Castles of Steel (129 page)

The Battle of Jutland was over. Nothing remained for the Grand Fleet to do except to sweep north, hoping to find enemy stragglers and damaged vessels. At 4:13 a.m., Jellicoe re-formed the battle fleet into its daytime cruising order—battleship divisions of four ships each; the divisions spread abeam of one another—in order to search on a wide front and to provide better protection against U-boats. Through the morning, the fleet steamed through the desolate waters that had been the scene of the previous day’s and night’s battles. Flotsam of all kinds, including wooden mess stools, broken timbers, and thousands of dead fish floating belly up, killed by the detonation of shells, rolled gently in vast patches of oil. Frequently, the surface was disturbed by air bubbles rising from far below, where water had penetrated a compartment of a sunken ship. Bodies wearing the uniforms of both nations floated in life preservers; many of these men had died, not of wounds or drowning, but of exposure. Among the survivors picked up was the captain of the destroyer
Ardent,
who had watched many of his own crew die in the water during the night. “None appeared to suffer at all,” he said. “They just seemed to lie back and go to sleep.”

Jellicoe devoted the morning to collecting his scattered fleet and gathering information about his missing and damaged ships. By 6:00 a.m. his light cruisers had rejoined, but not until 9:00 a.m. were all British destroyers back in company. At 9:07 he signaled Beatty, “I want to ascertain if all disabled ships are on the way. Are all your light cruisers and destroyers accounted for? Where are
New Zealand
and
Indefatigable
?” Beatty replied, astonishing the Commander-in-Chief by giving the positions of the “wreck of
Queen Mary
. . . wreck of
Invincible
. . . [and] wreck of
Indefatigable.
” This first knowledge of the loss of a second and third British battle cruiser provoked a long silence between the two admirals. Then, at 11:04, Jellicoe asked Beatty, “When did
Queen Mary
and
Indefatigable
go down?” Beatty replied that it had been the previous afternoon. At 11:25, Jellicoe was back: “Was cause of sinking mines, torpedoes or gunfire?” and Beatty answered, “Do not think it was mines or torpedoes because both explosions immediately followed hits by salvos.” It was in this manner that the Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Fleet learned of the sinking of two of his capital ships, nineteen hours after they went down. Heavyhearted, but with nothing more to be done, Jellicoe reported to the Admiralty that he had swept the area where the battle had been fought, found no enemy ships, and therefore was returning to base. A little after 11:00 a.m., the Grand Fleet turned northwest for Scapa Flow.

Meanwhile, a procession of wounded British ships was struggling homeward across the North Sea. At one point,
Marlborough
seemed to be sinking; in the hour after midnight, the dreadnought ordered the small ships in her escort to be prepared to come alongside and take off her crew; this was never necessary. Along the way, both crippled British dreadnoughts,
Marlborough
and
Warspite,
were attacked by submarines.
U-46
fired one torpedo at
Marlborough,
which missed by fifty yards; the battleship turned away and eventually made the Humber. About the same time,
Warspite,
still 100 miles from the Firth of Forth, was sighted by
U-51.
Despite a heavy sea, the submarine managed to maintain periscope depth, approach unseen to within 650 yards, and fire two torpedoes. Only one torpedo left its tube, however, because at just that moment, a large wave plunged the submarine’s bow into the sea. This missile broke the surface, betraying the presence of the submarine, and
Warspite
’s captain swung his ship around, increased speed, and hurried away. Two hours later, a lookout sighted a periscope 100 yards ahead of the ship.
Warspite
attempted to ram, but
U-63,
returning with a disabled engine from its patrol off the Forth, crash-dived and escaped. At 3:30 on the afternoon of June 1,
Warspite
passed under the Forth bridge and reached Rosyth, her hull four and a half feet lower in the water than normal. Immediately, her sister
Queen Elizabeth
was moved out of dry dock so that
Warspite
could go in.

Sparrowhawk,
helpless after her collision with
Broke,
drifted until dawn, when a dim shape appeared out of the mist two miles away. When the crew of
Sparrowhawk
recognized a modern German light cruiser, they readied their one remaining gun and prepared for the end. But to their astonishment, the enemy did not open fire; instead, the light cruiser rolled over, stood on her head, and sank. The stranger was the crippled ghost ship
Elbing,
abandoned by her crew.

Meanwhile, water was rising steadily in the engine rooms of the shattered armored cruiser
Warrior.
After staggering away from the battle, the cruiser had been sighted by
Engadine,
the small cross-Channel steamer converted into a seaplane carrier that had flown off a scouting seaplane early in the battle. The smaller ship’s captain, seeing the big armored cruiser in trouble, had offered help.
Warrior
asked
Engadine
to remain near and when
Warrior
’s engines stopped altogether, the seaplane carrier took the waterlogged cruiser in tow.
Engadine
—a 1,600-ton ship towing a 13,500-ton ship—did her best and together they struggled along at 3 knots. During the night, however, the wind rose and
Warrior
yawed so much from side to side that
Engadine,
“bobbing about like a cork,” was forced to cast off the tow. By 7:00 a.m., the armored cruiser was obviously sinking and her captain decided to abandon ship.
Engadine
tried to come along
Warrior
’s starboard side to take off her crew, but it was too difficult. The seaplane carrier backed off and tried the port side, but this attempt also failed.
Engadine
then lay off the starboard quarter—and for a while, the hundreds of men of
Warrior
’s crew believed that they would have to swim across or go down with the ship. But
Engadine
was only waiting for
Warrior
’s yawing to steady; then, once again, she came up along the starboard side. This time her approach succeeded and the two ships made fast. While their steel plates ground against each other in the heavy seas,
Warrior
’s crew mustered on deck to transfer to the other ship. The wounded went first on stretchers; then the captain ordered his crew to go by sections. Considering that the men were moving too hastily for safety, he had the bugler sound “Still.” Every man fell back into ranks on deck; later,
Engadine
’s captain was to marvel at this “triumph of organization, discipline and courage.” When “Carry on” sounded, the transfer resumed. Seven hundred and forty-three men were taken off, and the last to leave were the officers and the captain. At 8:00 a.m.,
Warrior
was left 160 miles east of Aberdeen, never to be seen again. Thus, three of the four armored cruisers that sailed with Sir Robert Arbuthnot from Cromarty—
Defence, Black Prince,
and
Warrior
—were gone. Of the 1st Cruiser Squadron, only
Duke of Edinburgh
returned from Jutland.

On every British ship, men slumped and dozed wherever they were. Officers returning to their cabins and finding them wrecked and uninhabitable went to the wardroom to find every chair occupied by someone fast asleep. Admirals were no less weary. Aboard
Lion
on the afternoon of June 1, Beatty came into the chart house, “sat down on the settee and closed his eyes. Unable to hide his disappointment at the result of the battle, he repeated in a weary voice, ‘There is something wrong with our ships.’ Then, opening his eyes, he added, ‘And something wrong with our system.’ Then he fell asleep.” In another part of the ship, Chatfield went down to his quarters to find his bathroom being used as an operating room. “[It was] an awful sight,” he said, “[with] bits of body and arms and legs lying about.” No one was more exhausted than the ships’ surgeons, but their work could not end. “The wounded who could speak were very cheerful and wanted only one thing—cigarettes,” remembered one officer. “The most dreadful cases were the ‘burns’—but this subject cannot be written about.” Nevertheless, years later, one surgeon did write about his experience at Jutland with flash burns from exploding powder: “Very rapidly, almost as one looks, the face swells up, the looser parts of the skin become enormously swollen, the eyes are invisible through the great swelling of the lids, the lips enormous jelly-like masses, in the center of which a button-like mouth appears. . . . The great cry is water. . . . They die and die very rapidly.”

Not all sailors were sentimental about wounds or death. A gunner on
Warspite,
who had lost a leg, sent his friends back to look for it, hoping to recover the money he kept wrapped up in that sock. And a Cockney cook on
Chester
cheerfully told an officer “how he had found his mate lying dead with the top of his head neatly sliced off, ‘just as you might slice off the top of a boiled egg, Sir.’ ” The tradition of the British navy required that dead men on board be buried at sea before a ship reached port and throughout the day, all across the North Sea, bodies were committed to the deep. Sail makers stitched bodies into hammocks with a hundred-pound shell at their feet, placed them on a plank, and covered them with a Union Jack. Ships slowed in heavy seas with spray sweeping the decks, chaplains with gowns blowing in the wind read prayers, bugles sounded, the planks were lifted, and the hammocks slid out from under the flags and into the water. Not all of the remains could be identified. On
Lion,
“poor charred bodies” were removed from Q turret and at noon, ninety-five mutilated forms, including six officers and eighty-nine men, were buried.
Malaya
interred many “poor, unrecognisable scraps of humanity.” Afterward, on
Tiger,
“an awful smell penetrated all over the ship and we had to get busy with buckets of disinfectant and carbolic soap. Human flesh had gotten into all sorts of nooks, such as voice pipes, telephones, and ventilating shafts.”

The following morning, Friday, June 2, 1916,
Lion
and the battle cruisers reached the Firth of Forth, passed under the great railway bridge, and anchored off Rosyth. At noon the same day, the Grand Fleet passed through Pentland Firth and entered Scapa Flow. During the afternoon and early evening, the battle squadrons coaled, oiled, and took on ammunition. And at 9:45 p.m., Jellicoe reported to the Admiralty that, on four hours’ notice, the British fleet could go back to sea.

CHAPTER 34
Jutland: Aftermath

On Thursday afternoon, June 1, twenty-four hours before Jellicoe and the Grand Fleet returned to Scapa Flow, the High Seas Fleet reached Wilhelmshaven, and Scheer, finishing his champagne, assembled his admirals and asked for their reports. The evidence presented was impressive: they had confronted the might of the Grand Fleet; they had watched British dreadnought battle cruisers and large armored cruisers blow up before their eyes, and they had discovered their own big ships to be powerfully resistant to fatal damage from heavy-caliber British shells. Scheer telegraphed the Naval Staff in Berlin; by early evening, an official communiqué was published. The battle was announced as a German victory. Famous British ships—the battleship
Warspite,
the battle cruisers
Queen Mary
and
Indefatigable
—had been sunk (
Invincible
had been mistaken for
Warspite
). Two British armored cruisers, two light cruisers, and thirteen destroyers were described as destroyed. German losses were said to be the old battleship
Pommern
and the light cruiser
Wiesbaden; Frauenlob
and several destroyers had “not yet returned to base.” Nothing was said about
Lützow, Rostock,
and
Elbing.
The victory was called the Skagerrakschlacht, the Battle of the Skagerrak, and Scheer became the Victor of the Skagerrak. The Austrian naval attaché reported to Vienna that the German fleet was “intoxicated with its victory.”

The German communiqué went immediately to the news agencies of Europe and America and then to the newspapers of the world. In Germany, the presses roared with special editions. Crowds gathered at newspaper offices and around kiosks to read electrifying headlines: “Great Victory at Sea,” “Many English Battleships Destroyed and Damaged.” Above the entrance of
Tageszeitung,
a huge placard read, “Trafalgar Is Wiped Out.” Flags appeared on Unter den Linden, then all over Berlin, then in every city and town in Germany. Schoolchildren were given a holiday. In subsequent editions, the papers spoke, not just of victory, but of “annihilation.” Illustrations showed British dreadnoughts blowing up and floating upside down. Stories brimmed with contempt for the British navy; one paper described “the arrogant presumption of the British rats who have left their safe hiding places only to be trapped by German efficiency, heroism and determination.” Friday, June 2, was declared a national holiday and Sunday became a day of national mourning when the dead from the fleet were buried in the naval cemetery at Wilhelmshaven. On Monday morning, the kaiser arrived in Wilhelmshaven to visit the fleet. William, described by Marder as “almost hysterical in his theatrical display of emotion,” boarded the flagship, embraced Scheer, and kissed him on both cheeks. To the crew assembled on the quay beside the battleship, he shouted, “The journey I have made today means very much to me. The English were beaten. The spell of Trafalgar has been broken. You have started a new chapter in world history. I stand before you as your Highest Commander to thank you with all my heart.” William then boarded other ships, kissing the captains and distributing Iron Crosses. Scheer and Hipper both were handed Germany’s highest military decoration, the Ordre pour le Mérite. Scheer was promoted to admiral and Hipper to vice admiral. King Ludwig III of Bavaria then elevated Hipper, a Bavarian by birth, to the kingdom’s nobility, making him Franz von Hipper. Scheer, offered a “von” by the kaiser, refused and remained simply Reinhard Scheer.