Castles of Steel (112 page)

From day to day, however, the numbers were never the same. On Janu-ary 6, 1916, the predreadnought
King Edward VII,
proceeding from Scapa Flow to Belfast for dockyard maintenance, hit a mine, turned over, and sank off the Scottish coast. Fortunately, she went down slowly and all her crew was saved. On December 3, 1915, the superdreadnoughts
Barham
and
Warspite
collided in heavy seas.
Barham,
the flagship, had hoisted a signal reducing squadron speed to 8 knots;
Warspite
misread the signal as 18 knots and began to overtake. Then just as
Barham
’s stern sank into a deep trough,
Warspite
’s bow, coming up behind, lifted high in the air. When the bow dropped, it came down on
Barham
with a noise described as “a horrible crunching, like a giant robot chewing crowbars.”
Barham
was able to repair her damage at Cromarty, but
Warspite
had to go south to Devonport.

As for battle cruisers, Beatty now commanded ten of these fast ships. Two more were coming,
Renown
and
Repulse,
converted from battleships on the building ways during Jacky Fisher’s brief second term as First Sea Lord. Meanwhile, to the four battle cruisers Hipper commanded at the Dogger Bank, only
Lützow,
a sister of
Derfflinger,
had been added. Their third sister,
Hindenburg,
was still under construction. Beatty’s battle cruisers remained at Rosyth, where they had been based since December 1914. In addition to his flagship
Lion,
the vice admiral now had three squadrons of three ships each: the fast, 13.5-inch-gun Cats, which were
Lion
’s sisters:
Prin-cess Royal, Queen Mary,
and
Tiger;
the second-generation, 12-inch-gun ships
New Zealand, Indefatigable,
and
Australia;
and finally, Britain’s three oldest battle cruisers,
Invincible, Inflexible,
and
Indomitable.
Beatty never ceased trying to augment this force, and he and Jellicoe had been wrestling for possession of the new
Queen Elizabeth
superdreadnoughts, which had been coming to Jellicoe at Scapa Flow. Beatty declared that he needed these fast, powerful ships to stiffen the Battle Cruiser Fleet, as
Lützow
and
Hindenburg
were reported ready to join Hipper; Jellicoe resisted, wanting to keep maximum strength in his own command and to use the new dreadnoughts as a fast wing of the Grand Fleet battle line. Beatty, the Commander-in-Chief pointed out, already had ten battle cruisers to Hipper’s four (five with
Lützow,
six with
Hindenburg
) and, he confided in Jackson, his feeling was that “the stronger I make Beatty, the greater is the temptation for him to get involved in an independent action.” Twice—in February 1916, and again in the middle of March—Jellicoe had overruled Beatty’s request for these new ships.

Three circumstances joined to reverse Jellicoe’s decision. At the end of March, the Admiralty learned that
Lützow
had indeed joined the High Seas Fleet and become Hipper’s flagship. Then, the collision on April 22 of
New Zealand
and
Australia
and the need of both for repairs reduced Beatty’s strength from ten to eight. Meanwhile, both Jellicoe and Beatty were concerned about British battle cruiser gunnery. In one shoot in November 1915, both
Lion
and
Tiger
had performed abominably; Beatty had admitted to Jellicoe that it had been a “terrible disappointment.” In March 1916, a group of junior officers from the light cruisers attached to Beatty’s force, meeting one night in
Southampton
’s wardroom, agreed “collectively and separately . . . that the battle cruisers’ shooting was rotten.” One explanation was that Beatty’s ships, lacking a gunnery range near the Firth of Forth, were unable to carry out sufficient practice. At a conference held at Rosyth on May 12, 1916, Jellicoe decided to rectify this problem by bringing the battle cruisers north from Rosyth to Scapa, squadron by squadron, to do heavy-caliber firing on the ranges developed near Scapa Flow. To plug the gap in Beatty’s ranks while some of his battle cruisers were away, Beatty was to get what he wanted; the
Queen Elizabeth
s would join him at Rosyth. Accordingly, in the third week of May, Rear Admiral Horace Hood’s 3rd Battle Cruiser Squadron—
Invincible, Inflexible,
and
Indomitable
—was detached from Beatty for three weeks of gunnery practice, while Rear Admiral Hugh Evan-Thomas’s 5th Battle Squadron—the five
Queen Elizabeth
s—came south to bolster Beatty. Hood was displeased by the order. “This is a great mistake,” he said. “If David [Beatty] gets these ships [the
Queen Elizabeth
s] with him, nothing will stop him from taking on the whole German fleet if he gets the chance.” Once the five superdreadnoughts arrived,
Queen Elizabeth
herself went into a Rosyth dry dock, leaving Beatty with four. With the three
Invincible
s gone north and
Australia
still in dry dock, Beatty’s force now consisted of six battle cruisers plus four fast battleships. This was the force he led at Jutland.

There were many flaws in Beatty’s leadership during the battle, some of which can be traced to a curious failure beforehand. Having succeeded in his persistent effort to add the 5th Battle Squadron to his force, Beatty—inexplicably—did little to ensure its effective use. Ten days passed between the arrival of the
Queen Elizabeth
s at Rosyth and their sailing for Jutland. During this time, the four great battleships lay at anchor not far from
Lion
in the Firth of Forth. Not once did Beatty summon Rear Admiral Evan-Thomas on board his flagship so that the two men could sit down and Beatty could explain his tactics. Normally, such a conversation would take place with any new subordinate; here, it was especially important because Evan-Thomas was a battleship man, devoted to Jellicoe and the Grand Fleet, where all tactical maneuvers were controlled by explicit signals from the flagship. Evan-Thomas had never served under Beatty, and his squadron had never operated at sea with the battle cruisers. If he and they were now to fall in with Beatty’s freer “Follow me!” style in battle, he needed to be told what was expected of him. Andrew Gordon, whose recent history of Jutland is one of the best ever written, calls Beatty’s behavior “shockingly unprofessional. . . . For how long Evan-Thomas would have had to swing around a buoy a few hundred yards from
Lion
before Beatty bothered to talk to him, is unknown.” In any case, Evan-Thomas sailed uninstructed.

There was another change in the array of the British fleet, of less significance for the moment, but with portent for the future. On April 12, 1916, a bulky, unusual-looking ship joined the fleet at Scapa Flow. She was the converted 18,000-ton Cunard liner
Campania,
a veteran of the North Atlantic tourist run, coming up from a Liverpool yard that had converted her into an aircraft carrier. Jellicoe was pleased to see her. From the beginning of the war, he had asked the Admiralty for aircraft-carrying vessels to counter the zeppelins that soared over his fleet, reporting its movements. He also yearned for some means of providing himself with aerial scouting of his own. Britain’s small, early carriers, the 3,000-ton cross-Channel steamers
Engadine, Riviera,
and
Empress,
with their canvas shelters for three seaplanes, had remained with Tyrwhitt at Harwich while the Admiralty worked on something better for Jellicoe.

Seaplane operations in the open sea were inherently difficult: any combination of light wind, fog, and rough seas hampered takeoff. More important, the virtual uselessness of seaplanes as antizeppelin weapons had become obvious; the weight of their floats limited rate of climb, speed, altitude, and radius of action. The solution embodied in
Campania
was a flight deck, extending forward from the bridge over the bow, from which single-seat aircraft with wheels could take off into the wind. With their minimal weight, these craft could rise to the altitudes where the zeppelins flew, attack the monsters, then return and land in the sea near their ship; air bags would keep the plane afloat long enough for the pilot to be rescued. Jellicoe followed these developments closely and hoped for great things. “I’m glad to say we got one up yesterday,” he wrote to Beatty on August 7, 1915, “the first that has risen from a ship underway. It is not a nice job for the pilot as he has to get up a speed of 45 miles an hour before he leaves the deck. . . . If there is any hitch, he . . . is certain to be finished.” This system fulfilled one of Jellicoe’s wishes—attacking the zeppelins—but not the other—providing himself with scouting information. Unfortunately,
Campania
’s new forward platform-ramp was not long enough for takeoff by the larger, heavier two-seat planes needed to carry the wireless equipment essential for reconnaissance work. Therefore, the new carrier remained a fore-and-aft hybrid: along with its forward flight deck, it retained a large afterdeck hangar for seaplanes, which, as before, had to be placed in the water for takeoff. Seven seaplanes and three fighters made up the new carrier’s air group.

While the ships increased in number and evolved in design, the men in the fleet continued to wait. In many ways, their situation had improved. Scapa Flow now was a heavily fortified anchorage, and its minefields and the strong steel nets spread across its entrances permitted British admirals and sailors and their hundreds of vessels—battleships, battle cruisers, armored cruisers, light cruisers, destroyers, submarines, depot ships, oilers, colliers, store ships, ammunition ships, hospital ships, trawlers, and drifters—to rest in the same tranquil security enjoyed by their German counterparts in Wilhelmshaven. But safety in harbor was only one ingredient of life at Scapa Flow. There also was the bleak isolation of the base, the often fierce, always changeable weather, and the sheer, grinding boredom of the endless wait.

Jellicoe did what he could with fleet exercises to keep the men alert. Again and again, the admiral took the fleet to sea, drilling the ships tirelessly in battle evolutions. Because the water inside the Flow was secure from torpedo attack and ships could practice there without danger, gunnery and torpedo drills were held every day except Sundays. At regular intervals, battleship squadrons went outside to the west of Pentland Firth for main battery firing at towed targets. On most days, the little bays around the Flow were occupied by ships firing at small targets towed by steam picket boats. After dark, the Flow would be lit by the gun flashes and searchlights of ships exercising in night firing. Occasionally, battleships exercised steaming in company without lights inside the Flow to give practice to their officers of the watch.

The island anchorage had no railway connection with the rest of the British Isles, so everything had to be brought by ship: coal, oil, ammunition, and food. Every month, 320 tons of meat, 800 tons of potatoes, 6,000 bags of flour (each weighing 140 pounds), 1,500 bags of sugar (each weighing 120 pounds), and 80,000 loaves of bread were delivered to the fleet. For the men, of course, the most important delivery was the daily mail, brought around to all ships every morning except when the seas were too high for the mail boat to come alongside.

The seasons at Scapa Flow offered spectacular contrasts. Winter was an elemental world of darkness, wind, and snow. Nightfall arrived between 3:30 and 4:00 p.m. and did not fade until 9:00 the next morning. Sometimes, the sun did not appear for days. In December 1915, Jellicoe noted fog or mist at Scapa on the fifteenth, twenty-second, and sixteenth, gales on the sixth, eighth, and twenty-third, snow on the third, fourth, eighth, and twelfth. The following month, January 1916, he recorded winds of up to eighty miles an hour on the fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth, nineteenth, twentieth, twenty-second, twenty-third, twenty-fourth, and thirtieth: fifteen days out of thirty-one. When it blew hard, bending the stunted trees on shore to the ground, the heavy seas inside the Flow made it impossible to lower boats, leaving the men penned up on ships rolling on double anchors. On clear winter nights, the Northern Lights burned and crackled, flinging giant curtains of green and silver across the sky. Summers were gentler and often lovely. Scapa Flow became a world of airy space and seabirds, of blue skies and green fields, of towering cloud formations and red-gold sunsets. Looking at the shore from their anchored ships, the men saw low hills and moors purple with heather. In June, a man could fish at dawn from the deck of a battleship at 2:00 a.m. and then sit on the same spot and read his mail or a newspaper at 11:30 that night.

But fishing and reading were not enough. In the early months of war, when the fleet was continually at sea, the few hours spent in harbor were consumed in coaling and replenishing stores; then it was back to sea. As the months passed and the Germans failed to come out, the Grand Fleet spent more time at anchor. It became necessary to provide the officers and men—between 60,000 and 100,000 of them, many wrenched from their homes on the eve of war—with something more than “coaling, sleeping, sleeping, eating, sleeping, reading mail, writing letters, arguing about the war, eating, sleeping and then to sea.” Leave was given only when a ship left the fleet to enter a yard in the south for repair and maintenance; then a week or two might be granted. Meanwhile, Kirkwell, a sleepy Orkney town of 4,000 inhabitants, offered a medieval redbrick cathedral and a single hotel. “I should not select it for a cheery weekend,” said an officer of a light cruiser.

Football (Americans call it soccer) was one antidote. In the autumn of 1914, on the island of Flotta, football grounds were laid out in rectangles burned and smoothed out of the heather and used year-round, whenever the boats could bring players ashore. An eighteen-hole golf course was built, with battleships competing to construct individual holes. The winner was
Canada,
which imported turf from an established Scottish course and made its green “as smooth as a billiard table.” Nevertheless, said a Grand Fleet officer, “it was, I suppose, one of the very worst golf courses in the world. There were no prepared tees, no fairway, no greens. But there was much bare rock, great tufts of coarse grass greedy for balls, wide stretches of hard, naked soil destructive of wooden clubs, and holes cut here and there of approximately the regulation size.” Despite complaints, the course became so popular that alacrity in play was essential. A foursome would drive off the tee, then have to run down the course in order to be out of range of the next players, already shouting “Fore!” Tennis in its normal form was impossible owing to rain and continual wind, but two courts of gravel and ash were constructed and rarely went unused. There was fishing, boating, and even some shooting of ducks and grouse, although the four resident ducks on Flotta—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—were religiously protected. Officers enjoyed walking, hiking, and picnicking; on a summer’s day, the 1,500-foot summit of Ward Hill on the island of Hoy offered a magnificent panorama of emerald-green islands set in sparkling blue water with the gray ships lined up in rows like children’s toys. Flotta offered a pistol range for officers, a rifle range for men, and an annual Grand Fleet boxing championship, which drew 10,000 cheering spectators. Sailing and rowing matches between ships were frequent. Gardening became popular among both men and officers and, although neither soil nor climate were promising, edible vegetables were harvested. These were welcome, because the vegetables brought by sea to Scapa Flow sometimes arrived unrecognizable.