Battle of Dogger Bank

On 24 January 1915 in the North Sea, near the Dogger Bank, the British battlecruisers of Vice-Admiral David Beatty clashed with the German squadron of Rear-Admiral Franz von Hipper. After a pursuit of several hours the British sank the armoured cruiser Blücher, in which nearly 800 sailors died. Three German battlecruisers, however, managed to escape.

The trap

Hipper put to sea on the evening of 23 January. He was to destroy the British patrols and fishing boats in the Dogger Bank area, which the Germans regarded as the eyes and ears of the Royal Navy. A few weeks earlier, during the raid on Scarborough and Hartlepool, his ships had slipped away from the British in the mist. This time it was different. The British Admiralty’s codebreakers read the German wireless messages, and that same evening five battlecruisers from Rosyth, together with light cruisers and destroyers from Harwich, put to sea to intercept Hipper.

Just after 7 a.m. the British light cruiser Aurora ran into the German cruiser Kolberg. Hipper, seeing that he faced a much stronger enemy, turned back towards Germany. Beatty set off in pursuit at the highest possible speed. The British were faster, and the Germans were slowed down by the slowest ship of the squadron, Blücher. At about 9 a.m. Beatty’s flagship, Lion, opened fire at a range of about 18 kilometres.

The battlecruiser duel

For nearly two hours the two lines of ships exchanged salvoes. Hit by Lion, the German flagship Seydlitz lost both her after turrets, in which about 160 men were burned to death. Only the flooding of her magazines saved her from blowing up. The Germans in turn concentrated their fire on Lion. Shortly before 11 a.m. the British flagship, hit more than a dozen times, lost one of her engines and fell out of line. At about the same time Blücher, falling further and further behind, was badly damaged, and Hipper left her to her fate.

Beatty could no longer command effectively from his crippled ship. His flag signals were misread by Rear-Admiral Archibald Moore, who understood them as an order to attack the rear of the German line, that is, Blücher herself. Four British battlecruisers, instead of chasing the fleeing Hipper, concentrated their fire on the lone Blücher.

The sinking of Blücher

Blücher fought to the end, though she was on fire and had been hit by dozens of shells. After a torpedo attack by the light cruiser Arethusa she capsized and sank shortly after noon. The British pulled more than two hundred survivors from the icy water, but the rescue was interrupted by bombs dropped by a German airship and a seaplane. Of a crew of more than a thousand, about 790 died. The photograph of the capsizing ship, with hundreds of sailors on her side, became one of the best-known images of the war at sea.

When Beatty had transferred to another ship and resumed command, the German battlecruisers were already too far away. The British turned back, and Lion was towed to base by the battlecruiser Indomitable. The Germans lost about 950 killed that day, the British around fifteen. Britain celebrated a victory, although the Admiralty knew that the destruction of Hipper’s entire squadron had been within reach.