Castles of Steel (121 page)

As the British light cruisers and destroyers scrambled to reach their new positions, another element of Jellicoe’s advance screen, the large armored cruisers of Rear Admiral Sir Robert Arbuthnot’s 1st Cruiser Squadron—
Defence, Warrior, Black Prince,
and
Duke of Edinburgh
—were forced by the crunch of ships to break formation and separate. But not before Arbuthnot, whose flagship,
Defence,
was steaming five miles ahead of
Iron Duke,
had spotted Bödicker’s light cruisers fleeing from the three
Invincible
s and leaving behind their crippled sister
Wiesbaden.
Arbuthnot was a small, lean bantam rooster of a man, a passionate athlete who played rugby and cricket, ran in long distance races, and insisted on acting as chief referee at Grand Fleet boxing matches. His reputation at sea was as a demanding, competitive disciplinarian, but he had never forgotten—or perhaps had not been allowed to forget—that, seventeen months earlier, he had missed a golden opportunity. This was the moment when, on
Orion
during the Scarborough Raid, he had refused to open fire on German light cruisers directly under his guns, citing the need to await permission from higher authority. The next time, Arbuthnot had sworn to himself—and confided to others—he would not wait. Now, seeing
Wiesbaden
immobile and billowing smoke, he determined to send the German ship to the bottom. Only his two leading ships,
Defence
and
Warrior,
were in position to attack;
Black Prince
and
Duke of Edinburgh
had scattered when the press of British dreadnoughts had splintered his squadron. This, to Arbuthnot, was irrelevant; two armored cruisers were enough to finish
Wiesbaden,
and he turned and charged. His move attracted the admiration of an observer in
Warspite
who watched as
Defence
went by, “dressed in all her glory with her battle ensigns streaming.” In his eagerness, Arbuthnot steamed directly across Beatty’s course, steering
Defence
so close under
Lion
’s bow that the battle cruiser, firing at Hipper, was compelled to make an emergency turn to avoid ramming. Arbuthnot appeared not to care and his ships closed on
Wiesbaden,
firing 9.2-inch shells as fast as the gunners could load. But Arbuthnot and his men would pay for his impetuosity. None of the squadron commanders coming up with the Grand Fleet were informed about the enemy’s position and strength and, in the poor visibility, they could not see for themselves. Arbuthnot had not asked permission to attack and no one had warned him that the High Seas Fleet was nearby. Suddenly, as he closed in on
Wiesbaden,
the massive outlines of Hipper’s battle cruisers and Scheer’s leading battleships loomed out of the mist only 8,000 yards away. Arbuthnot tried to turn back, but it was too late. Two German 12-inch shells struck
Defence
near her after 9.2-inch turret; the armored cruiser heeled, but righted herself and steamed on. Then, a salvo struck behind the forward turret and there was a cataclysmic explosion. A huge black cloud enveloped everything; when this smoke had cleared, the sea was empty. The 14,000-ton ship, with Admiral Arbuthnot and all 900 men of her crew, had vanished. “Twenty-four hours earlier,” Gibson and Harper note, “Arbuthnot had been playing tennis at Cromarty with Lady Jellicoe.”

Arbuthnot’s behavior has been described as “berserk,” not primarily because it led to the destruction of his own ship—he could not have foreseen the arrival of the German dreadnoughts—but because his move jeopardized the tactical situation of the entire fleet. Just when Jellicoe needed to exercise the tightest control and discipline in conducting the complex maneuver of deployment, here came Arbuthnot, charging into the middle, intent on his own affairs. In Andrew Gordon’s metaphor, “while center stage should have been clearing for the leading contenders to engage, here was a supporting actor, getting in the way and babbling his own nonsensical lines.”

Arbuthnot’s second armored cruiser,
Warrior,
now became the focus of German attention. Heavy shells burst on this ship, smashing through her upper decks, bursting in her engine room, flinging shards of steel through boilers and steam pipes. Steam scalded many in the engine-room crew to death. Now only 8,000 yards from Scheer’s battle line,
Warrior
seemed certain to share the horror of
Defence.
Curiously, it was another unscripted performance that prevented this from happening. At the moment
Warrior
’s doom seemed inevitable, a single British battleship, wholly unintentionally, intervened to save her.

At 6:00 p.m., Evan-Thomas’s four
Queen Elizabeth
s were still doggedly following Beatty, as they had done or attempted to do throughout the afternoon. But as the British battle cruisers swung eastward, bending Hipper’s line of advance and also cutting directly across the line of fire of the approaching Grand Fleet, Beatty and Evan-Thomas deliberately separated; the position of the
Queen Elizabeth
s, now that Beatty and Jellicoe had joined, was in the Grand Fleet battle line. When an officer on
Malaya
sighted
Marlborough
leading the starboard column of the Grand Fleet, Evan-Thomas, assuming that Jellicoe would deploy to starboard and intending to place his fast battleships at the head of the entire line—their assigned place in a fleet action—began turning the 5th Battle Squadron to take station ahead of
Marlborough.
A minute later, he realized that
Marlborough
was swinging, not to starboard, but to port; that the fleet was deploying to the east, not the west, and that
Marlborough
and her 1st Battle Squadron, instead of being at the head of the deployed battle line, would be bringing up the rear. In this context, Evan-Thomas knew that his place was not in the van, but behind
Agincourt,
the last ship in Marlborough’s squadron, at the very tail end of the entire British battle line. Accordingly, at 6:18 p.m., the 5th Battle Squadron began to turn to port. It was two minutes later that
Defence
blew up and
Warrior,
under heavy fire and apparently doomed, began creeping off to the northwest—toward the
Queen Elizabeth
s.

As Evan-Thomas’s four battleships wheeled under fire from Scheer’s advancing
König
s,
Barham
was forced to turn sharply and reduce speed to make room for
Marlborough
’s squadron to pass ahead. Then
Warspite,
turning hard inside
Valiant
and
Malaya,
was hit near the stern by a 12-inch shell from
Kaiserin.
Finding the ship boxed in, the quartermaster “got a bit rattled and forced the helm too quick,” jamming the rudder 10 degrees to starboard. The ship swerved out of line, narrowly missed a collision with
Valiant
’s stern, and continued to swing. Captain Edward Phillpotts tried to bring his ship back into line by running her engines and port and starboard propellers at different speeds to counteract the effect of the jammed rudder. He managed only to send her driving straight toward the enemy, who now concentrated on this huge target only 8,000 yards away. Still unable to bring his rudder back to port, Phillpotts decided to continue at full speed and drive his ship around in a full circle as quickly as possible. Accordingly, he made a wide turn, his ship plunging through smoke and towering shell splashes, frequently shaken by the concussion of a heavy caliber hit, but all the while still firing back with her eight 15-inch guns. The captain brought the ship around in a complete circle, but the rudder remained jammed. It being essential to present a moving target, Phillpotts took the dreadnought around again in a wider full circle, this time circling clean around the crippled
Warrior
and drawing enemy fire away from the helpless armored cruiser. Eventually, the battleship’s crew managed to restore a degree of steering control to the rudder and the captain attempted to rejoin his squadron. But
Warspite
had been hit that day by a total of twenty-nine heavy German shells, thirteen of these during the two turns, and she discovered that at speeds higher than 16 knots, the sea poured in through holes in her hull armor. Leaving her sisters, she withdrew to the north and at 9:05 p.m. Evan-Thomas ordered her to return to Rosyth.
Warspite
’s misfortune, harrowing as it was, had been
Warrior
’s salvation, saving the cruiser’s 900 men from the fate of
Defence.
By careening around in two full circles and drawing the enemy’s fire, the battleship had effectively masked the crippled cruiser and allowed her to escape.

Invincible
had come out of dry dock in Rosyth on the morning of May 22; that afternoon at 5:00, Hood took the battle cruiser and her sisters,
Inflexible
and
Indomitable,
north to Scapa Flow for an intensive schedule of gunnery practice.
Invincible
and her two sisters spent eight days at Scapa. On the morning of May 30, they had been out in Pentland Firth for 12-inch-gun practice; the results were reported as “highly satisfactory.” By 3:45 that afternoon, they were back at anchor in the Flow, coaling and preparing for night firing scheduled to begin after dark. And on the following morning, all of Hood’s ships were due to return to Rosyth. That was the afternoon, however, that Jellicoe and Beatty received the Admiralty’s signal warning of a probable German sortie from the Jade. At 6:25 p.m., Jellicoe told Hood to raise steam for 22 knots, at 8:50 p.m., he ordered him to weigh anchor, and at 9:00 p.m., accompanied by the light cruisers
Chester
and
Canterbury
and four destroyers, the three battle cruisers moved down the harbor and out to sea.

During the Grand Fleet’s deployment, Hipper won another dramatic success against the British battle cruiser force—his third of the day and, as it turned out, his last of the war. Hood, after his bludgeoning of four German light cruisers, including
Wiesbaden,
continued west in search of Beatty. He sighted the Grand Fleet approaching on his starboard bow and, at almost the same moment on his port bow,
Lion
charging eastward toward him. The normal station of Hood’s three battle cruisers would have been astern of Beatty; but in maneuvering to reach it, he would have further obstructed the fire of Jellicoe’s oncoming battleships. It was obvious to Hood that he should instead turn ahead of Beatty and take a position in advance of the vice admiral. Accordingly, at 6:21 p.m., Hood led his three battle cruisers around through a 180-degree turn to starboard, taking station 4,000 yards ahead of
Lion. Invincible
now found herself on a parallel course with the five German battle cruisers, visible 9,000 yards off her starboard beam. As Beatty’s four battle cruisers already were engaging the three rear ships of Hipper’s line, Hood’s three ships, fresh from gunnery practice at Scapa Flow, trained their 12-inch guns on the two leading German ships,
Lützow
and
Derfflinger,
and im-mediately opened an accurate fire. “The gunnery of the 3rd Battle Cruiser Squadron was tremendous in its majestic intensity, great rippling salvos running down the line of the three ships. Hits were showing all over Hipper’s battle cruisers,” remembered an officer on
Tiger.
Within eight minutes,
Invincible
fired fifty shells at
Lützow
and hit her eight times. From
Invincible
’s bridge, Hood shouted into the voice pipe to tell the ship’s gunnery officer, Lieutenant Commander Hubert Dannreuther, in the foretop: “Your firing is very good! Keep it up as quickly as you can! Every shot is telling!”

Meanwhile,
Invincible
was receiving as well as inflicting punishment. One salvo hit the battle cruiser aft, but caused no apparent damage. Then, suddenly,
Invincible
was annihilated. Commander von Hase, gunnery officer of
Derfflinger,
was watching. “At 6.29 p.m., the veil of mist in front of us split like a curtain at a theater,” he said. “Clear and sharply silhouetted against the horizon, we saw a powerful ship . . . on an almost parallel course at top speed. Her guns were trained on us and immediately another salvo crashed out, straddling us completely.” It was
Invincible.
Hase fired three salvos and the third fell on
Invincible
’s amidships Q turret. And then at 6:30, said Hase, “for the third time we witnessed that dreadful spectacle we had already seen in the case of
Queen Mary
and
Defence.
” When the German shells penetrated Q turret, the flash ignited the powder in the hoist and traveled down the turret trunk to the magazine, causing both Q and P turrets’ magazines to explode. The whole central section—including boiler rooms, coal bunkers, and the two amidships turret systems—was ripped apart in a gigantic ball of crimson flame. Masses of coal dust spurted from the broken hull, the tall tripod masts collapsed inward, and a ball of flame mounted into the sky followed by an enormous tower of black smoke. The ship broke in half and the two severed halves sank until each rested vertically on the bottom. Then, when the smoke had cleared, a curious sight was seen. As the ship was 567 feet long and the sea was only 180 feet deep, the bow and stern were seen standing separately—a hundred feet of bow and a hundred feet of stern, each with red bottom paint and gray topside paint—rising perpen-dicular out of the water. There were a few survivors nearby. These men waved as
Inflexible
and
Indomitable
swept past. “I have never seen anything more splendid,” said an officer in
Indomitable,
“than these few cheering as we raced by them.”

When the Grand Fleet went by a few minutes later, many British seamen in the passing dreadnoughts thought the victim was a German ship. “My gun layer took her for a Hun and the crew cheered. But I could read the name
Invincible
on the stern,” said an officer. It was not British naval practice for warships still in action to stop to pick up survivors, but when Beatty passed by at 6:40 p.m. and saw men in the water, he signaled the destroyer
Badger,
“Pick up survivors from wreck on starboard side.” Only six men were rescued out of a crew of 1,031. One of them, Dannreuther, the gunnery officer and Wagner’s godson, had been in the control top on the foremast. When he was picked up, he told his rescuers that he “had not a scratch on his entire body,” and that he had merely “stepped off into the water when the foretop came down.” When
Iron Duke
came by, Jellicoe asked, “Is wreck one of our own ships?” To which
Badger,
still searching for men in the sea, replied, “Yes.
Invincible.
”