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| HMS Spitfire in 1915 |
As darkness fell, Grand Fleet Commander of the Grand Fleet Admiral John Jellicoe headed south to keep himself between the Germans and their home bases. He put his light craft in the rear of the battle squadrons. A desperate Scheer eventually turned for home and, as a later study of the battle described it, what was a converging ‘v’ turned into an ‘x’ as the Germans crossed astern of the British – and then into an upside down ‘v’ as the High Sea Fleet won clear. [But] they did not go unopposed.
A series of ferocious encounters ensued, which resulted in another British armoured cruiser blowing up, together with an old German battleship. When there was no other sensor but the human eye, the result was a form of seaborne hand to hand combat. The Royal Navy's destroyer HMS Spitfire was in the middle of the action and the near-blind conditions.
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| The Doomed HMS Black Prince |
Stoker Henry Albert Wishart of the Spitfire’s crew later described a confused encounter with a burning cruiser, believed to be HMS Black Prince, during the night :
Suddenly there was a cry from nearly a dozen people at once, ‘Look out!’ I looked up, and saw a few hundred yards away, on our starboard quarter, what appeared to be a battle cruiser on fire, steering straight for our stern….. To our intense relief she missed our stern by a few feet, but so close was she to us that it seemed that we were actually under her guns, which were trained out on her starboard beam. She tore past us with a roar, rather like a motor roaring uphill on low gear, and the very crackling and heat of the flames could be heard and felt. She was a mass of fire from fore-mast to main-mast, on deck and between decks… flames were issuing out of her from every corner…. Soon afterwards, about midnight, there came an explosion from the direction in which she had disappeared.
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| SMS Nassau |
In a subsequent encounter, the Spitfire collided with the German first ever Dreadnought, SMS Nassau. Nassau had contributed to the gunfire which eventually resulted in the sinking of the Black Prince. In the collision Spitfire’s superstructure was flattened by the blast when the battleship fired her 11-inch guns overhead. There were nearly seven metres of Nassau’s side plate left on her upper deck when the destroyer broke free. Spitfire made it home and served out the war after repairs as did Nassau.
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| Survivor: HMS Spitfire After the Battle |
Sources: Stories of the Fallen; "Firepower: Lessons from the Great War Seminar Series", presented by Rear Admiral James Goldrick, Royal Australian Navy
"Jellicoe was the only man on either side who could lose the war in an afternoon." -Winston Churchill
ReplyDeleteThe fate of the British Fleet rested on Admiral Jellico's tactical decisions to save his battleships in the thick of the night, where there were no radars except the human eye. Being cautious, Jellico saved the British fleet from destruction. If the Germans had won the battle, Britain would not have been able to obtain the desperately needed supplies to prevent starvation. Britain also relied on weapons and medicine. Furthermore, the British would have had to negotiate for a peace treaty. Through fleet deployment strategies, Jellico was able to put the odds of winning in his favor, where he used the "Line of Battle Formation, enabling him to protect his ships and open fire with the ship's main battery. The T tactic enabled Jellico to use the ship's broadside guns, which gave the fleet an advantage against the German firing forward turrets.