CHAPTER 33

Jutland: Night and Morning

As darkness fell, Jellicoe was pleased with his situation. “I went back to the bridge from the conning tower at about 8:30 p.m.,” said Frederic Dreyer, captain of Iron Duke, “and spoke to Jellicoe and [Rear Admiral Charles] Madden [the Grand Fleet Chief of Staff], both of whom expressed satisfaction at the good firing of the Iron Duke. I found that they agreed that everything that had happened had been according to expectation.” In fact, things were far less rosy than Jellicoe supposed. The British battle cruiser force had been depleted by considerably more than the admiral actually knew; he had seen Invincible’s severed bow and stern sections rising from the water, but no one had informed him of the loss of Queen Mary and Indefatigable. Lion and Princess Royal each had one turret out of action and three turrets able to fire. Still, the British battle cruisers had served their essential purpose: they had brought Scheer to the Grand Fleet and had assisted in the reduction of their own natural enemies, Hipper’s battle cruisers, to floating wreckage. Warspite was returning to Rosyth, but the 5th Battle Squadron still carried twenty-four 15-inch guns. Marlborough had been torpedoed and had lost 4 knots of speed, but was still in action. Two armored cruisers had been lost—Defence blown up and Warrior disabled—and three destroyers had been sunk, with three others damaged and out of action. Otherwise, the Grand Fleet’s immense dreadnought battle line was almost untouched. Adding the three Queen Elizabeths and the surviving six battle cruisers, British supremacy was even more preponderant than when the battle started.

Jellicoe’s purpose now was to preserve this supremacy through the night. Keenly aware that German ships were better equipped and trained for night fighting, the Commander-in-Chief at once decided to postpone renewal of the battle until morning. A battleship night action, he believed, “must have inevitably led to our battle fleet being the object of attack by a very large German destroyer force throughout the night.” To repel destroyer attacks at night required a coordinated effort by battleship searchlights and secondary armament (6-inch and 4-inch guns), aided if possible by a counterattack by friendly destroyers. The Germans were trained to do this. Searchlights and gun crews worked together: first, a thin, pencil beam would locate an enemy ship; then an iris shutter would snap aside, focusing the full beam of light on the target and, instantly, the guns would fire. Jellicoe had little confidence in the British fleet’s ability to match these techniques. “It was known to me that neither our searchlights nor their control arrangements were at this time of the best type,” he said. “[And] the fitting of Director Firing Gear for the guns of the secondary armament of our battleships had only just begun, although repeatedly applied for.” Further, he continued, “our own destroyers would be no effective antidote at night since . . . they would certainly be taken for enemy destroyers and fired on by our own ships.” In sum, Jellicoe believed that “the result of night actions between heavy ships must always be very largely a matter of chance as there is little opportunity for skill on either side. Such an action must be fought at very close range, the decision depending on the course of events in the first few minutes.” Later, he put it more bluntly in a letter to the First Sea Lord: “Nothing would make me fight a night action with heavy ships in these days of destroyers and long-range torpedoes. I might well lose the fight. It would be far too fluky an affair.”

Having rejected a night battle with Scheer, Jellicoe turned to the question of where he would be most likely to find the German admiral at first light. Which of several escape routes was Scheer most likely to use? Four were possible. The first, the 344-mile voyage around the northern coast of Denmark into the Baltic, Jellicoe dismissed as being too long and dangerous for the numerous ships of the High Seas Fleet he knew to be seriously damaged. That left three routes within the North Sea that would bring Scheer back safely through the minefields, British and German, in the Bight. One was southeast to the Horns Reef light vessel, then back to the Jade behind the minefields of the Amrum Bank—a reversal of the path by which Scheer had come north the previous night. Although this route was the closest to the 9:30 p.m. position of the two fleets, Jellicoe doubted that Scheer would choose it. The Grand Fleet already blocked a German passage to Horns Reef, and Scheer’s fleet lacked the speed to get ahead and cut across in front of it. Was it likely that Scheer would attempt to force his way to Horns Reef through the middle of the British fleet? Jellicoe thought probably not. Twice that afternoon, Scheer had collided with the Grand Fleet battle line and both times he had immediately reversed course to get away. Jellicoe did not believe that he would try it again, even at night, and especially not when two other routes back to Germany were available. One of these lay southwest, toward the Ems, then east to Wilhelmshaven behind the German minefields; the other was due south, straight for Heligoland and the Jade Bay. Estimating that Scheer would choose one of these two, Jellicoe made his decision: “to steer south where I should be in a position . . . to intercept the enemy should he make for . . . Heligoland or towards the Ems.”

Soon after nine o’clock, the British Commander-in-Chief closed up his battle fleet into night cruising formation and signaled a fleet speed of 17 knots. The dreadnoughts shifted out of their single line ahead and formed in three columns abreast, one mile apart; this was to ensure that the battleship divisions remained in sight of one another and to prevent ships mistaking one another for enemy vessels. In making these dispositions, Jellicoe did not exclude the possibility of some sort of night engagement; indeed, as Scheer was to his northwest, he expected torpedo attacks on his fleet from destroyers in that quarter. To shield his battleships from this threat, Jellicoe placed all of his own flotillas—fifty-eight destroyers—five miles astern of the battle fleet. He put them there, he said later, to “fulfill three conditions. They would be in an excellent position for attacking the enemy’s fleet should it turn . . . [toward Horns Reef] during the night. They would be in a position to attack enemy destroyers should the latter search for our fleet with a view to night attack on our heavy ships. Finally, they would be clear of our own ships, and the danger of attacking our battleships in error, or of our battleships firing on them, would be reduced to a minimum.”

His dispositions made, Jellicoe signaled the fleet, “No night intentions,” leaving his admirals and captains to assume that they could expect four or five relatively quiet hours and a renewal of the battle at first light. The signal was welcome, although most men remained at action stations through the night. Sandwiches and tins of corned beef and salmon were handed out, along with mugs of traditional Royal Navy cocoa “made from dark slabs of rich chocolate of such a thick consistency that a spoon would stand up in it.” And on Iron Duke, an exhausted John Jellicoe lay down fully clothed to rest for a few hours on a cot in a shelter just behind the bridge.

Surrounded by darkness on his own bridge, Reinhard Scheer was in a perilous situation. He was opposed by the entire Grand Fleet; he understood that if there was a battle in the morning, the Imperial Navy would be annihilated. The corollaries were plain: there must be no battle; somehow, he must escape. But there was little time; dawn would arrive at 2:00 a.m., and 3:00 would bring full daylight. Scheer knew other things about his enemy: he was aware that British warships, unlike his own, had not been trained to fight at night, and, therefore, that Jellicoe probably would prefer to postpone battle until dawn. He knew that the British battle fleet was southeast of him, somewhere between eight and twelve miles away, in a position to block his fleet from returning home by that route. In Jellicoe’s course, Scheer saw his own impending doom—but also an opportunity. Jellicoe obviously had won the race to the south; if he, Scheer, continued in that direction, the British fleet would be able to deliver a terminal blow at dawn. But, Scheer conjectured, suppose he did not follow Jellicoe to the south. The nearest sanctuary, the entrance to the Horns Reef swept channel, lay to the southeast, only eighty-five miles away. Suppose, in the darkness, he were to turn southeast and somehow manage to avoid—or, if necessary, break through—the Grand Fleet and reach the Horns Reef lightship by daybreak. If this could be done, the High Seas Fleet could retreat down the Amrum Channel between the minefields and the sandbanks, and Jellicoe would be unable to follow.

Scheer decided to try. He would turn southeast for Horns Reef, keeping his battle fleet in close order, hoping to pass unnoticed in the darkness astern of the Grand Fleet, but accepting the possibility of a night action if he failed. He would maintain this course regardless of losses. Meanwhile, his own destroyer flotillas would attack the British at every opportunity, sacrificing themselves so that his dreadnoughts could escape. At 9:10 p.m., Scheer initiated this plan with a signal sent out from Friedrich der Grosse: “Battle fleet’s course southeast by a quarter east. This course is to be maintained. Speed sixteen knots.” At the same time, he sent an urgent request to the Naval Staff asking for airship reconnaissance of Horns Reef at daybreak. Repeatedly during the night, the urgent command came from the flagship: “Durchhalten”—“Maintain the course.”

To prepare for the nocturnal breakthrough, Scheer realigned his ships. Westfalen and her undamaged sisters, Nassau, Rheinland, and Posen, were in the van; Scheer’s flagship, Friedrich der Grosse, remained in the middle. Mauve’s slow predreadnoughts were ordered to the rear, out of the way. For the same reason, the mangled battle cruisers also were sent to the rear. By now, Lützow and Seydlitz were incapable of renewing action. Lützow had received forty large-caliber hits, Seydlitz twenty-four shell hits and a torpedo. Steering erratically with a broken gyrocompass, she fell behind Moltke in the dark and was left on her own. Derfflinger, with 3,400 tons of water aboard and only one turret ready for action, trailed the toothless Von der Tann. Of Scheer’s battleships, König had been hit by ten heavy projectiles, while Grosser Kurfürst, Markgraf, and Kaiser had received fifteen hits among them. Wiesbaden was sinking and four destroyers had been sunk.

Meanwhile, at 9:32 p.m., Lion—so a number of historians have written—unintentionally handed the Germans a valuable gift. Out in front of Jellicoe’s battle fleet, Beatty’s flagship signaled by flashing lamp to Princess Royal, her next astern: “Please give me challenge and reply now in force . . . as they have been lost.” Princess Royal obediently signaled back the current identification signal. That much is certain; Lion’s request and her sister’s compliance are both recorded in The Battle of Jutland Official Despatches. What, if anything, happened next is less certain. It is frequently said that because neither British battle cruiser knew that two miles away in the darkness, a sharp-eyed signalman aboard the German light cruiser Frankfurt was watching, the British signal was intercepted and immediately distributed to the whole German fleet: “First sign of enemy challenge is UA.” If true, this would have given the Germans a second advantage: not only were their ships and crews equipped and trained to fight at night while the British were not, but they also would have been able to recognize and use the British challenge. Andrew Gordon considers German interception “implausible” for a number of technical reasons. And neither of the official naval histories of the war, British (Corbett) or German (Groos), mentions that the Germans saw this exchange of signals.

As Jellicoe steamed south and Scheer drove relentlessly southeast for Horns Reef, the two fleets were converging, their tracks forming the two sides of a long, narrow “V,” with the British fleet, moving 1 knot faster than the German, drawing slowly ahead. Because the British battleships reached the bottom of the “V” and passed through it about fifteen minutes before Scheer’s battleships arrived, “the ‘V’ became an ‘X’ . . . neither side was conscious of what was happening,” and the two lines of dreadnoughts did not meet and engage. Nevertheless, with each side unaware that their pathways were crossing, spasms of sudden, ferocious violence erupted between smaller ships. The first came at 10:15 p.m. when Commodore William Goodenough and others on the bridge of the light cruiser Southampton became aware of the presence of unknown ships in the darkness to starboard. For a few moments, four British light cruisers and five German light cruisers steamed parallel to each other, only 800 yards apart, each side uncertain of the identity of the other. Finally, Goodenough said, “I can’t help who it is. Fire!” Dublin fired, and almost simultaneously a dozen brilliant German searchlights illuminated the head of the British line. “Those who have not experienced it cannot possibly understand the overpowering effect of searchlights being in our face with gunfire at what was really point-blank range,” said a young officer. Four German light cruisers concentrated on Southampton, smothering Goodenough’s flagship with shell bursts and carpeting her decks with dead and wounded men. Despite this damage, the beleaguered British vessel managed to fire a torpedo, which hit the old light cruiser Frauenlob, a survivor of the Battle of the Bight. Frauenlob sank with her entire crew of 320 men.

After the war, Lieutenant Stephen King-Hall of Southampton gave this account of the action:

A signalman suddenly whispered: “Five ships on the beam.” The Commodore looked at them. . . . From their faint silhouettes, it was impossible to discover more than the fact that they were light cruisers. . . . We began to challenge; the Germans switched on coloured lights at their fore yardarms. A second later, a solitary gun fired from Dublin. . . . I saw the shell hit a ship just above the waterline 800 yards away. . . . At that moment, the Germans switched on their searchlights and we switched on ours. Before I was blinded by the lights in my eyes, I caught sight of a line of light grey ships. . . . The action lasted three and a half minutes. The four leading German ships concentrated on Southampton. . . . The range was amazingly close. . . . There could be no missing . . . but to load guns there must be men, flesh and blood . . . and flesh and blood cannot stand high explosives. . . . The German shots went high, just high enough to burst on the upper deck around the bridge and after superstructure. . . . Another shell burst on the searchlight just above us. . . . Fragments scoured out the insides of the gun shields of the two 6-inch guns manned by Marines. Then . . . the flash of an exploding shell ignited half a dozen rounds of powder. It became lighter than day. I looked forward. Two pillars of white flame rose aloft. One roared up the foremast, the other reached above the tops of the second and third funnels. This, then, was the end. . . . It was bad luck, but there could be no doubt; the central ammunition hoist was between those two funnels. What was it going to feel like to blow up? What ought one to do? . . . The two pillars of flame wavered and decreased in height. . . . I ran to the boat deck to get to the fire and tripped over a heap of bodies. I got up, tried not to tread on soft things, and arrived at the boat deck. The firing had ceased. . . . Everything was pitch black . . . nothing but groans from dark corners. The Germans had fled. They fled because our Torpedo Lieutenant had fired a 21-inch torpedo. At forty-one knots, the torpedo, striking the Frauenlob, had blown her in half.

Southampton had lost thirty-five killed and forty-one wounded, and she had also lost her wireless, the means by which Goodenough had tried to keep Jellicoe informed. In any case, this phase of the battle—in which Southampton was severely damaged and Frauenlob sunk—had occurred more or less between equals: light cruisers against light cruisers. The desperate clashes that followed would pit unequal adversaries: 900-ton British destroyers against 20,000-ton German dreadnought battleships.

Through the night, Room 40 continued to intercept and decode German signals and pass them along to the Admiralty Operations Staff, where ignorance and incompetence held firm. Messages, accurate and inaccurate, were sent to Jellicoe during the night; it was left to the Commander-in-Chief to sort out which was which. Worse, vital and accurate information available in London was never sent at all. At 9:55 p.m., the Admiralty supplied Jellicoe with accurate information: “Three [German] destroyer flotillas have been ordered to attack you during the night.” This signal buttressed Jellicoe’s view of what was likely to happen and when, as the night progressed, he heard the sounds of battle astern of his main fleet, he believed they were the result of these German destroyers trying to break through his own destroyer screen to the rear. Then, three minutes later, the Admiralty sent Jellicoe information that the Commander-in-Chief knew to be false. The German battle fleet, London advised, was ten miles southwest of Iron Duke. This message increased Jellicoe’s already substantial distrust of Admiralty intelligence. He knew that Scheer’s fleet lay northwest of him, not southwest, and, he said, “I should not for a moment have relied on Admiralty information of the enemy in preference to reports from ships which had actually sighted him to the northwest.”

Meanwhile, the Admiralty had deciphered Scheer’s 9:10 p.m. signal and at 10:41 p.m., Jellicoe was informed—accurately—“German battle fleet ordered home. . . . Battle cruisers in rear. Course south southeast. Speed sixteen knots.” “South southeast” clearly pointed to Horns Reef. If this was true and if Scheer was to Jellicoe’s northwest—as Jellicoe knew he was—the German fleet must somehow cross the track of the Grand Fleet to reach this sanctuary. By now, however, Jellicoe’s confidence in intelligence coming from the Operations Division was so thoroughly shaken that he did not believe the Admiralty signal. Thus, later that night, when the sounds of heavy gunfire astern reached Iron Duke, the Commander-in-Chief assumed that they emanated from the expected German destroyer attacks on his screen, not from Scheer’s main fleet attempting to force its way through the rear of his own huge formation. In any case, if German battleships were engaging his destroyers, he assumed that reports of battleship sightings would come pouring in to the flagship. And there were no such reports.

The crucial message that never came from the Admiralty that night was one telling Jellicoe that Room 40 had intercepted and decoded Scheer’s request for zeppelin reconnaissance over Horns Reef at dawn. Coupled with the previous message giving Scheer’s southeasterly course, this could have left no doubt as to the path by which the High Seas Fleet was returning home. Jellicoe said later, “The lamentable part of the whole business is that, had the Admiralty sent all the information which they acquired . . . there would have been little or no doubt in my mind as to the route by which Scheer intended to return to base. As early as 10:10, Scheer’s message to the airship detachment . . . was in the possession of the Admiralty. This was practically a certain indication of his route but it was not passed to me.” Elsewhere he said, “Of course, if the Admiralty had given me this information, I should have altered in that direction during the night.” As it was, assuming that he was keeping between Scheer and his base and that the British fleet would finish the battle in an all-day gunnery duel beginning at dawn, Jellicoe continued south forty miles in the wrong direction.

The message requesting airship reconnaissance was only one of seven German operational signals revealing Scheer’s course or position between 10:43 p.m. and 1:00 a.m. that were intercepted that night by Room 40, but not forwarded to Jellicoe. Another signal containing crucial evidence was that from the commodore of all German destroyers, ordering his flotillas to assemble at Horns Reef by 2:00 a.m. This too was intercepted, but not passed to Jellicoe. Personal responsibility for this gross Admiralty failure—Arthur Marder calls it “criminal neglect”—was never officially assigned. Captain Thomas Jackson—he of the general contempt for cryptographers and signals intelligence—was not present in the War Room that night. Admiral Oliver, the Chief of Staff, charged with approving Admiralty messages sent to the Commander-in-Chief, “had left the War Room for some much-needed rest and had left in charge an officer who had no experience of German operational signals.” Seeing no special significance in these decoded messages, this officer carefully placed them in an Admiralty file.

In the hour before midnight, when the darkness was intense and neither side knew where the other was, the leading battleships of the High Seas Fleet began to converge on the British destroyers screening the rear of the Grand Fleet. At 11:20, the lead vessels of Jellicoe’s 4th Flotilla became aware of unknown ships approaching on their starboard quarter. Some appeared to be light cruisers, some larger. Believing the ships were British, Tipperary, the flotilla leader, waited until they were only 700 yards away and then flashed the recognition challenge. Instantly, three German battleships, Westfalen, Nassau, and Rheinland, and three light cruisers, Hamburg, Rostock, and Elbing, switched on an array of searchlights, most aimed at Tipperary. Then, the battleships’ secondary armament burst out; within four minutes, Westfalen alone fired 150 5.9-inch shells. Tipperary burst into flames. Every new hit stoked the fires, and for several hours the misshapen but still floating mass of wreckage continued to burn.

As the British destroyers astern of Tipperary swerved to avoid the blazing wreck, they used their 4-inch guns to rake the superstructures of their massive opponents, hitting bridges, searchlight stations, and signal flag positions. The destroyers also launched torpedoes; one, they believed, hit Elbing, which nine hours earlier had fired the first shot in the battle. (Afterward, the Germans declared that the cruiser was never torpedoed.) In accordance with High Seas Fleet procedure when under torpedo attack, the German dreadnoughts turned away, from southeast to southwest. The German light cruisers, avoiding the torpedoes as well as they could, steered for the gaps in the line of their own battleships. Elbing misjudged and was rammed by the dreadnought Posen. The bow of the battleship sliced into the light cruiser, flooding both engine rooms, stripping Elbing of power, and leaving her adrift.

The destroyer Spitfire, which had been just astern of Tipperary, found herself confronting the dreadnought Nassau. Tormented by the torpedoes, Nassau turned at full speed to ram. The two ships collided port bow to port bow, the impact rolling the destroyer over, almost, but not quite enough, to swamp her. Then, alongside her little antagonist, Nassau fired her two huge forward turret guns. She was too close; the gun barrels would not depress sufficiently to hit the destroyer with shells, but even so, Spitfire bore the weight of Nassau’s rage. The concussion of muzzle blasts at close range and maximum depression swept away the destroyer’s bridge, foremast, funnels, boats, and searchlight platform. Everyone on the bridge except the captain and two seamen was killed. Then, with a screech of tearing metal, the dreadnought surged down the destroyer’s port side, bumping, scraping, and stripping away everything including boats and davits, “and all the time she was firing her guns just over our heads.” Eventually Nassau cleared Spitfire’s stern and disappeared into the darkness, leaving twenty feet of upper deck plating on the destroyer’s forecastle. Spitfire had lost sixty feet from the side of her hull, but remained afloat and was able to make 6 knots. Thirty-six hours later, she reached the Tyne.

Scheer was undeterred by these episodes. When the British torpedo attack forced the German battle line to turn away, the Commander-in-Chief immediately signaled Westfalen to resume course southeast for Horns Reef. Nothing must be allowed to divert the fleet from this course. Swinging back, the leading German battleships once again clashed with the 4th Flotilla. With the destruction of Tipperary, leadership of the flotilla had passed to the destroyer Broke, which almost immediately sighted a large ship on a crossing course half a mile away. Uncertain of the ship’s identity despite its two funnels and a massive amidships crane—the distinctive profile of German dreadnoughts—Broke’s captain gave the order to challenge by searchlight. As he spoke, the stranger switched on a vertical string of colored lights, a signal unknown in the British fleet. Then the terrible sequence repeated itself and the 4th Flotilla was further dismembered: “A blaze of searchlights straight into our eyes . . . so great was the dazzling effect that it made us feel helpless,” said Broke’s navigating officer. Then came a hurricane of shells, this time from the light cruiser Rostock and the dreadnoughts Westfalen and Rheinland. Broke managed to fire one torpedo before she was smashed. Everyone on her bridge was killed. The wheel was shattered, jamming the rudder to port, leaving the ship out of control and turning in a circle, still at high speed. Sparrowhawk, just astern, was about to fire her own torpedoes when she saw Broke careening toward her at 28 knots. There was no time to get out of the way; Broke’s bow rammed Sparrowhawk just in front of the bridge. The force of the blow catapulted twenty-three men from the Sparrowhawk across onto the forecastle of Broke’s embedded bow. With the two destroyers locked together and each ship believing that she was sinking, men from each ship were sent across to the other to save their lives. As Broke began backing astern to disengage, the destroyer Contest appeared out of the dark and could not avoid the entangled pair. Sparrowhawk was rammed again, this blow slicing off six feet of her stern. Eventually, Broke and Contest both extricated themselves and limped away. Sparrowhawk, now lacking both bow and stern, lay where she was, lit by the flames of the burning Tipperary. Around 2:00 a.m., Tipperary, abandoned by her crew for life rafts or the open sea, foundered and sank. Twenty-six of her survivors were taken aboard the mutilated Sparrowhawk, which after the failure of an attempt by the destroyer Marksman to tow, continued to drift until the following day she too was abandoned and sunk. The survivors of both ships were taken aboard Marksman and eventually reached Scotland. Meanwhile, Broke, with a crumpled bow, heavy shell damage, and half her crew dead or wounded, managed in Spitfire’s wake to creep back to the Tyne. Four of the 4th Flotilla’s destroyers were out of action, but the survivors extracted revenge when a torpedo from the destroyer Achates hit the light cruiser Rostock. She limped away and, with her crew taken off by a destroyer, sank at 4:25 a.m.

A second time, Scheer’s battle fleet had swung off course, and once again the stern command “Durchhalten!” went out from the flagship. As a result, the German line again rammed through the 4th Flotilla, or what remained of it. Again, the British destroyers used their 4-inch guns against the searchlights and superstructures of Westfalen, Rheinland, Posen, Oldenburg, and Helgoland. Every man on Oldenburg’s bridge was hit. Captain Hofner, bleeding heavily, staggered forward and took the wheel himself until help came.

Back on course, the ships in the German van hoped that the torpedo danger was over. It was not. Ardent and Fortune, separated from their 4th Flotilla consorts in the first attack, were searching for them. Now, Ardent’s captain said, they found “four big ships on a nearly parallel, but slightly converging course. They challenged several times and their challenge was not an English one. They then switched on their searchlights, picked up Fortune and opened fire. . . . Fortune was hard hit. . . . We caught a last glimpse of Fortune on fire and sinking but fighting still.” Separated again, searching again, Ardent discovered “a big ship steaming on exactly the opposite course to us. I attacked at once and from a very close range our remaining torpedoes were fired, but before I could judge the effect, the enemy switched on searchlights and found us. . . . I then became aware that Ardent was taking on a division of German battleships. . . . Our guns were useless against such adversaries, our torpedoes were fired; we could do no more but wait in the full glare of the blinding searchlight for the shells. . . . Shell after shell hit us and our speed diminished and then stopped . . . all the lights went out. I could feel the ship was sinking.” Of Ardent’s company, only two men, one her captain, survived. This marked the end of the 4th Flotilla’s part in the battle. The twelve destroyers had done their best; now four were sunk or sinking, three others were heavily damaged, and the rest were scattered. In effect, the flotilla had ceased to exist.

In the harsh arithmetic of war, the loss of two light cruisers to one side and four destroyers to the other meant little. For the Germans, it was the price of success. Scheer intended to ram his battle fleet through to Horns Reef at any cost and if this could be done in exchange for two light cruisers, the bargain was an excellent one. For the British, the destruction of a destroyer flotilla might have been acceptable had its sacrifice been made useful by someone telling the Commander-in-Chief whom the destroyers were fighting. But this did not happen. Extraordinarily, as the dark horizon was lit by gun flashes and rent by the noise of the cannonade, these battles were witnessed from many British ships, but no one reported the presence of German battleships to Jellicoe. For this failure, it is easier to forgive the destroyer captains. Desperately attempting to handle their small ships so as to keep formation, avoid shellfire, and aim and launch torpedoes, they had little time to compose and send messages. But the engaged destroyers were not the only witnesses. Between 11:15 p.m. and 1:15 a.m., others could have told the Commander-in-Chief that the High Seas Fleet was crossing in his wake. Seven battleships in the rear of the British battle line were only 6,000 yards from these engagements, and three of those battleships were the most powerful dreadnoughts in the British navy.

The situation was this: by 10:00 p.m., Marlborough, wounded by a torpedo and no longer able to maintain the 17-knot fleet speed ordered by Jellicoe, had gradually slipped astern of the main body of the Grand Fleet. The other three dreadnoughts of her division, Revenge, Hercules, and Agincourt, remained behind with Marlborough, as did the three Queen Elizabeths of the 5th Battle Squadron, assigned to keep station on Marlborough. All of these ships were within point-blank range of Scheer’s battleships when they passed only three miles astern. No one had a better view than Malaya, the last ship in the British battle line, which saw and identified the German dreadnought Westfalen. According to Malaya’s captain: “At 11.40, [we] observed what appeared to be an attack by our destroyers on some big enemy ships steering the same way as ours. . . . The leading ship of the enemy . . . had two masts, two funnels and a conspicuous crane—apparently Westfalen class.” All of Malaya’s guns trained on the enemy battleship, and the gunnery officer asked permission to open fire. Captain Algernon Boyle refused. Like Arbuthnot during the Scarborough Raid, Boyle argued that what he could see must also be visible to the flagship Barham, two ships ahead, and that he must await orders to fire from his rear admiral, Evan-Thomas. A few minutes later, Boyle changed his mind and reported what he had seen to Evan-Thomas. But not to Iron Duke; Boyle believed that a captain should respect the chain of command and pass his observations to his own rear admiral, not directly to the Commander-in-Chief.

In fact, Barham already had witnessed “constant attacks by torpedo craft on ships first to the west and then to the north.” So had Valiant, the third of the three Queen Elizabeths: “At 11.35 p.m., we observed heavy firing on our starboard quarter. . . . They appeared to be two German cruisers with at least two funnels and a crane amidships [the profile of German dreadnoughts] steering eastward at high speed. These cruisers then evidently sighted an unknown small number of British ships ahead of them, possibly a light cruiser and a few destroyers. . . . Both Germans switched on top searchlights and opened a very rapid and extraordinarily accurate fire on our light cruiser. She replied but was soon in flames fore and aft.” Evan-Thomas, watching these attacks from Barham’s bridge, had seen heavy firing behind him, “which I surmised to be attacks by enemy destroyers on our light cruisers and destroyers. . . . At 10.39, heavy firing was observed . . . and destroyers appeared to be attacking the cruisers. At 11.35 p.m., a further attack was seen . . . right astern.” Despite these observations, Evan-Thomas, who had twenty-four 15-inch guns at his command, did nothing. Years later, Barham’s captain attempted to justify his admiral’s behavior. He doubted “whether the various observations of enemy ships made by ships of our battle fleet ought to have been reported to the Commander-in-Chief. I was on the bridge all night with my admiral and we came to the conclusion that the situation was known to the C.-in-C. and that the attacks were according to plan. A stream of wireless reports from ships in company with the Commander-in-Chief seemed superfluous and uncalled-for. The unnecessary use of wireless was severely discouraged as being likely to disclose our position to the enemy. . . . This may have been an error in judgement but cannot be termed ‘amazing neglect.’ ”

Still another British destroyer, Turbulent, was sunk—blown to pieces by twenty-nine 5.9-inch shells from the dreadnought Westfalen—during the High Sea Fleet’s continuing charge to the southeast. In all, two German light cruisers and five British destroyers were sunk during this phase of the battle, but not all of these ships went down suddenly; in most cases, the crews were taken off first by friendly vessels. This was not the case with two other warships, both large, one British and one German. Near the end of this dreadful night, two sudden, cataclysmic explosions obliterated these vessels, each with its entire crew of almost a thousand men. The first of these disasters occurred about midnight, during an intermission in the dreadnought-versus-destroyer battles. In the darkness, a solitary, large, four-funneled ship, the 13,500-ton British armored cruiser Black Prince, blundered smack into the center of Scheer’s battle line. After the turmoil at Windy Corner near 6:00 p.m. when the 1st Cruiser Squadron was scattered and Sir Robert Arbuthnot had led two of his four ships, Defence and Warrior, into a cataract of gunfire, Black Prince had turned northwest, traveled too far, and lost contact. Ever since, she had steamed south through the mist, hoping to find the British fleet. At last, near midnight, she discovered a group of dreadnoughts; but they were not English. Thüringen, Ostfriesland, and Friedrich der Grosse saw and recognized her, and their gunners prepared. Black Prince kept coming and, less than a mile away, flashed the British recognition signal. The reply was a dazzle of searchlights and a storm of shells at point-blank range. Black Prince’s two central funnels were shot away, and lurid red and yellow flames rose 100 feet in the air. But her engines still worked and, roaring like a furnace, she staggered back along the length of the German line, so close, said Scheer, watching from the bridge of Friedrich der Grosse, “that the crew could be seen rushing backwards and forwards on the burning deck.” Finally, the fire reached her magazines. She blew up with an incandescent white light and a gigantic thunderclap of noise; “a grand but terrible sight,” said Scheer. Her entire crew perished, 900 men.

As dawn was breaking on the morning of June 1, this British disaster was matched by one equally dreadful for the German navy. By 1:45 a.m., Scheer’s battleships, still plowing relentlessly to the southeast, had worked their way around to the port quarter of the British fleet and now were crossing the path of another—and as it happened, the last—group of British destroyers between themselves and Horns Reef, twenty-eight miles away. In the early gray light, Captain Anselan Stirling of the destroyer Faulknor, leading the 12th Flotilla, sighted a shadowy line of large, dark ships on his starboard beam. They were battleships, the rear of the German battle line, where, in the confusion and darkness, Behncke’s battered superdreadnoughts had intermingled with Mauve’s fragile predreadnoughts. When one of these ships flashed the letter “K” in Morse code—the wrong recognition signal—Stirling knew that they were German. He did not make the same mistake other British captains had made that night. He wirelessed Jellicoe. At 1:56 a.m., Faulknor signaled, “URGENT. PRIORITY. Enemy’s battle fleet steering southeast. . . . My position ten miles astern of 1st Battle Squadron.” Not only did Stirling send this message; he sent it three times: at 1:56, 2:08, and 2:13 a.m. Unfortunately, Iron Duke received none of these signals, perhaps because of efficient German jamming. But informing the Commander-in-Chief was only half of Stirling’s duty, and he initiated the other half as well, signaling, “URGENT. I am attacking.” Conditions at that hour were nearly ideal for destroyer torpedo attack: it was too light for enemy searchlights to be useful, but still sufficiently dark to make it difficult to aim at fast-moving targets. At 2:02, Stirling fired his first torpedo; two minutes later, the second; within a few minutes, he and his six destroyers had fired seventeen torpedoes at ranges of 2,000 to 3,000 yards. The torpedoes missed the big, important targets—König, Grosser Kurfürst, Kronprinz, and Markgraf—but a violent explosion shook the old predreadnought Pommern. “Amidships on the waterline of the Pommern appeared a dull, red ball of fire,” said an officer of the destroyer Obedient. “Quicker than one can imagine, it spread fore and aft, until, reaching the foremast and mainmast, it flared up the masts in big, red tongues of flames, uniting between the mastheads in a big, black cloud of smoke and sparks. Then we saw the ends of the ship come up as if her back had been broken.” Pommern was now in two sections; as her sister Hannover passed by, the stern was upside down, propellers and rudder high out of water. Part of the bow was still afloat ten minutes later, but there were no survivors. Eight hundred and forty-four men were lost.

This was the last of the Jutland night actions in which British destroyers fought German battleships and light cruisers. In these fierce, chaotic struggles, the small British ships had done the best they could and had sunk one German battleship, three light cruisers, and two German destroyers at a cost of five of their own number. What they could not do was to bar or even seriously delay the High Seas Fleet in its determined lunge to escape.

Through the night, the flicker of gunfire and the glare of distant searchlights were seen and heard throughout the British fleet. Some had no idea what was happening. “Every now and then out of the silence would come bang, bang, boom, as hard as it could go for ten minutes,” said a destroyer officer whose ship was not involved. “The flash of guns lit up the whole sky for miles and miles and the noise was far more penetrating than by day. Then you could see a great burst of flame from some poor devil, the searchlights switched on and off, and then perfect silence once more.” In their official reports after the battle, the captains of the dreadnoughts Hercules, Conqueror, Colossus, Superb, Thunderer, Téméraire, Bellerophon, Vanguard, and Canada all told of hearing gunfire and seeing the glare of searchlights, first to the northwest and then, as the night progressed, in an arc across the rear of the fleet. “A cruiser on fire . . . searchlight beams from her turned quite red by flames. . . . After midnight, there was intermittent firing on the port quarter, but otherwise the night passed without incident,” reported Bellerophon. Forty-five years after Jutland, Lieutenant William Jameson of Canada remembered that “violent action flared up in the darkness to the northwest, passed across our wake and died away towards the east. Something tremendous was going on only a few miles away, but to our astonishment (it surprises me still) the battle fleet continued to steam south.”

As the hours passed and these scenes of fire and destruction were enacted and witnessed, their significance was universally misunderstood on the large British ships. The Commander-in-Chief and his senior officers all interpreted the commotion to the north to mean that, as expected, enemy destroyers were attacking from astern and were being beaten off by the British destroyers stationed there for that purpose. Jellicoe certainly did not wish to involve his own dreadnoughts in this battle; indeed, he wanted them as far from German destroyers as possible. The irony is that the German destroyer flotillas, the element of the High Seas Fleet that Jellicoe most feared and that had loomed so large in his night dispositions, played no part in the nighttime battle. Ten German destroyers actually left the battlefield early and returned to Kiel around the northern tip of Denmark. Through the rest of the night, the remaining German destroyers searched in vain for the British battle fleet. They found nothing, suffered no losses, and might as well not have been there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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