Castles of Steel (78 page)

By 9:43 a.m.,
Lion
was straddling
Seydlitz
at 17,000 yards. Then, at 9:45 a.m., a 13.5-inch armor-piercing shell from
Lion
struck the after deck of
Seydlitz
and pierced the armor of the aftermost turret. The powder charges being brought up were ignited by the explosion and flash fires shot upward into the turret—setting fire to the charges being delivered to the gun—and downward into the magazine. The magazine crew, seared by the flames, tried to flee forward by opening the steel doors leading to the compartments of the adjacent turret. As a result the fire spread forward, setting alight the charges there, spreading to the adjacent magazine and upward to C turret. In this way, two turrets were destroyed by a single hit and the entire crews of both turrets died almost instantly. Filson Young, staring through binoculars from
Lion
’s foretop, saw “a great glowing mass of fire appear . . . on the after part of
Seydlitz.
Well do I remember seeing those flames and wondering what kind of horrors they signified.” Chatfield, witnessing the same catastrophe, had a laconic, professional reaction: “A shell struck
Seydlitz
on the after turret and a sheet of flame and smoke went up about two hundred feet in the air. I hoped she was out of action.”

Seydlitz
now faced the danger of a final, annihilating explosion that would detonate all of the magazines and cause the ship to disintegrate. Three men saved her: Lieutenant Commander Hagedom, Chief Artificer Hering, and Gunner’s Mate Müller. Making their way through searing heat to the valves for flooding the magazines, they spun the handles and drowned the threat of explosion by permitting 600 tons of seawater to flow into the magazines. Remarkably, although 165 men had been killed and two of her five turrets destroyed,
Seydlitz
not only survived but continued in action and maintained her speed. It was an extraordinary demonstration of the excellence of German warship design and the extensive watertight subdivision of her hull.

During this crisis, Admiral Hipper stood, silently chain-smoking, on the bridge. Damage reports from different parts of the ship came to the captain standing nearby: no reply could be heard from the steering room; the two rear heavy turrets were out of action; 600 tons of water had been flooded into the magazines. Hipper seemed unaffected, almost detached. After the war, he remembered looking back and seeing “the two after turrets . . . spouting huge volumes of flame. This lasted about two minutes, then ceased for a time, to leap up afresh about a minute later. It was a strange sight to see the after part of the ship fiercely ablaze, while the three forward turrets were still firing vigorously.” Hipper realized that the damage to the
Seydlitz
dramatically altered the balance in favor of the British. Beatty had five battle cruisers; Hipper had three, one of which was heavily damaged. His reaction was to send an urgent signal to Ingenohl at 9:55: “Need assistance badly.” The Commander-in-Chief received the signal at 10:00 a.m., and within ten minutes the order was given to sail. But Ingenohl could not possibly be in a position to support Hipper until 2:30 p.m. As a ploy to scare off the British until he could come closer, Ingenohl replied to Hipper at 10:03 in a clear, uncoded signal: “Main fleet and flotillas will come.” In code, he appended the grim reality: “. . . as soon as possible.”

When Hipper appealed for help,
Seydlitz
was not the only German ship in difficulty;
Blücher,
battered by one British battle cruiser after another, her steering gear damaged, was dropping behind Hipper’s formation and yawing away to the north. This course brought her within range of Goodenough’s light cruisers, keeping their lookout station to the north of the British battle cruisers. Despite the pounding she had taken,
Blücher
’s fighting capacity still remained formidable and she opened an accurate fire with her 8.2-inch and 5.9-inch guns, forcing Goodenough to keep away. Nevertheless, the punishment of
Blücher
by
New Zealand
continued. At 10:30 a.m., a 12-inch hit put
Blücher
’s bow turret out of action. Soon after, a serious fire broke out amidships, her speed dropped to 17 knots, and the gap between the armored cruiser and the three German battle cruisers continued to grow.

Implacably, the British were overtaking their enemies.
Lion
had been hit, but appeared to have shrugged off these blows. Beatty’s principal concern became the straggling out of his squadron and, to rectify this, at 9:53 a.m. he slowed to 24 knots. In consequence, the range to the German squadron, which had been decreasing for an hour, temporarily remained constant. For young officers in the British fleet, the morning was providing vivid images. “It was wonderful to see our battle cruisers steaming at top speed with spits of flame and brown smoke issuing every minute or so from their bows and sides—and in the far distance the enemy’s guns flashing in reply,” wrote an officer on
Aurora,
one of Tyrwhitt’s Harwich light cruisers. From
Indomitable,
struggling to catch up, a young turret officer observed “the
Lion, Tiger, Princess Royal
and
New Zealand
on our starboard bow, cleaving the water at full speed. . . . We slowly gained on . . . [the Germans] . . . [then] through the navy phone came, ‘A turret open fire.’ . . . At 10.31 the enemy altered to port and so did we and this brought my turret [Q turret, amidships] into action against
Blücher.
In and out recoiled the guns as we pounded the enemy. ‘Left gun ready,’ shouts someone and another 850 pounds of explosive goes hurtling towards the enemy.” Not every young officer had as good a view. Inside a turret on
New Zealand,
Prince George of Battenberg grumbled, “My range finder was useless. I was soaked through to the skin by spray coming in through the slit in my hood, hitting me in the face and then trickling down outside and inside my clothes and I was frozen by the wind which came in with the spray. My eyes were extremely sore and I was blinking all the time.”

The best view belonged to Filson Young, kneeling in the foretop of
Lion.

Many . . . details registered . . . the smell and taste of cordite smoke as the wind drove it back from the mouths of our guns . . . the silences; lulls that came at the very heat of battle when sometimes for five or ten seconds there would be no sound but the soft brushing of the wind and its harp-like harmonies in the rigging, until a salvo from our guns would split the heavens again and, like its echo, the hollow growl of the enemy’s guns. . . . One could see clearly the flashes of salvos from
Seyd-litz
and
Moltke,
both of which were firing at
Lion
and, timing their flight with a stopwatch, know to a second when their arrival would be signaled either by an explosion . . . or by the uprising of a group of lovely and enormous fountain blossoms, where the water slowly rose in columns two hundred feet high that mushroomed out at the top, stood for five or ten seconds, and then as gracefully subsided, deluging our decks with tons of water. . . . It was strange to think, observing those flashes and the little black second hand ticking around the dial of the watch, “I have perhaps twenty-three seconds to live; when the little hand reaches that mark, then—oblivion.” . . . Sometimes from the foretop one could see the shell coming, a black speck in smoky atmosphere, growing larger. . . . I remember observing in the Admiral [Beatty] and the Flag Captain [Chatfield]—who enjoyed this performance more than I have ever seen anything enjoyed by anyone—a child-like blandness of demeanour which I had at no other time observed in either of them, but which had nothing of insanity in it. And . . . the officer in charge of the fore-transmitting station, who, after the explosion of a shell . . . followed by an outbreak of screams and cries, was heard to observe: “That means either Kingdom Come or ten days’ leave”—the inference being that the damage was so serious that it would mean the explosion of a magazine [and the instant destruction of the ship] or a long refit.

At this stage of the action,
Lion,
the principal target of German guns, was, said Young, “very nearly smothered with fire.” At 10:01 a.m., an 11-inch shell from
Seydlitz
pierced her side armor at the waterline. Water flooded in and spread to the main switchboard compartment, where it short-circuited two of the ship’s dynamos and shut down the circuits for the secondary armament and the after fire control. The ship began to list to port, but still maintained a speed of 24 knots.

Then, at 10:18 a.m.,
Lion
was staggered by a massive blow, “so violent,” said Young, “that we thought she had been torpedoed, and the mast to which the foretop was secured, rocked and waved like a tree in a storm. . . . [He and his companions in the foretop] looked at one another and prepared to alight from our small cage into whatever part of the sea destiny might send us, but nothing happened.” The shock was so great that Chatfield, the captain, also believed that “we must have been struck by torpedoes.” In fact, his ship had been hit almost simultaneously on the port side below the waterline by two heavy shells from
Seydlitz
or
Derfflinger.
One of these pierced the 6-inch main belt armor on the waterline and exploded behind it. Very quickly, all the adjacent compartments were flooded up to the main deck. In addition, a shell splinter slashed a pipe leading to a feed tank containing fresh water for the port boiler condenser, allowing salt water to pass into the system. Soon, this contamination would clog the boiler pipes and close down the port engine. The second shell exploded below the waterline against the main armored belt, not penetrating it but driving in several heavy armor plates 9 inches thick and 15 feet long. The plates were forced back two feet and more seawater entered.

Lion
could not keep up her speed and the admiral knew that she could not long continue to function as squadron flagship. Beatty was deeply chagrined. His guns had been firing for an hour and a half, but no decisive result had been achieved. It was true that the wounded
Blücher
was falling behind and that spectacular flames had been observed rising above the stern of
Seydlitz.
But Hipper’s flagship churned steadily ahead, not losing speed. Heligoland and the Bight were always closer and there was no knowledge as to the whereabouts of the High Seas Fleet. It was imperative, Beatty believed, to force the pursuit, to close in, to bring all of his heavy guns to bear. Accordingly, at 10:35 a.m., he signaled an 11-degree turn toward the enemy. At 10:45 a.m., he ordered another 11 degrees. At 10:47, increasingly anxious, he signaled, “Close the enemy as rapidly as possible consistent with keeping all guns bearing.”

Meanwhile, the German battle cruisers were concentrating on disabling the British flagship and
Lion
was under constant, heavy fire from
Seydlitz
and
Moltke.
At 10:35, she was hit, then, a minute later, hit again. At 10:41, a shell bursting against the armor of A turret caused a small fire in A turret lobby and a message was sent to the bridge that the fire had spread. “We thought our last moment had come when we got a message up the voice pipe saying that A turret magazine was on fire,” said Filson Young. “We sat waiting for the last gorgeous explosion and the eternal silence that would follow it, but it did not come and after four minutes of suspense, our sentence of death was reprieved in a welcome message that the fire was out.” By 10:52 a.m., the ship had received fourteen hits. Three thousand tons of water, now flooding the lower compartments, caused a 10 degree list to port. Rising water short-circuited her last remaining dynamo and deprived the ship of all electric power.
Lion
was left with no electric lights and no wireless radio. A few minutes later, the port engine failed and the ship’s speed immediately sagged to 15 knots. The flagship was losing her position at the head of the squadron.

But not before a command from Beatty had sealed
Blücher
’s doom.
Blücher
’s position at the rear of the German line made her fate inevitable. Every overtaking British battle cruiser fired at her before shifting to the larger German ships farther up the line. The armored cruiser’s forward 8.2-inch turret was out of action, although she continued to fire briskly from her other guns. At 10:35 a.m., two shells pierced her armored deck amidships and penetrated down through two decks to explode in an ammunition room. The inferno spread to her two port-side 8.2-inch-gun wing turrets. Both were destroyed and every man inside was killed. The concussion also damaged her engines and jammed her steering gear.
Blücher
’s speed dropped to 17 knots and she began to fall out of the German line and sheer away to port. Beatty, seeing the armored cruiser burning and listing, leaving Hipper’s squadron and erratically circling off to the north, understood what was happening. At 10:48 a.m., he ordered his rearmost battle cruiser,
Indomitable,
now finally coming into action, “Attack the enemy breaking away to northward.” If he scored no other success that day, at least this crippled ship would be destroyed.

As
Lion
began to drop astern,
Tiger,
next astern, drew abreast and began to pass her. And now
Tiger
became the primary German target. She was hit on the roof of Q turret, in the intelligence office—where eight men, including Beatty’s fleet engineer, were killed—and in the boat stowage area between the two after funnels. The ship’s boats were set on fire and the blaze produced plumes of flame that rose above the tops of the funnels. Seen from other ships in the squadron,
Tiger
looked like a roaring, open furnace. Farther away, officers on
Moltke
believed that the blaze signified
Tiger
’s final immolation and, on returning to Wilhelmshaven, they reported that she had been sunk. In fact, within fifteen minutes the fire had consumed everything that would burn and the ship’s damage control parties had the flames under control. The fighting qualities of the battle cruiser remained unaffected.