Castles of Steel (22 page)

But
Mainz
was receiving as well as dealing blows. Her rudder was jammed to starboard, she was on fire, her port engine was dead, and she was slowly turning in the direction of Goodenough’s arriving cruisers. Worse was to come. Suddenly, a torpedo from the British destroyer
Lydiard
hit her. “The ship reared,” wrote one of
Mainz
’s surviving officers, “bent perceptibly from end to end, and continued to pitch for some time. The emergency lights went out. We had to find our way about with electric torches.” Stricken,
Mainz
turned west, straight into the arms of Goodenough’s four cruisers, now only 6,000 yards away. “We closed down on her,” wrote one of
Southampton
’s officers, “hitting with every salvo. She was a mass of yellow flame and smoke. . . . Her two after-funnels collapsed. Red glows, indicating internal fires, showed through her gaping wounds in her sides.” One of her guns still fired spasmodically, but within ten minutes she lay a blazing wreck, sinking by the bow. Then, the mainmast slowly leaned forward and, “like a great tree, gradually lay down along the deck.” “
Mainz
was incredibly brave, immensely gallant,” wrote another British officer. “The last I saw of her [she was] absolutely wrecked . . . her whole midships a fuming inferno. She had one gun forward and one aft still spitting forth fury and defiance like a wild cat mad with wounds.” A surviving German seaman added grim details: “The state of
Mainz
at this time was indescribable. . . . Gun crews, voice-pipe men, and ammunition supply parties were blown to pieces. The upper deck was a chaos of ruin, flame, scorching heat and corpses, and everything was streaked with the green and yellow residue of the explosives which produced suffocating gases.” At 12:20, the captain ordered, “Sink [that is, scuttle] the ship. All hands [put on] life jackets.” Then he stepped outside the conning tower and was immediately killed by a shell burst. At 12:25 p.m., Goodenough signaled, “Cease Fire,” and at 12:50 p.m. he ordered the light cruiser
Liverpool
to lower boats and pick up the men swimming in the water.

At this point, Commodore Keyes with
Lurcher
and
Firedrake
arrived. Seeing
Mainz
’s smoking decks littered with men wounded and unable to move, he took
Lurcher
alongside, the steel plates of the two ships grinding with the movement of the sea. By this action, Keyes was able to evacuate and save 220 men. One man refused. “A young German officer [who] had been very active in directing the transport of the wounded” now stood motionless on the deck of his doomed ship. Keyes, anxious to push off before the cruiser capsized and guessing what was in this young man’s mind, shouted to him that “he had done splendidly, we must clear out, he must come at once, there was nothing more he could do, and I held out my hand to help him jump on board.” But the young man scorned to leave his ship as long as she remained afloat. “He drew himself up stiffly, saluted, and said, ‘Thank you. No.’ ” A few minutes later,
Mainz
rolled over, lay on her side for ten minutes, then turned bottom up and sank. Happily, the young officer who had refused Keyes’s offer was found in the water and rescued; another survivor was Lieutenant Wolf von Tirpitz, a son of the German Grand Admiral.

Tyrwhitt still was not out of danger. One German light cruiser had been sunk and another damaged, but eight more were converging on his battered force.
Stettin
and
Strassburg
were still about;
Köln,
with Rear Admiral Maass,
Stralsund, Kolberg, Ariadne, München,
and
Danzig
were on the way; and still another,
Niobe,
was hastily coaling at Wilhelmshaven. Meanwhile,
Arethusa, Laurel, Laertes,
and
Liberty
were badly damaged and would have to be withdrawn from the Bight in the face of attacks by the German light cruisers. Fortunately for the British, the actions of the German ships remained uncoordinated. All were careening about, looking for smaller British ships to attack, fleeing when confronted by larger British warships. The British, at least, were attempting to exercise tactical control; for the Germans it was a confused barroom brawl. The ability to identify an antagonist depended on factors such as the number of funnels and the shape of the bows, characteristics difficult to make out in that day’s weather.

As shells from
Strassburg
and then from
Köln
began to fall near
Arethusa,
Tyrwhitt began to wonder whether he and his ships would be overwhelmed. “I really was beginning to feel a bit blue,” he wrote after the battle. Then, suddenly, out of the haze to westward, the shadowy form of a large ship loomed up. She was coming at high speed, black smoke was pouring from her funnels, and a huge white wave was rolling back from her bow. Alarm and dismay were followed by relief and joy when the oncoming giant was identified as HMS
Lion.
One by one, out of the mist astern of the leader, four more huge shapes came into view. “Following in each other’s wake, they emerged . . . and flashed past us like express trains,” said an officer aboard
Southampton.
“Not a man could be seen on their decks; volumes of smoke poured from their funnels; their turret guns, trained expectantly on the port bow, seemed eager for battle.” A young lieutenant serving on one of Tyrwhitt’s crippled destroyers described the same moment: “There straight ahead of us in lovely procession, like elephants walking through a pack of . . . dogs came
Lion, Queen Mary, Princess Royal, Invincible
and
New Zealand.
Great and grim and uncouth as some antediluvian monsters, how solid they looked, how utterly earthquaking. We pointed out our latest aggressor to them . . . and we went west while they went east . . . and just a little later we heard the thunder of their guns.”

For
Arethusa
and her flock, the battle was over. For
Lion
and her sisters, it was beginning.

Aboard the British battle cruisers, excitement was at a peak: “As we approached,” said Captain Chatfield of
Lion,

everyone was at action stations, the guns loaded, the range-finders manned, the control alert, the signal men’s binoculars and telescopes scouring the misty horizon . . . one could hardly see two miles. Suddenly the report of guns was heard . . . [and] on our port bow, we saw . . . the flash of guns through the mist. Were they friendly or hostile? No shell could be seen falling. Beatty stood on the bridge by the compass, his glasses scanning the scene. At length we made out the hulk of a cruiser—indeed, she was little more than a hulk—[this was
Mainz
] her funnel had fallen and her foremast had been shot away, a fire raged on her upper deck. She . . . had been engaged by all four ships of Goodenough’s squadron. We swung around ninety degrees to port. “Leave her to them,” said Beatty. “Don’t fire!”

At 12:37 p.m.,
Lion
approached
Arethusa
and her destroyers, which were under attack by
Strassburg
and
Köln. Strassburg
turned and fled.
Köln,
however, was doomed. As Beatty steered to cut her off from Heligoland, the German light cruiser remained for seven minutes in clear sight on
Lion
’s bow. “The turrets swung around . . . [and] our guns opened fire, followed by those of the squadron,” said Chatfield. “In a few moments, the German was hit many times by heavy shells; she bravely returned our fire with her little four inch guns aiming at our conning tower. One felt the tiny four-inch shell spatter against the conning tower armor, and the pieces ‘sizz’ over it. In a few minutes, the
Köln
was . . . a hulk.”

Even so, Rear Admiral Maass’s flagship did not sink; indeed, she received a brief reprieve. Just at that moment, a small, two-funneled German light cruiser appeared, steaming east, directly across
Lion
’s path. Beatty immediately abandoned the shattered
Köln
and led his ships in pursuit of this new prey. Although by this time
Invincible
(which could make no better than 25 knots) and
New Zealand
(not much faster) were lagging behind the three modern Cats (as the London press had eagerly described the
Lion-
class battle cruisers), which were traveling at 28 knots, Beatty did not detach either of the two to sink
Köln.
Aware that he was close to the enemy’s base and that German dreadnoughts could appear at any moment, he wished to keep his squadron concentrated. Chatfield described what happened next: “A small German ship, a mile on [
sic
] the starboard bow . . . made off at right-angles, zig-zagging. Pointing her out to . . . [the gunnery officer] I told him to cease firing at
Köln
and to engage . . . [the new enemy ship] be-fore she could torpedo us. He rapidly swung the 13.5-inch turrets round from port to starboard and re-opened fire. Three salvos were enough and the German disappeared from sight; an explosion was seen and a mass of flame.”

The victim was the old light cruiser
Ariadne,
which had followed
Köln
from Wilhelmshaven through the mists out onto the battlefield. When Beatty, leaving the crippled
Köln,
turned his attention to
Ariadne,
the range was under 6,000 yards.
Ariadne
had no chance. She ran for it, but, said one of her officers, “the first salvo fell about three hundred and thirty yards short, but the second pitched so close to our boat that the towering columns of water broke over our forecastle and flooded it.”
Lion
’s third salvo struck home and, as
Princess Royal
joined the assault,
Ariadne
staggered away, “completely enveloped in flames,” and helpless. Beatty left her behind.
Ariadne,
like
Köln,
remained afloat, but the heat and smoke made it impossible for her crew to remain on board. The men assembled on the forecastle, gave three cheers for the kaiser, sang “Deutschland über Alles,” and awaited rescue. Shortly after two o’clock the German light cruiser
Danzig
appeared and lowered boats. For a while, the fires on
Ariadne
were dying down and her captain, hoping to save his ship, asked
Stralsund
to take her in tow. It was too late: at 3:10 p.m., she rolled over and went to the bottom, her colors still flying.

Despite his success, Beatty was nervous about his proximity to Heligoland and Wilhelmshaven; from one of his ships, an officer could see chimneys along the German coast. He knew that the water over the Jade bar was deepening and that the German dreadnoughts would probably be coming out. And one of his destroyers reported the presence of floating mines. For these reasons and because it was now his primary duty to cover the withdrawal of Tyrwhitt’s damaged ships, it was time to go. At 1:10 p.m., only forty minutes after he arrived on the scene, Beatty turned
Lion
and her sisters to the northwest and made a general signal to all British forces in the Bight: “Retire.” On this arc of retreat, he sighted, a mile and a half away, the crippled
Köln,
still afloat, still flying her flag. “The Admiral told me to sink her,” Chatfield said. “We put two salvos from the two foremost turrets into her; she sank beneath the waves stern first.” Beatty ordered his four accompanying destroyers to pick up survivors. They had begun to search when a submarine was reported and they departed. Two days later a German destroyer discovered a single stoker, Adolf Neumann, still alive and “drifting among corpses [held up] in lifejackets.” According to Neumann, “About 250 men” jumped into the sea before
Köln
went down. “On the next day I saw close around me 60 men apparently still living. One after another, they fell prey to the sea.” The rest of
Köln
’s company of more than 500 men, along with Rear Admiral Maass, had perished.

Up to this point, four German cruisers—
Frauenlob, Mainz, Köln,
and
Ariadne
—had been sunk or damaged, but four more—
Stettin, Stralsund, Strassburg,
and
Danzig
—were still prowling in the fog. These four ships were saved by the mist; on a clear day, Beatty’s heavy guns could have reached out and smashed them all. As it was,
Strassburg
had a close encounter. She sighted the British battle cruisers, then busy dispatching
Köln,
before they sighted her. Momentarily, the British were confused:
Strassburg
had four funnels, while most German cruisers had only three. The German captain realized that he might be mistaken for one of the
Southampton
s and boldly held on course rather than turning and running. The ploy succeeded: by the time the British issued a challenge,
Strassburg
had vanished into the haze.

Meanwhile, help for the Germans was on the way.
Moltke
and
Von der Tann
crossed the Jade bar at 2:10 p.m., and Hipper signaled all German light cruisers to fall back on the two battle cruisers. Ingenohl was cautious. Hipper’s battle cruisers were told “not to engage the [enemy] battle cruiser squadron”; Hipper himself, an hour astern in
Seydlitz,
did not want to make the same mistake the German light cruisers had made by attacking piecemeal; he refused to risk his two battle cruisers in the absence of his powerful flagship. At 2:25 p.m.,
Moltke
and
Von der Tann
rendezvoused with the German light cruisers. Hipper himself arrived in
Seydlitz
at 3:10 p.m., just in time to watch
Ariadne
sink. The German admiral then began a wary reconnaissance with three light cruisers ahead of his three battle cruisers, searching for the missing light cruisers
Mainz
and
Köln,
from whom there had been no word for over three hours. By four o’clock, Hipper was ready to give up and turn his ships in order to be back in the Jade before low water. “At 8:23 p.m.,” says the German naval history, “
Seydlitz
anchored in Wilhelmshaven roads and Rear Admiral Hipper reported to the fleet commander [Ingenohl] and verbally gave him an account.”