Castles of Steel (117 page)

As the five remaining British battle cruisers steamed on through towering waterspouts,
Lion
took five more hits, one of which destroyed her main wireless transmitter. Beatty thereafter was able to communicate by wireless with his own ships and with Jellicoe only by passing his messages by flag or searchlight to the ship astern,
Princess Royal,
which then would relay them. Needing time to deal with the problems afflicting his squadron, Beatty eased his course to starboard, opening the range to 18,000 yards. His guns fell silent.

During this short lull, the cast in the drama changed. Since the battle began, Evan-Thomas had been pressing to catch up with Beatty, signaling his battleships that he wanted them to steam at 24½ knots. He was still eight miles behind the battle cruisers, but, as the Germans had only been making 18 to 20 knots, the superdreadnoughts were coming closer. The Germans saw him coming: “Behind the [British] battle cruiser line appeared four big ships,” said Hase. “We soon identified these as of the
Queen Elizabeth
class. There had been much talk in our fleet of these ships. They carried a colossal armament of eight 15-inch guns, 28,000 tons displacement and a speed of twenty-five knots. They fired a shell more than twice as heavy as ours. They engaged at portentous ranges.” Now, at 4:00 p.m., these mammoth 15-inch guns were coming within range of the rear ships of Hipper’s line. Visibility remained a problem: “Although out in the open sea there was maximum visibility and a bright sun shone down warmly on a sea smooth as a pond, the eastern horizon was shrouded in sea mist and even with the aid of a telescope no movement was discernible,” said a
Warspite
midshipman in the spotting top. Minutes later, two ships appeared through the haze,
Von der Tann
and
Moltke,
19,000 yards away. It was enough to begin. The 5th Battle Squadron, meticulously schooled by Jellicoe at Scapa Flow, was one of the most accurate shooting squadrons in the Grand Fleet. After firing a few spotting rounds from the forward turrets of
Barham, Valiant,
and
Warspite,
Evan-Thomas turned 45 degrees to starboard, paralleling Hipper’s course. His gun turrets swung around to port, and at 4:10 p.m., after a few ranging shots, salvos of 15-inch shells thundered down on the two German battle cruisers, landing in the water so near their targets that the German hulls “quivered and reverberated.”
Von der Tann
was hit almost immediately by 1,920 pounds of steel and explosive, the shell ripping through her underwater armor, permitting 600 tons of seawater to flood into her after compartments. Then it was
Moltke
’s turn as one of these tremendous shells pierced her side armor, exploding in a coal bunker, igniting coal dust, and wrecking a 5.9-inch gun. A minute later, all four British battleships were within range.
Barham
and
Valiant
fired at
Moltke; Warspite,
adding her fire to
New Zealand
’s, shifted to
Von der Tann,
joined quickly by
Malaya.
To escape this dreadful bombardment, these two rearmost German battle cruisers began to zigzag, adversely affecting their own gunnery.

Meanwhile, despite their injuries, the British battle cruisers were shooting more accurately. At 4:14 p.m.,
Lion
landed a salvo on
Lützow;
at 4:17 p.m.,
Queen Mary
hit
Seydlitz
again, while
New Zealand
sent a 12-inch shell into
Von der Tann
’s forward turret, putting it out of action with jammed guns and a flooded magazine. Almost simultaneously, a 15-inch shell penetrated
Von der Tann
’s armored deck aft and beat through the barbette of the rear turret, putting it out of action. Even so,
Von der Tann
hit
New Zealand
again, and
Moltke
struck back at
Tiger.
Fierce though this part of the battle was, the struggle at the head of the line was even more ferocious and punishing. Here,
Derfflinger
and
Seydlitz
together were concentrating twenty 12-inch guns on
Queen Mary.
In
Derfflinger
’s gunnery-control tower, Hase’s eyes were glued on this target:

The
Queen Mary
was firing less rapidly than we were but usually full salvos. I could see the shells coming and I had to admit that they were shooting superbly. As a rule, all eight shells fell together, but they were almost always over or short. . . . But the poor
Queen Mary
was having a bad time. In addition to
Derfflinger,
she was being engaged by
Seyd-litz
. . . . At 4.26 p.m. [she] met her doom. . . . First, a vivid red flame shot up from her forepart. Then came an explosion forward, followed by a much heavier explosion amidships. Black debris flew into the air and immediately afterwards the whole ship blew up with a terrific explosion. A gigantic cloud of smoke rose, the masts collapsed inwards, the smoke cloud hid everything and rose higher and higher. Finally, nothing but a thick, black cloud of smoke remained where the ship had been. At its base, the smoke column covered only a small area, but it widened towards the summit and looked like a monstrous pine tree.

Tiger,
only 500 yards astern of
Queen Mary
and moving at 25 knots, had to maneuver abruptly to avoid a collision with the doomed ship. An officer on
Tiger
’s bridge had an intimate view of what happened: “I saw one salvo straddle her. Three shells out of four hit. . . . The next salvo straddled her and two more shells hit her. As they hit, I saw a dull red glow amidships and then the ship seemed to open out like a puffball or one of those toadstool things when one squeezes it. There was another dull red glow forwards and the whole ship seemed to collapse inwards. The funnels and masts fell into the middle, the roofs of the turrets were blown a hundred feet high.
Tiger
put her helm hard-a-starboard and we just cleared the remains of
Queen Mary
’s stern by a few feet.”

New Zealand,
following
Tiger
at high speed, saw
Tiger
turning to starboard and immediately turned sharply to port to avoid the wreck. From
New Zealand
’s conning tower an officer reported:

We disappeared in this dense mass of smoke and
Tiger
and ourselves passed one on either side of
Queen Mary.
We passed her about fifty yards on our port beam by which time the smoke had blown clear, revealing the stern . . . afloat, and the propellers still revolving, but the forward part had already gone under. . . . Men were crawling out of the top of the after turret and up the after hatchway. When we were abreast and only a hundred and fifty yards away, this after portion rolled over and, as it did so, blew up. The moist noticeable thing was the masses and masses of paper which were blown into the air. . . . Great masses of iron were thrown into the air and things were falling into the sea around us. Up in the air two hundred feet high [was] a boat which may have been a dinghy or a pinnace still intact but upside down. . . . Before we had passed, the
Queen Mary
had completely disappeared. This second disaster was rather stunning, but the only signal coming from the flagship was, “Battle cruisers alter course two points to port”—that is, towards the enemy.

[Neither the charts nor the detailed record of
Official Naval Despatches
published after Jutland include this command or alteration of course. Nevertheless, it has become a part of the Beatty legend.]

For those watching from
Lion
’s bridge, the horrors seemed to continue. Immediately after
Queen Mary
blew up,
Princess Royal
was straddled and disappeared into a forest of towering waterspouts. A
Lion
signalman stared in dismay and reported, “
Princess Royal
blown up, sir.” Beatty, turning to Chatfield, shook his head and said, “There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today.” Then
Princess Royal
reappeared intact from behind the massive curtains of smoke and spray.

Beatty, who had just lost a 26,000-ton battle cruiser and an 18,500-ton battle cruiser along with their crews totaling more than 2,000 men, realized that he needed help. Twelve British destroyers, led by Captain Barry Bingham in
Nestor,
had reached a point to deliver a torpedo attack on Hip-per’s battle cruisers, and at 4:15 p.m., Beatty signaled them to go forward. The British destroyers charged at 34 knots. From
Lützow
’s bridge, Hipper watched the attack develop; he countered by sending his light cruiser
Regensburg
with fifteen destroyers dashing out at 30 knots to meet Bingham. On both sides, the massed torpedo attacks on the enemy’s capital ships quickly dissolved into numerous individual small ship battles. Churning white foam, their signal flags whipping frantically in the wind, their 4-inch guns banging incessantly, the little ships lunged at one another in the no-man’s-land between the lines of big ships. During this melee, each side launched torpedoes, but the British battle cruisers and battleships managed to avoid all eighteen torpedoes fired by the German destroyers and, by turning away, Hipper’s big ships successfully evaded nineteen of the twenty torpedoes launched by the British. Somehow, one British torpedo found
Seydlitz,
exploding on her port side near the forward turret and tearing a hole forty feet long and thirteen feet wide in her side plating. Although she took in hundreds of tons of water and listed to port, the splendidly constructed German battle cruiser was able to maintain speed and hold her place in line. The tumult brought casualties to the destroyers on both sides:
Nestor
and
Nomad,
each hit in a boiler, halted under clouds of escaping steam, and later both sank. The German destroyers
V-27
and
V-29
were also sunk. At 4:43 p.m., Beatty terminated the encounter by recalling his destroyers. As the British destroyers turned back, their captains saw something incredible: Beatty and his battle cruisers were giving up their pursuit of Hipper to the southeast. They were reversing course and heading north. Apparently, Beatty was running away.

From his damaged flagship, Beatty now led only four battle cruisers. Exposed on
Lion
’s open compass platform, soaked by spray while shrapnel screamed around him, he seemed to his staff a heroic figure. Nevertheless, in the Run to the South, this first phase of the Battle of Jutland, Beatty was clearly the loser and Hipper the victor. The German admiral, commanding an inferior force, had sunk two British battle cruisers and two British destroyers at a cost of only two German destroyers. Hipper’s position remained difficult—he had begun with five heavy ships against ten; now it was five against eight—but the German plan was succeeding and every ninety seconds brought his unsuspecting enemies one mile closer to the sixteen dreadnoughts of the High Seas Fleet. When the battle began at 3:48 p.m., Hipper and Scheer had been forty-seven miles apart; now, an hour later, Hipper at last saw in the distance ahead of him the welcome sight of Scheer’s long, pale gray column. Glad as he was, Hipper now anticipated a larger victory. Beatty, hungry for battle, had impatiently taken Hipper’s lure and done what the German admirals had hoped he would do: charge impetuously into a German trap. Smoothly, Franz Hipper swung his battle cruisers around 180 degrees and took up his normal battle position at the head of the northbound High Seas Fleet.

During the fifty-five-minute Run to the South, Beatty’s three light cruiser squadrons—twelve vessels in all—which had been left behind by the admiral’s turn to the southeast, had been straining to catch up and take their proper scouting positions ahead of
Lion.
In the new alignment, the veteran Commodore William Goodenough understood exactly where his place should be. “Those of us who had been in action with Sir David Beatty before knew that his general principle was to get between the enemy and his base,” said Goodenough. “I therefore had no difficulty in shaping a course to the southeast.” By 4:35 p.m., Goodenough’s 2nd Light Cruiser Squadron was the most southerly of the three squadrons. Then, from his flagship
Southampton,
the commodore sighted farther to the southeast something no British seaman had ever seen before: the entire High Seas Fleet at sea, dozens of light gray ships, large and small, steaming against a background of gray water and gray sky, all belching black smoke and steaming in his direction.

“We saw ahead of us first smoke, then masts, then ships . . . sixteen battleships with destroyers around them on each bow,” Goodenough continued. “We hung on for a few moments to make sure before confirming the message. Then my commander, efficient and cool, said, ‘If you’re going to make that signal, you’d better make it now, sir. You may never make another.’ ” Goodenough saw the reasoning and at 4:38, he flashed an electrifying wireless signal to Beatty and Jellicoe: “URGENT. PRIORITY. Have sighted enemy battle fleet, bearing approximately southeast.” For Beatty, rushing toward this mighty force, and for Jellicoe pacing the bridge of
Iron Duke
fifty miles away, this signal instantly changed their perceptions of the situation. It made twaddle of the Admiralty’s noon signal that the
Friedrich der Grosse
was anchored in the Jade. Instead, Scheer was here, in the North Sea, 180 miles from the Jade and only a few miles from Beatty. The British battle cruisers, already severely punished and diminished in number by Hipper, were about to face the massed guns of the High Seas Fleet.

Hipper could be pleased: he had splendidly carried out his mission. He had led Beatty’s battered and diminished battle cruiser force, along with the lonely 5th Battle Squadron, into the arms of the High Seas Fleet. It seemed a moment of victory for the Imperial Navy, what the German people, the navy, and the kaiser had been awaiting for twenty years. But the real situation was not as Hipper imagined it. Standing on
Lützow
’s compass platform and watching Beatty’s wounded flagship lead her remaining sisters into his “trap,” the German admiral may have pictured Beatty suddenly dismayed by what was happening. In fact, Beatty had recognized the opportunity the Germans now laid before him. Here was
his
chance: with luck, he could turn and lure the High Seas Fleet into an ambush deadlier than anything the Germans might have prepared for him. Hipper and Scheer, Beatty was certain, had no idea what gigantic force lay over the northern horizon. If he turned north, seeming to flee, he could, with his superior speed, draw ahead. The 5th Battle Squadron, with its stout armor and powerful guns, would follow behind as both additional bait and a sturdy shield, keeping the Germans engaged. And then, in a little over an hour, he would rendezvous with Jellicoe. Scheer would come north confidently expecting to conduct a massacre. And a massacre would occur, but not in the form the German admirals expected.