JUTLAND
31st May 1916
The Royal Navy’s
A
passenger steamer cruising off
the Danish coast on 2nd June
1916 ran into a vision from hell:
more than 500 lifeless, bloated
bodies floating on the waves, the
human detritus of the most titanic clash of
battleships in history.
The armoured fleets that clashed off
Jutland in 1916 included dozens of warships that were the most formidable naval
vessels the world had ever seen.
Massively armoured and bristling with
an array of up to 15-inch calibre guns,
these capital ships were designated Dreadnoughts, for obvious reasons.
They could fire shells at ranges of up
to 16,000 yards, and were unmatched by
any other nation. They made big guns the
decisive factor in naval warfare until the
emergence of carrier-borne war planes.
As it turned out, the titanic encounter
of Skaggerak Strait, as the Germans designated the battle, ended indecisively, with
both sides claiming victory.
The Admiralty succeeded in keeping the
German High Seas Fleet bottled up in their
Heligoland harbours for the rest of the war.
But by the same token, the Royal navy, too,
was largely immobilised in its watching brief
at Rosyth and Scapa Flow.
The German Imperial Navy proved
more than a match for the British Grand
Fleet in terms of ships and tactics. Indeed,
the British navy’s reluctance to press home
its advantage in numbers was largely the
result of the German’s superior gunnery
and tactical mastery of a new weapon, the
torpedo.
As Admiral Sir David Beatty was said
to have exclaimed in the heat of battle,
“There seems to be something wrong with
our bloody ships today…” as he watched
10
More than 6,000 British sailors — including the
youngest VC — died in the most titanic naval battle in history. The German navy lost half as many
men and ships in the first — and last — encounter
between Dreadnoughts. Dan Morris reports
two great ships under his command explode and disintegrate.
Within minutes of both fleets opening
fire, the Indefatigable exploded, blown up
by a single shell, and it sank with the loss
of all but two of her 1,017 crew.
Little more than 20 minutes later,
one of the Royal navy’s most powerful
battlecruisers the Queen Mary exploded in
similarly dramatic fashion.
Both ships’ armour-plating, designed
to survive multiple hits, counted for nothing. The exchange of shellfire took place at
a range of 12,000-16,000 yards, and on the
German side involved the Von der Tann
and the Derfflinger.
The Queen Mary and the Indefatigable were just two of the 14 ships lost by
the British Grand Fleet at Jutland. They
included three battlecruisers, three heavy
cruisers, seven destroyers and one flotilla
lead ship. Casualties among British seamen
totalled 6,097 dead.
The Grand Fleet had sailed into battle
with 28 dreadnoughts, nine battlecruisers, eight heavy and 26 light cruisers, 78
destroyers and one minelayer.
On the German side the High Seas
Fleet lost one battlecruiser, one battleship,
four light cruisers and five destroyers sunk
for the loss of 2,551 sailors.
The prelude to Jutland had been a
series of cat-and-mouse raids over 18
months by elements of the German High
Seas Fleet which attempted to divide the
British battlecruiser squadrons commanded by Vice-Admiral Beatty based at Rosyth
from the rest of the Grand Fleet and its
Dreadnoughts at Scapa Flow under Admiral Sir John Jellicoe.
The British admirals knew they faced
a formidable foe, and as a result, caution
proved the guiding watchword in the clash
that had been signalled two years earlier.
British Admiralty guests at Germany’s
renowned Kiel regatta in 1914 were told
to spy on Kaiser Wilhelm II’s fleet. What
the British spies would have had confirmed was that Germany was catching
up fast in the arms race that had begun
in 1905 when work started on the Royal
Navy’s first Dreadnought.
By 1910, 25 per cent of all defence expenditure was going to the Admiralty. And
on the outbreak of the First World War,
Britain had amassed 42 Dreadnoughts to
ensure Britannia would go on ruling the
waves as she had done since Trafalgar.
But the Kaiser was determined that legacy would not go unchallenged, and by the
outbreak of war, Germany had no fewer than
26 capital ships in the Dreadnought class.
Today, Kiel has become a major maritime centre of Germany, and the city’s
annual Kiel Week is the biggest sailing
event in the world. Not a warship in sight.