Castles of Steel (111 page)

On May 22, the High Seas Fleet was preparing to sail the following day when Scheer received disturbing news:
Seydlitz
still was not ready for sea. Previously, the Wilhelmshaven dockyard had reported that her repairs would be completed by May 22, but a flooding test carried out in the dock the night before had revealed that her damaged underwater broadside torpedo area still was not watertight. Unwilling to leave without
Seydlitz,
Scheer again reluctantly postponed the operation, this time until May 30. This left only two days for the Sunderland operation to take place before the fuel endurance of the submarines already at sea would be exhausted.

Meanwhile, the U-boats patrolling off British coasts were waiting. On May 22,
U-42,
stationed off Sunderland, reported everything clear for the next day’s bombardment—which, of course, had been canceled. Thereafter, fog and low visibility made it difficult for the submarines to observe while, at the same time, the sea was so smooth that even the appearance of a periscope was enough to give them away. British patrol activity was intense. One submarine minelayer,
U-74,
was sunk by trawler gunfire as she was making her way into Moray Firth. Another,
U-72,
developed an oil bunker leak before laying her mines off the entrance to the Firth of Forth. A broad trail of oil on the surface made her too easy to locate and she had to return to port. A third minelayer,
UC-3,
disappeared on May 27, perhaps after hitting a British mine in the eastern Channel. On May 29, a fourth minelayer,
U-75,
operating in thick fog, laid her twenty-two mines off the Orkneys, between Marwick Head and the Brough of Birsay. This minefield had no effect on the Battle of Jutland, but on June 5, four days after the battle, one of the mines exploded to strike an immense psychological blow at the British nation.

During these days, Scheer, on board
Friedrich der Grosse,
was watching the window of opportunity closing inexorably on his Sunderland raid. First, the repairs to the battleships’ condensers and then to
Seydlitz
had postponed Hipper’s bombardment until May 29. That was dangerously close to June 1, the last day the U-boats manning his ambushes would have sufficient fuel to remain on patrol. Now, increasingly, this three-day window had to be considered in conjunction with another factor: the weather and its effect on zeppelin operations. Unfortunately, after the U-boats sailed for Britain, a spell of bad weather set in; day after day, the fleet airship commander reported air reconnaissance impossible.

Disappointed, Scheer was yet unwilling to give up on the operation and waste the mine and U-boat ambushes staked out. He formed an alternative plan: if the weather continued bad and the zeppelins could not fly, he would not fling his battle cruisers across the North Sea at Sunderland; instead he would send Hipper north to cruise provocatively off the Norwegian coast as though to attack British shipping in the Skagerrak. The overriding objective would be the same: to lure the British out and expose them to U-boat attack. Hipper’s presence off Norway would be reported; the operation still would likely bring Beatty rushing out—over the waiting submarines. Meanwhile, Scheer and the battle squadrons, steaming north in Hipper’s wake, would be waiting for Beatty only forty miles to the south. And if the Grand Fleet should also come, these were safer waters for the German fleet. The Skagerrak was much closer to German than to British bases, and with the Danish coast protecting his starboard—eastern—flank and destroyer and light cruiser screens spread far to the west on his port flank, zeppelin reconnaissance was unnecessary; Scheer still would have sufficient warning and ample time after annihilating Beatty to retreat to the safety of the minefields in the Bight.

May 28 was the day of decision. The U-boats lying off British bases had orders to depart and return to base on the evening of June 1. Departure of the High Seas Fleet therefore was imperative if the U-boat trap was to work. The possibility of putting Scheer’s original Sunderland plan into operation now hung on the availability of air reconnaissance over the next twenty-four to thirty-six hours. At that moment, strong northeasterly winds in the Bight ruled out airship reconnaissance and Scheer decided that if the wind did not moderate by May 30, he would abandon Sunderland and substitute the Skagerrak.

At midnight, May 28, all ships anchored in Jade roads were ordered to prepare to raise steam. At noon on May 29,
Seydlitz
was declared seaworthy and released from the dockyard. At 3:00 p.m. the following day, with strong northeasterly winds still blowing, the commander of the Naval Airship Division reported that no adequate zeppelin reconnaissance could be done during the next two days. Scheer immediately decided to execute his alternative plan; at 3:40 on the afternoon of May 30, a wireless signal from
Friedrich der Grosse,
“31 G. G. 2490,” went out to the assembly of ships in Schillig roads. The signal meant “Carry out top secret instruction 2490 on May 31.” The Skagerrak operation would commence before dawn the following morning.

An hour after midnight on Wednesday, May 31, the ships of the High Seas Fleet began raising their anchors. First out to sea were the battle cruisers, led by the new
Lützow,
a sister of
Derfflinger.
On her bridge, returned from sick leave and restored to self-confidence, was Franz Hipper, who predicted to the officers standing near him that by afternoon, they would be “at it hammer and tongs” with the British. Further, he thought that there would be “heavy losses of human life.” “Well,” he consoled himself, “it is all in God’s hands.” In Hipper’s hands that day were forty ships: five battle cruisers, five light cruisers, and thirty destroyers.

An hour and a half later, as dawn was breaking, the main German battle fleet began to weigh anchor. Scheer was taking with him that day sixteen of Germany’s eighteen dreadnought battleships;
König Albert
remained behind with continuing condenser problems and the new
Bayern,
the first German battleship carrying 15-inch guns, was considered too recently commissioned to be ready for battle. Six light cruisers and thirty-one destroyers sailed to screen the heavy ships. At 5:00 a.m., south of Heligoland, the six old predreadnought battleships of the 2nd Battle Squadron, coming from their base on the Elbe, joined up astern of Scheer’s sixteen modern battleships. To most High Seas Fleet officers, their presence seemed a serious mistake. Able to make only 18 knots, armed with only four 12-inch guns apiece, they were dubbed the five-minute ships, that being their anticipated survival time in action against dreadnought battleships. Scheer was thoroughly aware of these facts and gibes, having once commanded the squadron himself, and he had not originally intended to take the old ships with him. Nevertheless, as the time for departure approached, Rear Admiral Mauve, the squadron commander, begged the Commander-in-Chief not to leave the predreadnoughts behind. Sentiment prevailed and Scheer gave way. By including them, he handicapped himself by reducing the speed of the German battle line to 18 knots and awarding the British battle fleet a 2-knot advantage.

Scheer’s main battle fleet now included fifty-nine ships: sixteen dreadnought battleships, six old battleships, six light cruisers, and thirty-one destroyers. Adding Hipper’s force to Scheer’s, a total of ninety-nine German warships were steaming north up the mine-free channel running to Horns Reef, a group of sandbanks stretching out into the North Sea from Denmark’s Jutland peninsula. When the sun rose, “covering the sea with its magnificent golden rays,” exulted the
Derfflinger
’s gunnery officer, men throughout the fleet looked out at the great spectacle of which they were a part: the famous battle cruisers in the van; then the huge light-gray dreadnoughts in a single column, rising and plunging in the swell, black smoke pouring from their funnels; and, all around, the light cruisers and destroyers. Today or perhaps tomorrow would be
Der Tag,
the Day, for which the German navy had worked so hard and waited so long.

As the day began, three messages were brought to Scheer on the bridge of
Friedrich der Grosse.
One of his submarines,
U-32,
on the surface 300 miles away, reported sighting two British dreadnoughts, two cruisers, and several destroyers off May Island, sixty miles east of the Firth of Forth. They were heading southeast. An hour later, a second submarine,
U-66,
reported eight British battleships attended by light cruisers and destroyers sixty miles east of Cromarty on an easterly course. About the same time, the German radio station at Neumünster reported intercepting British wireless messages indicating that two British dreadnoughts—or groups of dreadnoughts; the call signs did not make clear—had left Scapa Flow. Scheer considered these pieces of information and discarded them; they seemed too vague and disconnected to be related to his operation. The enemy forces were far apart and they seemed to represent isolated movements by separate units of the British fleet. There was no indication that the entire Grand Fleet was at sea; Scheer held to his northerly course.

In this sequence of early events lay Scheer’s greatest miscalculation at the Battle of Jutland. Before the first shot was fired, his U-boats had failed. The submarine ambushes—the underlying reason for the entire operation—had been spectacularly useless. Submarines had neither provided Scheer with useful information nor reduced Jellicoe’s superiority by a single vessel. Now, the full might of the Grand Fleet was at sea, coming toward him, unattacked, undiminished, and undetected.

The twelve months following the Dogger Bank had been difficult for the officers and men of the Grand Fleet. As long as the kaiser held his fleet in port, Great Britain exercised command of the sea. Yet Royal Navy tradition demanded more. British naval officers yearned for a new Trafalgar, although they knew that, before Trafalgar was fought, Nelson had spent two monotonous years patrolling off Toulon. Nor did they consider the slow strangulation of Germany by blockade a substitute for battle. Not only were they frustrated and bored; they were plagued by guilt. The army—their brothers, cousins, and friends—was dying in the trenches while they, cooped up in their gray ships, swung uselessly around mooring buoys in remote northern harbors.

Beatty, particularly, chafed. “I heard rumors of terrible casualties on the Western Front,” he wrote to Ethel on May 15, 1915. “I don’t think, dear heart, you will ever realize the effect these terrible happenings have upon me. . . . I feel we are so impotent, so incapable of doing anything for lack of opportunity, almost that we are not doing our share and bearing our portion of the burden laid upon the nation. . . . We spend days doing nothing when so many are doing so much. . . . [It] makes me feel sick at heart.” Six months later, things seemed, if possible, worse. “The horrid Forth like a great ditch full of thick fog makes everything so cold,” he wrote to Ethel. “There is no joy in life under such conditions. . . . My time must come.” Beatty’s time would come, but not before still another seven months had passed.

Jellicoe and the Admiralty shared Beatty’s frustration. Correspondence between London, Scapa, and Rosyth continually discussed offensive projects that might lure or force the Germans out: Bombard Heligoland. Fill six tankers and twelve trawlers with oil, set them alight, and drive them into the middle of Heligoland dockyard. Bombard the High Seas Fleet in Schillig roads, then send destroyer flotillas in to attack with torpedoes, then have at them again with a midnight ram, gun, and torpedo suicide attack by five old battleships. Penetrate the Baltic with predreadnoughts to open a path to Russia. Jellicoe vetoed all these suggestions. The Commander-in-Chief favored action, but even more strongly, he opposed risk. Without a battle, Britain possessed command of the sea. Frustrating as it was, a new Trafalgar would have to wait.

The new Admiralty Board endorsed Jellicoe’s caution. Lacking a Churchill, who had tried to thrust battleships through the Dardanelles, and a Fisher, who had wanted to storm into the Baltic, they made suggestions, but never pushed the Commander-in-Chief. The tone was set by Jackson, who once wrote wistfully to Jellicoe, “I wish we could entice them out from Heligoland to give you a chance. Have you any ideas for it? I wish I had.” Jellicoe’s replies—like this one on January 25, 1916—always came back to the bedrock of British naval strategy: “Until the High Seas Fleet emerges from its defences, I regret to say that I do not see that any offensive against it is possible. It may be weakened by mines and submarine attack when out for exercises, but beyond that no naval action against it seems practicable.”

While the Grand Fleet waited, it grew. By April 1916, there were thirty-three dreadnought battleships and ten dreadnought battle cruisers in the Royal Navy; thirteen of these ships had been added since the beginning of the war. The battleships
Benbow
and
Emperor of India
had come to the fleet in December 1914.
Canada,
requisitioned from Chile in 1915, had been added to
Agincourt
and
Erin,
requisitioned from Turkey. Five
Queen Elizabeth
–class superdreadnoughts had joined the Grand Fleet:
Queen Elizabeth
herself, along with
Warspite
and
Barham
in 1915 and
Valiant
and
Malaya
early in 1916. These five, each mounting eight 15-inch guns and firing projectiles weighing 1,900 pounds, were then the finest battleships in the world. They were heavily armored and able to take severe punishment; their 25-knot speed was 4 to 5 knots greater than the designed speed of any German battleship and almost the same as that of the older British and German battle cruisers. They burned fuel oil, which permitted greater steaming endurance and saved their crews the exhausting labor of hand coaling and stoking. In addition, another five superdreadnoughts of the
Royal Sovereign
class, each carrying eight 15-inch guns, were on their way:
Royal Oak
and
Revenge
arrived in time to fight at Jutland;
Royal Sovereign
was a few days too late, and
Resolution
and
Ramillies
were still under construction. Overall, the British margin over the Germans in dreadnought battleships had increased substantially. Since August 1914, the Germans had added five dreadnoughts: four
König
s—all of them present at Jutland—and the new 15-inch-gun
Bayern,
which was left behind at Wilhelmshaven.