices.”

Eventually, Beatty’s feelings percolated high enough to deny Jellicoe immediate promotion to Admiral of the Fleet, the usual reward for a successful admiral.

[In a letter to a friend, Ethel Beatty wrote, “Now that it is all over, there seems very little to say except to
curse
Jellicoe for not going at them as the battle cruisers did and never stopping until we had annihilated them. I hear he was frightened to death in case he
might
lose a battleship. I think the real truth [is] he was in a
deadly
funk and of course it makes one perfectly sick with the Admiralty trying to make out he is a great man and did all he could and that he is a great
leader.
He failed hopelessly. . . . It makes one so
furious.
I feel I can’t bear it.”

On the other hand, two other Royal Navy officers were quickly promoted. A week after the battle, Captain Thomas Jackson, Director of the Operations Division of the Admiralty, who had bungled Room 40’s interception of
Friedrich der Grosse
’s call sign and failed to tell Jellicoe that Scheer was at sea, was promoted to rear admiral. Later in the summer, Lieutenant Commander Ralph Seymour, Beatty’s signals officer, who had mishandled numerous critical signals at Jutland, received early promotion and was decorated with a DSO.]

This was due in part to a letter from retired Admiral of the Fleet Sir Hedworth Meux, a Beatty admirer, to the king’s private secretary: “If Jellicoe had grasped the opportunity which Providence, assisted by Beatty, placed in his way and destroyed the German fleet, he ought to have been made an Earl. But instead . . . practically the whole of the fighting was done by the battle cruisers, and our battle fleet only fired a very few rounds. . . . Jellicoe has done splendid work as an organizer and driller of the fleet, but as yet I am sorry to say he has shown no sign of being a Nelson.”

As Meux’s letter indicates, naval officers began mustering in opposing Jellicoe and Beatty camps soon after the battle. The Jutland Controversy simmered during the remaining two years of the war; then, in peacetime, open hostilities broke out at the Admiralty, in the press, and in dueling books. This animosity reached a level of rancor, accusation, and epithet that no British naval officer ever directed at Admiral Scheer or Hipper.

Over the years, only one of the four senior admirals at Jutland, two German and two British, entirely escaped criticism. Franz von Hipper, the veteran of the Scarborough Raid and the Dogger Bank, led his battle cruisers at Jutland with confidence and skill and managed to triumph over Beatty’s superior force. His ships stood up not only to the British battle cruisers but also to the 15-inch guns of battleships—although he later said, “It was nothing but the poor quality of their bursting charges that saved us from disaster.” During the Run to the South, Hipper sank two British battle cruisers and led an unsuspecting Beatty to the High Seas Fleet, as well. Hipper should not be blamed for obeying Scheer’s command to pursue Beatty to the north, thereby thrusting the High Seas Fleet into the arms of the Grand Fleet. The training and élan of the German battle cruiser squadron, for which Hipper was responsible, proved themselves when his battered, crippled ships, lacking their admiral, charged the enemy in order to save Scheer’s battleships. Hipper made no mistakes at Jutland and was the only one of the four senior admirals present to come away with his reputation enhanced.

Reinhard Scheer was a bold, experienced tactician, famous for his quick decisions, who had the misfortune to command the smaller fleet at Jutland. The High Seas Fleet was made up of superbly built ships with efficient officers and crews having superior training in areas such as night fighting; if the numbers of ships on each side had been equal, the outcome might easily have been different. Scheer’s tactics, based on recognition that the strength of his fleet was inferior, were to blend the use of the weapons systems carried by his dreadnoughts and destroyers. The battleships would fight a gunnery duel if they encountered a weaker enemy, but Scheer himself was a torpedo specialist and believed that the torpedo could be as decisive as the gun. If his dreadnoughts encountered an enemy as strong, or stronger, they would rapidly withdraw under cover of smoke screens and massed destroyer torpedo attacks. At Jutland, Scheer’s tactics and skills were sorely tested. Twice he came by accident under the guns of the British battle fleet, and on each occasion he was so completely surprised that he found the Grand Fleet crossing his T. Scheer’s first turnaround escape was brilliantly executed, but his second—when he turned back toward the Grand Fleet from which he had escaped only thirty minutes before—detracts from his reputation. It was clumsily executed; but, as before, he was hugely assisted by luck and the weather. Scheer had never wanted to fight this particular battle and, from the moment he discovered that he was confronting the entire Grand Fleet, his preoccupation was to get away, if necessary sacrificing his battle cruisers and destroyers. The High Seas Fleet fought bravely and well, but in the end, Reinhard Scheer succeeded not in winning a victory but in escaping annihilation.

[After the war, Scheer’s Flag Lieutenant at Jutland, Ernst von Weizsäcker, offered an unflattering portrait of his chief during the battle: “Scheer had but the foggiest idea of what was happening during the action and . . . his movements were not in the least dictated by superior tactical considerations. On the contrary, he had only two definite ideas: to protect the
Wiesbaden
and, when that was no good, to disentangle himself and go home. Talking of the destroyer attack . . . the origin lay in Scheer saying, ‘The destroyers have not done anything yet—let them have a go.’ . . . Scheer’s success lay in his ability to make a decision, but he knew nothing of tactics, although he was against sitting in harbor and liked to get the fleet to sea when he could. . . . In other words, Scheer was much like any other admiral and by no means the tactical genius and superman that the present day historian tries to make out.”

In 1936, when Weizsäcker said this, he was acting director of the Political Department of the Foreign Ministry of Nazi Germany.]

David Beatty was an impetuous, bulldog type of fighter, courageous and impatient for action. His preferred tactic was to charge the enemy, and he expected his captains to follow without having to be told. With men who had long been with him and understood his ways—his battle cruiser captains and the commodores of the light cruiser squadrons attached to the battle cruiser force—this simple system worked well. Unfortunately, he did not explain his tactics to men new to his command, especially the two rear admirals, Moore and Evan-Thomas, who played critical roles in his two most famous battles, the Dogger Bank and Jutland. Beatty’s failure to acquaint Moore with his style of leadership led to Hipper’s escape at the Dogger Bank; because of a similar failure to brief Evan-Thomas, he engaged Hipper at Jutland without the initial support of the powerful 5th Battle Squadron. In other areas, too, Beatty’s leadership was flawed. Leaving initiative to subordinates was one thing; ignoring slipshod performance was another. Mistake after mistake was made by his signals staff, led by the hapless Ralph Seymour. And Beatty’s effort at Jutland was marred by his continuing failure to improve the poor gunnery of his battle cruisers.

In the immediate aftermath of the battle, Beatty won huge popular praise and was proclaimed another Nelson, but the facts scarcely justify these laurels. Beatty had six battle cruisers and four of the most powerful battleships in the world, as well as fourteen light cruisers and twenty-seven destroyers; Hipper had five battle cruisers, five light cruisers, and twenty-two destroyers. Yet in spite of this preponderance, Beatty lost two battle cruisers and Hipper lost none. Scheer may not have defeated Jellicoe, as claimed by the German communiqué, but there is no doubt that Hipper defeated Beatty.

Beatty began badly at Jutland by failing to concentrate before he attacked. At 10:10 a.m., Beatty ordered the four
Queen Elizabeth
s of the 5th Battle Squadron to take station five miles northwest of
Lion.
Had the battleships been closer, or had they had been stationed on a bearing where an enemy was most likely to appear (southeast, for example), Hipper’s battle cruisers would have been subjected to overwhelming fire from the beginning. Once the enemy was discovered, Beatty, determined not to let Hipper get away as he had at the Dogger Bank, turned the battle cruisers at high speed to the southeast, signaling the battleships five miles away to follow. But the signal was given by flag hoist, which could not be distinguished from
Barham,
and it was not repeated by searchlight or wireless. Minutes went by before Evan-Thomas realized that the battle cruisers had altered course and turned to follow. By then, his four giant battleships were ten miles astern.

In the artillery duel that followed, British battle cruiser gunfire inflicted little damage on German ships. Hipper later compared this shooting unfavorably to that of the 5th Battle Squadron and other British battleships while
Lützow
’s gunnery officer stated, “Neither
Lion
nor
Princess Royal
hit us once between 4.02 and 5.23 p.m.; their total hits were three in ninety-five minutes.” There was also the usual confusion in fire distribution between Beatty’s ships, leaving
Derfflinger
to shoot untroubled. The same mistake had been made at the Dogger Bank. Potentially, Beatty’s most harmful error at Jutland was his failure to keep Jellicoe informed as to the position of the enemy battle fleet. Jellicoe had counted on Beatty to provide this vital information, but during the Run to the North, Beatty lost touch with the High Seas Fleet. As a result, he could not tell the Commander-in-Chief what Jellicoe desperately needed to know before deciding in which direction to deploy. Only at the last minute, and largely by instinct, did Jellicoe choose correctly.