Truth about the Navy’s darkest hour
100 years ago, 6,000 British sailors lost their lives at the Battle of Jutland. So why were survivors spat on back home?
ATINY shaft of light saved the life of Royal Navy engineer Henry Kitching. At the Battle of Jutland, 100 years ago, he was below decks in the engine room of HMS Warrior on May 31, 1916, when ‘I heard a tremendous explosion, a heavy jar went through the whole fabric, the lights went out. There was a roar of water and steam’.
Groping his way up an escape ladder to the deck of the elderly armoured cruiser, he was quickly lost in the pitch black.
‘I was driven back by a rush of thick smoke and blinding fumes, and there seemed no possibility of lifting the heavy hatches above me and getting out,’ he recalled. ‘A spasm of terror came over me. I was like a trapped rat.’
The water rose and he was sure he was going to die there in the North Sea, 80 miles off the coast of Denmark, just another of the thousands of British sailors to go down with their ships in what was turning out to be the biggest and bloodiest battle in naval history.
Then a miracle happened. A figure beckoned. ‘I looked up and there was a man calling my attention to a glimmer of light above. The next minute I found myself climbing out through a hole torn in the deck.’
Kitching was one of the lucky ones. So was Leading Signalman Charles Falmer, who, as the battle roared, had been ordered 180ft up the pitching mast of the battlecruiser HMS Indefatigable to untangle a signalling flag.
‘From the top I could see all the German fleet and made out 40 ships. Suddenly, a shell hit our magazine. There was a terrific explosion and our big guns flew up in the air like matchsticks. Lots of bodies, too.
‘Within half a minute, the ship turned right over and she was gone. I was thrown well clear, otherwise I would have been sucked under.
‘I came to on top of the water and there was another fellow, Jimmy Green. We got a piece of wood, him on one end and me on the other. A couple of minutes afterwards, some shells came over and Jim was minus his head, so I was on my lonesome.’
Picked up by the Germans, Falmer was one of just two survivors from the Indefatigable’s crew of 1,019 officers and men, all obliterated in the blink of an eye.
Heroes emerged. Royal Marine officer Major Francis Harvey had both legs blown off when a gun turret on HMS Lion, the flagship of the battlecruiser fleet, took a direct hit, but managed to crawl to a voice pipe and order the powder magazines to be flooded and sealed off before the fire could get to them. He saved the ship, but lost his own life.
On the light cruiser HMS Chester, Jack Cornwell, just 16 with the rank of Boy (First Class), stayed at his post manning a gun though mortally wounded — a feat which was honoured this week as his grave in East London was given a Grade-II listed status. Both Harvey and Cornwell were posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross, two of the four won at Jutland.
On the same ship, an officer reported a line of casualties, the feet of every one of them shorn off at the ankles by a shell, sitting calmly smoking cigarettes with the bloody stumps of their legs tourniqueted out in front. An hour later, they were dead from shock.
Here on the high seas was carnage to compare with anything being experienced in the trenches at this desperate midway point in World War I. In fact, it was because of the stalled land war that this slaughter at sea was happening at all.
On the mainland of Europe, the war had been fought to a bloody standstill by the summer of 1916. It was time for the Kaiser to flex his maritime muscle. It was time for
Der Tag — The Day. There had been bloody clashes in the North Sea in 1914 and 1915, and German ships had shelled British east coast ports, but the clash of the titans which both sides longed for had simply not happened.
Now, the British were to be drawn into battle and defeated, relieving the blockade that was depriving Germany of much-needed military supplies and food for its slowly starving civilians.
Unfortunately for the Germans, the British had cracked their naval codes, so as soon as the German High Seas fleet left Wilhelmshaven, the Royal Navy’s Grand Fleet steamed out of Scapa Flow and Rosyth.
Battle was joined on the afternoon of Wednesday, May 31, when a scouting group of German battlecruisers ran into an advance force of Royal Navy battlecruisers led by the gung-ho Vice-Admiral Sir David Beatty.
The first shots were fired at 3.48pm. A quarter of an hour later, the Indefatigable sank. Just 25 minutes later, another battlecruiser, HMS Queen Mary, was blown out of the water by shellfire and a further 1,266 British sailors were dead.
Watching his battlecruisers being vaporised, Beatty turned to his flag captain and said: ‘Chatfield, there seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today.’
At this point, the German force headed south towards home, a ploy to lure Beatty into a pulverising ambush by their main battle fleet. Beatty took the bait, taking fire and more casualties. When Beatty saw the larger German force, he set off back north, giving the impression he was running. Instead, he was using the same tactic — leading the Germans into a trap.
The British Grand Fleet, under Admiral Sir John Jellicoe, with 16 dreadnoughts, was steaming in from the north-west, drawing the now combined German force onto their guns.
A remarkable and daring feat of seamanship gave Jellicoe his crucial advantage. In one swift movement and risking multiple collisions, he turned his six columns of fastmoving ships — 144 in all, including torpedo-carrying destroyers — into a single six-mile curved line lying across the Germans’ path.
He then ordered his dreadnoughts to launch a massive broadside at an enemy they could not even see.
Then the battlecruiser Invincible exploded in a huge fireball. The 567ft hull split in two, each half plunging to the seabed 180ft below and settling upright, the tops sticking up above the water like tombstones. Of her 1,032 crew, there were just six survivors.
But Jellicoe was getting the upper hand; it was the enemy fleet that was taking the bigger pounding. From his flagship, the Lutzow, all the German commander, Admiral Reinhard Scheer, could see was the flash of guns and ‘a sea of fire’ in a vast arc ahead of him.
Hopelessly outgunned and in a state of panic, within minutes he ordered his ships to turn about and run, but Jellicoe kept after him.
For 50 minutes a rain of British heavy metal battered the High Seas Fleet. To survive, Scheer issued a desperate command — he ordered his battlecruisers to charge the
‘Our guns flew up like matchsticks . . . bodies, too’ A rain of British shells battered the German fleet
enemy in a death ride while his destroyers launched a mass torpedo attack.
The ploy worked. Jellicoe turned his ships away and, as the day turned into evening, the German fleet — dead and wounded lying mangled on many of its decks — slipped away at full speed.
Jellicoe pursued for a while, then, as night fell, gave up the chase. As dawn broke the following day, the British knew their quarry had escaped. The Germans claimed a famous victory. It made much of the British losses — 6,000 men dead, 14 ships sunk — against its own — 2,550 men, six ships.
The Royal Navy reached home a few days later to a storm of public protest that it had allowed itself to suffer an ignominious defeat. Dockyard workers booed the ships. Sailors were spat on in the streets for supposedly betraying the Nelsonian tradition.
It wasn’t true. At worst, the battle was a draw; at best, it was a strategic victory that maintained British mastery of the North Sea and confined the German fleet to its home waters, with poor morale.
When the German sailors were ordered to put to sea in October 1918 for a final battle, they mutinied. The Kaiser abdicated and peace followed. But the loss of British lives and of ships on such a scale had rankled, and there were urgent inquests to find out what had gone wrong.
The finger of blame was pointed at supposedly inferior British ship design, which allowed so many to sink so quickly, and stuffy battle tactics that stifled the initiative of individual captains to close in on the enemy and defeat him. And there had indeed been crucial intelligence blunders.
The Royal Navy’s analysts knew from decrypts which port the retreating German fleet was heading for, but kept Jellicoe in the dark.
The headstrong Beatty also erred at the start of the action by getting too far ahead, stringing out his ships and leaving them vulnerable. He was lax, too, in not passing on clear orders to his fellow battlecruisers, resulting in confusion.
Modern methods of investigation allow us to lay to rest some old chestnuts about Jutland. Laboratory experiments in the BBC documentary show conclusively that British ship design was not at fault, after all.
Our ships were every bit as capable of staying afloat after multiple hits as the riddled German ones were.
So why did so many more of ours sink? The answer lies in a big bang theory. They suffered direct hits into gun turrets, which then flashed down into magazine chambers below the waterline and blew the ship apart in one mighty explosion.
Proper safety procedures should have prevented this — explosives properly stored; flash-proof doors kept closed. But, in the heat of battle, corners were cut.
While the German gunnery was more accurate, Beatty’s battlecruisers relied on rapid fire.
Speed was the order of the day — load, fire, re-load, no pauses. To keep up the rate, excessive amounts of cordite in linen bags were kept too close to the gun turrets. Protective doors were propped open.
On British ships at Jutland 100 years ago, safety was sacrificed for speed, with the result that thousands of men were sent in one big bang after another to unnecessary, watery graves.
The Battle Of Jutland: The Navy’s Bloodiest Day, BBC2, 9pm tomorrow.
Direct hits blew ships apart in mighty blasts