CHAPTER 22
The Battle of the Dogger Bank:
“Why Didn’t You Get the Lot?”
Blücher, abandoned, did not escape. When Beatty hoisted his final signal to the battle cruisers, “Attack the rear of the enemy,” Blücher was engaging Commodore Goodenough’s four light cruisers at a range of 12,000 yards. For over two hours, she had been under fire from one or another of five British battle cruisers. Hit repeatedly, she had lost speed and developed a list, and only two of her six 8.2-inch turrets remained in action, but still her gunfire was straddling Goodenough’s ships so accurately that at 11:05 a.m. the commodore was forced to retreat to a range of 16,000 yards. Then once again he edged in toward the German ship, beginning to score hits at 14,000 yards. Meanwhile, Commodore Tyrwhitt was coming up in Arethusa, accompanied by four M-class destroyers. At 11:20 a.m., these four ships attacked Blücher with torpedoes. Meteor came close enough to launch her torpedoes, but before she could do so, she was struck by a heavy shell that put the destroyer out of action. Her three sisters managed to fire their torpedoes and believed that they had scored five hits. Arethusa now bored in, peppering Blücher with 6-inch-gun fire until the range was down to 2,500 yards, at which point Tyrwhitt’s flagship turned sharply and launched two torpedoes. Both struck, all electric power on Blücher failed, and the ship’s below-deck spaces went dark.
Still, it was not over. The doomed German ship now became a target for four British battle cruisers. Admiral Moore, performing the duty he believed he had been given, assembled the battle cruisers in line and with sixteen 13.5-inch guns and sixteen 12-inch guns, began to conduct a massacre. Tiger, Princess Royal, New Zealand, and Indomitable began to circle their victim, firing continuously. By then, Blücher’s punishment was purely gratuitous. She was a wreck, out of control, shrouded in steam and smoke: the cruiser and her destruction seemed to have been become “a kind of obsession with the captains of the two British battlecruisers [Tiger and Princess Royal].” Again and again they fired, pouring shells into the helpless mass of flame and smoke. A German survivor recalled that “Blücher was under fire from so many ships” that it seemed
there was one continuous explosion. . . . The ship heeled over as the broadsides struck her, then righted herself, rocking like a cradle. . . . The shells came thick and fast with a horrible droning hum. . . . The electric plant was . . . destroyed and . . . [belowdecks] you could not see your hand before your nose. . . . The shells . . . bored their way even to the stokehold. The coal in the bunkers was set on fire. . . . In the engine room, a shell licked up the oil and sprayed it around in flames of blue and green, scarring its victims. . . . The terrific air pressure resulting from explosion in a confined space . . . roars through every opening and tears . . . through every weak spot. . . . Open doors bang to and jam—and closed iron doors bend outward like tin plates and through it all the bodies of men are whirled about like dead leaves . . . to be battered to death against the iron walls. . . . As one poor wretch was passing though a trap door a shell burst near him. He was exactly half way through. The trap door closed with a terrific snap. In one of the engine rooms . . . men were picked up by that terrible air pressure and tossed to a horrible death amidst the machinery.
The British watched with horror and awe. Near the end, a witness on Indomitable saw a sheet of flame leaping up from Blücher’s bow that “stayed for about twenty seconds and I should think must have roasted them all in their fore turret.” It could not continue. At 11:45 a.m., Tyrwhitt signaled Moore that Blücher appeared to have struck her colors, and Moore ordered a cease-fire. As Arethusa and her destroyers closed in to rescue survivors, Tyrwhitt observed that Blücher “was in a pitiable condition—all her upper works [were] wrecked and fires could be seen raging between decks through enormous holes in her sides.” Goodenough’s light cruisers also approached while, farther off, the battle cruisers prepared to leave. “It was a pathetic sight to see that huge ship a mere wreck lying helpless as we steamed by,” said a young midshipman on Indomitable.
At seven minutes past noon, Blücher suddenly heeled over, floated for a few minutes bottom up, and then went down. Arethusa and her destroyers came closer, lowered boats, and began picking up survivors from the water. One of these was Blücher’s Captain Erdmann, who subsequently, as a result of exposure in the cold sea, died of pneumonia as a prisoner in England. Of the 1,200 men in the crew, only 234 were saved. Afterward, the Royal Navy recognized the achievement of Blücher and the heroism of her crew. For over three hours, during which she had been hit by seventy shells and seven torpedoes, Blücher never ceased to reply. In the words of the official British naval history, “As an example of discipline, courage and fighting spirit, her last hours have seldom been surpassed.”
More German sailors might have been pulled from the sea had it not been for the ill-timed arrival of two German flying machines. The zeppelin L-5, patrolling over the North Sea, had not been summoned by Hipper to act as an aerial scout, but her captain, Lieutenant Commander Klaus Hirsch, had picked up numerous radio messages and, curious to see what was happening, had steered his airship in the direction of the battle. Lion saw her first. “As we turned out of action, we observed a zeppelin approaching about eighteen or twenty miles away,” said Filson Young. “I confess that we felt rather helpless with both our engines stopped and had no doubt that she was coming to finish us off. Apparently, however, she did not see Lion, but headed instead for Blücher.” A few minutes later, L-5’s officers and men found themselves looking down on Blücher’s death agony. They saw “a tremendous picture although we could hear almost nothing of the thunder of the guns because of the noise of our engines,” said one of the officers. “The four English battle cruisers fired at her together. She replied for as long as she could, until she was completely shrouded in smoke and apparently on fire. At 12:07 p.m., she heeled over and capsized. We didn’t drop bombs on the English ships. We had no chance because the clouds were at 1,300 feet. If we had dared fly over them at this altitude we would have been shot down.”
The crews of the motionless British light cruisers and destroyers, staring up at the huge cigar-shaped airship droning overhead, felt every bit as vulnerable as the German airmen. Then, quite suddenly, attention was diverted to a second German assailant, this one actually dropping bombs. A German seaplane based on Borkum had witnessed from a distance the sinking of Blücher. The plane misidentified the doomed vessel as British, an error explained by the fact that all British battle cruisers had tripod masts and Blücher was the only large ship in the German navy with a tripod mast. The pilot and observer, looking down on the rescue operation, believed they were watching British ships pulling beleaguered British seamen out of the water. Banking around, the seaplane roared down and the observer began heaving twenty-pound hand bombs out of the rear cockpit. No British ship or sailor was hit, but Commodore Goodenough, the senior officer on the immediate scene, quickly ordered a withdrawal. Afterward, Tyrwhitt speculated that some of the German bombs might have killed German sailors in the water. In any case, he was certain that, but for the seaplane attack, he could have saved many more men from the icy seas.
As Blücher was sinking, Rear Admiral Moore had to decide what to do next. Admiral Hipper was now a smoke cloud on the horizon between 24,000 and 30,000 yards (twelve and fifteen miles) away, making for home at 25 knots. If Moore resumed the pursuit, he would need at least two hours to get back within range; by then, he would be much too deep inside the Bight for safety. Moore’s disinclination to accept this challenge was reinforced by his flagship’s interception of a signal from the Admiralty to Roger Keyes, whose submarines were approaching the German coast. The message was ominous: “High Seas Fleet coming out.” Unfortunately, in New Zealand’s radio room, the direction of the message was reversed and Moore, on New Zealand’s bridge, was told that it was Keyes who had informed the Admiralty that the German battle fleet was coming out, rather than the Admiralty informing Keyes. Now Moore knew what to do. No part of his duty, or even of common sense, dictated that a British admiral should lead four battle cruisers against the High Seas Fleet in German waters. He decided to retreat. His decision was reinforced by his concern over the condition of Lion. He had last seen her battered and listing. Because Beatty’s flagship had lost all electric power and could not send messages, Moore had heard nothing from her since losing visual contact. He decided to go to her assistance. At 11:52 a.m., he formed the battle cruisers into a new line with New Zealand in the van and headed northwest at 20 knots toward Lion’s last known position. At noon, Moore informed the Admiralty: “Reports High Seas Fleet coming out. Am retiring.”
At the Admiralty, Moore’s report seemed to imply grim news. “Some one said, ‘Moore is reporting; evidently Lion is knocked out,’ ” Churchill wrote later. “Across my mind there rose a purely irrelevant picture. I thought of the Memorial Services I had so often attended in Westminster Abbey: the crowd and the uniforms, the coffin with the Union Jack, the searching music, Beatty!” *37
Beatty, very much alive on Lion, knew nothing of these events or forebodings. When his crippled flagship fell out of line, the admiral hoped that tem-porary repairs might quickly restore power to the malfunctioning port engine. Instead, Chatfield gave him “the horrid news” that nothing more could be done at sea and that, in fact, both engines needed to be stopped, at least for a while. To Filson Young, high in Lion’s foretop, the ship’s condition at that moment—dead in the water and listing to port—seemed sufficiently precarious that he and his companions climbed down the mast, leaving behind their oilskins and other cumbersome equipment that might hamper their ability to swim. The decks, Young found, were “an extraordinary spectacle, battered and littered with fragments of smashed and twisted steel, with here and there yawning gashes where heavy shells had burst or fragments penetrated. The men came up from below and swarmed over them, picking up souvenirs in the form of splinters and fragments of shells.”
Beatty, however, was unwilling to give up. As Tyrwhitt’s two light cruisers and twenty-five destroyers returned and closed in to provide protection for the wounded Lion, the admiral signaled the destroyer Attack to come alongside. His intention was to board the smaller ship, speed after his four still-effective battle cruisers and resume command. Coming down from Lion’s bridge, Beatty found the crew pressing “around him, cheering, and, in the enthusiasm of the moment, one of them clapped him on the back and shouted ‘Well done, David!’ ” The ship’s list to port made it easy for Beatty to step from Lion’s slanting deck onto the forecastle of the destroyer, with Seymour, the Flag Lieutenant, clutching an armful of flags and signal books, following behind. Then, standing on the deck of Attack as it backed away from Lion, Beatty waved. “The Lion was one huge grandstand of cheering men,” Seymour said, “but she looked a rather sad sight heeled over to port with a good many holes in her side.” At 11:50 a.m., “with the admiral’s flag flying proudly from her mast, the little destroyer swept off into the haze.”
Beatty’s desperate attempt to overtake and rejoin his squadron and continue the chase was doomed. A few minutes after noon, he came in sight of the four British battle cruisers, which had left behind the wrecked and burning Blücher and were coming back toward him. At a loss to understand what his ships were doing, he ordered Attack alongside Princess Royal, climbed aboard, and at 12:33 p.m., hoisted his flag on Lion’s sister. He hoped, on reaching Princess Royal’s bridge, to be told that at least one, perhaps two, of Hipper’s three battle cruisers had been sunk. Instead, he learned that, despite heavy damage, the German ships had all been allowed to escape. In a rage, Beatty instantly ordered his squadron to reverse course and resume the pursuit. Within a few minutes, however, he realized that this effort was pointless. Forty precious minutes had been lost, and with them probably 30,000 yards. This was irretrievable; the German ships were by now so far away that there would be no overtaking them before they reached the German coast. In addition, the Admiralty had signaled that the High Seas Fleet was coming out. Heartsick, Beatty concluded that no more could be done. At 12:45 p.m., he again reversed course and steered west to cover the retirement of the crippled Lion.
The Battle of the Dogger Bank was over.
Beatty found Lion, battered and listing, making for home at 10 knots on her starboard engine, surrounded by a screen of light cruisers and destroyers. Despite the appalling appearance of her decks and superstructure, casualties had been remarkably low: two men killed and eleven wounded. The critical damage to the ship was below the waterline. Here, work parties had placed collision mats and built wooden cofferdams to stop the inflow of seawater, shored up bulkheads to prevent collapse, and started the pumps. Nevertheless, the injury to the ship’s propulsion system was grave. Saltwater contamination of the boiler-feed-water system already had caused the failure of the port engine and now was also affecting the starboard engine. All dynamos were out of action and, except for the light produced by lanterns and candles, the ship was dark. No stoves were working, but Beatty’s steward, left behind when the admiral departed the ship, managed to produce a cold lunch of champagne and foie gras sandwiches for the members of the staff. Young and his colleagues, their faces blackened by cordite smoke and their nerves jangled by hours under shellfire, sat down and cheered themselves at this unusual picnic.
Beatty, returning to them in Princess Royal, wrestled with a final, aggressive impulse. He might still inflict harm on the Germans by sending a mass of destroyers into the Bight to make a night attack on Hipper and the High Seas Fleet. At 2:30 p.m. he proposed to Jellicoe that he hold back one flotilla to screen Lion and thrust the rest toward Heligoland. Before Jellicoe could answer, however, Lion’s starboard engine began to fail. Her speed dropped to 8 knots and Chatfield was told by his engineering officer that there was no guarantee that the engine would keep going through the night. At three o’clock, Chatfield passed this information to Beatty, who ordered Indomitable to take Lion in tow. Beatty chose Indomitable, partly because her captain, Francis Kennedy, was known as an exceptional seaman, and partly because, should the battle somehow be renewed, Indomitable was the least potent of the remaining British battle cruisers. Towing a huge ship, listing with thousands of tons of water inside her and the bow down by six feet, was a dangerous and delicate operation; Kennedy needed all of his experience and skill. Simply passing and establishing the tow absorbed almost two hours. First, a 51⁄2-inch wire hawser was passed between the two ships and successfully secured, but the wire parted when the strain of moving Lion’s 30,000 tons of steel plus the 3,000 tons of water was applied too quickly. On the next attempt, a 61⁄2-inch hawser was passed over and this line, tautened more gradually, got the ship moving. At 5:00, Lion restarted her own starboard engine and, tethered to Indomitable, began the 300-mile voyage home. Eventually, linked in tandem, the two ships reached a speed of 10 knots.
In midafternoon, Jellicoe arrived. He knew that Hipper had fled and he doubted that Ingenohl remained at sea, but he wished to give Lion maximum protection. Accordingly, he dispatched Vice Admiral Bradford’s seven predreadnoughts, along with Pakenham’s armored cruisers and two light cruiser squadrons, to a blocking position twenty-five miles east of Lion in the direction of Heligoland. At 4:30 p.m., while Indomitable was attempting to establish its tow to Lion, the Grand Fleet appeared on the horizon. Jellicoe, understanding the dangers facing the crippled ship, immediately detached from the Grand Fleet the light cruiser Galatea and seventeen destroyers of the 2nd Flotilla, and the light cruiser Caroline and eighteen destroyers of the 4th Flotilla, adding these thirty-seven ships to Lion’s protective cordon. In addition to Jellicoe’s battleships and Beatty’s battle cruisers, Lion now had, by James Goldrick’s calculations, “an escort of thirteen light cruisers and sixty-seven destroyers, most of the Royal Navy’s front-line strength in these types.”
Jellicoe’s decision to strip away his own destroyers and assign them to screening Lion was the result of an urgent message from the Admiralty sent to Iron Duke at 3:45 p.m.: “Germans are preparing a night attack by destroyers but the two flotillas which were out with their battle cruisers last night have not enough fuel to take part. Our destroyers should protect damaged ships.” Hipper, of course, had pondered just such an attack with his own destroyers, but—as the Admiralty had predicted—he was deterred by a shortage of fuel. And the High Seas Fleet destroyers were too far away. But neither the Admiralty, Beatty, nor Jellicoe could be certain of this.
At nightfall, anxious to remove his own (now unescorted) battleships before German destroyers could appear, Jellicoe turned the Grand Fleet back for Scapa Flow. Soon after, for the same reason, Beatty accelerated northward with his three remaining battle cruisers. Behind, the wounded Lion, roped to Indomitable and surrounded by their numerous escort, made her laborious way across the North Sea. The night was anxious for those on board. Shortly after Beatty departed, Lion’s starboard engine broke down again and Indomitable, her engines now pulling more than 50,000 tons of steel and water (her own weight plus Lion’s) through the sea, slowed to 7 knots. If the enemy knew this, it seemed certain that he would attempt a destroyer or submarine attack, but the hours went by without interruption. At dawn, Lion was still over a hundred miles from the Firth of Forth. The British destroyer flotillas re-formed as a submarine screen, but still no enemy appeared. All day, Lion crept along, silent and helpless.
“It was a strange journey lasting all night, all the next day and through the night following . . . along the road over which we had made such an exhilarating chase in the morning,” wrote Filson Young. “The wounded Lion in tow of her consort was surrounded by a cloud of destroyers and from her bridge that evening I watched in the calm twilight the beautiful evolutions of these craft, weaving in and out in ever changing formation. All about us as far as we could see, the divisions were zigzagging weaving their web of safety around us.” At nightfall, Tyrwhitt, commanding the sixty destroyers of the escort, issued a blunt command: “Keep a good lookout for submarines at dawn. If seen, shoot and ram them regardless of your neighbors.” Inside the ship, the night passed without heat or electric light—an uncomfortable novelty for Young, who was not a professional sailor. “The silence of the ship was the strangest element of all,” he said.
The absence of those buzzings and whinings that come from the innumerable dynamos, ventilating fans, refrigerating machines and motors that are never silent . . . [and which now were silent] made audible other sounds: the echo of voices through the long steel alleyways, the strange gurgling of water where no water should be. Most of us had headaches; all of us had black faces, torn clothes and jangled nerves. The ship was as cold as ice, all the electric radiators by which the cabins were warmed being out of action. Blows and hammerings echoed on the decks down below where the carpenters were at work. The sick bay, into which I looked before turning in, was a mess of blood and dirt, feebly lighted by oil lamps. . . . The remaining staff managed to have quite a cheery little dinner with Captain Chatfield whose galley and pantry were in commission. But there is nothing so cold as an unwarmed steel warship in the winter seas. The only place to get warm was in bed; and I turned in after dinner and slept like the dead.
At midnight on the second night, the crippled ship arrived off May Island at the entrance to the Firth of Forth. Here, as Lion dismissed her escort and transferred her tow cable to tugboats, Beatty returned to his flagship and, accompanied by his friend Tyrwhitt, stood on the bridge as the ship was pulled slowly up the estuary. With her bow drawing an extra six feet, the battle cruiser was forced to anchor below the Forth bridge while harbor craft with additional pumps came alongside and pumped out water. This done, the ragged voyage resumed. “There was a thick fog that morning,” said Filson Young, “but as we approached the little island on which the central pier of the Forth bridge is founded, we could hear sounds of cheering coming faintly to us through the mist, which thinned just enough to show us the shore of the island thronged with people cheering and waving. Lion’s band played ‘Rule, Britannia.’ As we came under the bridge, we could see that the mighty span was lined with diminutive human figures, waving and cheering.”
At Rosyth, examination revealed that the Lion’s wounds were beyond that facility’s capacity to repair. Beatty and Chadwick wanted to send the ship to Plymouth where she could be dry-docked and repaired rapidly. But the Admiralty, particularly Fisher, was anxious that the extent of her damage be kept secret and directed that the battle cruiser not be brought to one of the major naval dockyards in the south. Instead, Fisher sent her to Armstrong’s shipyard at Newcastle upon Tyne even though no dry dock was available there. “It was a bad decision,” said Chatfield. “We spent nearly four months in the Tyne with the ship permanently heeled over while the bottom was repaired by means of a vast wooden cofferdam.” Lying on her starboard side in the black mud while damaged armor plates were removed and new plates attached, the once “proud” and “noble” Lion appeared to Young “incredibly small and mean.”
The Dogger Bank was a British victory, even if it was not the total annihilation of the enemy that the British navy and public so eagerly desired. The Germans had run for home, Blücher had been sunk, Seydlitz was badly damaged, and more than 1,200 German seamen had been killed, wounded, or taken prisoner. *38 On the British side, Lion had been severely punished, but only one other battle cruiser, Tiger, had been struck by heavy shells. Princess Royal and New Zealand had not been touched, and Indomitable was hit once by an 8.2-inch shell from Blücher. The damaged destroyer Meteor was towed to safety in the Humber, and no other British destroyer or light cruiser had been hit. There was immense satisfaction in the outstanding engineering performance of the new battle cruisers, which had surpassed their design speeds without the faltering of a single turbine. Ironically, in view of what was to happen at Jutland, the British were also pleased by their ships’ seeming ability to withstand punishment.
The victory provided an enormous lift to British civilian morale, depressed over the long casualty lists from the Western Front. On the twenty-fifth, even as Lion was under tow, Beatty received a signal from the king: “I most heartily congratulate you, the officers and ships’ companies of squadrons on your splendid success of yesterday. George, R. I.” The British press trumpeted the German “rout” and the avenging of the previous month’s Scarborough and Hartlepool bombardments. “It will be some time before they go baby-killing again,” chortled The Globe. The victory also rebutted the German claim that the British navy was skulking in port, afraid to contest the mastery of the North Sea. “After yesterday’s action,” declared the Pall Mall Gazette, “it will not be easy for the loud-mouthed boasters of Berlin to keep up the pretence that the British Fleet is hiding itself in terror.” A Daily Mail photograph of the capsized Blücher—the huge ship lying on her side and her crew scrambling down into the water—gave satisfaction to millions.
The navy knew better. “For the second time, when already in the jaws of destruction, the German Battle Cruiser Squadron escaped,” wrote Winston Churchill. “The disappointment of that day is more than I can bear to think of,” Beatty wrote to Keyes. “Everybody thinks it was a great success, when in reality it was a terrible failure. I had made up my mind that we were going to get four, the lot, and four we ought to have got.” Moore became the primary target of criticism. Years later, Keyes wrote, “I think the spectacle of Moore & Co. yapping around the poor tortured Blücher with beaten ships in sight still to be sunk is one of the most distressing episodes of the war.” Moore defended himself by saying that he had obeyed explicit orders flying from Lion’s signal halyards: “Attack the enemy rear bearing northeast”—the bearing of the Blücher. Because this confusing signal had, indeed, come from his flagship, Beatty did not ask for Moore’s relief. He knew that Seymour had made an unfortunate choice in selecting and hoisting the Lion’s signal flags and that Moore had correctly read their literal meaning as flown. Nor did Beatty blame Seymour; he knew that, to some extent, the faultiness of the signal resulted from the shooting away of all but two of Lion’s halyards. “I am against all charges,” he wrote to Jellicoe. “It is upsetting and inclined to destroy confidence.” But, “frankly, between you and me,” he admitted to the Commander-in-Chief, “he [Moore] is not of the right sort of temperament for a battle cruiser squadron. . . . Moore had a chance which most fellows would have given the eyes in their head for and did nothing. . . . It is inconceivable that anybody should have thought it necessary for four battle cruisers, three of them untouched, to have turned on the Blücher which was obviously a defeated ship and couldn’t steam, while three others, also badly hammered, should have been allowed to escape.”
Fisher, chronically unable to moderate opinions or soften blows, roared that Moore’s conduct had been “despicable!” “No signals (often unintentionally ambiguous in the heat of action) can ever justify the abandonment of a certain victory such as offered itself here when the Derfflinger and the Seydlitz . . . were blazing at the end of the action . . . severely damaged.” Furiously, the First Sea Lord minuted Moore’s report: “The Admiralty require to know WHY the Derfflinger and the Seydlitz, both heavily on fire and in a badly damaged condition, were allowed to escape, when, as Admiral Moore states in his letter, gun range with the leading ships of the Enemy could have been maintained by Tiger and Princess Royal at all events.” Jellicoe put it more gently but agreed that “if, as has since been stated, two of the enemy battle cruisers were very seriously damaged and the fact was apparent at the time, there is no doubt whatever that the Rear Admiral [Moore] should have continued the action.” Moore was spared court-martial, but bitterness at his failure to annihilate a crippled, fleeing enemy lifted only gradually. Early in February, Beatty wrote to Jellicoe that Churchill “wanted to have the blood of somebody” and that the First Lord and Fisher had settled on Moore. Near the end of February, Moore was quietly removed from the Grand Fleet and assigned to command a cruiser squadron in the Canary Islands where the possibility of any appearance by German surface ships was remote.
Fisher’s fiercest wrath fell on Henry Pelly of Tiger, whom he labeled a “poltroon.” It was “inexcusable that Captain Pelly should have left a ship of the enemy [Moltke] unfired at and so permitt[ed] her to fire unmolested at Lion.” Why, the First Sea Lord roared, did Pelly, whose ship was in the lead once the flagship had staggered out of line, not take the initiative and, in the absence of a countermanding order from Moore, continue to pursue the German battle cruisers? Pelly, Fisher said, “was a long way ahead, he ought to have gone on had he the slightest Nelsonic temperament in him, regardless of signals. Like Nelson at Copenhagen and St. Vincent! In war the first principle is to disobey orders. Any fool can obey orders!” Beatty made excuses for Pelly. “Pelly did very badly, first in not carrying out the orders to engage his opposite number which had disastrous results [the crippling of the Lion],” he conceded to Jellicoe. But Beatty also recalled that Pelly was commanding a new ship and that he had been given a mixed ship’s company, which included a large number of apprehended deserters. It had been an uphill task, Beatty realized, for her captain to pull them together in wartime. As for Pelly himself, Beatty said, he “had done very well up to then, he had difficulties to contend with and I don’t think he is likely to do the same again. But he is a little bit of the nervous, excited type.” Nevertheless, Jellicoe could find no excuse for Pelly’s failure to comply with Beatty’s order to engage opposite numbers. “Special emphasis is laid in Grand Fleet Orders on the fact that no ship of the enemy should be left unfired at, and a consideration of this rule should have led to the Tiger engaging No. 2 in line.” Pelly survived because Churchill preferred to close the book on the matter. “The future and the present claim all our attention” was the First Lord’s verdict. Despite his ship’s continued poor shooting, Pelly was to captain Tiger at Jutland.
Fisher was especially furious at the failure to annihilate, as “the rendezvous was given in both cases [the Scarborough Raid and the Dogger Bank battle], and the enemy appeared exactly on the spot [identified by Room 40].” Privately, he questioned Beatty’s turn away from the supposed submarine and the admiral’s error in not explaining his action either to others on Lion’s bridge or to other ships in the squadron. The only extenuation came years later from Beatty’s biographer and fellow admiral W. S. Chalmers, who pointed out that the admiral’s sighting of a periscope and his decision to turn were made “in a split second from the sloping bridge of a listing ship which had borne the brunt of the battle.”
On Wednesday night, January 27, Beatty, still at Rosyth, received a letter from Fisher “urgently inquiring how it was that the action had been broken off.” That same night, as the battle cruisers were preparing to go back to sea, Beatty wrote a quick note to the First Sea Lord, instructing Filson Young, who knew Fisher, to carry it personally to London. Young arrived in London at 6:00 on the evening of January 29 and went immediately to the Admiralty. “I was taken to Lord Fisher at his room. . . . He had aged a great deal in three months, and the yellow face looked very old and worn, but grim as ever. . . . He shook hands . . . and turning his hard, wise old eye on me, he said, ‘Well, tell me about it. How was it they got away? What’s the explanation? Why didn’t you get the lot? And the Derfflinger—I counted on her being sunk, and we hear that she got back practically undamaged. I don’t understand it.’ ” He criticized Beatty’s 90-degree turn to port. “Submarines?” said Fisher. “There weren’t any; we knew the position of every German submarine in the North Sea; and there wasn’t a mine within fifty miles.” Two days later, Fisher told Beatty himself the same thing: “We know from themselves [that is, from Room 40 intercepts] exactly where they [the U-boats] were—hours off you.” Nevertheless, when all the action reports were in, Beatty retained the full confidence of Churchill, Fisher, and Jellicoe. On the last day of the month, Fisher followed his first “very hurried line” to Beatty with warmer words: “I’ve quite made up my mind. Your conduct was glorious. Beatty beatus!” *39
Beatty himself remained bitterly disappointed—the annihilating, Nelsonic victory had shriveled, in Ralph Seymour’s words, to “an indecisive fight in our favor”—but the admiral’s prestige in the navy soared. When Churchill visited Lion ten days after the battle, he found Beatty’s senior officers enthusiastic. “Well do I remember,” Churchill wrote, “how, as I was leaving the ship, the usually imperturbable Pakenham caught me by the sleeve, ‘First Lord, I wish to speak to you in private,’ and the intense conviction in his voice as he said, ‘Nelson has come again.’ ”
The Dogger Bank was the first sea battle between dreadnoughts whose high speed and heavy gun power dominated the action. Both the British and German Battle Cruiser Squadrons were accompanied by flocks of light cruisers and destroyers, but except in the opening moments near dawn and, at the end, in delivering the death strokes to Blücher, they played little part in the fighting. Neither submarines nor mines were involved, although fear of their presence affected British tactics. The preponderance of heavy gun power favored the British: Beatty’s five battle cruisers carried twenty-four 13.5-inch and sixteen 12-inch guns to Hipper’s eight 12-inch and twenty 11-inch guns. During the battle, the five British battle cruisers fired a total of 1,150 13.5-inch and 12-inch shells. The Germans fired 976 12-inch and 11-inch shells. Lion was hit by sixteen heavy shells from the German battle cruisers and one 8.2-inch shell from Blücher. Six heavy shell hits were recorded on Tiger and none on any of the other British ships except one 8.2-inch hit on Indomitable by Blücher. Seydlitz was hit by three heavy British shells—two from Lion (one of these nearly destroyed her) and one from Tiger. Derfflinger also was hit three times, once each by Lion, Tiger, and Princess Royal. Obviously, accuracy on both sides was poor: 31⁄2 percent of the shells fired by the Ger-man battle cruisers hit a target while on the British side the percentage achieved by the three Cats firing at the three German battle cruisers was below 2 percent. *40
The dismal gunnery figures on both sides do not take into account the circumstances of the battle: high speed, long range, smoke, and the fact that no one on either side had ever fought this kind of battle before. Neverthe-less, Lion was hit sixteen times and no German ship more than four times. Discussion of comparative gunnery began on board Lion even as the ship was being towed home. “My impression,” said Filson Young, “was that the German gunfire was better than ours initially, and they got on the target sooner. . . . To anyone sitting, as I was, on the target surrounded by the enemy’s shells, his shooting appeared to be painfully accurate; and, indeed, towards the end of the action, when two and possibly three ships were concentrating on Lion, she was very nearly smothered by their fire.” Young believed that one cause of poor shooting was that “we had no director firing [“a device by which all the guns can be aimed and fired simultaneously and accurately from one central position, generally on the foremast well above the smoke,” according to Young’s footnote definition] in any ship except Tiger.” Yet Tiger, using the new system, had scored only three hits and Lion, which lacked it, had scored four. The result was an erosion of confidence among British naval officers in their equipment, training, and tactics. “Every one of them,” said Young, “had been brought up on the theory of the big gun, the first blow, etc. We had the biggest guns and we got in the first blows, but none of the results that . . . [we] had been taught to believe as gospel had happened. . . . We had gone on hitting, and hitting, and hitting—and three of their four ships had got home. Why?”
After the battle, Young and his shipmates assumed that its results and the lessons learned “would immediately have been fastened upon by the . . . navy and the Admiralty. . . . Doubtless throughout the fleet there were hundreds of officers who were keen to get all the information and technical data that they could. . . . Every gunnery officer in the fleet wanted to know exactly how the great ranges, and the high speeds of the ships engaged affected the existing organization for fire control.” Accordingly, immediately after their return to the Firth of Forth, the officers of the Battle Cruiser Squadron wrote detailed reports. A wealth of technical data was forwarded to the Admiralty, but, said Young, “the Admiralty, having acknowledged the receipt of the masses of material, made no further sign.” After the war, Churchill himself blithely reported: “The result of the engagement confirmed and fortified my own convictions of the great strength of the British line of battle, and in particular of the ships armed with 13.5-inch guns.”
Jellicoe, whose career specialty had been gunnery, was not so complacent. Battle reports indicating superior accuracy on the part of the Germans confirmed his “suspicion that the gunnery of our battle cruiser squadron was in great need of improvement, a fact which I very frequently urged upon Sir David Beatty.” Beatty needed no convincing, having, from the day he took command of the battle cruisers in 1912, urged that gunnery exercises be conducted at long range and high speed. Nevertheless, despite these admonitions and good intentions, the need for excellence in gunnery was never hammered home. “We went out to sea for fleet exercises with the same totally inadequate monthly allowance of ammunition to be expended,” said Young. “[After the battle] Lion was fitted with . . . director fire control and other improvements, but with the Grand Fleet there was no development or modification of tactics and the reliance was still on the fallacy that all was well with our [matériel] and that we had more of it than the enemy. The result was that . . . our gunnery . . . showed the same disappointing results at Jutland as it had at Dogger Bank.”
If a deficiency in the ability of the British battle cruisers to deal out punishment was recognized by some and ignored by others, ominous flaws in their ability to survive punishment remained hidden. Since the building of Invincible, British battle cruisers had been structurally flawed by Jacky Fisher’s demand that weight in armor plate be sacrificed to weight invested in larger guns and heavy propulsion machinery that could generate higher speeds. The Germans, obeying Tirpitz’s dictum that a warship’s first duty is to remain afloat, had taken a different course, accepting lower speed and smaller gun caliber in return for heavier protective armor. Thus, at the Dogger Bank, Lion had 9-inch armor over her amidships belt, New Zealand 8-inch, and Indomitable 7-inch, while Derfflinger was shielded in this area by 13-inch armor and Seydlitz and Moltke by 11-inch. Ironically, the Battle of the Dogger Bank failed to illuminate this design flaw; indeed, it encouraged Fisher and the Royal Navy to believe that their choice had been correct. Lion, despite her weaker armor, had absorbed sixteen heavy hits, had suffered few casualties, and had survived, while the better-protected Seydlitz had been hit only three times, but had lost two turrets and 200 men. This was one fact that permitted Churchill to preen himself on the capabilities of the 13.5-inch gun.
On both sides, the vulnerability of ships to shells fired at long range in a high, arching trajectory before plunging steeply down on enemy decks had been unknown before the battle. When dreadnought battle cruisers and battleships were designed, naval tacticans and designers had assumed that battles between capital ships would be fought at ranges of around 10,000 yards. Shells, therefore, were expected to travel on flatter, more horizontal trajectories and explode against or penetrate the sides of target ships. The sides of ships, accordingly, were more heavily armored than the decks. But at the Dogger Bank, the first dreadnought action, the British battle cruisers opened fire at 18,000 yards. Despite their heavier armor, even the German vessels lacked adequate deck armor, which was why a shell lofted from 17,000 yards away had pierced Seydlitz’s after deck.
Another defensive design fault manifested itself in ships on both sides at the Dogger Bank. No one in Britain or Germany had realized the menace of an explosive flash fire within an enclosed gun-turret system. In Lion, Seydlitz, and their sisters in both fleets, shells and powder journeyed upward on hoists from the magazines, through the turret lobbies, and into the turrets to the breeches of the guns. These separate compartments remained open and unsealed. A flash fire at any point along this extended route could spread quickly to all other points, including the magazines. Such a fire had occurred in Lion at the Dogger Bank and might easily have destroyed her. The fire in her A turret lobby, which caused most of her casualties, could have spread downward into her ammunition handling rooms and from there into her magazines, where a cataclysmic explosion would have destroyed the ship. Fortunately, little ammunition was present in the turret lobby and the resulting fire was small and rapidly extinguished. As a result of this escape, the intrinsic danger of fire transmission went unrecognized on board the ship and at the Admiralty and no effort was made to install antiflash devices in turret trunks to prevent flames from spreading. Not until after Jutland sixteen months later, when the battle cruisers Queen Mary, Invincible, and Indefatigable blew up from this cause, were these corrections made in British ships.
After the Dogger Bank, the Royal Navy made changes in battle orders, in communications systems, signals, and fleet organization. Jellicoe issued new Grand Fleet Battle Orders regarding distribution of fire on enemy ships; he wanted no more mistakes such as Pelly’s. Beatty updated his Battle Cruiser Orders, emphasizing that captains must possess, “in a marked degree, initiative, resource, determination and fearlessness of responsibility. . . . War is a perpetual conflict with the unexpected, so that it is impossible to prescribe beforehand all the circumstances that may arise.” Along with director firing systems, all battle cruisers were to be equipped with an auxilary wireless set. And Nelson’s flag signal, “Engage the enemy more closely,” was restored to the signal book.
The admirals at sea resisted another change urged on them by Churchill and Fisher. The First Lord, concerned that the Grand Fleet’s base at Scapa Flow was too remote from the potential battlefield, wanted Jellicoe to move his ships down to Rosyth. The First Sea Lord concurred, telling Beatty that because Scapa was too far away, he doubted that “Jellicoe’s Battle Squadrons will be in this war.” Later, writing to Jellicoe, Fisher elaborated: “The fundamental fact is that you can never be in time so long as you are at Scapa Flow and therefore there will NEVER be a battle with the German High Seas Fleet unless von Pohl [who assumed command soon after the Dogger Bank battle] goes north especially to fight you and that he never will!!!” Jellicoe refused, citing the thick fogs in the Firth of Forth and his fear that Beatty “would be mined in” by the Germans. The Commander-in-Chief preferred to remain at Scapa Flow, now well protected, because the huge anchorage was so large that ships could carry out gunnery practice and torpedo drills inside the Flow, free of submarine menace. When Beatty supported Jellicoe, Churchill and Fisher backed off.
Beatty’s success stimulated the Admiralty to change the structure and name of the battle cruiser force. With no need now for battle cruisers anywhere in the world except in the North Sea—the one exception was Inflexible, now on guard at the Dardanelles against any sortie by Goeben—the Admiralty could now place all these ships under Beatty’s command. This new force was renamed the Battle Cruiser Fleet; Lion, once repaired, was set apart as its flagship. Captain Osmond de Brock of Princess Royal was promoted to commodore and a week later to rear admiral, and given command of the 1st Battle Cruiser Squadron, comprising Princess Royal, Queen Mary, and Tiger. Admiral Pakenham, brought from the 3rd Cruiser Squadron to replace the disgraced Moore, went to the 2nd Battle Cruiser Squadron, which included New Zealand, Australia, and Indefatigable. Rear Admiral Horace Hood was given the 3rd Squadron: Invincible, Indomitable, and—when she could be brought home—Inflexible. Against Hipper’s four battle cruisers, Beatty now had nine, with a tenth to come.
Despite its new name and increased strength, the Battle Cruiser Fleet remained an organic part of the Grand Fleet and Beatty remained subordinate to Jellicoe. On March 23, the Commander-in-Chief, looking ahead and imagining the opening phases of a future battle, wrote to Beatty, employing his own particular blend of fatherly praise and gentle admonition:
I imagine the Germans will try to entrap you by using their battle cruisers as a decoy. They know that the odds are that you will be 100 miles away from me, and can draw you down to the Heligoland Bight without my being in effective support. This is all right if you keep your speed, but if some of your ships have their speed badly reduced in a fight with their battle cruisers, or by submarines, their loss seems inevitable if you are drawn into the High Seas Fleet with me too far off to extricate them before dark. The Germans know you very well and will try to take advantage of that quality of “not letting go when you have once got hold,” which you possess, thank God. But one must concern oneself with the result to the country of a serious decrease in relative strength. If the game looks worth the candle risks can be taken! If not, one’s duty is to be cautious. I believe you will see which is the proper course and pursue it vigorously.
German reaction in the fleet, the press, and—where it counted most—with the kaiser was greater embarrassment and deeper depression. The Dogger Bank proved that the British fleet had not evacuated the North Sea, although this boast by the German press had never been believed in the German navy. “The dominant feeling in the [German] fleet,” says Arthur Marder, “was that an inept operation had met the fate it deserved.” All Germans had reason to be proud of the gallant fight put up by Blücher; and, in general, in this first clash of dreadnoughts, the German navy had proved—as it had with Scharnhorst and Gneisenau—that its fighting abilities, discipline, and courage were superb. The ships were splendidly handled, the guns well aimed, and signaling and damage control expert. But nothing could obscure the facts that the German navy had fled the field, lost a heavy armored ship, and left behind over a thousand men.
German seamen had special reason to be proud of their gunnery. “Our own fire was very effective,” Hipper reported after the battle. “Hits could be repeatedly observed on the first and second [British] ships and fire in the second.” Long before they knew that they had scored twenty-two hits on Lion and Tiger to only seven received by their own three battle cruisers, the Germans had seen their shells exploding on Beatty’s flagship and had watched her turn out of the line with a heavy list. Twice, they had watched Commodore Goodenough’s light cruisers come within range and then retreat; they had seen Meteor struck and other British destroyers give up and fall back. Finally, when they witnessed the entire squadron of British battle cruisers turning away, it naturally appeared that the British had given up the fight. Admiral Scheer observed, “There seems no obvious reason why the English battle cruisers would so soon have stopped fighting after their leader fell out and when the number of our [battle] cruisers had already dwindled to three, unless it was because our guns had severely handled them.” In addition, when Hipper entered the Jade, he believed that he had sunk Tiger. Officers on board Moltke declared absolutely that they had seen the second battle cruiser in the enemy line sink. Moltke’s log recorded: “11:52: Hits on Tiger aft of third funnel and fire observed. 12:23: . . . an enemy battle cruiser which did not appear to be in the line, but to have drawn off . . . disappeared after heavy explosions.” The airship L-5, hovering overhead, bolstered this report by reporting that it witnessed only four large British ships withdrawing after the battle. “I cannot confirm the view of Moltke that the second ship of the enemy line sank,” Hipper reported, “though I think it is possible.” Hipper reported this possibility to Ingenohl, and Ingenohl reported it to the kaiser. When, in time, it became apparent that Tiger was still afloat, Hipper was mortified; it underlined the fact that Blücher, alone of all the ships in the battle, had been abandoned.
Ingenohl endorsed Hipper’s conduct of the battle. Reporting to the kaiser, he said, “The tactical dispositions were in my opinion correct; the leadership during the action was irreproachable. Further, the difficult decision to leave the damaged Blücher to her fate must in the circumstances be approved.” Some in the navy grumbled at Hipper’s abandonment of Blücher, but these criticisms were muted. Scheer endorsed Hipper’s decision, saying, “Seeing so many [British] ships assembled, he [Hipper] must have considered it extremely probable that still more forces were behind.” As Captain Ludwig von Reuter of Derfflinger pointed out, “With the Dogger Bank only eighty sea miles from the English coast and two hundred sea miles from Wilhelmshaven . . . the stern action chosen by Admiral Hipper was tactically correct.” The real fault, most German officers believed, lay in the absence of the High Seas Fleet.
Hipper’s official postbattle report and those offered by Derfflinger’s captain and the captains of other battle cruisers sounded similar themes. A general, urgent recommendation was that when the battle cruisers went out, they be supported by the High Seas Fleet even at the risk of a major battle with the British Grand Fleet. With this in mind, Reuter recommended that no important offensive operations go forward until all German battle squadrons (he referred to the absence of the Königs) were available. In addition, Hipper suggested the careful placement of a line of submarines able to attack before or during the battle. Reuter added that “in English waters, our forces should be accompanied by submarines which in the case of a chasing action as took place on January 24 might reap a rich harvest.” Only efficient ships, Hipper believed, should take part in battle: “All ships other than the most modern must, in view of the tremendous effectiveness of modern naval artillery, fall an easy prey to the enemy.” Hipper, of course, had Blücher in mind.
The German Naval Staff analyzed the comparative technical deficiencies in their ships in the areas of speed, firing range, and gun caliber. As Beatty was overtaking him, Hipper had greatly envied the superior engine power of the British battle cruisers. There was no cure for this until new ships were built. Similarly, although the Germans professed to be satisfied with the performance of their smaller 11-inch and 12-inch guns, new ships under construction—the battleships Bayern and Baden, and the battle cruiser Hindenburg—would come to sea with 15-inch guns. There was, however, one deficiency that could be corrected before new ships were completed: the fact that at the Dogger Bank British guns could fire at longer range. Long ranges depended to a large extent on the elevation of the guns in the turrets. At the Dogger Bank, the Germans could not raise the muzzles of their gun barrels as high as the British could. To elevate the guns farther meant enlarging the opening of the gun embrasures and thereby increasing the risk of shell fragments and splinters coming into the turret. The British had done this. And, after the Dogger Bank, the Germans did so, too. Another unexpected problem was reported by Captain von Egidy of Seydlitz: “The consumption of ammunition surpassed anything that had been previously anticipated. During the two hours’ action, the ammunition in the two turrets in which fire was continuously maintained was shot away, leaving only sixty-five and twenty-five rounds respectively. The average time between salvos was 42.3 seconds. . . . The new ships will have to be provided with greatly increased space for ammunition storage.”
The Germans learned one vital lesson from the battle. The near fatal damage to the Seydlitz turned out—despite the terrible casualties in the turret inferno—to have been a blessing, which eventually would give the German navy a huge material advantage over the British. Understanding of the flashlike qualities of an explosive fire, and the realization that a fire in the turret system must not be allowed to penetrate to the magazine, dawned quickly on those who stared at the burnt-out after turrets of Seydlitz lying in a Wilhelmshaven dry dock. To quote from Ingenohl’s report: “The working chamber is a danger to the entire turret. In all new construction it must be eliminated. Shell and cordite hoists must be equipped with doors which close automatically after the cages have passed. The charges must be delivered to the guns in flame-proof covering. The doors connecting the magazines to adjacent turrets must be secured with padlocks to prevent premature opening, the key must be in the custody of the turret officer and the order to open only given when all the turret’s ammunition has been fired.” The German navy moved quickly to implement these recommendations. Multiple, elaborate “antiflash” shutters were installed between turrets and magazines in all battle cruisers and battleships and the risk of fires spreading was reduced by limiting the amount of combustible reserve ammunition, particularly powder, held in turret handling rooms. Of these changes and the reason for them, the Royal Navy remained ignorant.
There was one mystery that the Germans failed to solve. Hipper was alarmed by the implications of once again having sailed in secret and nevertheless encountering Beatty and Tyrwhitt directly in his path. Scheer also was concerned: “The unexpected presence of English ships . . . leads to the conclusion that the encounter was not a matter of chance and that our plan in some way or another had got to the knowledge of the English.” Ingenohl reported to the Naval Staff, “It must be considered a remarkable coincidence that our [battle] cruisers would encounter the enemy precisely at dawn. It appears as if the enemy had intelligence concerning the operation.” The Naval Staff reply was dismissive: “Not apparent by what means,” it minuted, although it recommended watchfulness against the activities of a British agent who was supposed to pass his messages through inconspicuous newspaper advertisements. No one asked how the agent could have communicated the Dogger Bank intelligence in this manner when the decision to go to sea and Hipper’s sole message to his captains occurred on the day the Scouting Groups sailed. Room 40 and its work remained a secret.
The debacle demanded a culprit. Captain Hans Zenker, of the Naval Staff, had no doubt as to who this should be. “The blame . . . lies with the Commander-in-Chief [Ingenohl],” he wrote to his superior Admiral von Pohl on February 1. “Our previous advances to the English east coast have had such an effect on English public opinion that it should have been expected that strong forces would be in the North Sea. Also, from previous experience, it should have been no surprise that the enemy had warning of our sortie. Such lack of foresight and prudence is all the more astonishing and regrettable because the Commander-in-Chief had already been excused for the defeat on August 28 [the Battle of the Bight] and, in two opera-tions against the English east coast [Yarmouth and Scarborough], only luck enabled him to avoid painful consequences. The only way to avoid further disasters from such obstinate inflexibility is to change the Commander-in-Chief.”
Ingenohl attempted to defend himself by telling the kaiser that an English battle cruiser had gone to the bottom along with Blücher. This failed to save him. On February 2, nine days after the battle, Ingenohl was relieved of command, along with his Chief of Staff, Vice Admiral Eckermann. The new Commander-in-Chief of the High Seas Fleet was none other than Admiral Hugo von Pohl, moved over from his post as Chief of the Naval Staff. Pohl, fifty-nine, a respected former battleship squadron commander, was described by a prewar British naval attaché in Berlin as “short and square built, but slim. Has the reputation of being a good seaman. Gives impression of ability, quickness of decision and force of character. . . . He won’t enthuse people at all [but he is] . . . a man . . . with a good knowledge of his profession. He does not look healthy.” Pohl was a better naval tactician than Ingenohl, but it scarcely mattered; like his predecessor, he was never allowed to prove his merit in battle. The real culprit in the defeat at the Dogger Bank was Kaiser William, who continued to demand that the fleet be preserved and that its commanders avoid battle with superior force. William tightened these restrictions when he appointed Pohl. All sorties by Hipper’s battle cruisers were forbidden and for over a year German capital ships did not venture into the North Sea. As Churchill wrote, “Apart from submarine warfare, a period of fifteen months halcyon calm reigned over the North Sea. The neutral world accepted . . . [this] as decisive proof of British supremacy at sea.”
After the Battle of the Dogger Bank and the consequent shackling of German dreadnoughts to their harbor buoys, different paths opened before the two opposing navies. The German Naval Staff turned to U-boat warfare and initiated a submarine campaign against merchant shipping, Allied and neutral, sailing to Allied ports. In Britain, the public was temporarily satisfied with the navy. The National Review saw in the restriction of “the second navy in the world to the mud banks of the Elbe . . . as supreme an exhibition of superior sea power as the world has witnessed.” But this was not the mood at the Admiralty, where restless spirits wanted a more vigorous and imaginative employment of the navy’s resources. Even before the Battle of the Dogger Bank, discussions were under way about the use of British sea power in offensive operations far from the North Sea.