HMS Iron Duke.
I n August 1914 the Royal Navy had what seemed to be an unassailable lead in capital ships over Germany’s High Seas Fleet. Already in service were twenty dreadnought battleships and nine battle cruisers, against fourteen and four. Building in British yards, and commissioned by December were the last two Iron Dukes and the battle cruiser Tiger.
In addition two ships being built for Turkey were completed in August of 1914. Reshadieh, built by Vickers at Barrow, with ten 13.5-inch guns on 22,780 tons was similar to Iron Duke. Sultan Osman I built by Armstrongs on the Tyne, laid down for Brazil as Rio de Janeiro but purchased by Turkey in 1912, had fourteen 12-inch in seven centre-line turrets. Both were taken into the Royal Navy as Erin and Agincourt respectively.
HMS Iron Duke.
HMS Agincourt.
The Chilean Almirante Latorre with ten 14-inch guns was in an advanced state of completion and was commissioned as HMS Canada, while her sister ship, Almirante Cochrane, was completed as the aircraft carrier HMS Eagle. Against these, Germany completed three König class and the battle cruiser Derfflinger by the end of the year. Although the latter was offset by the sale of Goeben to Turkey, she had been replaced by Lutzow by March 1916. Elsewhere the fleets of France and Russia were comparable in strength with those of Italy and Austria-Hungary. It was President Woodrow Wilson’s avowed policy to keep the United States out of the war, but in the Pacific Japan was a valuable ally to Britain.
In the further building programme, Britain was in an even stronger position. In 1912 the decision had been taken to increase the size of the main armament to 15-inch for the ships of the Queen Elizabeth class. This gun fired a shell of 1,920 pounds against the 1,250 pounds of the 13.5-inch. The total weight of the guns, barbettes, turrets and magazine protection for four 15-inch twin turrets was virtually the same as for five 13.5-inch, for a broadside almost 3,000 pounds heavier.
Another innovation was the use of oil fuel which gave a forty per cent increase in radius of action for an equivalent fuel load. The Americans had already introduced oil fuel into the Nevada class, but there was hesitation in Britain over a step which would make her dependent on overseas resources when she had plentiful stocks of the best Welsh anthracite. The government purchase in 1914, of controlling shares in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, at a cost of two million pounds was a natural sequel. The first three of the ships, Queen Elizabeth, Warspite and Barham were completed by 1915, and Valiant and Malaya the following year.
Admiral Sir John Jellicoe.
A further class of 15-inch gunned ships was planned for the financial years 1913–14, and five were laid down before war began. These were the Revenge class, coal-burning and rather slower, at 23 knots. Four were in service by 1916 and the fifth in the following year. Two more, Renown and Repulse were completed as battle cruisers in 1916. They mounted six 15-inch guns and were capable of 32 knots, but spent so much time in dockyard hands that they were known in the fleet as HMS Refit and HMS Repair.
HMS Queen Elizabeth.
Battleship HMS Valiant anchored in Alexandria harbour taking on ammunition. (© National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London)
The concentration on the numbers of ships tended to mask other considerations. Britain had a further advantage in the calibre of guns. The Germans continued to use the 11-inch gun when the 12-inch was standard in the Royal Navy; by the time that they had adopted the 12-inch, Britain had moved to 13.5-inch and then to 15-inch. However, the poor quality of British shells led to the frustration of hits being observed without significant damage caused, and the unstable nature of cordite led to the loss of Vanguard by internal explosion in 1917. The ships of the High Seas Fleet were also much better protected, both by heavier armour and by internal subdivision, proving that they could absorb a great deal of punishment. After Jutland, the battered Seydlitz reached harbour, despite the damage inflicted by twenty-one shell hits as well as torpedo strikes. This kept her in the dockyard for three months, but contrasts favourably with the total loss of three British battle cruisers to shellfire in the same action.
The introduction of gunnery director firing in the Royal Navy came when Thunderer, the only ship so equipped, scored six times as many hits in practice than the next most successful ship. By 1914 only eight ships had been so fitted, but by Jutland all save Erin and Agincourt had been modified. There the gunnery of the four Queen Elizabeth class ships of the Fifth Battle Squadron was especially accurate. However, German range finding was better in poor visibility because of the advantage conferred by their more complex stereoscopic system.
Side view of HMS Thunderer circa 1914. The picture shows its two 13.5 inch gun turrets.
Rather than the big guns mounted by the battleships, the mine and the torpedo appeared to be the greatest threat. There was early evidence of this when Audacious sank after striking a single mine off the coast of Ireland in 1914. She was the only dreadnought to be lost in this way. Three German ships: Ostfriesland, Kronprinz and Bayern, all struck mines in the Baltic, but survived. So too did the battle cruisers Yavuz (formerly Goeben) and Inflexible in the Black Sea and the Dardanelles. The torpedo did not account for a single dreadnought. Marlborough, Moltke, Westfalen and Grosser Kurfürst all survived torpedo attacks. However, it was the fear of German submarines which caused Jellicoe to turn away at Jutland and not risk a night action.
The German bases in the Heligoland Bight, at Wilhelmshaven on the Jade, at Cuxhaven, Emden and Brunsbüttel, were in a highly defensible position, and were linked by the Ems–Jade Canal, with the newly widened Kaiser Wilhelm Canal giving direct access to the Baltic port of Kiel. (The Baltic could be regarded as a reasonably secure training and working-up area.) To blockade these in the way in which Admiral Cornwallis had blockaded Brest during the French Revolutionary War in 1795, would have exposed modern ships to quite unacceptable hazards. A policy of distant blockade had to be applied by the Royal Navy, of necessity allowing the German ships some freedom of action in the North Sea, but denying them passage to the Atlantic where they could menace the ocean trade routes. In practice two factors reduced somewhat the opportunities afforded to the High Seas Fleet. The battle squadrons could only cross the bars of the Elbe and Weser at high tide and good naval intelligence work by the Admiralty gave warning of German intentions. The capture of a German codebook after the sinking of the cruiser Magdeburg in the Baltic gave the cipher experts an advantage, so that when Jellicoe took the Grand Fleet to sea in May 1916 it was in the confident knowledge that Admiral Scheer was about to sortie in force.
The older British bases of Plymouth, Portsmouth and Chatham, while well-placed for wars against the older enemies of Spain, Holland or France, were not suitable for hostilities against Germany in the North Sea. In 1903 the decision was taken to establish a base at Rosyth, but this was not entirely satisfactory. It appeared to be too easy to mine the approaches to the Forth, where there was not sufficient anchorage for a fleet. In addition, the Forth Bridge was vulnerable to an attack whose destruction could keep the fleet bottled up. A second base and anchorage was established at Invergordon on the Moray Firth, but a major fleet base with full repair and replenishment facilities was urgently needed. Scapa Flow in the Orkneys was to be the answer as it offered sufficient space and shelter and was well placed to control the northern exits from the North Sea into the Atlantic. In August 1914, however, it was still undefended, lacking booms, nets and searchlights, and early in the war the Grand Fleet was withdrawn to Lough Swilly in Ireland for its own safety. Nevertheless, it was at Scapa Flow that Admiral Jellicoe, appointed commander-in-chief on the eve of war, hoisted his flag in command of the Grand Fleet.
The Grand Fleet comprised twenty dreadnought battleships, a squadron of eight King Edward class and another of the five remaining Duncan class; at Invergordon was the 1st Battle Cruiser Squadron comprising, Lion, Queen Mary, Princess Royal and New Zealand under Admiral David Beatty. Sixteen cruisers and seventy-six destroyers (thirty-five of the latter based at Harwich) provided the scouting force and anti-torpedo screen. The Channel was guarded by HMS Dreadnought and the two Lord Nelson class ships, along with twentythree pre-dreadnoughts of the Majestic, Canopus, London and Formidable classes, which initially ensured the safe passage to France of the British Expeditionary Force.
Swiftsure and Triumph were in the Pacific, Australia was in her home waters and Invincible was at Queenstown. The 2nd Battle Cruiser Squadron was in the Mediterranean, together with five armoured cruisers, chiefly to maintain a watch on the German battle cruiser Goeben. She was able to elude them and, with her attendant light cruiser Breslau to reach Constantinople where they were sold to Turkey, though remaining under the command of Admiral Wilhelm Souchon and manned still by their German crew. There they remained throughout the war, a threat to communications in the Levant and the Black Sea. Turkey had been assiduously courted by Germany in the previous decade, and the acquisition of Goeben (renamed Yavuz Sultan Selim) together with the loss of the two ships commandeered by the Admiralty, now brought her into the war.
By October 1914, Jellicoe’s margin of superiority had vanished. With the loss of Audacious, with Princess Royal in dry dock and with problems rendering four more ships unserviceable, he had fifteen battleships and three battle cruisers against the fifteen and four of his opponents. The arrival of Erin and Agincourt, the completion of Benbow, Emperor of India and Tiger, together with the return of the four ships under repair, restored the advantage before the Germans were aware that it had been lost.
At this point the attention was switched to distant waters. The German Pacific Squadron of armoured and light cruisers under Admiral von Spee soon lost its base at Kiaochow to the Japanese, but contrived to remain a real threat to convoys. Off Coronel they met and overwhelmed Rear Admiral Sir Christopher Cradock’s weaker ships. The loss of the two old armoured cruisers Good Hope and Monmouth did not in any way affect the overall balance of naval power, but the psychological blow was immense. At once the Admiralty acted, sending a hastily assembled squadron of two battle cruisers and five armoured cruisers under Admiral Sturdee. They encountered von Spee off the Falkland Islands and in a classic battle cruiser action Inflexible and Invincible outpaced, outranged and sank both Scharnhorst and Gneisenau while the armoured cruisers, Bristol, Kent, Carnarvon and Cornwall, similarly outclassed and sank the light cruisers Leipzig, Nürnberg and Dresden.
This seemed to justify the battle cruiser concept at a time when the fast battleships of the Queen Elizabeth class might have discredited it. The battle cruisers also sank three German light cruisers in the Heligoland Bight in 1914. The German admirals seem to have anticipated a close blockade by the Grand Fleet, to which their response would be attacks to whittle down the strength of their opponent, but in August 1914 a raid by Commodore Reginald Tyrwhitt’s Harwich Force drew out a squadron of light cruisers into the range of the five ships of Admiral Beatty’s 1st Battle Cruiser Squadron, Mainz, Ariadne and Köln being sunk.
German raids on Hartlepool, Scarborough and Whitby brought Beatty’s battle cruisers south to Rosyth late in 1914. When a raid in January 1915 by Admiral Franz von Hipper’s 1st Scouting Group of four battle cruisers was identified in advance by the codebreakers in Room 40, an interception was made, but the results were disappointing. Although with a five to four advantage in ships, higher speed and heavier guns, only the weakest of the German ships, the Blücher of 15,840 tons and armed with 8.2-inch guns, was sunk. Other aspects of the battle had a greater significance: a signal misunderstanding left Moltke unengaged and able to fire unimpeded. Lion was hit by three 12-inch shells from Derfflinger and then by a fourth which slowed her so that Beatty lost his control over the squadron. A hit on Seydlitz penetrated her magazines, but prompt action led to them being flooded and the ship saved. This led to corrective action being taken, action of which the British were unaware, leaving their ships vulnerable.
In the summer of 1916 came the long-awaited clash between the battle fleets. Again, intelligence gave Jellicoe the information that Scheer was planning a major sortie, and so the Grand Fleet put to sea with all available ships. Jellicoe had twenty-four battleships, his entire strength apart from Royal Sovereign which had only just joined the fleet and Queen Elizabeth which was undergoing a refit. In addition he had under his command the three Invincible class ships of the 3rd Battle Cruiser Squadron, at Scapa Flow for gunnery practice. To replace them, Beatty at Rosyth had the four new ships of the Fifth Battle Squadron, the 15-inch gunned Warspite, Barham, Valiant and Malaya, along with the six vessels of the 1st and 2nd Battle Cruiser Squadrons.
It was the light cruiser HMS Galatea, part of Beatty’s scouting force, which first sighted the enemy, making contact with Hipper’s Scouting Group. In the ensuing gun duel, first Indefatigable was hit by a salvo from Von der Tann, and then Queen Mary was struck by shells from Derfflinger. Both British ships blew up and sank. The flagship Lion was only saved from a similar fate by the flooding of a magazine after she had been hit in Q turret amidships.
By now the 15-inch guns of the Fifth Battle Squadron were dealing some heavy blows, and Moltke, Von der Tann, Seydlitz and Lützow were all badly hit during the run south. The leading ships of Scheer’s battle fleet were then sighted, and Beatty turned northwards to draw the High Seas Fleet under the guns of Jellicoe’s battle squadrons. Unfortunately, another signals failure led to this order not being relayed to Vice Admiral Sir Hugh Evan-Thomas, so that the Warspite was badly hit as she continued southwards. Jellicoe, now at last in full awareness of the presence of Scheer as well as Hipper, deployed his ships from a cruising formation in four columns of line abreast into a line ahead, crossing the T of the German fleet. At this point another disaster struck. HMS Invincible, at the head of the line, was hit amidships and became the third of the battle cruisers to be destroyed by an explosion.
A major fleet action, at so great a disadvantage of numbers was not Scheer’s intention, and he ordered his ships to execute the ‘battle turn away together’ and break off the fight. A second, and even briefer flurry of action saw Jellicoe turn away, fearing torpedo attack, and some confused fighting during the night ended this opportunity for a decisive fleet action to rival Trafalgar.
Battlecruiser HMS Invincible in 1911–12 at anchor. (© National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London)
Apart from the three battle cruisers, the Royal Navy lost three armoured cruisers and eight destroyers. The High Seas Fleet lost the battle cruiser Lützow when, after a long fight to save the battered ship, her crew was taken off and she was sunk by torpedo. The predreadnought Pommern, along with four light cruisers and five torpedo boats were lost and, on the basis of these figures, the Germans on reaching the safety of their port, claimed a victory. Equally, on the basis that the Germans had withdrawn and left the Grand fleet in control, the Admiralty could also claim a victory. Their fleet was ready for sea again after replenishing fuel and shells. Only HMS Marlborough of Jellicoe’s fleet, hit by a torpedo, was in need of extensive repair. All other major damage had been suffered by Beatty’s squadrons, but even he retained a numerical advantage over Hipper. All of the German battle cruisers had suffered heavy damage. Apart from the loss of Lützow, all of Von der Tann’s turrets had been put out of action and Seydlitz reached port in a sinking condition. Some units of the High Seas Fleet were in dockyard hands for months.
Of the ships planned or under construction at the time of Jutland, few were completed, and fewer still saw service. In Britain the Cabinet decided that no more capital ships were to be laid down after 1915, hence Fisher’s designation of the three ships of the Courageous class as ‘large light cruisers’. Intended for a not-entirely-planned assault on Germany’s Baltic coast, each was of some 23,000 tons, of relatively shallow draught, and were intended to mount two of the new 18-inch guns. In fact, to get Courageous and Glorious into service in 1917, each was armed with two twin 15-inch turrets; they did see action against German light forces in the Heligoland Bight in November 1917, but without success. HMS Furious was armed with the 18-inch guns, but by the end of 1917 had begun conversion to an aircraft carrier. HMS Hood, one of four planned 15-inch battle cruisers of 45,000 tons, was laid down in 1916, but was not completed until 1920. The other three vessels were cancelled.
HMS Hood.
Germany did complete the 15-inch battleships, Bayern and Baden and the 12-inch battle cruiser Hindenburg in 1916–17, but the later battleships, Sachsen and Württemberg and the battle cruisers Mackensen and Graf Spee, were never completed.
The United States completed six more battleships during the war, of which New York and Texas formed part of the Sixth Battle Squadron at Scapa Flow, but none of the six saw action. Japan also extended her battle fleet by the Ise and Hyuga by 1918.
Elsewhere the tale is one of cancellation throughout. None of the French battleships of the Normandie class were completed and the four Lyon class battle cruisers were cancelled. Italy cancelled the four Caracciolo class and Russia the four Borodino class. Four Austrian Tegetthoff class were never laid down.
Though the assertion that the German fleet never put to sea again is untrue, it never again risked action. As an American observer put it ‘the German fleet has assaulted its jailer, but is back in its cell’. When it was ordered to sortie again in November 1918, the crews mutinied. The distant blockade, maintained by the battle squadrons at Scapa Flow had proved to have a decisive effect on the war. It was necessarily a lengthy process, as Germany was much less dependent on sea-borne trade than Britain, but by 1918 the effects were beginning to tell. By restricting the High Seas Fleet to the North Sea, the Royal Navy was able to prevent any large-scale surface threat to the main arteries of trade, while the German inability to break this stranglehold led directly to the decision to initiate unrestricted submarine warfare, which in turn had led eventually to the American entry into the war in 1917. A Sixth Battle Squadron of American dreadnoughts arrived at Scapa Flow, more to emphasise the reality of the alliance than because they were needed. Of much greater significance were the escorts protecting the vital Atlantic convoys of supplies and the passage of the American Expeditionary Force for the final decisive battles of the autumn of 1918.
The absence of any other major action meant that the battle fleets had an uneventful existence for the rest of the war. For many of the great ships, which had been the index of the naval strength of Britain and Germany in the pre-war years, the only glimpse of the enemy had been through the murk of cloud and smoke at Jutland. The German König was involved in an unequal action in the Baltic with the old Russian battleship Slava, which was disabled and later scuttled. HMS Dreadnought rammed and sank a U-boat when on patrol in the North Sea. In neither in the Mediterranean, the Adriatic nor the Black Sea was there any battleship action, though Yavuz Sultan Selim (formerly Goeben) did bombard Sebastopol, and was on three occasions in action with Russian ships. Japan lost Kawachi by internal explosion in Tokoyuma Bay in July 1918.