Castles of Steel (128 page)

But Jellicoe did not know this. A destroyer battle to the rear of the fleet was what Jellicoe had said would happen—presumably it now was happening. And so, on board the flagship, no need to awaken the exhausted admiral to tell him that his expectation was being realized. Therefore, as his admirals and captains stood on their bridges, watching the fireworks and sipping their cocoa, the Commander-in-Chief lay resting undisturbed on his cot. And as daylight began to appear around 2:00 a.m., Reinhard Scheer completed his breakthrough across the wake of the British fleet.

At dawn, the sea was calm, with a heavy mist and visibility under two miles. On the bridges of German warships, still sixteen miles away from Horns Reef, binoculars swept the horizon for the British fleet. To everyone’s surprise and enormous relief, it was not there. A great weight fell from Scheer’s shoulders, but he and his staff remained anxious. They appeared to have succeeded, but they were not yet home; the protection of the minefields was at 2:30 a.m., still an hour’s steaming away. When the head of the German battle line reached the Horns Reef light vessel, Scheer paused, waiting for
Lützow,
which had not been heard from. Then came the news that the battle cruiser had been abandoned; Scheer resumed his retreat. He had no choice. The battle cruiser squadron could no longer fight. In the 3rd Battle Squadron, three of the fleet’s most powerful dreadnoughts were heavily damaged and
König,
with a hole in her bow, was drawing so much water that she could not pass through the Amrum Bank channel until high tide. Only three fast light cruisers,
Frankfurt, Pillau,
and
Regensburg,
remained available. “Owing to the bad visibility, further scouting by airship could not be counted on,” Scheer wrote in his after-battle report. “It was therefore hopeless to try to force a regular action on the enemy. . . . The consequences of such an action would have been a matter of chance. I therefore abandoned any further operations and ordered a return to port.” This was postbattle bravado. Scheer had no intention of “forcing an action” on anyone; twice he had reversed course when faced by the might of the Grand Fleet, and he had no desire to face it again. His only wish was to get away, and his exhilaration after the battle stemmed not from any feeling of triumph but from thankfulness that he had escaped. Relieved and exhausted, Scheer ordered his battle cruisers south into the swept channel, followed fifteen minutes later by the old predreadnoughts and, after another fifteen minutes, by the rest of the fleet.

On the way in, the High Seas Fleet passed safely over three British submarines lying on the bottom. The submarines, sent there as part of Jellicoe’s original plan for drawing the enemy out, had left Harwich on May 30 with orders to remain submerged until June 2. No one thought of amending these instructions and, as they received no news of the battle in progress, the submarine captains knew nothing of Jutland until they returned to Harwich on June 3. Despite avoiding this danger, the German fleet did not reach home without mishap. At 5:20 a.m., the dreadnought
Ostfriesland
struck a mine five miles from Heligoland. One man was killed and ten wounded, but the torpedo bulkheads held and, after sheering out of line, the battleship managed to limp into port.

The main body of the High Seas Fleet reached the mouths of the Jade and the Elbe between 1:00 and 2:45 on the afternoon of June 1. Five battleships were left on outpost duty in Schillig roads, while damaged ships passed through the locks into the inner harbor. Already, the mood was becoming festive; as the flagship passed by, the crews of other ships lined their decks to cheer the admiral. In the flag cabin of
Friedrich der Grosse,
Scheer received reports that strongly indicated that three British battle cruisers had blown up and that
Warspite
also had been sunk. Exultant that he had inflicted these losses on a superior enemy, Scheer invited his officers to the bridge, where the tired admiral raised a glass of champagne to survival, to escape, and to what, by the following day, the German kaiser, press, and nation would be calling victory.

Not every vessel in the High Seas Fleet returned with Scheer. Early light on June 1 found the giant battle cruiser
Lützow
sinking into a gray sea. Battered by twenty-four heavy shells, able to make only 7 knots, she had wandered away from the fleet. By 12:30 a.m., with more than 8,000 tons of water gurgling inside her hull, her bow was so low that waves washed over the fore turret. The dynamo room was flooded, eliminating electrical power and leaving the crew to work by candlelight. An attempt to move the ship backward, stern first, in order to relieve pressure on forward internal bulkheads, had to be abandoned when, as the bow continued to sink, the stern and the propellers rose out of the sea. Fearing that his ship was about to capsize, Captain Harder called four accompanying destroyers alongside and ordered his crew of 1,040 men to board the small ships. Then, from a few hundred yards away, Harder ordered
G-38
to fire two torpedoes.
Lützow
received the blows, rolled over, and went down while the ship’s company, watching from the destroyers, gave three cheers for the kaiser, three for Hipper and Scheer, and three for their ship. Then, across the empty water, they raised their voices in “Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles.”

There were no cheers when
Wiesbaden
sank. Stubbornly afloat long after the Grand Fleet had passed her by, she lay rising and falling in a desolate sea. Twenty men hoping for rescue huddled together on deck in a cold northwestern wind. As the sea rose higher, the ship rolled ominously; at some time during the night, she rolled too far and went down. Everyone on board went with her except the chief stoker, who was picked up, delirious, thirty-eight hours later by a Norwegian steamer.

Seydlitz
avoided
Lützow
’s fate by the narrowest of margins. With thousands of tons of water in her own damaged hull, she tried to follow
Moltke,
but lost her in the dark. Ordered to make her way independently to Horns Reef, she began a voyage filled with suspense and misery. Her charts were covered with blood and her gyrocompass was wrecked; steered by hand machinery, listing, and with her bow under water, she stumbled down the starboard side of the British battle line.
Agincourt,
with fourteen 12-inch guns, saw her. “I did not challenge her,” said
Agincourt
’s captain, “so as not to give our division’s position away.” Passing through a gap in the British battle line,
Seydlitz
came within less than a mile of the 5th Battle Squadron.
Malaya,
with eight 15-inch guns, saw and recognized the German battle cruiser but did nothing.
Marlborough,
with ten 13.5-inch guns, identified her as “a large ship” but did not fire. “I missed the chance of a lifetime,”
Marlborough
’s gunnery officer said later. “I saw the dim outline of this ship and had the main armament trained on it and put a range of 4,000 yards on the sights and asked the captain for permission to open fire. He replied ‘No’ as he thought it was one of our own ships. Of course what I ought to have done was to have opened fire and blown the ship out of the water and then said ‘Sorry.’ ”
Revenge,
with eight 15-inch guns, saw
Seydlitz,
too, and her 6-inch guns were ordered to fire, but the secondary battery gun crews were out on deck watching the fireworks of the destroyer actions and by the time they were back at their guns it was too late. Thus, when a few short-range broadsides would have finished her,
Seydlitz,
already sinking, was allowed to wander safely past three British dreadnoughts.

At 1:40 a.m.,
Seydlitz
reached Horns Reef—and twice ran aground on it. Twice, Captain von Egidy backed the ship off with her own engines, but by 4:40 a.m., she was down eleven feet by the bow. The light cruiser
Pillau
arrived to pilot, but in spite of this,
Seydlitz
went aground again. Again, by reversing her engines and with the aid of a rising tide, she backed off, but wind and sea also were rising and waves swept over the forward deck up to the base of the bridge. Passing through the Amrum Bank, the ship settled deeper until the keel began scraping along the bottom. The bulkheads inside the hull strained under the pressure of the sea. Men standing thigh-deep in water bailed with buckets in devastated, badly lit compartments filled with jagged fragments and, sometimes, human remains. The list reached 8 degrees and continued to grow. At 1:30 in the afternoon,
Seydlitz
turned and reversed engines to proceed stern first.
Pillau
and several minesweepers tried to tow the waterlogged ship backward, but the wire hawsers broke. Finally, at the end of the afternoon, she grounded hard on a Weser River sandbank. Tugs and two pumping ships arrived from Wilhelmshaven and she was dragged off and towed stern first to the outer Jade. There, her wounded were taken off and she was towed backward across the bar into Jade roads. She remained for four days, while, to reduce weight, the two 11-inch guns and much of the armor plate from the forward gun turret were removed. On June 6,
Seydlitz
was moved inside the harbor gates, but another week of caulking and pumping was necessary and the two 11-inch guns of the port wing gun turret were stripped out. Finally, on June 13, the ship was able to enter a floating dry dock to begin three months of repairs.

Moltke
was the only relatively unharmed German battle cruiser. Hipper was on board when she became separated from the fleet, and he knew that Scheer’s course was southeast toward Horns Reef. The Grand Fleet, unfortunately, was in the way. At 10:30 p.m., as
Moltke
attempted to edge through the British squadrons, Captain Johannes von Karpf suddenly saw the shadows of British dreadnoughts—the rear division of Admiral Jerram’s 2nd Battle Squadron—looming up 2,000 yards away. Hoping that his ship had not been sighted, Karpf quickly put the helm hard over and the phantom ships faded silently into the darkness. In fact,
Moltke
had been seen by one of these ships,
Thunderer,
but the British captain did not open fire. “It was inadvisable to show up the battle fleet unless obvious attack was intended,” he said later. A few broadsides at that range would have destroyed
Moltke,
and Hipper as well, but it was not to be. Twice more, Karpf groped eastward, trying to break through, but each time the menacing shapes of Jerram’s dreadnoughts stood up against the eastern sky, and each time, Karpf altered course back to the west. After the third attempt, he gave up and with Hipper’s permission ordered maximum speed to the south; at midnight
Moltke
was able to cross in front of the Grand Fleet with a clear passage home.

Two German light cruisers,
Elbing
and
Rostock,
were scuttled, like
Lützow,
by friendly hands.
Elbing,
after being rammed by
Posen,
had come to a stop with her engine rooms filled with water. At 1:00 a.m. a destroyer was ordered alongside and the crew, with the exception of a small salvage party including the captain, was taken off. When his derelict ship drifted close to a group of undamaged British destroyers, Captain Madlung gave the order for
Elbing
to be sunk with explosive charges.
Rostock
had been hit by a torpedo at 11:50 a.m. and was taken in tow. But the ship continued to settle and at 4:15 a.m., with her crew transferred, she was sunk by German torpedoes.

Jellicoe rose from his cot on
Iron Duke
prepared to resume the battle. His ships were ready, the crews were at action stations, the guns had remained loaded all night. The Commander-in-Chief’s plan had been to turn from his southerly course and arrive off Horns Reef at daylight, but now, looking at the sea, he reconsidered. The sky was gray, visibility was less than 4,000 yards, and the fleet was disorganized and widely dispersed. Seven of his battleships—
Marlborough
’s division and the three
Queen Elizabeth
s—had dropped far astern. Beatty and the battle cruisers were nowhere in sight; missing with them were the two light cruiser squadrons Jellicoe needed for scouting. Of greatest concern, the British destroyer flotillas were scattered far and wide. Jellicoe now was in waters close to the German coast, facing the possibility of destroyer or U-boat attacks with no light forces available to screen his dreadnoughts. “These difficulties rendered it undesirable to close Horns Reef at daylight as had been my intention,” he was to write in his usual laconic style. Still believing that Scheer was northwest of him rather than south or southeast, he ordered the Grand Fleet to reverse course and turn north for “the double purpose of catching Scheer and collecting the light craft which should be astern of me.” At 2:30 a.m., the battle fleet swung around to the north and formed a single line ahead, accepting the danger of submarine attack in this exposed formation in order to be ready for the German surface fleet if it suddenly appeared.

At 3:15 a.m., Jellicoe sent another dreadnought home.
Marlborough,
which had been dropping steadily astern, reported that her torpedo wound would force her to reduce speed to 12 knots. Vice Admiral Cecil Burney shifted his flag from
Marlborough
to
Revenge
and, with Jellicoe’s permission, ordered
Marlborough
back to the Tyne. About this same time, a zeppelin,
L-11,
appeared over the fleet and hovered four miles away.
Neptune
raised one gun of its X turret to maximum elevation and fired a 12-inch shell. The airship, said a midshipman in the battleship’s foretop, “lifted its nose disdainfully to the morning breeze and disappeared to the southwest.” Other British battleships fired at
L-11
with equally poor results. The significance, obvious to all in the Grand Fleet, was that now the Germans knew their exact position.

Beatty, fifteen miles southwest of Jellicoe at sunrise, was convinced that the High Seas Fleet lay to his own southwest, and, at 4:04 a.m., asked permission to sweep in that direction to find the enemy. It was too late. Five minutes earlier, an Admiralty message had been handed to Jellicoe that gave Scheer’s 2:30 a.m. position as sixteen miles from Horns Reef lightship, his course as southeast, and his speed as 16 knots. Ninety minutes had passed since 2:30 and it was evident to Jellicoe that by now Scheer must have passed Horns Reef and reached safety in the protected channel. At 4:30 a.m., Beatty, unaware of this Admiralty message and not waiting for the Commander-in-Chief’s reply, began exhorting his battle cruisers: “Damage yesterday was heavy on both sides. We hope today to cut off and annihilate the whole German fleet. Every man must do his utmost.
Lützow
is sinking and another German battle cruiser expected to have sunk.” Ten minutes later, the author of this rhetoric received a crushing message from
Iron Duke:
“Enemy fleet has returned to harbor. Try to locate
Lützow.
”