Castles of Steel (118 page)

Goodenough had not immediately turned after spotting and reporting the presence of the High Seas Fleet. Instead, wanting to report accurately the number, course, and speed of the enemy ships, he and his four light cruisers continued at 25 knots toward Scheer until they were only 13,000 yards away from the German battleships. Oddly, as the four light cruisers came closer, the Germans did not open fire. The reason was not visibility; Scheer himself later wrote that at 4:30 p.m., “the weather was extremely clear, the sky cloudless, a light breeze and a calm sea.” Goodenough was spared because the German battleships could see the four cruisers only bow-on, a view from which one cruiser looks much like another and these ships, the Germans thought, could easily be German. Finally, at 4:48 p.m., satisfied with what he had seen, Goodenough wirelessed another URGENT PRIORITY signal to Beatty and Jellicoe: “Course of enemy’s battle fleet is north, single line-ahead. Composition of van is
Kaiser
class. . . . Destroyers on both wings and ahead. Enemy’s battle cruisers joining battle fleet from the north.” Then, duty performed, Goodenough turned his own ships away, displaying their unmistakably British four-funneled profiles. Ten German battleships immediately opened fire. Twisting and turning between the waterspouts, the British cruisers fled. One officer estimated that forty large shells fell within seventy-five yards of
Southampton:
“I can truthfully say that I thought that each moment would be our last. . . . We seemed to bear a charmed life. . . . How we escaped amazes everyone from the Commodore downwards.” In fact, the miracle was the commodore’s doing. Asked later how he managed to avoid being hit, Goodenough replied, “Simply by steering straight for the splashes of the last enemy salvo!”—his thought being that, with the German gunners making constant corrections, the next salvo was unlikely to land in the same place as the one just before.

Beatty, after receiving Goodenough’s first signal reporting the presence of the High Seas Fleet, held on to the southeast for two minutes in order to see for himself the masts of the German battleships twelve miles away. Then at 4:40 p.m., a flag hoist ran up
Lion
’s signal halyard: “Alter course in succession 16 points [180 degrees] to starboard.” The flags were hauled down, the flagship’s helm went over, and
Lion,
followed in turn by
Princess Royal, Tiger,
and
New Zealand,
drew a massive curve on the surface of the sea, straightening out on a reverse course, now to the northwest. By turning in succession, each on the same point, Beatty risked bringing all four of his ships one by one under the concentrated fire of the oncoming enemy battle fleet. All managed without harm, although
New Zealand,
at the tail of Beatty’s line, did so by intelligently turning ahead of time on her own, before the German battleships came within range. Beatty’s turrets trained around from port to starboard, and a few minutes later the duel with Hipper resumed on an opposite course, giving this phase of the battle the name of the Run to the North. Beatty was fortunate that, despite the momentum of his charge to the south, the two-minute delay to see for himself, and then his choice of a turn in succession, his squadron had pivoted just beyond the range of the leading battleships of the High Seas Fleet, Admiral Paul Behncke’s elite
König
s. Still the German dreadnoughts, now only 20,000 yards away, were steaming hard, their guns at maximum elevation, awaiting the order to fire.

When, at 4:40 p.m.,
Lion
hoisted the flag signal for a turn to the north, Evan-Thomas on
Barham,
seven miles astern of the flagship and already firing at the rear ships in Hipper’s line, missed or was once again unable to read Beatty’s flags. Neither
Lion
nor
Tiger
passed the signal to
Barham
by searchlight, so the four superdreadnoughts continued steaming on course southeast, straight toward Scheer. The error or difficulty on
Barham
’s bridge was compounded by an error on
Lion
’s. Once the signal flag commanding a turn was hauled down at 4:41 p.m. and
Lion
actually began to turn, no one on the flagship’s bridge noticed that the 5th Battle Squadron continued racing south. It was not until 4:48, as the southbound battleships actually passed the northbound battle cruisers a mile and a half apart on an opposite course—and with Beatty’s squadron traveling at 26 knots and Evan-Thomas’s at 24, they charged by each other at a combined closing speed of 60 miles an hour—that Beatty saw and understood what had happened and repeated his turn-in-succession signal—again by flag hoist—to Evan-Thomas. Then the
Lion
’s signal staff—Ralph Seymour was the officer responsible—made another, more damaging error. The flags dictating that the 5th Battle Squadron turn were hoisted at 4:48. Because Seymour forgot or was distracted, they were not hauled down until 4:54. During this six minutes while Evan-Thomas awaited his superior’s command, his four dreadnoughts continued steaming toward the High Seas Fleet. By the time Seymour finally hauled down the flags, Evan-Thomas was 4,000 yards closer to Scheer, within gun range of the leading dreadnoughts of the German battle line.
Warspite
’s executive officer described the sequence:

I suddenly saw our battle cruisers coming close by about half a mile away, going in the opposite direction and I realized that they had turned back. I noticed that
Queen Mary
and
Indefatigable
were . . . [missing] but never realized that they had been sunk. . . . “X” turret of
Lion
was askew and trained towards us [that is, away from the enemy], the guns at full elevation, several hits showing on her port side. . . . Then we turned . . . [180 degrees] and trained the turret around full speed. Very soon after the turn, I saw on the starboard quarter the whole of the High Seas Fleet—masts, funnels and an endless ripple of orange flashes all down the line. . . . I felt one or two very heavy shakes but it never occurred to me that we were being hit. . . . I distinctly saw two of our salvos hit the leading German battleship. Sheets of yellow flame went right over her masts and she looked red fore and aft like a burning haystack. I know we hit her hard.

When Beatty’s command to turn had finally been given and received, Evan-Thomas in
Barham
led his dreadnoughts around, one after the other. As each turned on the same spot, wheeling in a semicircle 1,000 yards from a fixed point in the water, the onrushing Germans brought a concentrated fire on the British battleships.
Barham
was hit;
Valiant
was luckier and got around without being touched;
Warspite
was hit three times; and
Malaya,
the rear ship, received the concentrated fire of many German battleships. “The turning point was a very hot corner,” said one of her turret officers. “It is doubtful if we, the last ship of the line, could have got through without a severe hammering if the captain had not used his initiative and turned the ship early.”

After their turn to the north, Beatty’s battle cruisers also continued to suffer. Soon after the turn,
Lion
and
Tiger
were hit by
Lützow
and
Seydlitz,
and Beatty steered to port to put off the enemy range finders.
Lion
found herself passing through the wide patch of oil and floating wreckage where
Queen Mary
had gone down forty minutes earlier; it seemed possible that before long she might join her sister on the bottom. Already she had been hit by thirteen heavy shells; now came two more. Nor was
Lion
’s wounding unique:
Tiger
had been hit seventeen times,
Princess Royal
almost as many. Of Beatty’s four remaining battle cruisers, only
New Zealand
had escaped relatively unharmed. On the damaged battle cruisers, fires were burning, but because shell fragments had slashed fire hoses, it was difficult to bring water to the flames. Wounded men lay in the twisted wreckage until stretcher parties could pry them free and carry them to dressing stations. There, doctors sawed and stitched. In
Princess Royal,
a surgeon amputating a foot noted that the dim light of oil lanterns made “the securing of arteries particularly difficult.” Nevertheless, in all four ships, the engines remained undamaged and, taking advantage of their superior speed, Beatty steered northwest at 24 knots, leaving the battle behind. Once out of range, he reduced speed and for half an hour, during which his battered ships did not fire a shot, his crews attempted to control fires, clear away wreckage, restore turrets, and transform their vessels back into warships. On
Princess Royal,
a midshipman recorded that at 5:15 there was “a lull in the action and people were going out to stretch their legs and get a little fresh air. At 5.25, the flagship signaled ‘Prepare to renew the action’ and at 5.43 we opened fire again.” On one battle cruiser, the resumption of the battle caught the ship’s paymaster by surprise. He had come on deck for some fresh air and was standing on the forward superstructure when P turret suddenly opened fire. The blast stripped off his trousers.

Meanwhile, the battle cruisers’ withdrawal and time-out had left the 5th Battle Squadron to fight alone against Hipper’s five battle cruisers and the four powerful dreadnoughts leading Scheer’s 3rd Battle Squadron. This hour—from a few minutes before five o’clock, when the
Queen Elizabeth
s wheeled north three miles in Beatty’s wake, until just after six, when they joined the Grand Fleet battle line—was their time of glory. “When we turned,” said a turret officer on
Malaya,
“I saw our battle cruisers proceeding north at full speed, already seven or eight thousand yards ahead of us. I then realized that just the four of us of the 5th Battle Squadron would have to entertain the High Seas Fleet—four against perhaps twenty.” Steaming at 25 knots, Evan-Thomas distributed the fire of his four ships:
Barham
and
Valiant
were to deal with the five German battle cruisers up ahead, while
Warspite
and
Malaya
took on the four
König
s coming up behind. At the head of the German battle line, Behncke and his four formidable
König
s—
König, Grosser Kurfürst, Kronprinz Wilhelm,
and
Markgraf
—pressed forward to the limit of their stokers’ ability to shovel coal. All the while, their total of forty 12-inch guns lashed out.
Barham
was the first to be struck; then she was hit again; then four more times. A heavy shell wrecked her auxiliary wireless office and inflicted casualties on both wireless and medical personnel. One shell burst caused a fire in a 6-inch gun casement; a junior officer fought the fire “until swelling from burns closed his eyes.” A shell fragment all but severed the leg of the ship’s assistant navigator; his midshipman “did his best to tie a tourniquet, but he was much handicapped owing to the lights going out. The navigator died quickly from loss of blood.” “Six, eight, nine salvos a minute” were falling around
Malaya;
between 5:20 and 5:35 p.m., the battleship was hit five times. One 12-inch shell peeled back the roof of her X turret, but inside the gun crews continued to work; another heavy shell pierced the starboard side below the waterline, admitting enough water to give the ship a starboard list. Within half an hour,
Malaya
suffered 100 casualties. “Everything was dark chaos,” said one of the officers of a 6-inch gun battery. “Most of the wounded had been taken away, but several of the killed were still there . . . [and] the smell of burnt human flesh remained in the ship for weeks giving everybody a sickly nauseous feeling.” In
Warspite,
the chief surgeon ordered burns to be dressed with pre-prepared picric acid gauze. “The effect was agonizing—picric acid only aggravated the burns—and the patients tore off the bandages.” Thereafter, the victims lay in “restless agony . . . injections of morphine seemed to have very little effect on them.” About this time, a 12-inch shell penetrated into the storage place for fresh meat and hit the armored grating over B boiler room. “On its way through the beef screen, it had carried a whole sheep with it which was wedged into the gratings. At first I thought it was a human casualty,” said the ship’s executive officer, moving around to inspect damage. A few compartments away, he found real human casualties: “three stokers dead, one having his head blown off and another badly smashed to pieces. Rather a horrible sight, but the burnt ones were far worse.”

The human carnage and physical damage to the ships were bad enough, but for Evan-Thomas, his captains, and the crews themselves, worse was possible. The entire High Seas Fleet—Hipper’s five battle cruisers and light cruisers, Scheer’s sixteen dreadnoughts, six predreadnoughts, and dozens of destroyers—was rushing up behind them and if, at any moment during their 180-degree turn or their subsequent passage north, any one of the four British superdreadnoughts had been disabled, she must have shared the fate of
Blücher
at the Dogger Bank. Only one unlucky shell would have been required. It would not have been necessary to blow up the ship in a single cataclysm, as had happened with
Indefatigable
and
Queen Mary.
A more modest hit damaging the propulsion machinery or steering gear would have sufficed. And then the wounded ship would have been gobbled up. Moreover, should Evan-Thomas have decided at that point not to abandon the victim but instead to turn his squadron back to help, then perhaps all four of his ships would have been lost—although a German dreadnought or two might have been taken to the bottom with them. In any case, Scheer would have won the victory he desired, and a powerful, isolated squadron of the Grand Fleet would have been destroyed.

Hit after hit crashed into the four British battleships, but all the while, their thirty-two 15-inch guns roared back. During the Run to the North, Evan-Thomas’s four dreadnoughts hit three of Hipper’s battle cruisers and three of Behncke’s battleships with 1,900-pound shells.
Barham
and
Valiant
scored hits on
Seydlitz, Lützow,
and
Derfflinger,
while
Warspite
and
Malaya
fired at
König, Grosser Kurfürst,
and
Markgraf.
Hits on
Lützow
’s main and reserve wireless stations severed these communication links to the other ships in Hipper’s squadron. But, again, it was
Seydlitz
that suffered most. She was stripped of much of her fighting power, battered, listing to port, down by the bow from her torpedo wound; the question now was whether she could survive.