Castles of Steel (127 page)

A second time, Scheer’s battle fleet had swung off course, and once again the stern command
“Durchhalten!”
went out from the flagship. As a result, the German line again rammed through the 4th Flotilla, or what remained of it. Again, the British destroyers used their 4-inch guns against the searchlights and superstructures of
Westfalen, Rheinland, Posen, Oldenburg,
and
Helgoland.
Every man on
Oldenburg
’s bridge was hit. Captain Hofner, bleeding heavily, staggered forward and took the wheel himself until help came.

Back on course, the ships in the German van hoped that the torpedo danger was over. It was not.
Ardent
and
Fortune,
separated from their 4th Flotilla consorts in the first attack, were searching for them. Now,
Ardent
’s captain said, they found “four big ships on a nearly parallel, but slightly converging course. They challenged several times and their challenge was not an English one. They then switched on their searchlights, picked up
Fortune
and opened fire. . . .
Fortune
was hard hit. . . . We caught a last glimpse of
Fortune
on fire and sinking but fighting still.” Separated again, searching again,
Ardent
discovered “a big ship steaming on exactly the opposite course to us. I attacked at once and from a very close range our remaining torpedoes were fired, but before I could judge the effect, the enemy switched on searchlights and found us. . . . I then became aware that
Ardent
was taking on a division of German battleships. . . . Our guns were useless against such adversaries, our torpedoes were fired; we could do no more but wait in the full glare of the blinding searchlight for the shells. . . . Shell after shell hit us and our speed diminished and then stopped . . . all the lights went out. I could feel the ship was sinking.” Of
Ardent
’s company, only two men, one her captain, survived. This marked the end of the 4th Flotilla’s part in the battle. The twelve destroyers had done their best; now four were sunk or sinking, three others were heavily damaged, and the rest were scattered. In effect, the flotilla had ceased to exist.

In the harsh arithmetic of war, the loss of two light cruisers to one side and four destroyers to the other meant little. For the Germans, it was the price of success. Scheer intended to ram his battle fleet through to Horns Reef at any cost and if this could be done in exchange for two light cruisers, the bargain was an excellent one. For the British, the destruction of a destroyer flotilla might have been acceptable had its sacrifice been made useful by someone telling the Commander-in-Chief whom the destroyers were fighting. But this did not happen. Extraordinarily, as the dark horizon was lit by gun flashes and rent by the noise of the cannonade, these battles were witnessed from many British ships, but no one reported the presence of German battleships to Jellicoe. For this failure, it is easier to forgive the destroyer captains. Desperately attempting to handle their small ships so as to keep formation, avoid shellfire, and aim and launch torpedoes, they had little time to compose and send messages. But the engaged destroyers were not the only witnesses. Between 11:15 p.m. and 1:15 a.m., others could have told the Commander-in-Chief that the High Seas Fleet was crossing in his wake. Seven battleships in the rear of the British battle line were only 6,000 yards from these engagements, and three of those battleships were the most powerful dreadnoughts in the British navy.

The situation was this: by 10:00 p.m.,
Marlborough,
wounded by a torpedo and no longer able to maintain the 17-knot fleet speed ordered by Jellicoe, had gradually slipped astern of the main body of the Grand Fleet. The other three dreadnoughts of her division,
Revenge, Hercules,
and
Agincourt,
remained behind with
Marlborough,
as did the three
Queen Elizabeth
s of the 5th Battle Squadron, assigned to keep station on
Marlborough.
All of these ships were within point-blank range of Scheer’s battleships when they passed only three miles astern. No one had a better view than
Malaya,
the last ship in the British battle line, which saw and identified the German dreadnought
Westfalen.
According to
Malaya
’s captain: “At 11.40, [we] observed what appeared to be an attack by our destroyers on some big enemy ships steering the same way as ours. . . . The leading ship of the enemy . . . had two masts, two funnels and a conspicuous crane—apparently
Westfalen
class.” All of
Malaya
’s guns trained on the enemy battleship, and the gunnery officer asked permission to open fire. Captain Algernon Boyle refused. Like Arbuthnot during the Scarborough Raid, Boyle argued that what he could see must also be visible to the flagship
Barham,
two ships ahead, and that he must await orders to fire from his rear admiral, Evan-Thomas. A few minutes later, Boyle changed his mind and reported what he had seen to Evan-Thomas. But not to
Iron Duke;
Boyle believed that a captain should respect the chain of command and pass his observations to his own rear admiral, not directly to the Commander-in-Chief.

In fact,
Barham
already had witnessed “constant attacks by torpedo craft on ships first to the west and then to the north.” So had
Valiant,
the third of the three
Queen Elizabeth
s
:
“At 11.35 p.m., we observed heavy firing on our starboard quarter. . . . They appeared to be two German cruisers with at least two funnels and a crane amidships [the profile of German dreadnoughts] steering eastward at high speed. These cruisers then evidently sighted an unknown small number of British ships ahead of them, possibly a light cruiser and a few destroyers. . . . Both Germans switched on top searchlights and opened a very rapid and extraordinarily accurate fire on our light cruiser. She replied but was soon in flames fore and aft.” Evan-Thomas, watching these attacks from
Barham
’s bridge, had seen heavy firing behind him, “which I surmised to be attacks by enemy destroyers on our light cruisers and destroyers. . . . At 10.39, heavy firing was observed . . . and destroyers appeared to be attacking the cruisers. At 11.35 p.m., a further attack was seen . . . right astern.” Despite these observations, Evan-Thomas, who had twenty-four 15-inch guns at his command, did nothing. Years later,
Barham
’s captain attempted to justify his admiral’s behavior. He doubted “whether the various observations of enemy ships made by ships of our battle fleet ought to have been reported to the Commander-in-Chief. I was on the bridge all night with my admiral and we came to the conclusion that the situation was known to the C.-in-C. and that the attacks were according to plan. A stream of wireless reports from ships in company with the Commander-in-Chief seemed superfluous and uncalled-for. The unnecessary use of wireless was severely discouraged as being likely to disclose our position to the enemy. . . . This may have been an error in judgement but cannot be termed ‘amazing neglect.’ ”

Still another British destroyer,
Turbulent,
was sunk—blown to pieces by twenty-nine 5.9-inch shells from the dreadnought
Westfalen
—during the High Sea Fleet’s continuing charge to the southeast. In all, two German light cruisers and five British destroyers were sunk during this phase of the battle, but not all of these ships went down suddenly; in most cases, the crews were taken off first by friendly vessels. This was not the case with two other warships, both large, one British and one German. Near the end of this dreadful night, two sudden, cataclysmic explosions obliterated these vessels, each with its entire crew of almost a thousand men. The first of these disasters occurred about midnight, during an intermission in the dreadnought-versus-destroyer battles. In the darkness, a solitary, large, four-funneled ship, the 13,500-ton British armored cruiser
Black Prince,
blundered smack into the center of Scheer’s battle line. After the turmoil at Windy Corner near 6:00 p.m. when the 1st Cruiser Squadron was scattered and Sir Robert Arbuthnot had led two of his four ships,
Defence
and
Warrior,
into a cataract of gunfire,
Black Prince
had turned northwest, traveled too far, and lost contact. Ever since, she had steamed south through the mist, hoping to find the British fleet. At last, near midnight, she discovered a group of dreadnoughts; but they were not English.
Thüringen, Ostfriesland,
and
Friedrich der Grosse
saw and recognized her, and their gunners prepared.
Black Prince
kept coming and, less than a mile away, flashed the British recognition signal. The reply was a dazzle of searchlights and a storm of shells at point-blank range.
Black Prince
’s two central funnels were shot away, and lurid red and yellow flames rose 100 feet in the air. But her engines still worked and, roaring like a furnace, she staggered back along the length of the German line, so close, said Scheer, watching from the bridge of
Friedrich der Grosse,
“that the crew could be seen rushing backwards and forwards on the burning deck.” Finally, the fire reached her magazines. She blew up with an incandescent white light and a gigantic thunderclap of noise; “a grand but terrible sight,” said Scheer. Her entire crew perished, 900 men.

As dawn was breaking on the morning of June 1, this British disaster was matched by one equally dreadful for the German navy. By 1:45 a.m., Scheer’s battleships, still plowing relentlessly to the southeast, had worked their way around to the port quarter of the British fleet and now were crossing the path of another—and as it happened, the last—group of British destroyers between themselves and Horns Reef, twenty-eight miles away. In the early gray light, Captain Anselan Stirling of the destroyer
Faulknor,
leading the 12th Flotilla, sighted a shadowy line of large, dark ships on his starboard beam. They were battleships, the rear of the German battle line, where, in the confusion and darkness, Behncke’s battered superdreadnoughts had intermingled with Mauve’s fragile predreadnoughts. When one of these ships flashed the letter “K” in Morse code—the wrong recognition signal—Stirling knew that they were German. He did not make the same mistake other British captains had made that night. He wirelessed Jellicoe. At 1:56 a.m.,
Faulknor
signaled, “URGENT. PRIORITY. Enemy’s battle fleet steering southeast. . . . My position ten miles astern of 1st Battle Squadron.” Not only did Stirling send this message; he sent it three times: at 1:56, 2:08, and 2:13 a.m. Unfortunately,
Iron Duke
received none of these signals, perhaps because of efficient German jamming. But informing the Commander-in-Chief was only half of Stirling’s duty, and he initiated the other half as well, signaling, “URGENT. I am attacking.” Conditions at that hour were nearly ideal for destroyer torpedo attack: it was too light for enemy searchlights to be useful, but still sufficiently dark to make it difficult to aim at fast-moving targets. At 2:02, Stirling fired his first torpedo; two minutes later, the second; within a few minutes, he and his six destroyers had fired seventeen torpedoes at ranges of 2,000 to 3,000 yards. The torpedoes missed the big, important targets—
König, Grosser Kurfürst, Kronprinz,
and
Markgraf
—but a violent explosion shook the old predreadnought
Pommern.
“Amidships on the waterline of the
Pommern
appeared a dull, red ball of fire,” said an officer of the destroyer
Obedient.
“Quicker than one can imagine, it spread fore and aft, until, reaching the foremast and mainmast, it flared up the masts in big, red tongues of flames, uniting between the mastheads in a big, black cloud of smoke and sparks. Then we saw the ends of the ship come up as if her back had been broken.”
Pommern
was now in two sections; as her sister
Hannover
passed by, the stern was upside down, propellers and rudder high out of water. Part of the bow was still afloat ten minutes later, but there were no survivors. Eight hundred and forty-four men were lost.

This was the last of the Jutland night actions in which British destroyers fought German battleships and light cruisers. In these fierce, chaotic struggles, the small British ships had done the best they could and had sunk one German battleship, three light cruisers, and two German destroyers at a cost of five of their own number. What they could not do was to bar or even seriously delay the High Seas Fleet in its determined lunge to escape.

Through the night, the flicker of gunfire and the glare of distant searchlights were seen and heard throughout the British fleet. Some had no idea what was happening. “Every now and then out of the silence would come
bang, bang, boom,
as hard as it could go for ten minutes,” said a destroyer officer whose ship was not involved. “The flash of guns lit up the whole sky for miles and miles and the noise was far more penetrating than by day. Then you could see a great burst of flame from some poor devil, the searchlights switched on and off, and then perfect silence once more.” In their official reports after the battle, the captains of the dreadnoughts
Hercules, Conqueror, Colossus, Superb, Thunderer, Téméraire, Bellerophon, Vanguard,
and
Canada
all told of hearing gunfire and seeing the glare of searchlights, first to the northwest and then, as the night progressed, in an arc across the rear of the fleet. “A cruiser on fire . . . searchlight beams from her turned quite red by flames. . . . After midnight, there was intermittent firing on the port quarter, but otherwise the night passed without incident,” reported
Bellerophon.
Forty-five years after Jutland, Lieutenant William Jameson of
Canada
remembered that “violent action flared up in the darkness to the northwest, passed across our wake and died away towards the east. Something tremendous was going on only a few miles away, but to our astonishment (it surprises me still) the battle fleet continued to steam south.”

As the hours passed and these scenes of fire and destruction were enacted and witnessed, their significance was universally misunderstood on the large British ships. The Commander-in-Chief and his senior officers all interpreted the commotion to the north to mean that, as expected, enemy destroyers were attacking from astern and were being beaten off by the British destroyers stationed there for that purpose. Jellicoe certainly did not wish to involve his own dreadnoughts in this battle; indeed, he wanted them as far from German destroyers as possible. The irony is that the German destroyer flotillas, the element of the High Seas Fleet that Jellicoe most feared and that had loomed so large in his night dispositions, played no part in the nighttime battle. Ten German destroyers actually left the battlefield early and returned to Kiel around the northern tip of Denmark. Through the rest of the night, the remaining German destroyers searched in vain for the British battle fleet. They found nothing, suffered no losses, and might as well not have been there.