Battle of Dogger Bank, 1915: the battlecruiser chase that got away

Dogger Bank was the first time the heavy ships of the British and German fleets fought each other directly, and the first clash of battlecruisers anywhere. For a few hours on a clear winter morning it looked as though the Royal Navy might destroy an entire German squadron in the open sea. It sank one ship, and the chance it let slip haunted the men who had been there.²

Background: raids and intercepts

The battle had its roots in the raid of December 1914. On 16 December Hipper's battlecruisers shelled Hartlepool, Whitby and Scarborough on the English coast and got home safely when mist and misread signals kept the British squadrons from closing. The raid killed civilians and outraged Britain, and the Admiralty expected the Germans to try something similar again.³

The British had a hidden advantage. By 1915 the Admiralty could read the main German naval codes almost as fast as the Germans themselves, and its intelligence department, Room 40, was watching German wireless traffic. The Germans noticed that their sorties seemed to be expected, but blamed British spy ships disguised as fishing boats on the Dogger Bank, the great shoal in the middle of the North Sea.⁴

On 23 January 1915 Hipper was sent out with his battlecruisers to sweep the Dogger Bank of British fishing vessels and patrols. The British read the signals for the sortie that afternoon. Beatty, commanding the Battle Cruiser Force at Rosyth, was ordered to sea to meet him at dawn near the bank, Commodore Reginald Tyrwhitt was to bring the light cruisers and destroyers of the Harwich Force to the same rendezvous, and Admiral Sir John Jellicoe put to sea from Scapa Flow with the battleships of the Grand Fleet to cut off any breakout to the north.⁵

Fleets and commanders

Beatty had five battlecruisers in two squadrons: his flagship Lion with Tiger and Princess Royal, and New Zealand, flagship of his second in command Rear Admiral Sir Archibald Moore, with Indomitable. With them sailed Commodore William Goodenough's four light cruisers, and Tyrwhitt brought more light cruisers and the destroyer flotillas from Harwich.⁶

Hipper, flying his flag in Seydlitz, had three battlecruisers, Seydlitz, Moltke and Derfflinger, and the older armored cruiser Blücher, with four light cruisers and a strong force of destroyers. Ship for ship, Corbett judged, the British were the more powerful: Lion, Tiger and Princess Royal carried 13.5-inch guns against the Germans' 11- and 12-inch, and Blücher, the oldest of Hipper's big ships, had only 8.2-inch guns.⁷

The battle in phases

Contact at dawn

Shortly after 7 a.m. on 24 January, in the first gray light, the light cruiser HMS Aurora of the Harwich Force sighted a cruiser, took her for a British ship and challenged. She was the German Kolberg, and at 7:15 she opened fire. Both were hit and Kolberg turned away. Beatty saw the gun flashes, turned toward them and ordered his light cruisers to chase. By about 7:50 he could see the German battlecruisers on his port bow, some 14 miles off, pouring smoke as they raised steam.⁸

Faced with British forces in such strength, Hipper turned for home at full speed. Beatty was not placed to cut him off from the east, so the battle became a stern chase to the southeast, toward Heligoland and the German minefields.⁹

The chase

Beatty pressed his engine rooms to the limit, working the squadron up to about 28 knots; even the older New Zealand and Indomitable greatly exceeded their normal speed. The slower Blücher, at the rear of the German line, began to drop back. At 8:52, at about 20,000 yards, Lion fired her first ranging shot. It fell short, but within a quarter of an hour Lion was hitting Blücher, and the Germans replied from 9:14. Lion then shifted her fire forward while Tiger and Princess Royal took on Blücher.¹⁰

At 9:35 Beatty signaled each ship to engage her opposite number in the German line. Tiger misread the order and fired at Seydlitz, which Lion was already engaging, so Moltke was left free to concentrate on Lion. The Royal Navy's official historian, Julian Corbett, judged that this broke the principle that no enemy ship should be left unfired upon.¹¹

Around 9:45 a heavy shell, probably from Lion, struck Seydlitz aft, pierced the armor of her rear turret and set fire to the propellant charges below it. The flames spread through the ammunition rooms to the next turret and both were burned out. The ship came close to blowing up, and her after guns were out of the fight for the rest of the day.¹²

The flagship falls out

The Germans fought for their escape by concentrating on Lion. She was hit again and again, by 15 heavy shells according to the Royal New Zealand Navy museum and 16 according to Naval-History.net. At 10:18 two shells from Derfflinger struck her near the waterline, flooding compartments forward. Then, shortly before 11, a shell drove in the armor abreast a boiler room. The port engine had to be stopped, light and power failed, and she took a 10-degree list. Her speed fell to 15 knots and she dropped out of the line, her wireless gone and with only two signal halyards left.¹³

Turning point: the misread signals

At that moment the battle still looked won. Blücher was burning and out of control, Seydlitz was badly damaged, and the remaining German ships were within reach. Then a submarine was reported on Lion's starboard bow. Beatty ordered the squadron to turn eight points, a right angle, to port, the standard response to a submarine, but one that took his ships across the enemy's wake and opened the range. Corbett, working from German records, concluded that no U-boat could have been there.¹⁴

Beatty quickly hoisted "Course North East" to bring the squadron back onto the chase, and then "Attack the rear of the enemy." The two signals were read together as an order to attack the rear of the enemy bearing northeast, which was exactly where the crippled Blücher lay. Rear Admiral Moore, now in command, led the four undamaged battlecruisers around Blücher while Hipper's three ships drew away.¹⁵

The end of Blücher

Blücher fought to the last against the whole squadron. When the destroyer Meteor closed in for a torpedo attack, she was hit by a heavy shell that burst in her forward boiler room and put her out of action. Light cruisers and destroyers torpedoed the German ship, and shortly after noon Blücher rolled over and sank. Corbett, who had little praise to spare for the enemy, wrote that her last hours had seldom been surpassed as an example of discipline, courage and fighting spirit.¹⁶

British boats and destroyers went in to rescue her men. Corbett gives 260 survivors picked up; the National Maritime Museum, describing W. L. Wyllie's drawing of the sinking, gives 189. The rescue was cut short when a German seaplane, and then a Zeppelin, arrived and dropped bombs among the rescuers, apparently taking the sinking ship for British, and the boats had to be recalled.¹⁷

Beatty, meanwhile, had crossed to the destroyer Attack and raced after his squadron, only to meet it coming back. He boarded Princess Royal and at first turned the battlecruisers after Hipper again, but the German ships were now far ahead and nearing their own waters, and he gave up the pursuit to cover the crippled Lion. Hipper reached port safely.¹⁸

Aftermath

Lion was towed home by Indomitable at a crawl, screened by every destroyer available, and anchored in the Forth on 26 January. British losses were light: Tiger lost 10 men killed, and the destroyer Meteor a handful more. The Germans lost Blücher and most of her crew, and Seydlitz and Derfflinger came home badly damaged.¹⁹

The battle was claimed in Britain as a victory, and it was one. Britannica judges that the setback was large enough for the German navy to refrain from trying to engage the British fleet again for more than a year. But the British saw it as a disappointing victory, one that could have ended with Hipper's whole squadron at the bottom of the North Sea, and Beatty was bitterly disappointed.²⁰

Legacy and memory

Both navies studied the battle, and in the judgment of Britannica and of the historian John Rickard the Germans learned the more important lesson. The fire in Seydlitz showed how dangerous it was to have propellant charges out of the magazines and in the turrets and handling rooms, and the German navy tightened its ammunition handling. The Royal Navy concentrated on its signals and took no such notice of the flash danger. At Jutland in May 1916, several British battlecruisers blew up after flash reached their magazines.²¹ › Second Battle of Heligoland Bight, 1917