CHAPTER 32

Jutland: Jellicoe vs. Scheer

For Jellicoe, as for Scheer, the appearance of the enemy battle fleet in this part of the North Sea was a surprise. That morning, the Admiralty had advised the British Commander-in-Chief that Admiral Scheer’s flagship remained anchored in the Jade. Therefore, when Galatea’s first contact report came in at 2:20 p.m., announcing that German ships had been sighted sixty-five miles to the south, Jellicoe supposed that there might be a skirmish brewing between opposing light cruisers and destroyers. Of course, if Beatty could come up and catch them, he would make quick work of these unlucky Germans. And if Hipper was out, Beatty, with a two-to-one advantage—six battle cruisers and four Queen Elizabeths to Hipper’s five battle cruisers—should manage nicely. For the Grand Fleet, however, the day probably would drag on as part of another routine, uneventful sweep. At two o’clock, most captains in the battle fleet, sharing their admiral’s gloomy assessment, began sending their men to tea.

Then, contrary indications began to appear. At 2:28 p.m., St. Vincent reported to Iron Duke that she was picking up strong, nearby wireless signals from ships on the wavelength used by the High Seas Fleet. At 2:35 p.m., as Beatty was turning his battle cruisers toward Hipper and leaving Evan-Thomas behind, Jellicoe signaled the battle fleet to raise steam for full speed. Zigzagging ceased. At 2:39, Galatea was back, reporting a “large amount of smoke as though from a fleet.” And at 2:51, another Galatea message arrived: “Smoke seems to be seven vessels besides destroyers and cruisers.” Then St. Vincent signaled that she had picked up more wireless intercepts; Jellicoe increased battle fleet speed to 18 knots. At 3:00 p.m., the Commander-in-Chief ordered the Grand Fleet to prepare for action, and officers and men put down their tea cups and mugs. On Collingwood, Prince Albert, the future King George VI, ill following an excessively convivial visit with friends on the battle cruiser Invincible two nights before, rose from his sickbed and went to his post in A turret. A midshipman in Neptune’s foretop noticed that “several ships were flying, instead of their customary one White Ensign, three or four ensigns from various parts of the rigging. . . . In about ten minutes the air seemed to be thick with white ensigns, large and small, silk and bunting, hoisted wherever halyards could be found.” In an independent mode, the light cruiser Blanche flew four Union Jacks, one from each funnel.

At 3:40 p.m., Beatty reported to Jellicoe that he had sighted five German battle cruisers and many destroyers. Five minutes later, he declared that the enemy was running southeast toward home. This was followed at 3:55 p.m. by a third Beatty signal: “Am engaging enemy.” Now Jellicoe knew that, forty or fifty miles to the south, Beatty and Hipper were fighting on a course that carried them directly away from him at speeds beyond the ability of his slower battleships to overtake. There was little he could do with the battle fleet except to increase speed to its maximum of 20 knots. But there was one way he might help Beatty: by sending him Hood, whose three Invincibles, already twenty-five miles ahead of the battle fleet, were capable of 25 knots. At 4:05 p.m., the Commander-in-Chief signaled Hood: “Proceed immediately to support Battle Cruiser Force.”

Invincible, Inflexible, and Indomitable of Rear Admiral Horace Hood’s 3rd Battle Cruiser Squadron were Britain’s first battle cruisers, the eldest children of Jacky Fisher’s revolution in warship design. All had performed important service: Invincible in the Battle of the Bight and at the Falklands; Inflexible and Indomitable had pursued Goeben across the Mediterranean; Inflexible had gone on to the Falklands and afterward returned to the Dardanelles, where she had been heavily damaged by a Turkish mine; Indomitable was with Beatty at the Scarborough Raid and the Dogger Bank. Now, because of the temporary switch in assignments with the five Queen Elizabeths, the three old battle cruisers were with Jellicoe rather than with Beatty at Jutland. Hood’s force was screened by the newly commissioned light cruisers Chester and Canterbury, and by four destroyers, Shark, Acasta, Ophelia, and Christopher.

When Beatty reported that Hipper, once sighted, had turned and bolted back to the southeast—thus beginning the Run to the South—Jellicoe signaled Hood to hurry to Beatty’s support. The Invincibles belched black smoke and dashed away, but locating the fight turned out to be difficult; ninety minutes later, Hood was still looking. At 5:30 p.m., however, the Invincibles had reached a point east of the German battle cruisers, which were beginning their turn to the east. Five miles ahead of Hipper were the four light cruisers of Bödicker’s 2nd Scouting Group, Frankfurt, Wiesbaden, Pillau, and Elbing. At 5:35 p.m., one British and several German ships caught sight of one another. To both sides, the dim shapes were unclear in the haze; the Germans were the first to make the correct identification. The British ship, steaming six miles west of Invincible’s starboard beam, was the light cruiser Chester, in commission less than a month and having had little opportunity for gunnery practice. Nevertheless, when her lookouts saw smoke to the west, her captain turned to investigate. Because, in the haze, Bödicker’s light cruisers resembled the ships of the British 1st Light Cruiser Squadron, Chester came closer to take a better look. To encourage the deception, one of the German ships flashed a British identification signal, tempting Chester to come still closer. She was 6,000 yards away and had just recognized the three-funnel ships as hostile when the four German cruisers simultaneously opened fire. A storm of shells swept over Chester and within five minutes she was hit seventeen times. Her gun crews and bridge and signals personnel were ravaged, her range finder and its crew were blown overboard, all voice-pipe and electrical communications were smashed, and three of her four 6-inch guns were destroyed. But her engines remained intact and, when, a moment later, her assailants suddenly found the tables turned and themselves in terrible danger, Chester was able to slip away to the north.

Hood, not far away, saw the orange flashes illuminating the murk and turned toward them. He recognized Chester surrounded by shell splashes and then he saw the shadowy outlines of her assailants. At 25 knots, his three battle cruisers raced out of the mist, steering between Chester and her pursuers. Heavy battle cruiser guns opened fire at close range, catching Bödicker’s surprised light cruisers in a blizzard of 12-inch shells. For Invincible, these were the first shells fired at an enemy since the Falklands; for Inflexible, since the Dardanelles. These totally unexpected main battery salvos sent the German light cruisers flying, screaming to Hipper by wireless that they were “under fire from enemy battleships.” Within a few minutes, the Germans had vanished. Elbing escaped unhurt, but Frankfurt and Pillau had been hit and Wiesbaden was fatally wounded. A 12-inch shell from Invincible had burst in her engine room, piercing main steam pipes and putting both engines out of action. The crippled ship stopped and lay drifting in “a great cloud of steam and smoke.”

To rescue the German light cruisers, Hipper sent Regensburg and thirty-one destroyers to charge the Invincibles, but before most could launch their torpedoes, they were met by a countercharge from Hood’s second light cruiser, Canterbury, and four British destroyers. In a free-swinging brawl at close quarters, the Germans somehow got the impression that many more British ships were present than was the fact. As a result, the Germans fired only twelve torpedoes, after which the thirty-one destroyers turned back. In this action, Shark was hit and lay immobile in the water. Acasta came up and her captain asked Shark’s captain, Commander Loftus Jones, how he could help. Loftus Jones sent him away, saying, “Look after yourself and don’t get sunk over us.” Acasta turned and followed in Inflexible’s wake as she steamed north into the haze. With Shark sinking and many in her crew killed or wounded, Loftus Jones took a place at one gun; as he did so, “a shell took off his right leg above the knee.” German destroyers were approaching and he gave the order to abandon ship. His men got him overboard onto a raft where he died just as German torpedoes were sending Shark to the bottom. Only six of Shark’s crew survived, rescued that night by a Danish steamer. Posthumously, Loftus Jones was awarded the Victoria Cross.

After sending Hood to join Beatty, Jellicoe received no news for thirty minutes—this was the period of Beatty’s Run to the South. The Commander-in-Chief was given no details of the battle cruiser action and he learned of the loss of Indefatigable and Queen Mary only the following day. At 4:17 p.m., he asked Evan-Thomas whether the 5th Battle Squadron remained in company with Beatty. The reply was ambiguous: “Yes, I am engaging enemy.” At 4:38 p.m., however, an “URGENT. PRIORITY” message came in from Goodenough in Southampton: “Have sighted enemy battle fleet.” Scheer was coming north and, Jellicoe assumed, Beatty would fall back on the Grand Fleet, drawing the enemy after him. At 4:47 p.m., the Commander-in-Chief signaled all ships in the Grand Fleet, “Enemy’s battle fleet is coming north,” and the news ran through the ships like wildfire. On Hercules, the Russian naval attaché observed “every face radiant with enthusiasm and delight.” At 4:51 p.m., Jellicoe informed the Admiralty, “Urgent. Fleet action is imminent.” When the message arrived in Whitehall, Admiralty signals flowed out; ports and dockyards were to prepare to receive damaged ships; tugboats were alerted to assist cripples. In Whitehall, even the usually imperturbable First Lord, Arthur Balfour, was “in a state of very great excitement.” *60 Tyrwhitt with the Harwich flotillas was ordered to fill his bunkers with fuel in order to be ready to supplement or relieve Grand Fleet light cruisers and destroyers that might run low.

Then, for over an hour, the Commander-in-Chief was left in ignorance. The weather was partly responsible. Patchy haze, with visibility in some directions of up to 16,000 yards and down to 2,000 yards in others, hung over the water. Throughout the afternoon, the fleets were steaming at high speed through these shrouded seas, in which not only the enemy but their own forces frequently were hidden. Often, ships appeared only as pale, shadowy silhouettes, impossible to identify, appearing and then vanishing in the murk. In this confusion, heightened by the complexity of formations and maneuvers, scouting arrangements disintegrated and detailed information became impossible to acquire or pass along. The reports, when they did come in, were as apt to be wrong as right, with no way of knowing which was which. And beyond this general problem, which affected all commanders in both fleets, Jellicoe was afflicted by something else: the failure of a subordinate to perform his duty. Beatty’s primary role as a battle cruiser commander was to maintain contact with the enemy battle fleet and keep his own Commander-in-Chief informed of its strength, bearing, course, and speed. In the months before the battle, Jellicoe’s instructions to Beatty had constantly stressed the need for timely information. Yet between 4:45 p.m. and 6:06 p.m., Beatty, immersed in his own battle with Hipper, had neglected or forgotten this duty and sent Jellicoe nothing. Goodenough had signaled three times—at 5:00, 5:40, and 5:50 p.m.—reporting that the enemy battle fleet was coming north, but Goodenough’s descriptions of his own positions were so obviously inaccurate that Jellicoe wondered how much weight to give his information. Under enormous strain, the Commander-in-Chief reacted by attempting to tighten his tactical control of the battle fleet. Small, fidgety messages flashed from her searchlights or were signaled by semaphore. The 22-knot Royal Oak was reproved for slewing around astern of the 20-knot Iron Duke: “You must steer a steadier course in action or your shooting will be bad,” Jellicoe prompted. “Keep just clear of the wake of next ahead if it helps ships to keep up,” he advised the entire fleet. And to Thunderer, he signaled, “Can you pass Conqueror? If so, do so.”

Meanwhile, the Grand Fleet’s dark gray columns steamed forward—but toward what? Where was the enemy? Jellicoe assumed that the High Seas Fleet was pursuing Beatty to the north, but still no one was providing him with fresh, reliable information. At 5:55 p.m., he signaled Marlborough, leading the dreadnought column on his starboard wing: “What can you see?” Five minutes later, Marlborough reported that she could see “our battle cruisers bearing south southwest, steering east, Lion leading ship.” So Beatty was nearby and, that being so, Hipper was not far away. But where was Scheer? Jellicoe heard the rumble of heavy guns on Iron Duke’s port bow and saw gun flashes on the southeastern horizon; these came from Hood’s assault on Wiesbaden and her sister light cruisers. Jellicoe, who was unaware of the nature of this action, wondered whether, somehow, this could be the bearing of Scheer’s battle fleet. “I wish somebody would tell me who is firing and what they are firing at,” he said.

Then, just at 6:00 p.m., Jellicoe and his staff could see Lion for themselves; she was off his starboard bow, steaming east through the haze five miles away, driving right across the front of the battle fleet, thundering salvos to the south at an invisible foe. A long trail of smoke was pouring from a hole in her port side, the guns of her X turret were pointed up at a useless angle, and tall gray columns of water thrown up by German shells were rising between her and her sisters. A midshipman in Benbow also saw the British battle cruisers “suddenly burst through the mist . . . a wonderful sight, these great ships, tearing down across us, their huge funnels silhouetted against a great bank of red cordite smoke and lit up by sheets of flame as they fired salvo after salvo at the enemy whose flashes could be seen in the distance.” Jellicoe had no time for admiration. Instantly, at 6:01 p.m., he flashed Beatty by searchlight: “Where is enemy’s battle fleet?”

Beatty did not know the answer; he had not seen the German battleships since he had left Evan-Thomas behind in order to give his own battered ships a respite. For five minutes, therefore, as Beatty and his four surviving battle cruisers raced across the front of the British battle fleet, Lion did not respond to Jellicoe’s question. Then, at 6:06 p.m., Beatty gave an answer of sorts by searchlight: “Enemy’s battle cruisers bearing southeast.” This was no help to Jellicoe. In desperation, he signaled Beatty again: “Where is enemy’s battle fleet?” Again, Beatty gave no immediate answer. Seven minutes passed while Beatty searched the southern horizon with his binoculars. Then, suddenly, he saw the distinctive massive shapes of König and Grosser Kurfürst. He now knew the bearing of the enemy battle fleet and, enormously relieved, he signaled Jellicoe, “Enemy battle fleet in sight bearing south. The nearest ship is seven miles.” But his signal provided neither course nor speed.

Standing on the bridge of Iron Duke, a small figure in a belted blue raincoat with a white scarf knotted at his neck, Jellicoe stared intently at the hazy line of sea and sky to the south. The British Commander-in-Chief was facing the most critical decision of his life: how and when to deploy the dreadnought battle fleet. The Grand Fleet had been safer from U-boat attack in cruising formation—six columns abeam, with four ships in each column—but it was impossible to fight in this formation. If the fleet was forced to open fire while still in column, only the forward guns of the leading six ships could be used. “Deployment” was the maneuver that would convert the fleet from cruising formation into a single, long battle line of twenty-four dreadnoughts, which would bring to bear all the fleet’s heavy guns on the enemy. To deploy effectively, however, it was essential to know the location, formation, course, and speed of the enemy fleet; this would determine the direction of the British deployment. A battle line deployed without this knowledge—or on the basis of wrong information—might place the British fleet in the position of having its own T crossed. *61

Jellicoe, staring intently into the mist ahead, attempting to pierce the haze, knew that his own eyes were not sufficient. The range of heavy naval guns in 1916 exceeded normal North Sea visibility; that was especially true on this day, May 31. Once the order to deploy was given, its execution would require at least twenty minutes. As a result, if the Commander-in-Chief waited to give the command until he himself could see the enemy, he risked having his fleet caught in the act of deployment with many of its turrets masked by his other ships. Nevertheless, Jellicoe delayed until he could be certain, holding on in column formation, considering his next move methodically as if he were working out a mathematical problem. In the next few minutes before the firing began, he must swing his six columns into a single line—east to port, or west to starboard. His decision must be the right one; once started, there was no going back. Should he deploy on the right wing—to starboard and the west? At first, Jellicoe thought so; it would bring his fleet closest to where the enemy probably was and allow him to open fire sooner and at shorter range. But with every moment, deployment on the right seemed less wise. It would bring the two fleets within immediate torpedo range of each other, and nearby German destroyers would be able to deliver a massed torpedo attack on his battleships in the act of turning. If, on the other hand, he deployed to the left, on the port wing column, the Grand Fleet battle line, heading southeast, would be 4,000 yards farther away from the enemy fleet, but would have crossed the German T. Further, he would have achieved the best possible light for gunnery; his ships, except for gun flashes, would be invisible in the eastern mists while the German ships would be silhouetted against a bright, sunset horizon to the west. “I therefore decided to deploy on the port wing,” Jellicoe said later. After the war, the official German naval history endorsed Jellicoe’s choice: “One must agree that . . . [a deployment on the right wing] would have been only too welcome to the German fleet.”

All these calculations passed through and were resolved in Jellicoe’s mind in sixty seconds. He had received Beatty’s signal at 6:14 p.m. Frederic Dreyer, the captain of Iron Duke, was standing on his bridge when he saw Lion’s searchlight signaling that Scheer’s battleships were to the south:

I heard the signalman calling each word of Beatty’s reply to Jellicoe’s repeated demand. . . . I then heard at once the sharp, distinctive step of the Commander-in-Chief approaching—he had steel strips on his heels. He stepped quickly onto the platform around the compasses and looked in silence at the magnetic compass card for about twenty seconds. I watched his keen, brown, weather-beaten face with tremendous interest, wondering what he would do. . . . I realized as I watched him that he was as cool and unmoved as ever. Then he looked up and broke the silence with the order in his crisp, clear-cut voice to the Fleet Signal Officer: “Hoist equal speed pendant southeast.” This officer said, “Would you make it a point to port, sir, so they will know it is on the port wing column?” Jellicoe replied, “Very well, hoist equal speed pendant southeast by south.” The officer then called over the bridge rail to the signal boatswain. . . . Three flags soared up Iron Duke’s halyards. We had not yet sighted any German vessel.

The time was 6:15 p.m.

To speed things up, while some ships were still acknowledging his flag signal, Jellicoe told his Flag Captain, “Dreyer, commence the deployment.” Dreyer immediately blew two short blasts on the ship’s siren—the mariner’s signal for “I am turning to port”—and ordered Iron Duke’s helm to be put over. The admirals in adjacent columns, all watching Iron Duke, did the same; each blew two short blasts on his flagship’s siren and put over the helm. As the six battleships leading the columns swung to port, those astern followed ship by ship, the entire line falling in line behind the port wing division led by King George V. Iron Duke now was the ninth ship in a single line of twenty-seven British dreadnought battleships. Sir Julian Corbett, the official historian of the Royal Navy in the Great War, calls Jellicoe’s deployment decision “the supreme moment of the naval war”; Professor Arthur Marder describes it as “the peak moment of the influence of sea power upon history.” Jellicoe himself was well aware of the significance of what he had just done. If his calculations were correct, his deployment would deliver the High Seas Fleet into his hands. His fleet would be in a compact line six miles long with all gunnery arcs bearing on the enemy. And it began just as he had hoped: as his battleships were turning into line, the van of Scheer’s fleet loomed up to the south, first as shadowy silhouettes, then more clearly. From Iron Duke, the admiral himself saw three ships on the starboard beam whose shapes were those of the Königs. Turning to the man beside him, Jellicoe said, “Dreyer, I think it is time for you to go to your station in the conning tower.”

On either wing of this immense fleet, now transforming itself from one formation into another, the British deployment was distorted by the frantic activity of dozens of small ships: the light cruiser squadrons and destroyer flotillas attempting to reach their proper stations screening the battle fleet. As a result, on the port—the northeastern—wing, there was a mass of small ships, “as thick as the traffic in Piccadilly,” weaving and dodging at full speed across the path of the dreadnoughts turning onto their new course. At the opposite—the southwestern—end of the British battlefront, where the starboard wing column was deploying, the congestion was worse. Beatty’s four battle cruisers were charging across the front of the onrushing Grand Fleet dreadnoughts, while his cruisers and destroyers were forced to pass through the area where the battleships were deploying by darting and slipping between the turning dreadnought columns. Thus, as Galatea’s light cruiser squadron dashed between the four battleships of the port wing column, Galatea herself passed close under Agincourt’s bow just as the dreadnought opened fire. Agincourt “fired a salvo over us which fairly lifted us out of the water,” said one of the light cruiser’s officers. “I don’t know how many of her twelve 14-inch guns she fired, but I felt as if my head was blown off.” There were numerous near collisions and some ships had to stop engines to avoid collision. An officer watching from Malaya observed “a light cruiser squadron and a destroyer flotilla gathered together in a very small area on which the enemy was concentrating all available fire. Amidst this perfect deluge of shells, the light cruisers and destroyers were twisting and turning, endeavoring to avoid each other and the big ships. . . . It will never cease to be a source of wonder to me that so few ships were hit and there were no collisions. It must have been one of the most wonderful displays of seamanship and clear-headedness that ever existed.” Later, when participants looked back, the place and the moment came to be called the Windy Corner.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Franz Hipper was unable to savor his third victory that afternoon over the British battle cruiser force. Three of the nine British battle cruisers that had sailed for Jutland had now been sunk, but four of Hipper’s own five ships were in worse condition than the six surviving British battle cruisers. Lützow, Hipper’s flagship, was barely afloat, with water pouring into her forward compartments, dragging her bow deep into the water. Her wireless stations had been destroyed. Facing this situation, Erich Raeder, Hipper’s Chief of Staff, forced himself to confront the admiral, telling him that the ship must drop out of line and return to Wilhelmshaven as well as she could; meanwhile, Hipper must transfer to another battle cruiser. When Raeder said this, “a kind of paralysis seemed to descend on Hipper. . . . [He] issued no orders. It was the first time that he had nothing to say.” Raeder tried again: “We can’t lead the squadron from Lützow anymore, Your Excellency.” “But I can’t leave the flagship,” Hipper protested. Raeder persisted: “We’re unable to signal by wireless and anyhow our speed isn’t enough.” “No doubt!” said Hipper. “But my flagship!” Then Raeder spoke sharply: “The squadron needs Your Excellency,” and Hipper jerked back to reality. “You’re right,” he said, and signaled the destroyer G-39 to come alongside. Just before 7:00 p.m., with Lützow stopped and the destroyer waiting, Hipper grasped Lützow’s Captain Viktor Harder by the hand, saluted the officers on the bridge, and declared, “We’ll come back. We won’t forget you.” Then, as Beatty had done at the Dogger Bank, he jumped down onto the destroyer’s deck and told the captain to take him to another battle cruiser that he could use as his flagship. As Hipper departed, Lützow, with a huge volume of smoke pouring from her forecastle back across her bridge, turned out of line and, alone, steamed slowly off to the south. Her part in the battle was over.

For the next three hours, Hipper wandered across the battlefield in his small destroyer seeking to board another battle cruiser and make it his new flagship. He went first to Derfflinger, but her condition was almost as calamitous as Lützow’s. She had received twenty heavy-caliber shell hits; two armor plates had been torn from her bow, leaving an enormous hole open to the sea; her masts and rigging were shattered; most signal halyards were blown away or burned; her wireless apparatus was damaged so that she could receive but not send messages. And she had on board 180 dead or wounded men. Leaving Derfflinger, Hipper headed for Seydlitz, which was in even worse condition. The ship had “a hole as big as a barn door in her bow and several thousand tons of water gurgling inside her.” She was listing, awash forward up to the middle deck, and also had no working wireless. Von der Tann, which he tried next, had no gun turrets able to fire and was valueless as a fighting unit. That left Moltke, still largely undamaged. Hipper’s destroyer was about to come alongside Moltke when a new order from Scheer for the battle cruisers to attack made this impossible. As the squadron could not be controlled from the bridge of a destroyer, Hipper signaled Captain Johannes Hartog of Derfflinger to take temporary command until circumstances permitted Moltke to halt long enough to take him on board. But this did not happen until 10:00 p.m.

As the Grand Fleet deployed, the divisions came up to their turning points and swung into line, each ship “breaking into a ripple of flame from all her turrets” as soon as she could bring her guns to bear. Because of the haze and the interference from the funnel smoke of Beatty’s ships steaming at high speed across the front of the Grand Fleet, no organized distribution of fire was possible and individual ships selected their own targets. At 6:17 p.m., Marlborough, leading the starboard-wing column nearest the Germans, trained on one of the Kaisers at a range of 13,000 yards and fired seven 13.5-inch-gun salvos in four minutes. The other ships of her division followed: Revenge with eight 15-inch, then Hercules, then Agincourt with her seven turrets and fourteen 12-inch guns. At 6:23 p.m., Iron Duke opened fire at Wiesbaden; seven minutes later, she found a more suitable target in one of the Königs and gave the German nine salvos. Benbow, Colossus, Orion, Monarch, and Thunderer joined in. Even so, for the first fifteen minutes, firing came from only about one-third of the British fleet. There were other difficulties: at 6:26 p.m., Jellicoe was forced to reduce speed to 14 knots to allow Beatty’s battle cruisers to cross in front of him. This signal did not reach all ships, and there was bunching up and overlapping of battleships in the rear of the line; Marlborough had to reduce to 8 knots and, briefly, St. Vincent was forced to stop dead in the water. At 6:33 p.m., Beatty reached his new station ahead of the battle fleet’s new course and Jellicoe was able to increase speed to 17 knots. By then, firing was general.

It was a moment of triumph for Jellicoe and of horror for Scheer. Earlier in the afternoon, the German Commander-in-Chief, in Friedrich der Grosse, had been optimistic about the battle’s outcome. Hipper had told him that enemy light cruisers had been sighted and that the battle cruisers could handle them; in consequence, Scheer did not increase the speed of the High Seas Fleet battle squadrons. When, at 3:46 p.m., Hipper reported that six British battle cruisers were present, Scheer was delighted. The situation for which he had been hoping was developing: he had come upon a fraction of the Grand Fleet operating on its own, far from home. Scheer altered course to the northwest, toward Hipper, and his leading battleship squadron, Behncke’s four Königs, engaged both Beatty’s remaining battle cruisers and Evan-Thomas’s Queen Elizabeths. At maximum speed, the German dreadnoughts pressed forward, hoping to lame, and then overtake and sink, one or more of the big British vessels. Even as the Grand Fleet was preparing to deploy, Scheer was still pursuing the 5th Battle Squadron, and his battleships were firing enthusiastically at the circling Warspite. At 6:20 p.m., five minutes after Jellicoe’s signal to deploy, the German advance continued with Scheer and his admirals wholly unaware that König, leading their battle line, was only 14,000 yards southeast of Marlborough on the Grand Fleet’s starboard wing. Then, just as Warspite straightened out and steamed away, Rear Admiral Behncke, on König’s bridge, stared ahead and, to his horrified amazement, saw massed columns of battleships turning in front of him. Heavy fire began to fall on his ships and Behncke himself was wounded on his bridge. By 6:30 p.m., fifteen British battleships had come into line and, with every minute, more of Jellicoe’s dreadnoughts were adding their guns to the cannonade. The Grand Fleet now was crossing the German T, punishing the head of the German line—König, Grosser Kurfürst, and Markgraf. To relieve some of the pressure, Behncke followed Hipper’s battle cruisers ahead of him as they bore off to starboard; thus, without the knowledge or permission of its Commander-in-Chief, the High Seas Fleet’s original course, north to the Skagerrak, was bending to the east.

Scheer, even more than Jellicoe, was hampered by lack of information. His flagship was thirteenth in line in the long German column and the admiral himself could see nothing in the haze. Scheer’s Flag Lieutenant, Ernst von Weizsäcker, bluntly declared after the war that during the battle, Scheer “had but the foggiest idea of what was happening.” Even as he steamed steadily toward Jellicoe, Scheer still was not convinced that the Grand Fleet was at sea; the gunfire on the horizon ahead he assumed to be coming from the battle between Beatty and Hipper. Then, five minutes after the Grand Fleet had begun its deployment and as the volume of gunfire rose and the rain of heavy shells fell thicker on his fleet, Scheer realized that something larger and more ominous than Beatty and Evan-Thomas lay across his path. “It was now obvious that we were confronted by a large portion of the English fleet,” he said. “The entire arc stretching from north to east was a sea of fire. The flash from the muzzles of the guns was seen distinctly through the mist and smoke on the horizon although the ships themselves were not distinguishable.” The shock to Scheer was a terrible one. And then, at 6:25 p.m., with the four Königs in the van of his fleet immersed in a maelstrom of fire, he was handed a signal from the commander of his 5th Destroyer Flotilla; British prisoners rescued from the sunken destroyer Nomad had told their captors that sixty large British ships, including twenty dreadnoughts and six battle cruisers, were “in the vicinity.”

What could Scheer do? He was 150 miles from home, facing a more numerous, more powerful enemy, which, thanks to the presence of Mauve’s six predreadnoughts, was also superior in speed. He could not hope to win a running heavy-gun battle on a parallel course; his slower ships would certainly be lost and probably others as well. Already his punished van was beginning to lose formation. The volume of fire made it impossible to sight on and fire on any individual British ship. Worst of all, he had permitted his enemy to cross his T. Scheer was a professional and a realist; he knew that if he continued on this course, the life of his fleet could be measured in minutes.

Scheer reacted quickly. “While the battle is progressing a leader cannot obtain a really clear picture, especially at long ranges,” Scheer wrote after the war. “He acts and feels according to his impressions.” Scheer saw only one way out: to order a carefully rehearsed German fleet maneuver, designed for exactly this situation: when it was necessary to break away rapidly from a stronger fleet. At 6:36 p.m., Scheer signaled, “Gefechtskehrtwendung nach Steuerbord!” (“Battle about turn to starboard”). The maneuver called for each ship independently and simultaneously to make a 180-degree turn onto an opposite course; in this case directly away from the British fleet. The result would save time by reversing the course of the fleet without the need to follow the leader around a single point ahead. Scheer’s captains had practiced the maneuver often in peacetime in the Baltic; now, when the command was given, its execution was superb. Westfalen, the last dreadnought in line, turned immediately. Then, together, each heeling sharply, twenty-two battleships turned in place, and, within four minutes, the entire column had vanished into the murk. To the British, watching the advancing German column suddenly fade from view, it was inexplicable.

Jellicoe was astonished and perplexed: the High Seas Fleet, which had been heading straight for his battle line, had suddenly vanished. And it had disappeared before Jellicoe had finished deploying all of his battleships; only at 6:40 p.m. had the last Grand Fleet division turned onto the new deployment course with Barham, Valiant, and Malaya forming astern of Agincourt, the last ship. And now, extraordinarily, Scheer’s fleet was gone. The serious fleet action had lasted for only twenty minutes—from 6:15 to 6:35 p.m.—and even then, in the shifting banks of mist and smoke rolling toward the British line, no more than three or four enemy battleships had ever been visible from the bridge of Iron Duke. “I could not see his turn away from where I was on top of the chart house, nor could anyone else with me,” Jellicoe said later of Admiral Scheer. “I had imagined the disappearance of the enemy to be due merely to the thickening of the mist, but after a few minutes, I realized that there must be some other reason.” Only at 6:44 p.m., nine minutes after Scheer’s turn and once he had finished superintending the deployment of his own fleet, did Jellicoe react. Supposing, at first, that Scheer had made only a small alteration in course, Jellicoe responded by turning the British line slightly to starboard—to the southeast. Eleven minutes later, at 6:55 p.m., Jellicoe realized that Scheer must have made a larger turn, perhaps toward the southwest, which would have been the quickest way out of the British trap. Jellicoe again altered course, this time by 45 degrees to a heading of south, still at a diverging angle from Scheer’s new course to the southwest. This divergence did not concern Jellicoe; in bad visibility, he had no wish to pursue Scheer into the unknown. In addition, the new Grand Fleet course put the High Seas Fleet in ultimate peril: every mile placed Jellicoe in a better position to prevent Scheer’s return to Germany.

Jellicoe’s decisions before, during, and immediately after Scheer’s emergency turnabout were the results of his own personal analysis and estimates; no one in the British fleet passed along any useful information to the Commander-in-Chief. Most bridge officers in the battle fleet, of course, were necessarily absorbed in their own close-quarters deployment ship-handling; Scheer’s unexpected maneuver had gone virtually unobserved. But not totally unobserved: men on some British vessels—the light cruisers Falmouth and Canterbury, for example—had clearly seen Scheer’s battleships turning away, but no one thought to report this fact to the flagship. Iron Duke’s own gunnery-control staff in the battleship’s foretop witnessed the turn but failed to inform the admiral on the bridge. Throughout this critical time, therefore, Jellicoe was forced to rely solely on what he could see for himself—and he could see nothing. Even at 6:55, twenty minutes after Scheer had turned away, Jellicoe was uncertain what Scheer had done or where he had gone. Looking for help, he asked Marlborough, at the eastern end of the battle line, “Can you see any enemy battleships?” “No,” Marlborough replied.

Meanwhile, more trouble was on the way: torpedoes were heading for the rear of the British line. Most of the tracks were clearly visible and easily avoided, but not all. Revenge felt “a heavy shock”; a torpedo had struck the side, and, failing to explode, had bounced off the underwater armor. A moment later an explosion occurred on Marlborough’s starboard side. A torpedo destroyed thirty feet of hull plating, killed two men, and flooded a boiler room as well as the diesel- and hydraulic-engine rooms. The battleship listed 8 degrees and her speed was reduced to 17 knots, but she managed to maintain her position in line. This, as it turned out, was the only torpedo to hit and damage a British dreadnought during the Battle of Jutland. But the hit on Marlborough had a powerful effect on Jellicoe, strongly reinforcing his tendency to caution. His declared policy was not to risk his battle fleet to underwater damage by following closely in the wake of a retiring enemy who might launch a destroyer torpedo attack, or sow mines in his path, or both. No one knew where the torpedo that hit the Marlborough had come from; possibly a U-boat, possibly a mine, possibly even the wreck of the immobile Wiesbaden. On the chance that this last possible source might be the true one, more British salvos crashed out toward that crippled vessel. Still she did not sink and, on board, thirty desperate men remained alive.

Nothing better illustrates the difficulties facing Jellicoe at Jutland than the brevity of the first clash between the two battle fleets. Despite the skill with which Jellicoe and Beatty had enmeshed the High Seas Fleet, Iron Duke had fired only nine salvos when Scheer turned his ships around and vanished into the mist. Even so, Jellicoe remained hopeful. He retained the superior tactical position, and when the firing stopped, he and most men in the British fleet believed this to be only a temporary hiatus in the long-awaited day of reckoning. The High Seas Fleet remained out there somewhere, and the Grand Fleet was in position to prevent Scheer from returning to the Jade. Meanwhile, as ship after ship took stock, British admirals and captains realized that the Germans had not scored a single hit on any Grand Fleet battleship. The men in the fleet were cheerfully exuberant and, during the respite, those who were able came out to take a look. Prince Albert, whose A turret in Collingwood had been hammering away at Derfflinger, emerged to sit on the turret top and escape the cordite fumes inside. Later, the king’s second son wrote to his brother, the Prince of Wales, that, during the fighting, “all sense of danger and everything else goes, except the one longing of dealing death in every possible way to the enemy.”

For twenty minutes after reversing course, Scheer retreated to the west, managing to lose Jellicoe in the mist and smoke. The turn had reversed the order of the German line: Westfalen now led the dreadnoughts, and König brought up the rear. Battle damage was severe, although not equally distributed. The battle cruisers, except for Moltke, were badly hurt. Behncke’s battleship squadron, which had led the fleet, had been hard hit: König had heavy damage; Markgraf’s port engine was stopped and she was having trouble keeping her place in line. The other two ships of Behncke’s elite division were fighting fires, plugging holes below the waterline, and shoring up bulkheads. But Scheer’s other dreadnoughts were relatively unharmed, and Mauve’s six old ships had not been touched. Scheer could count his superbly executed Gefechtskehrtwendung a brilliant success.

Then, suddenly, Scheer did something even more extraordinary. At 6:55 p.m., the same signal soared again up the halyards on Friedrich der Grosse: “Gefechtskehrtwendung nach Steuerbord!” The German Commander-in-Chief was calling for another simultaneous 180-degree turn. Scheer was reversing course again; he was abandoning caution, staking everything on a single throw and deliberately hurling his fleet at the center of the British battle line whose immense firepower he had already felt. For this move, no one—not even Scheer himself—ever offered a rational explanation. Certainly, the admiral was acutely aware that his fleet was still in danger, that with every mile he steamed west into the North Sea, he was farther from home. He may also have believed that Jellicoe’s scouting cruisers must have seen his turn and that the whole Grand Fleet would be steering westward after him. But now, twenty minutes had passed and there was no British vessel in sight. The enemy was not following him, and Scheer wondered why. Perhaps the relative situation was better than he had thought. Perhaps he could capitalize on this. By returning to the battle he had just broken off, by attacking head-on with his entire fleet, he might surprise his enemy and throw him into confusion. And, if the Grand Fleet had moved far enough to the south, his own fleet might, in the coming darkness, be able to cross Jellicoe’s rear and make for Wilhelmshaven. Along the way, he might even be able to do something for Wiesbaden; rescue survivors, at least.

After the battle and after the war, Scheer was asked about his decision. His answers varied. Reporting to the kaiser, he wanted William to believe that before making his extraordinary turn back to the east and exposing the kaiser’s beloved fleet a second time to the crossing of its T by a superior and practically undamaged enemy battle fleet, he had carefully calculated every possibility: “If the enemy followed us,” he wrote, “our action in reversing course would be classed as a retreat and if any of our rear ships were damaged, we would have to sacrifice them. Still less was it feasible to disengage, leaving it to the enemy to decide when he would meet us next morning.”

It was as yet too early to assume night cruising order. The enemy could have compelled us to fight before dark, he could have prevented our exercising our initiative, and finally he could have cut off our return to the German Bight. There was only one way of avoiding this: to inflict a second blow on the enemy by advancing again regardless of cost, and to bring all the destroyers forcibly to attack. Such a maneuver would surprise the enemy, upset his plans for the rest of the day and, if the blow fell really heavily, make easier a night escape. It also offered the possibility of a last attempt to bring help to the hard-pressed Wiesbaden, or at least of rescuing her crew.

After the war, Scheer, speaking candidly to friends, admitted: “The fact is, I had no definite object. . . . I advanced because I thought I should help the poor Wiesbaden and because the situation was entirely obscure since I had received no wireless reports. When I noticed that the British pressure had ceased and that the fleet remained intact in my hands, I turned back under the impression that the action could not end this way and that I ought to seek contact with the enemy again. And then I thought I had better throw in the battle cruisers in full strength. . . . The thing just happened—as the virgin said when she got a baby.”

Some historians refuse to believe that the German Commander-in-Chief knowingly and deliberately thrust the High Seas Fleet straight into the jaws of the massive British battle line. And, if he did so, they find it incomprehensible that he placed his battle cruisers—his weakest heavy ships, with the thinnest armor, already battered and two almost sinking—in the van. Scheer himself later admitted that “if I’d done it in a peacetime exercise, I’d have lost my command.” Whatever his reasons—or perhaps there was no reasoning, only impetuosity, instinct, desperation—the German admiral turned his ships around and steamed back through the same water they had just passed through.Scheer’s move did not, as he had hoped it would, catch Jellicoe by surprise. Once again, it was Goodenough in Southampton who discovered the German fleet and sounded the alarm. The commodore had faithfully and expertly followed Scheer’s retreat and then, suddenly, out of the mists he saw the German dreadnoughts coming toward him. His own ship immediately came under fire, which did not prevent him from signaling Jellicoe that the High Seas Fleet was coming back. Grand Fleet officers and seamen standing on deck or sitting on turret tops tumbled back into their battle stations, and soon the giant, light gray ships—first Hipper’s battle cruisers, then Behncke’s battleships—appeared out of the mist. Without speculating as to his opponent’s motive, Jellicoe took the offered gift.

No naval assault during the Great War was as useless as this second attack of Reinhard Scheer’s. Weather and visibility were against him; as the day neared its end, his ships stood out sharply against the glowing western horizon, while to the east the Grand Fleet was shrouded in mist. Initially the resumption of British fire was sporadic, but it swiftly mounted in volume. Soon, the Grand Fleet’s broadsides merged into a solid, unbroken wave of endless thunder. Hercules fired on Seydlitz; Colossus and Revenge on Derfflinger; Neptune and St. Vincent on Derfflinger and Moltke. Marlborough, ignoring her torpedo injury, fired fourteen salvos in six minutes and saw four of them hit. Monarch, Iron Duke, Centurion, Royal Oak, King George V, Téméraire, Superb, Neptune—all reported scoring hits. By 7:14 p.m., fire from the whole of the British line was sweeping the length of the German line at ranges from 10,000 to 14,000 yards. At 7:15, Beatty’s battle cruisers joined in. As always, the German battle cruisers suffered most, but the cannonade also further devastated the ships in the German van. König, with Rear Admiral Behncke wounded on the bridge, was hit repeatedly. Grosser Kurfürst, next astern, was hammered seven times in two minutes by 15-inch and 13.5-inch shells from Barham, Valiant, and Marlborough. Markgraf, Kaiser, and Helgoland were hit. Under this torrent of heavy shells, the German column wavered; ships “bunched together”; the battleships, surrounded by towering waterspouts, found themselves overtaking and overrunning the battle cruisers. Captains ordered helmsmen to turn out of line and engine rooms to slow down, stop, and back astern. Scheer’s fleet was disintegrating.

Meanwhile, the German reply to this deluge of British fire was ineffective. German gunners saw nothing but smoke and mist and, in the words of the naval historian John Irving, “an almost continuous flickering orange light right round the horizon ahead, from port to starboard.” The nearly invisible British dreadnoughts could be located only by these gun flashes; German spotters desperately attempted to take ranges and fire back at the orange flashes, but they had no means of seeing the fall of shot. Only two heavy German shells hit the British battle line, both striking Colossus. These two 12-inch shells landed on the forward superstructure, one of them failing to explode, neither doing significant damage or inflicting casualties. A third heavy shell—an observer saw that it was bright yellow—fell short, bursting when it hit the water thirty yards from the forward turret. “Splinters penetrated . . . unarmoured parts of the ship in about 20 places,” her captain reported after the battle. Two men were wounded in the foretop and three at a 4-inch-gun post. The most serious harm was done to a seaman manning a range finder on the foretop; his right arm was practically severed by a steel splinter. His life was saved by a marine captain who stopped the bleeding with a tourniquet; the arm later was amputated at the shoulder. Remarkably, these five men wounded were the only gunfire casualties suffered by Grand Fleet dreadnoughts during the Battle of Jutland.

Ten minutes of this—unanswerable salvos fired by huge guns hidden in the eastern mist—was all that Scheer could stand. He had gambled and steered a second time into the greatest concentration of naval gunfire any fleet commander had ever faced. He had lost. The attack had failed and he understood that if he persisted, his fleet would be destroyed. Now there was only one thing to do: quickly extricate as many ships as possible. The most valuable ships, the dreadnought battleships, the core of German sea power, the kaiser’s glories, the cause of the naval building race with England—these must be saved, whatever the cost. To cover their retreat, the battle cruisers, already badly damaged, could, if necessary, be sacrificed. The destroyers massed on his port bow could be flung in to attack with torpedoes and lay smoke. But if it was to be done, it must be done now.

Again, Scheer acted instinctively, giving three commands intended to save his battleships. The first, hoisted on Friedrich der Grosse at 7:12 p.m., and left flying from the halyard for six minutes, signaled the battleships to prepare for a third emergency turnaround; this command was to be executed the moment the flags were hauled down. At 7:13 a second dramatic flag sig-nal rose up the halyard: “Schlachtkreuzer ran an den Feind, voll einsetzen,” meaning “Battle cruisers, at the enemy. Give it everything!” At 7:21 p.m., the third of Scheer’s orders was hoisted: a mass destroyer attack on the Grand Fleet was to cover the withdrawal of the German battleships.

The charge of the German battle cruisers has come to be called a “death ride.” Although Lützow was out of action and the other four German battle cruisers were heavily damaged, Derfflinger’s Captain Hartog led the squadron at 20 knots toward the British line. Two of the ships were scarcely more than battered hulls, filled with thousands of tons of salt water, the sea rolling over their bows up to the forward turrets, more than half their guns destroyed or out of action, their compartments filled with dead and dying men. Yet they drove forward.

“We were steaming into this inferno,” said Derfflinger’s Hase;

the range fell from 12,000 to 8,000. . . . Salvo after salvo fell around us, hit after hit struck our ship. . . . A 15 inch shell pierced the armor of “Caesar” turret and exploded inside. The turret commander had both legs torn off and most of the gun crew was killed. The flames passed to the working chamber and then to the handling room and seventy-three of the seventy-eight men in the turret died. . . . Another 15-inch shell pierced the roof of “Dora” turret. The same horrors followed. With the exception of one man who was thrown by the concussion through the turret entrance, the whole turret crew of eighty men was killed instantly. From both after turrets, great flames were spurting, mingled with clouds of yellow smoke. . . . Then, a terrific roar, a tremendous explosion, then darkness. . . . The whole conning tower seemed to be hurled in the air. . . . Poisonous, greenish yellow gasses poured through the aperture into our control. I called out “Don gas masks” and every man put his gas mask over his face. . . . We could scarcely see anything of the enemy who were disposed in a great semi-circle around us. All we could see was the great reddish-gold flames spurting from their guns.

Derfflinger was hit fourteen times during the “death ride.” Seydlitz, her bow already partially submerged, was hit five more times, bringing her total for the day to seventeen. Von der Tann, still keeping up although she could not fight, was struck again. Even Lützow, already hit nineteen times and now without Hipper, was seen struggling to get away. Five heavy shells in quick succession from Monarch and Orion battered the hulk again. Again, only Moltke escaped serious damage. The carnage ended at 7:17 p.m., when Derfflinger made out a new signal from Friedrich der Grosse, “Operate against the enemy’s van.” In effect, Scheer was saying that the battle cruisers had achieved their purpose and could be permitted to sheer off to starboard and draw away. Thus ended the “death ride” of the German battle cruisers, the bravest and, as it turned out, the last surface attack by dreadnoughts of the Imperial German Navy.

Scheer was able to reprieve his battle cruisers because, given a moment’s respite from the Grand Fleet’s overwhelming gun power, the German battleships were beginning their turn to the rear. For the third time that afternoon, the High Seas Fleet executed “Gefechtskehrtwendung nach Steuerbord!” This time, however, the emergency turn had none of the precision of a peacetime drill in the Baltic, none of the cool efficiency of the first course reversal forty minutes before. This time, captains turned their ships as well as they could, some to starboard, some to port, some finding their neighbors so close that collision seemed inevitable, then just missing. As they turned, the beleaguered ships fired an occasional defiant salvo from their after turrets; no shell came close to a British ship.

Nevertheless, Jellicoe soon faced another threat. The battle cruiser “death ride” had been a kamikaze charge without success, but the destroyer torpedo attack that followed helped to save the High Seas Fleet. When it came, the attack was delivered in less strength than Scheer would have wished. Only fourteen destroyers, carrying a total of fifty-eight torpedoes, were in position to obey his order, but they set out for the British line at 30 knots. They were met by a wall of fire from the 4-inch and 6-inch secondary batteries of the British battleships, by heavy shells from numerous dreadnought main battery turrets, and by the shells of British light cruisers and destroyers sent out by Jellicoe to blunt the attack. One German flotilla managed to come within 8,000 yards of the British battle line, where it launched eleven torpedoes before turning back and laying down smoke. The next flotilla, plunging into the same firestorm, launched more torpedoes, but one of its destroyers was sunk. A third wave attacked, but was out of range and fired only a single torpedo before retreating behind another smokescreen. In all, the fourteen German destroyers fired thirty-one torpedoes.

Even as the enemy destroyers were disappearing back into their own smoke, Jellicoe knew that their torpedoes were in the water. To escape this oncoming danger, the Commander-in-Chief ordered the standard Grand Fleet Battle Order response to approaching torpedoes: he turned his battleships away so that their sterns, rather than their broadsides, would be presented as targets. At 7:22 p.m., the battle fleet turned 2 points [22 degrees] away to port; then, to make sure, at 7:25, Jellicoe ordered the fleet to turn again another 2 points; in all, he now had turned a total of 44 degrees, onto a new course of southeast. Jellicoe’s turn away, putting hundreds of additional yards between the launch tubes and the intended targets, may have been responsible for ten torpedoes’ running out of fuel short of the Grand Fleet. Nevertheless, twenty-one torpedoes kept coming and reached the British line, forcing a number of battleships to maneuver independently to avoid them. It helped that the white torpedo tracks were visible in the water and that it was relatively easy for the men in the foretops to spot them and alert the bridges. The first torpedoes were sighted at 7:33 p.m., and separately the battleships began turning and twisting. Marlborough, already carrying a torpedo wound in her hull, saw and avoided another three torpedoes. She “altered course to starboard so that one track passed ahead, another passed so close astern that we should certainly have been hit if the stern had not been swinging under helm, while number three must have been running below depth because it went right under the ship.” Revenge, next behind Marlborough, swung hard to port to avoid two torpedoes; one passed ten yards before her bow and the other twenty yards from her stern. Hercules and Agincourt, the third and fourth ships behind Marlborough, saw torpedoes and escaped by putting their helms over to port and sheering out of line. Agincourt then watched one torpedo pass up her port side and the other up the starboard side. A torpedo ran between Iron Duke and Thunderer, while Colossus eluded another. A torpedo came very close to Collingwood’s stern; at least four passed through the line not far from Barham. Neptune was pursued from dead astern with what almost appeared to be a conscious malevolence. A torpedo “following exactly in our course, but going faster than our fastest speed . . . [kept] coming closer and closer. . . . We could do nothing but wait and wait, mouths open. . . . Nothing happened.” Afterward, the battleship’s Action Report conjectured that the “torpedo was either deflected by the wash from Neptune’s propellers or ran its range out. The latter is more likely.” Probably, other torpedoes went unnoticed before the danger passed. Twenty-one torpedoes had reached the British line, but none had found a victim. Meanwhile, the German battleships and battle cruisers and, now also, the destroyers had disappeared. And, for a while, the firing ceased.

Measured by his own hopes, Scheer’s three desperate offensive thrusts—with his battle fleet, his battle cruisers, and his destroyers—had failed: they had cost him the remaining fighting capability of his battle cruisers, additional punishment of his battleships, the expenditure of many torpedoes, and the loss—by sinking or damage—of five destroyers. But, although Scheer could not have known this, he had managed something critically important: he had forced Jellicoe to turn away at a moment when the German fleet was in a desperate position and a little more pressure might have produced a rout. And by the time Jellicoe returned to the pursuit, Scheer and the German battle line were out of sight and out of range, ten or eleven miles distant. The fact was that for seventeen critical minutes while the fate of the High Seas Fleet hung in the balance, Scheer had been given time to disengage his battle fleet—and thereby to avoid its annihilation.

Turning large ships away from an oncoming torpedo attack was a tactic then approved by the British, German, French, Italian, and American navies. To protect a fleet, or even a single ship, turning away from torpedoes rather than toward them offered substantial advantages. The greatest was relative speed. The torpedoes would be approaching at 30 knots, but the ships would be steaming away from them at 20; the relative speed of the approaching missiles, therefore, would be 10 knots. By the same arithmetic, turning toward approaching torpedoes could mean that the underwater missiles were approaching at 30 knots plus 20; thus, 50 knots. Anyone could see that dealing with an enemy approaching at 10 knots was preferable to dealing with one approaching at 50 simply because the slower relative speed gave the targeted ship a better opportunity to maneuver out of the way. In addition, turning away would put more distance between the attackers’ torpedo tubes and the intended victims, and this added distance might mean that some of the torpedoes would—as they did in this attack—run out of fuel before they reached their targets.

As a defensive measure against this German destroyer attack, Jellicoe’s turnaway at Jutland was a complete success: no torpedo hits were scored on British dreadnoughts. But the maneuver shocked some officers in the fleet and later became the most heavily criticized British decision of the entire battle. Beatty, who at the Dogger Bank had turned away because he believed he had seen a single periscope, was privately scornful, and three of Jellicoe’s squadron vice admirals had misgivings. The argument turns both on tactics and timing: at the moment Jellicoe turned away, the High Seas Fleet was beaten, in disarray, and in headlong flight. Had Jellicoe turned toward the torpedoes and pursued, rather than turning away, he might have lost some ships—so the argument goes—but he must have inflicted further heavy damage on the Germans and perhaps even brought about their total destruction. Instead, time and range were sacrificed—seventeen minutes and over 3,000 yards—and Scheer made good his escape. Jellicoe, by this decision, was said to have forsaken the Royal Navy’s chance for a new Trafalgar. This view would hover over Jellicoe’s reputation for the rest of his life.

Jellicoe was not left defenseless by his friends. The turn away was defended after the battle as vigorously as it was attacked. Admiral Sir Reginald Bacon, the first captain of the Dreadnought and eventually Jellicoe’s biographer, pointed out that Jellicoe had no way of knowing how many German destroyers would attack him, how many torpedoes they would launch, or from what directions the torpedoes would come; in the event, Bacon argued, Jellicoe’s turn away had saved at least six British battleships. John Irving puts this figure at “eight or even more.”

But the ultimate issue, beyond questions of timing and of potential losses to the British and German fleets, was one of grand strategy. The High Seas Fleet, as it was employed by the kaiser and his admirals in the Great War, never posed a mortal threat to Britain’s survival. Accordingly, the Admiralty and Jellicoe held the destruction of the German fleet to be infinitely less important than the preservation of the Grand Fleet, and thereby of overall British naval supremacy. Fervently though Royal Navy officers might yearn for a new Trafalgar, the naval status quo in May 1916 was acceptable to Great Britain; sea supremacy permitted the Allies exclusive use of the ocean highways while the blockade of Germany continued its corrosive work. Jellicoe, therefore, saw his primary duty as the preservation of the Grand Fleet. He was not afraid to risk his ships in a long-range gun battle because, as a gunnery expert, he knew the awesome weight of metal the British fleet could bring down on an enemy battle line. But he was agonizingly wary of exposing his fleet to any underwater ambush by torpedoes or mines. Jellicoe knew that Scheer was a torpedo specialist who believed that this weapon could be as decisive as the big gun and who would use it whenever he could. Moreover, he knew that the primary duty of German destroyers was to execute a massed torpedo attack; beating off enemy destroyers was their secondary duty. Finally, Jellicoe’s own torpedo experts had told him that in peacetime exercises, 35 percent of torpedoes fired indiscriminately at a line of battleships would find a target. The German navy had eighty-eight destroyers; if all were present, they could launch up to 440 torpedoes. The numbers were sufficient to deprive John Jellicoe of hours of sleep.

Jellicoe, therefore, saw turning away simply as an exercise of a fundamental Grand Fleet battle tactic in use throughout his command. Long before, in his letter to the Admiralty of October 30, 1914, he had made his intentions clear. He had explained that he meant to assume the defensive against all enemy underwater weapons while attempting to conserve his ships for offensive action with their more numerous, heavier guns. If the Germans attempted to retreat or escape from a fleet action, he was determined not to pursue; if he were confronted by a concentrated torpedo attack, he would turn away. The Admiralty had approved, expressing “full confidence in your contemplated conduct of the fleet in action.” On May 31, 1916, therefore, John Jellicoe simply did what he had said he intended to do.

For thirty minutes after Scheer’s second turnabout, the guns were silent. For the first ten of these minutes, Jellicoe steered southeast, approximately 135 degrees off Scheer’s course to the west. Then, feeling that the torpedo threat had evaporated, Jellicoe turned back expecting—once the dense clouds of black smoke spewed out by the retreating German destroyers had blown away—to find the High Seas Fleet where he had left it, still within gun range. But there was no sign of the Germans and, again, as with Scheer’s previous turnabout, Jellicoe did not know where his enemy was. Five minutes passed and Jellicoe turned south. Still the sea was empty. At 7:40 p.m., he ordered another turn, this time to the southwest. Still nothing. Then, at 8:00 p.m., a signal from Goodenough confirmed that the Germans were heading west. Jellicoe turned farther west. By then, Scheer was fifteen miles away, out of reach. Yet the British Commander-in-Chief remained optimistic: steaming south, he was actually nearer to Germany than was Scheer.

Meanwhile, Scheer, after two encounters with Jellicoe and two emergency course reversals, found himself in an appalling situation. He now knew that he was facing the entire Grand Fleet and that this superior force lay between him and his base. He knew that he could not afford to be driven farther west and he changed course, first to the southwest. His ships now were in reverse order to that in which they had twice assaulted the British line: Mauve’s old predreadnoughts were now in the van; the modern dreadnoughts were bringing up the rear. The half-demolished battle cruisers were a mile to port. Scheer’s overriding purpose now was to get away: to save as much of his fleet as he could, and, above all, the dreadnought battleships. At 7:45 p.m., knowing that he must get these ships into friendly waters by daybreak, he altered course to south. The single factor now in his favor was that sundown and twilight were approaching. Perhaps night would hide him.

Beatty’s six remaining battle cruisers, six miles ahead and to the southwest of the British battle line, had been too distant to have been affected by the German destroyer torpedo attacks that had caused Jellicoe to turn away. To Beatty at 7:45 p.m., Scheer’s position was a mystery, but he was anxious to press forward and find the High Seas Fleet before daylight failed. However, he did not wish to find them by himself, without the support of at least some British battleships. The eight dreadnoughts of Jerram’s squadron, now in Jellicoe’s van, were 12,000 yards to his northeast and would serve admirably. On the spur of the moment—perhaps annoyed to the point of cheekiness by what he saw as the excessive caution of Jellicoe’s turnaway—Beatty offered to take matters into his own hands. At 7:47 p.m., he signaled the Commander-in-Chief, “Submit van of battleships follow battle cruisers. We can then cut off whole of enemy’s battle fleet.” Jellicoe’s supporters later described this message as typical of Beatty’s “posturing”; even the modest Commander-in-Chief eventually declared, “To tell the truth, I thought it was rather insubordinate.”

Beatty’s signal took fourteen minutes to reach Jellicoe’s hand and by this time the Commander-in-Chief saw no need for urgency. He had already turned the fleet, including Jerram’s squadron, to a westerly course—nearer the enemy, in fact, than Beatty’s course. Nevertheless, coming from Beatty, the signal demanded consideration. But what did the signal mean? Where was Lion? What could Beatty see? Jellicoe assumed that, before sending this message, Beatty must have recovered visual contact with some German ships. But what ships? The German battle fleet? The German battle cruisers? If Beatty could see Germans, Jerram, leading the van of the battle fleet in King George V, also must see them. Therefore, the Commander-in-Chief responded by signaling Jerram: “Follow our battle cruisers.” Jerram, who received the order at 8:07 p.m. and who at that moment could see neither Beatty nor Germans, turned to the south hoping to find one or the other. By this time, however, Beatty had lost whatever contact he thought he had with the German fleet.

Then, just as the sun was setting, Beatty found the German battle cruisers only 10,000 yards away. At 8:12, all six British ships opened fire and all four German ships were hit, Seydlitz the hardest. A 13.5-inch shell from Princess Royal exploded on her open bridge, killing half the men there and covering the navigation charts with blood. The gyrocompass was smashed; as a result, Seydlitz, lacking charts and compass, her steering system failing, was blind and nearly helpless. The engagement also affected Hipper, still trying to resume command of his shattered squadron. Just before Beatty opened fire, Hipper had ordered his battle cruisers to stop engines so that his destroyer could come alongside Moltke. He was ready to board when suddenly 13.5-inch and 12-inch British shells plunged down nearby. The boarding attempt was instantly suspended so that Moltke and her sisters could begin to move. Once again, Hipper was forced to watch his squadron steam away.

At 8:30 p.m., the plight of the crippled German battle cruisers attracted a group of Samaritans. Rear Admiral Mauve, seeing the helplessness of Hipper’s ships, seized his chance to be useful and steered his six old battleships into the fight. Beatty’s gunnery officers recognized the distinctive silhouettes of the predreadnoughts and shifted fire from the German battle cruisers to the obsolete ships. Three were hit: Schleswig-Holstein, Pommern, and Schlesien; Posen, in turn, struck Princess Royal with an 11-inch shell. Then, their intervention having permitted the German battle cruisers to slip away, the old “five-minute ships” turned into the gloom. Beatty did not follow.

The sun had set at 8:19 p.m. and the light was quickly fading. There was no chance of further fighting between the dreadnought fleets that day, but Jellicoe was certain that he would be able to finish the battle in the morning. That time would come soon; sunrise would arrive in five hours. Meanwhile, Scheer was trapped. The High Seas Fleet had reversed course three times and still found itself in the wrong place. Now, as darkness fell, 143 British warships lay between 93 German vessels and their safe return home.