Castles of Steel (81 page)

At the Admiralty, Moore’s report seemed to imply grim news. “Some one said, ‘Moore is reporting; evidently
Lion
is knocked out,’ ” Churchill wrote later. “Across my mind there rose a purely irrelevant picture. I thought of the Memorial Services I had so often attended in Westminster Abbey: the crowd and the uniforms, the coffin with the Union Jack, the searching music, Beatty!”

[The First Lord’s vivid imagination was enormously stimulated that day: “There can be few purely mental experiences more charged with cold excitement than to follow, almost from minute to minute, the phases of a great naval battle from the silent rooms of the Admiralty,” Churchill wrote. “Out on the blue water in the fighting ships amid the stunning detonations of the cannonade, fractions of the event unfold themselves to the corporeal eye. There is the sense of action at its highest; there is the wrath of battle; there is the intense, self-effacing physical and mental toil. But in Whitehall only the clock ticks, and quiet men enter with quick steps laying slips of penciled paper before other men equally silent who draw lines and scribble calculations, and point with the finger or make brief subdued comments. Telegram succeeds telegram at a few minutes’ interval, often in the wrong sequence, frequently of dubious import; and out of these a picture, always flickering and changing, rises in the mind, and imagination strikes out around it at every stage flashes of hope or fear.”]

Beatty, very much alive on
Lion,
knew nothing of these events or forebodings. When his crippled flagship fell out of line, the admiral hoped that tem-porary repairs might quickly restore power to the malfunctioning port engine. Instead, Chatfield gave him “the horrid news” that nothing more could be done at sea and that, in fact, both engines needed to be stopped, at least for a while. To Filson Young, high in
Lion
’s foretop, the ship’s condition at that moment—dead in the water and listing to port—seemed sufficiently precarious that he and his companions climbed down the mast, leaving behind their oilskins and other cumbersome equipment that might hamper their ability to swim. The decks, Young found, were “an extraordinary spectacle, battered and littered with fragments of smashed and twisted steel, with here and there yawning gashes where heavy shells had burst or fragments penetrated. The men came up from below and swarmed over them, picking up souvenirs in the form of splinters and fragments of shells.”

Beatty, however, was unwilling to give up. As Tyrwhitt’s two light cruisers and twenty-five destroyers returned and closed in to provide protection for the wounded
Lion,
the admiral signaled the destroyer
Attack
to come alongside. His intention was to board the smaller ship, speed after his four still-effective battle cruisers and resume command. Coming down from
Lion
’s bridge, Beatty found the crew pressing “around him, cheering, and, in the enthusiasm of the moment, one of them clapped him on the back and shouted ‘Well done, David!’ ” The ship’s list to port made it easy for Beatty to step from
Lion
’s slanting deck onto the forecastle of the destroyer, with Seymour, the Flag Lieutenant, clutching an armful of flags and signal books, following behind. Then, standing on the deck of
Attack
as it backed away from
Lion,
Beatty waved. “The
Lion
was one huge grandstand of cheering men,” Seymour said, “but she looked a rather sad sight heeled over to port with a good many holes in her side.” At 11:50 a.m., “with the admiral’s flag flying proudly from her mast, the little destroyer swept off into the haze.”

Beatty’s desperate attempt to overtake and rejoin his squadron and continue the chase was doomed. A few minutes after noon, he came in sight of the four British battle cruisers, which had left behind the wrecked and burning
Blücher
and were coming back toward him. At a loss to understand what his ships were doing, he ordered
Attack
alongside
Princess Royal,
climbed aboard, and at 12:33 p.m., hoisted his flag on
Lion
’s sister. He hoped, on reaching
Princess Royal
’s bridge, to be told that at least one, perhaps two, of Hipper’s three battle cruisers had been sunk. Instead, he learned that, despite heavy damage, the German ships had all been allowed to escape. In a rage, Beatty instantly ordered his squadron to reverse course and resume the pursuit. Within a few minutes, however, he realized that this effort was pointless. Forty precious minutes had been lost, and with them probably 30,000 yards. This was irretrievable; the German ships were by now so far away that there would be no overtaking them before they reached the German coast. In addition, the Admiralty had signaled that the High Seas Fleet was coming out. Heartsick, Beatty concluded that no more could be done. At 12:45 p.m., he again reversed course and steered west to cover the retirement of the crippled
Lion.

The Battle of the Dogger Bank was over.

Beatty found
Lion,
battered and listing, making for home at 10 knots on her starboard engine, surrounded by a screen of light cruisers and destroyers. Despite the appalling appearance of her decks and superstructure, casualties had been remarkably low: two men killed and eleven wounded. The critical damage to the ship was below the waterline. Here, work parties had placed collision mats and built wooden cofferdams to stop the inflow of seawater, shored up bulkheads to prevent collapse, and started the pumps. Nevertheless, the injury to the ship’s propulsion system was grave. Saltwater contamination of the boiler-feed-water system already had caused the failure of the port engine and now was also affecting the starboard engine. All dynamos were out of action and, except for the light produced by lanterns and candles, the ship was dark. No stoves were working, but Beatty’s steward, left behind when the admiral departed the ship, managed to produce a cold lunch of champagne and foie gras sandwiches for the members of the staff. Young and his colleagues, their faces blackened by cordite smoke and their nerves jangled by hours under shellfire, sat down and cheered themselves at this unusual picnic.

Beatty, returning to them in
Princess Royal,
wrestled with a final, aggressive impulse. He might still inflict harm on the Germans by sending a mass of destroyers into the Bight to make a night attack on Hipper and the High Seas Fleet. At 2:30 p.m. he proposed to Jellicoe that he hold back one flotilla to screen
Lion
and thrust the rest toward Heligoland. Before Jellicoe could answer, however,
Lion
’s starboard engine began to fail. Her speed dropped to 8 knots and Chatfield was told by his engineering officer that there was no guarantee that the engine would keep going through the night. At three o’clock, Chatfield passed this information to Beatty, who ordered
Indomitable
to take
Lion
in tow. Beatty chose
Indomitable,
partly because her captain, Francis Kennedy, was known as an exceptional seaman, and partly because, should the battle somehow be renewed,
Indomitable
was the least potent of the remaining British battle cruisers. Towing a huge ship, listing with thousands of tons of water inside her and the bow down by six feet, was a dangerous and delicate operation; Kennedy needed all of his experience and skill. Simply passing and establishing the tow absorbed almost two hours. First, a 5½-inch wire hawser was passed between the two ships and successfully secured, but the wire parted when the strain of moving
Lion
’s 30,000 tons of steel plus the 3,000 tons of water was applied too quickly. On the next attempt, a 6½-inch hawser was passed over and this line, tautened more gradually, got the ship moving. At 5:00,
Lion
restarted her own starboard engine and, tethered to
Indomitable,
began the 300-mile voyage home. Eventually, linked in tandem, the two ships reached a speed of 10 knots.

In midafternoon, Jellicoe arrived. He knew that Hipper had fled and he doubted that Ingenohl remained at sea, but he wished to give
Lion
maximum protection. Accordingly, he dispatched Vice Admiral Bradford’s seven predreadnoughts, along with Pakenham’s armored cruisers and two light cruiser squadrons, to a blocking position twenty-five miles east of
Lion
in the direction of Heligoland. At 4:30 p.m., while
Indomitable
was attempting to establish its tow to
Lion,
the Grand Fleet appeared on the horizon. Jellicoe, understanding the dangers facing the crippled ship, immediately detached from the Grand Fleet the light cruiser
Galatea
and seventeen destroyers of the 2nd Flotilla, and the light cruiser
Caroline
and eighteen destroyers of the 4th Flotilla, adding these thirty-seven ships to
Lion
’s protective cordon. In addition to Jellicoe’s battleships and Beatty’s battle cruisers,
Lion
now had, by James Goldrick’s calculations, “an escort of thirteen light cruisers and sixty-seven destroyers, most of the Royal Navy’s front-line strength in these types.”

Jellicoe’s decision to strip away his own destroyers and assign them to screening
Lion
was the result of an urgent message from the Admiralty sent to
Iron Duke
at 3:45 p.m.: “Germans are preparing a night attack by destroyers but the two flotillas which were out with their battle cruisers last night have not enough fuel to take part. Our destroyers should protect damaged ships.” Hipper, of course, had pondered just such an attack with his own destroyers, but—as the Admiralty had predicted—he was deterred by a shortage of fuel. And the High Seas Fleet destroyers were too far away. But neither the Admiralty, Beatty, nor Jellicoe could be certain of this.

At nightfall, anxious to remove his own (now unescorted) battleships before German destroyers could appear, Jellicoe turned the Grand Fleet back for Scapa Flow. Soon after, for the same reason, Beatty accelerated northward with his three remaining battle cruisers. Behind, the wounded
Lion,
roped to
Indomitable
and surrounded by their numerous escort, made her laborious way across the North Sea. The night was anxious for those on board. Shortly after Beatty departed,
Lion
’s starboard engine broke down again and
Indomitable,
her engines now pulling more than 50,000 tons of steel and water (her own weight plus
Lion
’s) through the sea, slowed to 7 knots. If the enemy knew this, it seemed certain that he would attempt a destroyer or submarine attack, but the hours went by without interruption. At dawn,
Lion
was still over a hundred miles from the Firth of Forth. The British destroyer flotillas re-formed as a submarine screen, but still no enemy appeared. All day,
Lion
crept along, silent and helpless.

“It was a strange journey lasting all night, all the next day and through the night following . . . along the road over which we had made such an exhilarating chase in the morning,” wrote Filson Young. “The wounded
Lion
in tow of her consort was surrounded by a cloud of destroyers and from her bridge that evening I watched in the calm twilight the beautiful evolutions of these craft, weaving in and out in ever changing formation. All about us as far as we could see, the divisions were zigzagging weaving their web of safety around us.” At nightfall, Tyrwhitt, commanding the sixty destroyers of the escort, issued a blunt command: “Keep a good lookout for submarines at dawn. If seen, shoot and ram them regardless of your neighbors.” Inside the ship, the night passed without heat or electric light—an uncomfortable novelty for Young, who was not a professional sailor. “The silence of the ship was the strangest element of all,” he said.

The absence of those buzzings and whinings that come from the innumerable dynamos, ventilating fans, refrigerating machines and motors that are never silent . . . [and which now were silent] made audible other sounds: the echo of voices through the long steel alleyways, the strange gurgling of water where no water should be. Most of us had headaches; all of us had black faces, torn clothes and jangled nerves. The ship was as cold as ice, all the electric radiators by which the cabins were warmed being out of action. Blows and hammerings echoed on the decks down below where the carpenters were at work. The sick bay, into which I looked before turning in, was a mess of blood and dirt, feebly lighted by oil lamps. . . . The remaining staff managed to have quite a cheery little dinner with Captain Chatfield whose galley and pantry were in commission. But there is nothing so cold as an unwarmed steel warship in the winter seas. The only place to get warm was in bed; and I turned in after dinner and slept like the dead.

At midnight on the second night, the crippled ship arrived off May Island at the entrance to the Firth of Forth. Here, as
Lion
dismissed her escort and transferred her tow cable to tugboats, Beatty returned to his flagship and, accompanied by his friend Tyrwhitt, stood on the bridge as the ship was pulled slowly up the estuary. With her bow drawing an extra six feet, the battle cruiser was forced to anchor below the Forth bridge while harbor craft with additional pumps came alongside and pumped out water. This done, the ragged voyage resumed. “There was a thick fog that morning,” said Filson Young, “but as we approached the little island on which the central pier of the Forth bridge is founded, we could hear sounds of cheering coming faintly to us through the mist, which thinned just enough to show us the shore of the island thronged with people cheering and waving.
Lion
’s band played ‘Rule, Britannia.’ As we came under the bridge, we could see that the mighty span was lined with diminutive human figures, waving and cheering.”

At Rosyth, examination revealed that the
Lion
’s wounds were beyond that facility’s capacity to repair. Beatty and Chadwick wanted to send the ship to Plymouth where she could be dry-docked and repaired rapidly. But the Admiralty, particularly Fisher, was anxious that the extent of her damage be kept secret and directed that the battle cruiser not be brought to one of the major naval dockyards in the south. Instead, Fisher sent her to Armstrong’s shipyard at Newcastle upon Tyne even though no dry dock was available there. “It was a bad decision,” said Chatfield. “We spent nearly four months in the Tyne with the ship permanently heeled over while the bottom was repaired by means of a vast wooden cofferdam.” Lying on her starboard side in the black mud while damaged armor plates were removed and new plates attached, the once “proud” and “noble”
Lion
appeared to Young “incredibly small and mean.”