Castles of Steel (60 page)

Now, in the course of a fortnight in late October and early November, the fleet had been dramatically weakened. First came the sudden loss of
Audacious,
then the withdrawal of three of Beatty’s battle cruisers to hunt Spee. Of these reductions in strength, it was the dispatch to the western Atlantic of the modern 13.5-inch
Princess Royal
that most upset Jellicoe. He argued that, instead of taking
Princess Royal,
Fisher should send the older, slower
New Zealand,
which, he believed, would suffice to deal with Spee’s armored cruisers. Enabled by bad weather to delay by one day
Princess Royal
’s departure from Cromarty, he boldly questioned the First Sea Lord, “Is
Princess Royal
to go? . . . strongly urge
New Zealand
instead.” “
Princess Royal
’s coal expenditure is not far from double that of
New Zealand,
” he explained. Jellicoe was Fisher’s protégé, his own carefully selected and nurtured choice as Grand Fleet commander, but this bit of insubordination did not sit well with the crusty First Sea Lord. “
Princess Royal
should have proceeded at once on Admiralty orders,” he signaled the Commander-in-Chief.

Beatty fully supported Jellicoe’s effort to prevent the taking of one of his powerful Cats. Although, on November 6, his squadron was reinforced by the arrival of the new battle cruiser
Tiger,
Beatty refused to agree that this new ship was a substitute for
Princess Royal.
“The
Tiger
is absolutely unfit to fight,” he wrote to Fisher. “Three out of her four dynamos are out of action for an indefinite period and her training is impeded by bad weather which might continue for many weeks at this time of year. . . . At present she is quite unprepared and inefficient.” In this state, Jellicoe chimed in, “she would simply be a present for the Germans.” Stripped of
Invincible, In-flexible,
and
Princess Royal,
Beatty was left with four battle cruisers—
Lion, Queen Mary, Tiger,
and
New Zealand
—to face Hipper’s four battle cruisers—
Seydlitz, Moltke, Derfflinger,
and
Von der Tann.
In a letter to Jellicoe, Beatty pointed out that the change in relative strength of the two squadrons might perhaps dictate new battle tactics. He had always assumed that his duty was to engage Hipper’s battle cruisers when and where he could find them. However, now that his own force lacked its previous clear predominance, he asked for a ruling as to what he should do if he encountered the German squadron. Jellicoe forwarded Beatty’s letter to the Admiralty, covering it with one of his own:

We cannot rely on much if any superiority in gunnery in my opinion. The German fleet has shown itself to be highly efficient and their gunnery . . . has been markedly excellent. I can only repeat once more my request for the
Princess Royal
. . . . I can only inform Sir David Beatty . . . that he must do the best he can with the force at his dis-posal . . . but I hold a very strong opinion that we are running the greatest risk of losing an opportunity of inflicting a severe defeat on the enemy . . . by not adhering to the principle of concentration in the decisive theater.

The Admiralty’s reply to Jellicoe was austere: “The inferiority of the 1st Battle Cruiser Squadron to the German [Battle] Cruiser Squadron . . . is so slight that it should not make any difference in the Vice Admiral’s duty to engage the latter if opportunity offers.” Nevertheless, Fisher, recognizing his own words and beliefs in Jellicoe’s language, attempted to make amends. He summoned the battle cruiser
Indomitable
from the Mediterranean to join Beatty, and two armored cruisers to join Jellicoe. On November 28, he wrote Beatty a remarkably conciliatory letter: “I admit the force of all your arguments. . . . The eventuality (not yet improbable) has still to be faced of the
Scharnhorst
and Company coming through the Panama Canal to New York to release the mass of armed German liners ready to emerge into the Atlantic. Why the
Vaterland
has not ‘nipped out’ already is beyond me! Remember, the last new German battle cruiser,
Derfflinger
. . . is even later commissioned than the
Tiger,
and we know has had very little gunnery practice. . . . As I told Jellicoe, had I known of the
New Zealand
having more coal endurance, I would have taken her. I am in the position of a chess player coming into the game after some damned bad moves have been made in the opening of the game. . . . It’s very difficult to retrieve a game badly begun.”

As November progressed, Jellicoe’s anxieties grew. He worried about the three absent battle cruisers and he worried even more about his day-to-day strength in the basic unit of naval supremacy, dreadnought battleships. On paper, which was where Churchill viewed and compared numbers, the Grand Fleet had a comfortable superiority over the High Seas Fleet. On August 2, when Jellicoe took command, the Grand Fleet had nineteen dreadnought battleships and four dreadnought battle cruisers.

[Six other British battle cruisers were scattered around the world:
Inflexible, Indomitable,
and
Indefatigable
in the Mediterranean, hunting
Goeben; Invincible
at Queenstown in southern Ireland, guarding the Atlantic trade route;
Australia
in the Pacific; and
Tiger
in training.]

Since then, the former Turkish battleships now named
Erin
and
Agincourt
had come to the fleet and
Iron Duke
’s sisters,
Emperor of India
and
Benbow,
were coming in December. Meanwhile, the German High Seas Fleet, which had begun the war with thirteen dreadnought battleships and four battle cruisers, had received or was about to receive three new dreadnought battleships. Each fleet had been augmented by one new battle cruiser, the British
Tiger
and the German
Derfflinger.

On paper, this arithmetic—nineteen battleships to thirteen in August; twenty-three to sixteen in December–January—was always favorable to Jellicoe. These were the numbers the First Lord saw and they satisfied him that all was well. But numbers on paper told only part of the story. During the war’s first months, the Grand Fleet, lacking a secure base, was constantly at sea moving at high speed to thwart the U-boats. By November, continual high-speed steaming had taken a toll on condensers and other propulsion machinery. Breakdowns were occurring and Jellicoe was compelled to establish a regular repair schedule, sending ships, one from each battle squadron at a time, down to their home ports on the south coast for refits. Sadly, these ailments most affected the newest 13.5-inch-gun dreadnoughts, including Jellicoe’s own flagship,
Iron Duke.
Thus, during one two-week period,
Iron Duke
and
Ajax
both had leaking condenser tubes, which affected their speed,
Orion
had gone to Glasgow for examination of her main turbine supports,
Superb
had turbine trouble with stripped blades,
Conqueror
was refitting at Devonport, and
New Zealand
was in dry dock at Cromarty. At best, the result was the permanent absence from the Grand Fleet of two or three of its most important vessels as well as perhaps one battle cruiser, one or two armored cruisers, a light cruiser, and six destroyers. Recalculating relative strength on the basis of these additional factors, Jellicoe’s arithmetic differed from Churchill’s. He reckoned that, allowing for breakdowns and refits, he had nineteen dreadnoughts against sixteen German dreadnoughts. And since the competent but uninspired Admiral von Ingenohl could always choose a day to come out when all sixteen of his dreadnought battleships and four battle cruisers were available, the effective strength of the Grand Fleet was no more than that of the High Seas Fleet. On this point, no one at the Admiralty disputed Jellicoe. Indeed, Churchill himself had offered the maxim that “We must always be ready to meet at our average moment anything that . . . [the] enemy might hurl against us at his selected moment.”

Jellicoe’s pessimistic arithmetic and cautious hoarding were subject to criticism during and after the war. But he refused to give way, knowing that the gray ships stretched out in lines at Scapa Flow were the primary defense of the nation. Nor was this all. Jellicoe knew or suspected something that Churchill did not know and that Jacky Fisher would never admit: vessel for vessel, German ships were better constructed than British ships. It was Jellicoe’s conviction, derived from years at the Admiralty and considerable experience with the German navy, that in matters such as armor plating, underwater protection, watertight subdivision of compartments, gunnery control, and some types of shells, the British fleet was inferior to the German. If so, the Grand Fleet was not the overwhelmingly superior weapon the country, Churchill, and many in the navy believed it to be.

Churchill found Jellicoe’s constant complaints hard to bear. He believed that Jellicoe always magnified his own disadvantages and credited the enemy with more ships than he actually possessed. Not having a naval background, Churchill tended to compare ships solely by the size of their guns and he could not understand Jellicoe’s insistence that until her crew was properly trained and her machinery thoroughly tested, a ship was virtually useless. When the Admiralty sent the Grand Fleet a new ship, the First Lord counted it; until the ship was ready, Jellicoe did not. A tone of exasperation crept into the First Lord’s relationship and correspondence with Jellicoe:

“The requirements of the Commander-in-Chief were hard to meet,” Churchill wrote after the war.

If at any time two or three [capital] ships were absent from the Grand Fleet for a week or two, the Commander-in-Chief drew severe comparisons between the High Seas Fleet and his own. He was a master of this kind of argument. From his own side he deducted any ship which had any defect, however temporary, however small—even defects which would not have prevented her from taking her place in the line in an emergency. He sometimes also deducted two or three of the most powerful battleships in the world because they were not trained up to the full level of efficiency of the others, and these were absolutely blotted out as if they were of no value whatever. The enemy he always credited with several more ships than we now know they had or were then thought likely to have. . . . Unable to deny that the British line of battle could fire a broadside double in weight to that of the Germans, he developed a skilful argument to prove that this advantage was more than counteracted by other disadvantages. . . . He dwelt on this even at a period when his fleet had been reinforced by seven or eight additional units of enormous power without any corresponding accession to the enemy’s strength.

Jellicoe’s argument with the Admiralty extended beyond dreadnoughts to include the eight predreadnought battleships of the
King Edward
class, each of which carried four 12-inch guns. Jellicoe wanted them stationed as far north as possible in order to bring thirty-two additional heavy guns to bear on the High Seas Fleet when Ingenohl came out to fight; the Admiralty wanted to keep them farther south to help defend the east coast from raids or invasion. On November 13, Churchill attempted a general mollification of the Commander-in-Chief: “Since war began you have gained two dreadnoughts on balance and will by 20th have twenty-seven superior units to twenty. We intend
Princess Royal
to join you as soon as
Scharnhorst
is dealt with. During the next month you should suspend sending ships away for refit, doing the best you can at Scapa. . . . If . . . you still feel need for further reinforcement, we propose stationing
King Edwards
at Rosyth, where they can join you for general action or repelling invasion. . . . If you agree, the eight
King Edwards
will be ordered to sail tonight.”

But Jellicoe did not want the
King Edward
s at Rosyth; he wanted them farther north—at Scapa Flow or Cromarty. Further, he replied, the twenty-seven dreadnoughts cited by the Admiralty included two ships that had never fired a gun and a third whose crew was only partially trained. The Admiralty, however, refused to change its orders. “We cannot reinforce you at present, nor alter our dispositions,” Churchill wrote on November 17. Taking these positions, Churchill had the support of Fisher and Sir Arthur Wilson. “I think we have to stand fast,” Fisher had written to Churchill regarding Jellicoe’s request to move the
King Edward
s north. “The Tyrwhitt mob and our overseas submarines are our sole aggressive force in the South.” But Fisher did not blame Jellicoe for requesting reinforcements. Writing to Churchill, he noted, “As A. K. Wilson observed a moment ago, both he and I would probably have written exactly the same letter as Jellicoe, trying to get all we could! Yours till death, F.”

The Admiralty, having told Jellicoe that it was sending the
King Edward
s to Rosyth, then inflicted fresh pain by insisting that he surrender some of his Grand Fleet destroyers to screen the old battleships. Churchill’s letter had a defensive tone: “The coast has been so denuded of destroyers for sake of strengthening the force with you (amounting now to seventy-one) that there is only a skeleton force between the Naze [Harwich] and St. Abbs Head [Rosyth], a distance of 300 miles. . . . You should detach half a flotilla [that is, ten destroyers] of the seventy-one destroyers at Scapa to act with . . . [the
King Edward
s]. . . . We are sending a comparative table of your fleet and German High Seas Fleet which makes it quite clear that, without the
King Edwards,
you have such a preponderance of gun power that with equal gunnery efficiency, a successful result is ensured.” To soothe, Churchill added, “The Admiralty have in mind the importance of getting back the
Princess Royal
as soon as the situation admits.”

Jellicoe reacted with controlled anger. He declared that the seventy-one destroyers mentioned by the Admiralty included ten that were absent from his fleet, refitting. He pointed out that the forty destroyers of the Harwich flotillas had been omitted from Churchill’s mention of the “skeleton force” between the Naze and St. Abbs Head. “I regret to appear importunate,” he continued, “but must beg for reconsideration of the order detaching a half flotilla” to join the
King Edward
s at Rosyth. Without these ten destroyers, he said, the safety of the dreadnought battle fleet was endangered. A U-boat attack on Scapa Flow was quite feasible and “as I am directed to use this base, I trust I shall not be held responsible for any disaster that may occur.” As for a major fleet action, Jellicoe did not take the Harwich Force destroyers into account as he felt that they could not be counted on to join the Grand Fleet at the moment the Germans chose to come out. “I know perfectly well,” he wrote to Fisher on December 4, “that the Harwich flotillas will not join me in time.” Jellicoe also knew that the Germans had eight flotillas comprising eighty-eight destroyers assigned to the High Seas Fleet and that every one would certainly be there on the day Ingenohl chose to come out. The German destroyers “have five torpedoes each—total four hundred forty torpedoes,” he continued. He himself might arrive for this battle bringing as few as thirty-two or even twenty-eight destroyers. The result, he warned the First Sea Lord, might be retreat. “You know the difficulty and objections to turning away from the enemy in a fleet action, but with such a menace, I am bound to do it unless my own destroyers can stop or neutralize the [enemy’s] movement.” “I cannot but feel,” he concluded, “that with my present weakness in destroyers, I am greatly handicapped in obtaining the crushing victory over the High Seas Fleet that is expected of me.” In reply to this argument, the Admiralty gave little ground, declaring only that eight, not ten, of Jellicoe’s destroyers must leave Scapa Flow for Rosyth.