Castles of Steel (116 page)

Lieutenant W. S. Chalmers on the bridge of
Lion
remembered that “it was one of those typical North Sea summer days with a thin white mist varying in intensity and having too much humidity for the sun to break up.” As the two forces drew nearer, officers on both sides admired one another. In the gunnery control tower of
Derfflinger,
Georg von Hase, the ship’s gunnery officer, adjusted his optical instruments to maximum power: “Suddenly my periscope revealed some big ships. Black monsters. Six tall, broad-beamed giants steaming in two columns. Even at this great distance, they looked powerful, massive. . . . How menacing they appeared, magnified fifteen times. I could now recognize them as the six most modern enemy battle cruisers. Six battle cruisers were opposed to our five. It was a stimulating, majestic spectacle as the dark grey giants approached like fate itself.” To the British, their enemies revealed themselves gradually: first smoke, then masts and funnels and upper works, then stern waves, white and high; finally large, light gray hulls, pale against the gray eastern sky. On board
Tiger,
an officer remembered “how splendid the enemy battle cruisers looked . . . their last ship in particular showing up wonderfully.”

At 3:45, 16,500 yards from the enemy, Beatty swung his ships into a line of battle.
Lion,
at 26 knots, was in the lead, followed at 500-yard intervals by
Princess Royal, Queen Mary, Tiger, New Zealand,
and
Indefatigable.
The four massive battleships,
Barham, Valiant, Warspite,
and
Malaya,
coming up at maximum speed, were closing the gap, down from ten to seven miles. Beatty now was certain that his own particular adversaries were going to be brought to action. His four Cats were several knots faster than Hipper’s fastest ships; the two older British battle cruisers and the four
Queen Elizabeth
s—all capable of 25 knots—could almost match the older Germans. This day would be no repetition of the Dogger Bank, when Hipper began his race for home with a long head start. This time, ten fast British dreadnoughts, racing for a position to cut off Hipper from his base, could not fail to annihilate the five isolated Germans.

And yet, at that moment and afterward, even Beatty’s friends wondered why he took so long to begin his work. The 13.5-inch guns of his Cats outranged Hipper’s 12-inch and 11-inch guns by several thousand yards and he could have opened fire long before Hipper was able to reply. By waiting until the range had closed, Beatty denied himself a number of opening, unopposed, and possibly significant salvos. Ultimately, it was not Beatty, but his admirer Ernle Chatfield,
Lion
’s captain, who gave the order to open fire. “The enemy battle cruisers were rapidly closing us,” Chatfield wrote later. “The range receiver on the bridge showed twenty thousand yards. I was on the compass platform. . . . Beatty . . . was on his own bridge below me with his staff. . . . I wanted him to come on the compass platform and sent a mes-sage . . . [to him] that the range was closing rapidly and that we ought almost at once to be opening fire. . . . But I could get no reply; the Vice Admiral was engaged in an important message to the Commander-in-Chief. Eighteen thousand yards. I told Longhurst [
Lion
’s gunnery officer] to be ready to open fire immediately. The turrets were already loaded and trained on the leading enemy ship,
Lützow.
At 3.45 p.m., the range was sixteen thousand yards. I could wait no longer and told Longhurst to open fire. At the same time the enemy did so. The firing of the ship’s main armament of 13.5-inch guns was by double salvos of four guns each. . . . [Then] Beatty came on the compass platform.”

Meanwhile, on the admiral’s bridge of
Lützow,
Hipper stood and watched, his cigar clamped between his teeth. Commander Erich Raeder, his Chief of Staff, remembered “a moment of supreme tension as the great turrets rotated and the gray gun muzzles elevated.” In their turrets and control towers, the German range takers and gun layers watched the approaching British ships, sharp and clear against the sun. “The six ships, which had been proceeding in two columns, formed a single line ahead,” said Hase on
Derfflinger.
“Like a herd of prehistoric monsters, they closed on one another with slow movements, specter-like, irresistible.” Hase identified
Derfflinger
’s target as the
Princess Royal,
but he could not open fire without a signal from the flagship. “At last, there was a dull roar. . . . The
Lützow
is firing her first salvo and immediately the signal ‘Open fire’ is hoisted. In the same second, I shout ‘Salvos: Fire!’ and the thunder of our first salvo crashes out.”

The opposing battle cruiser squadrons, traveling on parallel southeastern courses, opened fire almost simultaneously. The Germans’ firing, coming in continuous ripples down their line, won immediate admiration from their enemies. The first salvos, bunched in groups of four projectiles, were only about 200 yards short. The next straddled
Tiger,
one shot short, two hits and one over, the two hits bursting with a tremendous crash of tearing metal. The German shooting was this good despite the fact, as Hase recorded, that his gunners had to contend with “dense masses of smoke accumulated around the muzzles of the guns, growing into clouds as high as houses which stood for a second in front of us like an impenetrable wall until they were driven away by the wind.” Eight miles away, Beatty’s ships also were driving through continuous curtains of spray and smoke that made it difficult for their gunnery personnel to see the enemy at all, let alone get his range. Because of this, for the first ten minutes every British shell sailed far over the German line, some even as much as three miles beyond. In addition, mistaken assignments added to British difficulties.
Queen Mary
and
Tiger
had missed Beatty’s signal for the distribution of fire and were shooting at the wrong ships. Correctly,
Lion
and
Princess Royal
were engaging
Lützow,
but
Queen Mary,
third in line, instead of aiming at
Derfflinger,
which was second in Hipper’s line, fired at
Seydlitz,
third in the German line. The result was that for ten minutes nobody troubled
Derfflinger,
a crack gunnery ship, which steamed happily along, her guns thundering salvos every twenty seconds as if she were at target practice. Meanwhile,
Tiger
and
New Zealand
both fired at
Moltke,
while at the rear of the two lines,
Indefatigable
and
Von der Tann,
the two oldest, smallest, and slowest of the battle cruisers, carried on a private duel, undisturbed.

The Germans, who had the advantage of better light, also possessed better range finders and gun sights. “The Zeiss lenses of our periscopes were excellent,” Hase reported. “At the longest distances, I could make out all details of the enemy ships; for instance, movements of turrets and individual guns which were lowered almost to the horizontal for loading.” Hipper’s ships found the range quickly. Four minutes after opening fire,
Lützow
hit
Lion
twice, while
Derfflinger
placed three 12-inch shells on
Princess Royal. Tiger
was hit once by
Moltke,
which then went to rapid fire and hit her again, then twice more. At the rear of the line,
Von der Tann
hammered
Indefatigable.
No one followed this more closely than Hipper on
Lützow
’s bridge. “His unruffled calm communicated itself . . . to all those on the bridge,” said one of his officers. “Work was carried on exactly as it had been in peacetime maneuvers.” Another officer reported that Hipper “could not be separated from the telescope. There was nothing which escaped him, nothing he forgot, and he personally issued orders even on matters of detail. Just before fire opened, the First Staff Officer and the Gunnery Officer were discussing the unfavorable fire distribution. Hipper intervened with the remark that this was
his
business. No one need worry about it.” Subsequently, he interrupted a conversation about the advisability of warning the squadron about the presence of British destroyers. “Hipper left his telescope for a second or two, turned around and said somewhat sharply, ‘I’ve seen everything, gentlemen, and will give the order when the signal is to be given.’ ”

War at sea was Franz Hipper’s “business,” and “unruffled calm” his natural state, but for a sixteen-year-old
Malaya
midshipman, at sea for only four months and now in his ship’s torpedo control tower, the battle was a unique and terrible experience. A turret only a few feet away began to fire, and “from this time on, my thoughts were really more like a nightmare than the thoughts of a wide-awake human being. I don’t think I felt fright, simply because what was going on around me was so unfamiliar that my brain was incapable of grasping it. Even now I can only think of the beginning of the action as through a dim haze. I remember seeing the enemy lines on the horizon with red specks coming out of them, which I tried to realize were the cause of projectiles landing around us, continually covering us with spray, but the fact refused to sink into my brain.” The midshipman could see the enemy, but, with a northwesterly wind blowing their own funnel and gun smoke back into their eyes, the range finders in the British ships were having a difficult time. To add to this, two flotillas of British destroyers, which had been astern, were racing to get into their proper place ahead of the large ships, and their funnel smoke added to the murk. Nevertheless, the 13.5-inch shells of Beatty’s Cats began to creep closer to their targets. “With each salvo fired by the enemy,” said Hase of
Derfflinger,
“I was able to see distinctly four or five shells coming through the air. They looked like elongated black spots. Gradually, they grew bigger and then—crash—they were here! They exploded on striking the water or the ship with a terrific roar. Each salvo fired by the enemy raised colossal splashes. Some of these columns of water were of a poisonous yellow-green tinge . . . these would be lyddite shells. The columns stood up for five to ten seconds before they completely collapsed.”

[Lyddite is an explosive made largely of picric acid, which is yellow.]

Eventually, at 3:55 p.m., when the range was down to 13,000 yards,
Queen Mary
scored two hits on
Seydlitz,
putting one of the waist 11-inch gun turrets permanently out of action. Four minutes later,
Lion
hit
Lützow.
Then
Derfflinger
was hit, the shell piercing a door with a glass window behind which a petty officer was standing and watching the battle. “His curiosity was severely punished,” observed Hase, “the shot severing his head clean from his body.”

At 4:00 p.m.,
Lion
suffered a blow that might have killed her. A 12-inch shell from
Lützow
hit the British flagship on its amidships Q turret between the two 13.5-inch guns, penetrated the 11-inch armor, burst inside, and blew off the front half of the armored roof. Most of the gun-house crew was killed instantly, and both legs of the turret captain, Major Francis J. W. Harvey of the Royal Marines, were crushed. Dying, but realizing the great danger to the ship, Harvey dragged himself to the voice pipe and called down to his crew below to close the magazine doors and flood the magazine. Then he sent the only walking survivor in the gun house, a marine sergeant, to the bridge to report that the turret was out of action. Worse was to happen. The shell explosion had jarred open the breech of the elevated left-side 13.5-inch gun and the already loaded powder charge in its silk bag slid back out of the gun breech and burst open on the floor. The scattered powder instantly ignited, sending a sheet of white flame rushing down the hoist toward the magazine. Seventy officers and men were incinerated, but because the magazine doors had been closed, the flash reversed itself and vomited out through the opened turret top. The ship was saved and Harvey won a posthumous Victoria Cross. A few minutes later, the dazed, blood-stained marine sergeant in burned clothing appeared on the bridge to tell the first officer he met, “Q turret has gone, sir. All the crew were killed and we have flooded the magazines.” Surprised, the officer looked back. “No further confirmation was necessary: the armored roof of Q turret had been folded back like an open sardine tin; thick yellow smoke was rolling up in clouds from the gaping hole, and the guns were cocked up in the air awkwardly. All this had happened within a few yards of where Beatty was standing and none of us on the bridge had heard the detonation.”

Five minutes later, at the rear of Beatty’s line, another British battle cruiser was badly hit and this time it brought catastrophe.
Von der Tann
had already fired forty-eight 11-inch shells at
Indefatigable.
Then she fired two more and the projectiles struck the British battle cruiser’s after superstructure. In
New Zealand,
just ahead, the navigating officer looked back at
Indefatigable
.

We were altering course to port at the time and it seemed as if her steering was damaged as she did not follow around in our wake but held on until she was about five hundred yards on our starboard quarter. While we were still looking at her, she was hit again by two shells, one on the forecastle and one on the fore turret. Both shells appeared to explode on impact. There was an interval of about thirty seconds and then the ship completely blew up. The main explosion started with sheets of flame, followed immediately by a dense dark smoke cloud which obscured the ship from view. All sorts of stuff was blown into the air, a fifty foot picket boat being blown up about two hundred feet, apparently intact though upside down.

Stricken, with smoke pouring from her shattered hull,
Indefatigable
rolled slowly onto her side, all the while driving through the water. Then the huge vessel turned completely over and plunged, taking with her 1,017 officers and men. Only two seamen survived, both shell-shocked and delirious when they were pulled from the sea hours later by a German destroyer. Curiously, because of the din of battle and because the
Indefatigable
was last in line, many in Beatty’s squadron were unaware of what had happened. From
Lion
’s bridge, an officer looked back to admire the following ships “with their huge bow waves and flashing broadsides. Astern of the rear ship was a colossal pall of grey smoke. I gazed in amazement and at the same time realised that there were only five battle cruisers in our line. Where was the sixth? The unpleasant truth dawned on me that the cloud of smoke was all that remained of the
Indefatigable.
” But the loss did not long affect the British squadron. “It happened so suddenly,” said a
New Zealand
officer, “that, almost before we realized she had gone, our attention was entirely absorbed in the fierce battle now progressing. The noise of our own salvos and the shriek of enemy shells falling over or short and throwing up great sheets of spray, left one with little time to think of anything except the work at hand.”