Castles of Steel (82 page)

The Dogger Bank was a British victory, even if it was not the total annihilation of the enemy that the British navy and public so eagerly desired. The Germans had run for home,
Blücher
had been sunk,
Seydlitz
was badly damaged, and more than 1,200 German seamen had been killed, wounded, or taken prisoner.

[The best estimate of German casualties is 951 killed and 78 wounded. Most of these men were from
Blücher,
although the fire that destroyed the two after turrets of
Seydlitz
killed 153 men and wounded 33. In addition, the British rescued and took prisoner 189 unwounded and 45 wounded men from
Blücher.

British casualties totaled 15 killed and 80 wounded.
Lion,
despite the pounding she received, suffered only 2 men killed and 11 wounded, almost all by a shell that had burst in the confined space of the A turret lobby.
Tiger
lost 2 men killed along with 9 wounded. The destroyer
Meteor
had 4 dead and 2 wounded.]

On the British side,
Lion
had been severely punished, but only one other battle cruiser,
Tiger,
had been struck by heavy shells.
Princess Royal
and
New Zealand
had not been touched, and
Indomitable
was hit once by an 8.2-inch shell from
Blücher.
The damaged destroyer
Meteor
was towed to safety in the Humber, and no other British destroyer or light cruiser had been hit. There was immense satisfaction in the outstanding engineering performance of the new battle cruisers, which had surpassed their design speeds without the faltering of a single turbine. Ironically, in view of what was to happen at Jutland, the British were also pleased by their ships’ seeming ability to withstand punishment.

The victory provided an enormous lift to British civilian morale, depressed over the long casualty lists from the Western Front. On the twenty-fifth, even as
Lion
was under tow, Beatty received a signal from the king: “I most heartily congratulate you, the officers and ships’ companies of squadrons on your splendid success of yesterday. George, R. I.” The British press trumpeted the German “rout” and the avenging of the previous month’s Scarborough and Hartlepool bombardments. “It will be some time before they go baby-killing again,” chortled
The Globe.
The victory also rebutted the German claim that the British navy was skulking in port, afraid to contest the mastery of the North Sea. “After yesterday’s action,” declared the
Pall Mall Gazette,
“it will not be easy for the loud-mouthed boasters of Berlin to keep up the pretence that the British Fleet is hiding itself in terror.” A
Daily Mail
photograph of the capsized
Blücher
—the huge ship lying on her side and her crew scrambling down into the water—gave satisfaction to millions.

The navy knew better. “For the second time, when already in the jaws of destruction, the German Battle Cruiser Squadron escaped,” wrote Winston Churchill. “The disappointment of that day is more than I can bear to think of,” Beatty wrote to Keyes. “Everybody thinks it was a great success, when in reality it was a terrible failure. I had made up my mind that we were going to get four, the lot, and
four
we ought to have got.” Moore became the primary target of criticism. Years later, Keyes wrote, “I think the spectacle of Moore & Co. yapping around the poor tortured
Blücher
with beaten ships in sight still to be sunk is one of the most distressing episodes of the war.” Moore defended himself by saying that he had obeyed explicit orders flying from
Lion
’s signal halyards: “Attack the enemy rear bearing northeast”—the bearing of the
Blücher.
Because this confusing signal had, indeed, come from his flagship, Beatty did not ask for Moore’s relief. He knew that Seymour had made an unfortunate choice in selecting and hoisting the
Lion
’s signal flags and that Moore had correctly read their literal meaning as flown. Nor did Beatty blame Seymour; he knew that, to some extent, the faultiness of the signal resulted from the shooting away of all but two of
Lion
’s halyards. “I am against all charges,” he wrote to Jellicoe. “It is upsetting and inclined to destroy confidence.” But, “frankly, between you and me,” he admitted to the Commander-in-Chief, “he [Moore] is not of the right sort of temperament for a battle cruiser squadron. . . . Moore had a chance which most fellows would have given the eyes in their head for and did nothing. . . . It is inconceivable that anybody should have thought it necessary for four battle cruisers, three of them untouched, to have turned on the
Blücher
which was obviously a defeated ship and couldn’t steam, while three others, also badly hammered, should have been allowed to escape.”

Fisher, chronically unable to moderate opinions or soften blows, roared that Moore’s conduct had been “despicable!” “No signals (often unintentionally ambiguous in the heat of action) can ever justify the abandonment of a certain victory such as offered itself here when the
Derfflinger
and the
Seydlitz
. . . were blazing at the end of the action . . . severely damaged.” Furiously, the First Sea Lord minuted Moore’s report: “The Admiralty require to know WHY the
Derfflinger
and the
Seydlitz,
both heavily on fire and in a badly damaged condition, were allowed to escape, when, as Admiral Moore states in his letter, gun range with the leading ships of the Enemy could have been maintained by
Tiger
and
Princess Royal
at all events.” Jellicoe put it more gently but agreed that “if, as has since been stated, two of the enemy battle cruisers were very seriously damaged and the fact was apparent at the time, there is no doubt whatever that the Rear Admiral [Moore] should have continued the action.” Moore was spared court-martial, but bitterness at his failure to annihilate a crippled, fleeing enemy lifted only gradually. Early in February, Beatty wrote to Jellicoe that Churchill “wanted to have the blood of somebody” and that the First Lord and Fisher had settled on Moore. Near the end of February, Moore was quietly removed from the Grand Fleet and assigned to command a cruiser squadron in the Canary Islands where the possibility of any appearance by German surface ships was remote.

Fisher’s fiercest wrath fell on Henry Pelly of
Tiger,
whom he labeled a “poltroon.” It was “inexcusable that Captain Pelly should have left a ship of the enemy [
Moltke
] unfired at and so permitt[ed] her to fire unmolested at
Lion.
” Why, the First Sea Lord roared, did Pelly, whose ship was in the lead once the flagship had staggered out of line, not take the initiative and, in the absence of a countermanding order from Moore, continue to pursue the German battle cruisers? Pelly, Fisher said, “was a long way ahead, he ought to have gone on had he the slightest Nelsonic temperament in him, regardless of signals. Like Nelson at Copenhagen and St. Vincent! In war the first principle is to disobey orders.
Any fool can obey orders!
” Beatty made excuses for Pelly. “Pelly did very badly, first in not carrying out the orders to engage his opposite number which had disastrous results [the crippling of the
Lion
],” he conceded to Jellicoe. But Beatty also recalled that Pelly was commanding a new ship and that he had been given a mixed ship’s company, which included a large number of apprehended deserters. It had been an uphill task, Beatty realized, for her captain to pull them together in wartime. As for Pelly himself, Beatty said, he “had done very well up to then, he had difficulties to contend with and I don’t think he is likely to do the same again. But he is a little bit of the nervous, excited type.” Nevertheless, Jellicoe could find no excuse for Pelly’s failure to comply with Beatty’s order to engage opposite numbers. “Special emphasis is laid in Grand Fleet Orders on the fact that no ship of the enemy should be left unfired at, and a consideration of this rule should have led to the
Tiger
engaging No. 2 in line.” Pelly survived because Churchill preferred to close the book on the matter. “The future and the present claim all our attention” was the First Lord’s verdict. Despite his ship’s continued poor shooting, Pelly was to captain
Tiger
at Jutland.

Fisher was especially furious at the failure to annihilate, as “the rendezvous was given in both cases [the Scarborough Raid and the Dogger Bank battle], and the enemy appeared exactly on the spot [identified by Room 40].” Privately, he questioned Beatty’s turn away from the supposed submarine and the admiral’s error in not explaining his action either to others on
Lion
’s bridge or to other ships in the squadron. The only extenuation came years later from Beatty’s biographer and fellow admiral W. S. Chalmers, who pointed out that the admiral’s sighting of a periscope and his decision to turn were made “in a split second from the sloping bridge of a listing ship which had borne the brunt of the battle.”

On Wednesday night, January 27, Beatty, still at Rosyth, received a letter from Fisher “urgently inquiring how it was that the action had been broken off.” That same night, as the battle cruisers were preparing to go back to sea, Beatty wrote a quick note to the First Sea Lord, instructing Filson Young, who knew Fisher, to carry it personally to London. Young arrived in London at 6:00 on the evening of January 29 and went immediately to the Admiralty. “I was taken to Lord Fisher at his room. . . . He had aged a great deal in three months, and the yellow face looked very old and worn, but grim as ever. . . . He shook hands . . . and turning his hard, wise old eye on me, he said, ‘Well, tell me about it. How was it they got away? What’s the explanation? Why didn’t you get the lot? And the
Derfflinger
—I counted on her being sunk, and we hear that she got back practically undamaged. I don’t understand it.’ ” He criticized Beatty’s 90-degree turn to port. “Submarines?” said Fisher. “There weren’t any; we knew the position of every German submarine in the North Sea; and there wasn’t a mine within fifty miles.” Two days later, Fisher told Beatty himself the same thing: “We know from themselves [that is, from Room 40 intercepts] exactly where they [the U-boats] were—hours off you.” Nevertheless, when all the action reports were in, Beatty retained the full confidence of Churchill, Fisher, and Jellicoe. On the last day of the month, Fisher followed his first “very hurried line” to Beatty with warmer words: “I’ve quite made up my mind. Your conduct was glorious.
Beatty beatus!
”

[Blessed be Beatty.]

Beatty himself remained bitterly disappointed—the annihilating, Nelsonic victory had shriveled, in Ralph Seymour’s words, to “an indecisive fight in our favor”—but the admiral’s prestige in the navy soared. When Churchill visited
Lion
ten days after the battle, he found Beatty’s senior officers enthusiastic. “Well do I remember,” Churchill wrote, “how, as I was leaving the ship, the usually imperturbable Pakenham caught me by the sleeve, ‘First Lord, I wish to speak to you in private,’ and the intense conviction in his voice as he said, ‘Nelson has come again.’ ”

The Dogger Bank was the first sea battle between dreadnoughts whose high speed and heavy gun power dominated the action. Both the British and German Battle Cruiser Squadrons were accompanied by flocks of light cruisers and destroyers, but except in the opening moments near dawn and, at the end, in delivering the death strokes to
Blücher,
they played little part in the fighting. Neither submarines nor mines were involved, although fear of their presence affected British tactics. The preponderance of heavy gun power favored the British: Beatty’s five battle cruisers carried twenty-four 13.5-inch and sixteen 12-inch guns to Hipper’s eight 12-inch and twenty 11-inch guns. During the battle, the five British battle cruisers fired a total of 1,150 13.5-inch and 12-inch shells. The Germans fired 976 12-inch and 11-inch shells.
Lion
was hit by sixteen heavy shells from the German battle cruisers and one 8.2-inch shell from
Blücher.
Six heavy shell hits were recorded on
Tiger
and none on any of the other British ships except one 8.2-inch hit on
Indomitable
by
Blücher.
Seydlitz
was hit by three heavy British shells—two from
Lion
(one of these nearly destroyed her) and one from
Tiger.
Derfflinger
also was hit three times, once each by
Lion, Tiger,
and
Princess Royal.
Obviously, accuracy on both sides was poor: 3½ percent of the shells fired by the Ger-man battle cruisers hit a target while on the British side the percentage achieved by the three Cats firing at the three German battle cruisers was below 2 percent.

[A number of shells fired by the Cats were aimed at
Blücher,
while
New Zealand
and
Indomitable
fired only at
Blücher.]

The dismal gunnery figures on both sides do not take into account the circumstances of the battle: high speed, long range, smoke, and the fact that no one on either side had ever fought this kind of battle before. Neverthe-less,
Lion
was hit sixteen times and no German ship more than four times. Discussion of comparative gunnery began on board
Lion
even as the ship was being towed home. “My impression,” said Filson Young, “was that the German gunfire was better than ours initially, and they got on the target sooner. . . . To anyone sitting, as I was, on the target surrounded by the enemy’s shells, his shooting appeared to be painfully accurate; and, indeed, towards the end of the action, when two and possibly three ships were concentrating on
Lion,
she was very nearly smothered by their fire.” Young believed that one cause of poor shooting was that “we had no director firing [“a device by which all the guns can be aimed and fired simultaneously and accurately from one central position, generally on the foremast well above the smoke,” according to Young’s footnote definition] in any ship except
Tiger.
” Yet
Tiger,
using the new system, had scored only three hits and
Lion,
which lacked it, had scored four. The result was an erosion of confidence among British naval officers in their equipment, training, and tactics. “Every one of them,” said Young, “had been brought up on the theory of the big gun, the first blow, etc. We had the biggest guns and we got in the first blows, but none of the results that . . . [we] had been taught to believe as gospel had happened. . . . We had gone on hitting, and hitting, and hitting—and three of their four ships had got home. Why?”