Castles of Steel (70 page)

It was at this moment that luck came down hard on Hipper’s side. The German light cruisers, deflected to the south away from Goodenough and Beatty, sighted Warrender’s battleships. At 12:13 p.m.,
Stralsund
urgently signaled Hipper that she had seen “five enemy battleships.” Hipper immediately realized that these ships were many miles south of those reported earlier and that he now confronted not one blocking force but two. Still, despite knowing that he would have to risk fighting British battleships in order to support his own light cruisers and destroyers, Hipper continued on course for another half hour. Then, at 12:44 p.m., to his immense relief, he received another message from
Stralsund:
“Enemy is out of sight.” “Are you in danger?” he signaled
Stralsund.
At five minutes past one, he received the welcome reply, “No.” Now free to shed responsibility for his light forces and to concentrate on getting his battle cruisers home, Hipper turned the big ships sharply to the north to clear the danger area as quickly as possible. With rain squalls and low clouds still hampering visibility, the German battle cruisers made a wide detour around the northern edge of the Dogger Bank. Sometime between 2:30 p.m. and 3:30 p.m., the German battle cruisers were observed by two British trawlers twenty-five miles north of the Dogger Bank, steering eastward at high speed. By 7:30 the next morning, December 17, Hipper’s ships were home.

From the perspective of the War Room at the Admiralty, Winston Churchill described this day:

Telegraph and telephone were pouring the distress of Hartlepool and Scarborough to all parts of the kingdom and by half-past ten, when the War Committee of the Cabinet met, news magnified by rumor had produced excitement. I was immdiately asked how such a thing was possible. “What was the Navy doing and what were they going to do?” In reply, I produced the chart which showed the respective positions of the British and German naval forces, and I explained that subject to moderate visibility we hoped that collision would take place about noon. These disclosures fell upon all with a sense of awe and the Committee adjourned until the afternoon.

At 10.30, the Admiralty learned that the enemy was leaving our coasts and apprised Admiral Warrender. . . . But now already ominous telegrams began to arrive. . . . No contact. . . . The weather got steadily worse. It was evident that mist curtains were falling over the North Sea. 3,000 yards visibility, [then] 2,000 yards visibility, were reported by ships speaking to each other. The solemn faces of Fisher and Wilson betrayed no emotion but one felt the fire burning within. I tried to do other work but it was not much good. . . . Then, all of a sudden, we heard . . . Goodenough report that he had opened fire upon a German light cruiser. Hope flared up. The prospect of a confused battle at close range had no terrors for the Admiralty. They had only one fear—lest the enemy should escape. . . .

About half past one, Sir Arthur Wilson said, “They seem to be getting away from us.” But now occurred a new development of a formidable kind. At 1.50 we learned that the High Seas Fleet was at sea. . . . We instantly warned our squadrons. . . .

At 3 o’clock I went over and told the War Committee what was passing; but with what a heavy heart did I cross again that Horse Guards Parade. I returned to the Admiralty. The War Group had re-assembled around the octagonal table in my room. The shades of a winter’s evening had already fallen. Sir Arthur Wilson then said in his most ordinary manner, “Well, there you are, they have got away. They must be about here by now,” and he pointed to a chart on which the Chief of Staff was marking positions every fifteen minutes. It was evident that the Germans had eluded our intercepting force and that even their light cruisers with whom we had been in contact had also escaped in the mists. Said Admiral Warrender in his subsequent report, “They came out of one rainstorm and disappeared into another.”

At this point, in an effort not to let the Germans get away untouched, the frustrated Admiralty War Group launched a flurry of orders. “Twenty destroyers of . . . [the Harwich] Flotillas are waiting off Gorleston [on the Norfolk coast],” they signaled Warrender. “If you think it advisable you may direct Tyrwhitt to take them to vicinity of Heligoland to attack enemy ships returning in dark hours.”

Warrender rejected the idea, replying, “Certainly not advisable as there is a strong northwest wind and nasty sea.” Jellicoe simply signaled Warrender, “It is too late.”

A final means of intercepting the Germans remained. Roger Keyes with ten submarines and two destroyers had been posted off the coast of Holland. At 10:34 a.m., Keyes in
Lurcher
intercepted the message that the Germans were bombarding Scarborough. Anticipating that he could be useful, he took
Lurcher
and began to steam up and down to collect his submarines. Even though the submarines were on the surface, it was a difficult task. “I had a most trying day . . . ,” Keyes wrote. “In the visibility prevailing, they had to dive the moment they sighted a vessel if they wished to remain unseen . . . and by dusk I had succeeded in finding only four.” At 2:10 p.m., the Admiralty sent Keyes the order he had been hoping for: “The High Seas Fleet is at sea. . . . They may return after dawn tomorrow so proceed to Heligoland and intercept them. They [will] probably pass five miles west of Heligoland steering for Weser Light.” When this signal arrived, Keyes had found only four of his submarines: three British and the French
Archimède.
He ordered these four into the Bight, three to the southern side of Heligoland and one to the northern, with instructions to attack whatever enemy ships came within range. Keyes, meanwhile, continued trying to locate his other submarines.

It was too late to intercept Ingenohl. By nine o’clock that night, the High Seas Fleet was back in the mouth of the Elbe, where the squadrons would wait until dawn before going into Jade Bay. Hipper, however, was still at sea. The Admiralty knew that his battle cruisers, racing for home at 23 knots, could reach Heligoland before Keyes’s submarines, which at best could make 14 knots on the surface. But Keyes’s two destroyers,
Lurcher
and
Firedrake,
might overtake the Germans, and both were equipped with torpedo tubes. In the Admiralty War Room it was Sir Arthur Wilson who spoke: “There is only one chance now. Keyes with
Lurcher
and
Firedrake
. . . could probably make certain of attacking the German battle cruiser squadron as it enters the Bight tonight. He may torpedo one or even two.” To Churchill, it seemed a “forlorn hope to send these two frail destoyers with their brave commodore and faithful crews far from home, close to the enemy’s coast, utterly unsupported, into the jaws of this powerful German force with its protecting vessels and flotillas. There was a long silence. We all knew Keyes well. Then someone said, ‘It is sending him to his death.’ Someone else said, ‘He would be the last man to wish us to consider that.’ There was another long pause. However, Sir Arthur Wilson had already written the following message [to Keyes]: ‘We think Heligoland and Amrun lights will be lit when ships are going in. Your destroyers might get a chance to attack about 2 a.m. or later. . . .’ The First Sea Lord [Fisher] nodded assent. The Chief of Staff [Oliver] took the telegram, got up heavily and quitted the room.”

The Admiralty sent the signal at 8:12 p.m. It should have reached Keyes within an hour. It took five hours. The Admiralty originally had sent the signal out on the wrong wavelength, the D-band, for destroyers, which had a radius of only fifty miles. Keyes had told them to use the S-band, for submarines, which had a greater radius. Not until twenty-three minutes past midnight, when Keyes was 200 miles away from Heligoland, did the Admiralty recognize its mistake and resend the message on the S-band. Through the afternoon, Keyes had considered moving into the Bight on his own responsibility. He had held back because he anticipated that Tyrwhitt might be following the German ships with his light cruisers and destroyers and making a night torpedo attack near Heligoland. If this were so, the uncoordinated appearance of
Lurcher
and
Firedrake
could create chaos. Two days later, when Keyes went to see Churchill at the Admiralty, the First Lord said, “We sent you a terrible message the other night. I hardly expected to see you alive.” “It
was
terrible,” Keyes replied. “I waited three hours in the hope of getting such a message.” Long afterward, Keyes wrote, “Words fail me even now, after more than nineteen years, to express my feelings when I received this belated message.”

One of Keyes’s submarine captains, Martin Naismith of
E-11,
did get a look at the High Seas Fleet. At dawn on the morning of December 17, as the German fleet was moving from the Weser into the Jade, Naismith observed the dreadnought
Posen
and fired a torpedo at 400 yards. Because the submarine was rolling heavily, the torpedo ran too deep, passing under
Posen
’s keel.
E-11
prepared to fire at another target, but before she could do so, a third vessel turned to ram. The submarine hurriedly dived and then, having unbalanced her trim, lunged back to the surface. By then, however, the German ships were some distance away headed into the Jade.

The Scarborough Raid was over.

The Scarborough Raid ended in frustration and recrimination in both the British and German navies. When the British fleet returned to port, officers and men read newspaper stories about the devastation of English towns. “The more we heard,” said Lieutenant Filson Young of
Lion,
“the more bitter was our disappointment. . . . The accounts of the horrible casualties to women and children in the bombarded towns were particularly affecting.”

[Young, a journalist in peacetime, was now a reserve officer attached to David Beatty’s staff.]

Beatty was nearly overcome by chagrin. Sitting at his desk on
Lion,
he poured out his feelings to Ethel. On December 20, he wrote again: “The happenings of the last week have left a mark which nothing can eradicate except the total destruction of the enemy’s battle and other cruisers. We were within an ace of accomplishing it the other day. . . . Our advanced ships had sighted them and then !!! I can’t bear to write about it! And I can think of nothing else. . . . If we had got them Wednesday, as we ought to have done, we should have finished the war from a naval point of view.”

In Beatty’s opinion, the officer responsible for the fiasco was Good-enough. Once the ships were back in harbor, the cruiser commodore came on board the
Lion
and Beatty unleashed his anger at this subordinate for committing the unpardonable sin of letting go of an enemy once action had begun. Afterward, he wrote to Jellicoe:

There never was a more disappointing day. . . . We were within an ace of bringing about the complete destruction of the enemy [battle] cruiser force—and failed. There is no doubt whatever that his [Goodenough’s] failure to keep in touch with and report the presence of the enemy cruisers was entirely reponsible for the failure. . . . Time after time I have impressed upon Goodenough the necessity of using his own initiative and discretion—that my orders are expressions of intentions and they are not to be obeyed too literally. The Man on the Spot is the only one who can judge certain situations. . . . [It] nearly broke my heart; the disappointment was terrific. . . . Truly, the past has been the blackest week in my life.

As a solution, Beatty suggested removing Goodenough from command of the light cruisers and replacing him with Lionel Halsey, the captain of
New Zealand.
“He knows cruiser work and battle cruiser work and the relation of one with the other,” Beatty said of Halsey. The decision was Jellicoe’s.

In fact, Goodenough’s action had also baffled the Grand Fleet commander. On December 18, he wrote to Fisher, saying how “intensely unhappy” he was about the whole affair. He “couldn’t understand Goodenough’s actions at all, so entirely unlike all he had previously done since the war began.” Jellicoe’s official report to the Admiralty added, “The Commodore gives as his reason for abandoning the chase of the enemy the signal made to him to resume his station. This signal was intended by the Vice Admiral for
Nottingham
and
Falmouth.
It was a most unfortunate error. Had the Commodore disobeyed the signal, it is possible that the action between the light cruisers might have resulted in bringing the battle cruisers to action.” A week later, Jellicoe drew a general conclusion for future use: “Should an officer commanding a squadron or a captain of a single vessel, when in actual touch with the enemy, receive an order from a senior officer which it is evident may have been given in ignorance of the conditions of the moment and which, if obeyed, would cause touch with the enemy to be lost, such officers must exercise great discretion as to representing the real facts before obeying the order.” To this admonition, the Admiralty added its own: “To break off an action which has begun against an equal force is a most serious step; and an officer so engaged should, in the absence of previous special instructions, make sure that his superior knows that he is fighting before relinquishing the action.”

Jellicoe hesitated to make so drastic a move as removing Goodenough: “Beatty [is] very severe on Goodenough but forgets that it was his own badly worded signal to the cruisers that led to the German being out of touch,” he noted on the back of an envelope. As time gave opportunity for reflection, naval opinion tended increasingly to take this view and sympathize with, if not wholly exonerate, Goodenough. “Goodenough was so close to Beatty that . . . for all Goodenough knew, Beatty might have some important reason for ordering the light cruisers to get ahead [and re-form the screen],” wrote Captain John Creswell. “I reckon that the fault lay entirely with Beatty and Seymour.”

Naval historians have wondered why, after Scarborough, Beatty continued to have confidence in his flag lieutenant, Lieutenant Commander Ralph Seymour. “The true guilt for the ambiguous signal from
Lion
points to Beatty’s flag lieutenant whose business it was to translate Beatty’s intentions,” concludes the British historian Richard Hough. “A flag lieutenant’s job was to select the wording and then the suitable flag, wireless signal or Morse message to express it. It was Seymour who ought to have been sacked after the Scarborough Raid fiasco, not Goodenough. Instead, he was retained at immeasurable cost to the navy and the country.” During the Scarborough Raid, again at the Battle of the Dogger Bank, and twice at Jutland, Seymour failed to translate Beatty’s intentions into a plain signal that allowed for no misunderstanding. “He lost three battles for me,” Beatty said glumly after the war.