End of the Battle of Jutland

On 1 June 1916, after a night of chaotic clashes in the North Sea, the Battle of Jutland came to an end. Admiral Reinhard Scheer’s German High Seas Fleet had crossed the track of the British Grand Fleet in the darkness and at dawn was already off the Horns Reef, from where a safe route led home. Admiral John Jellicoe spent the whole morning combing the sea for damaged German ships, and before noon turned back to his bases. Both fleets returned to port, and over the next few days both sides announced that they had won. Times are given, as in the British official history, in Greenwich Mean Time.

Escape past Horns Reef

During the night the Germans lost several more ships. At about two o’clock, when the bow of the badly damaged battlecruiser Lützow, Vice-Admiral Hipper’s flagship, had sunk so deep that her propellers came out of the water, her crew was taken off by four torpedo boats, and one of them finished off the wreck with a torpedo. Towards morning two light cruisers, Elbing and Rostock, which could no longer be saved, also went down. Scheer learned of Lützow’s fate only after 3.30 a.m., when his ships reached the lightship off Horns Reef.

Scheer halted the fleet there to wait for stragglers. Reconnaissance was carried out by five airships, which had taken off at about midnight. One of them reported twelve large battleships coming from the north off the coast of Denmark, where in reality there were no British ships at all. Another, L 11, sighted Beatty’s battlecruisers in the mist, then part of the British battle fleet, and was fired on by them. The reports from the battlecruiser commands were depressing: Hipper had only ships left that could not fight a serious action, and Scheer had three fast light cruisers remaining. Unwilling to be surprised in the mist by a much stronger enemy, Scheer abandoned further operations. At about 3.54 a.m. he signalled the fleet to return to port by the channel east of Amrum.

The way home was not without losses. At about 5.20–5.30 a.m. the battleship Ostfriesland struck a mine from a field laid in May by the British minelayer Abdiel. The explosion killed one sailor and wounded ten, but the ship reached port under her own power. The battleship König had taken on so much water that she had to wait for several hours off the Amrum Bank for high tide in order to pass through the shallow channel. Worst off was the battlecruiser Seydlitz. With her bow almost under water she crawled home all day, ran aground in the evening and reached the mouth of the Jade, steaming stern first, only on 2 June. Scheer’s remaining ships entered port in the course of 1 June.

An empty sea

Jellicoe knew that Lützow had been left far behind and hoped to catch at least the damaged German ships. From 4.30 a.m. his fleet steamed in cruising order on a broad front. For several hours the ships swept an area of about 60 by 50 nautical miles, reaching in the south as far as the German minefields. They came across patches of oil, lifebuoys, wreckage and the bodies of dead sailors of both sides, including wreckage of Black Prince, which had been lost in the night. Destroyers picked up from the water and from rafts the few survivors of Ardent and Fortune. Sparrowhawk, disabled after collisions, which in the morning had taken survivors of Tipperary off a raft, had to be sunk by gunfire from her own side. Of the German ships almost none was sighted. At 10.44 a.m. Jellicoe reported to the Admiralty that the whole area had been searched without result and that he was returning to base. After eleven the Grand Fleet set course for Scapa Flow, and Beatty’s battlecruisers for Rosyth.

The German U-boats, stationed off the British bases before the battle, were ordered to remain on station for another twenty-four hours. They encountered damaged British battleships returning alone. Before eleven U-46 fired a torpedo at the battleship Marlborough, which, with a hole in her side, was making for the Humber. The torpedo missed. U-51 fired two torpedoes at Warspite, and then the battleship nearly rammed U-63. Warspite reached Rosyth safely in the afternoon, and Marlborough the Humber the next morning.

The Grand Fleet put into Scapa Flow before noon on 2 June. That same evening, at 9.45 p.m., Jellicoe reported that the fleet had refuelled and was ready to put to sea at four hours’ notice. Many of Scheer’s ships, meanwhile, faced long repairs.

The race of communiqués

The Germans were the first to announce their version. The Admiralty communiqué, dated 1 June, was published at noon on 2 June. It spoke of victorious engagements with superior forces of the Grand Fleet and listed as sunk the battleship Warspite, the battlecruisers Queen Mary and Indefatigable, two armoured cruisers, a light cruiser, numerous destroyers and a submarine. It limited its own losses to the old battleship Pommern and the light cruiser Wiesbaden, plus the missing Frauenlob and several torpedo boats. Lützow, Elbing and Rostock, which the Germans had scuttled themselves, were not mentioned, although the command knew their fate well. Neither Warspite nor any submarine had in fact been sunk. The country celebrated the “victory of the Skagerrak”, schools were given a day off, and on 5 June Kaiser Wilhelm II, visiting the fleet at Wilhelmshaven, declared that the spell of Trafalgar had been broken.

The British kept silent for longer. For a whole day newspapers in neutral countries had only the German communiqué. The first British communiqué, written by the First Lord of the Admiralty Arthur Balfour, reached the press only on the evening of 2 June. It was very restrained and frank: it listed all the battlecruisers and armoured cruisers sunk, five destroyers lost and six missing, and spoke cautiously about German losses. It contained, however, no assessment of the outcome of the battle. A country that had been waiting for a new Trafalgar received it as news of a defeat. A few hours later the Admiralty released further details, and on 5 June it issued a fuller statement asserting that the Germans had lost more, together with a commentary by Winston Churchill. Only on 8 June did Berlin admit the loss of Lützow and Rostock, explaining that it had concealed them for military reasons. This belated admission harmed the Germans in the eyes of the neutral press more than the whole of the British Admiralty’s first communiqué.

A prisoner in his cell

Although the Germans had inflicted twice as heavy losses on the stronger fleet, the situation at sea did not change. Already on 2 June the merchant ships that had been held in port before the battle put to sea, and the blockade of Germany continued. Supporters of the British case often quote the comment of a New York newspaper: the German fleet had assaulted its jailer, but it was still in jail.