Sorry for not being around much. I've been busy at home and at work. Here's my latest installment, the World War 1 Battle of Dogger Bank.

Battle of Dogger Bank 1915

On January 24, 1915, squadrons of the British Grand Fleet and the German High Seas Fleet faced off near Dogger Bank in the North Sea.

The opposing forces.
British Grand Fleet
1st Battlecruiser Squadron: Lion, Tiger and Princess Royal.
2nd Battlecruiser Squadron: New Zealand and Indomitable.
1st Light Cruiser Squadron: six light cruisers.
Harwich Force: three light cruisers and thirty-five destroyers.
German High Seas Fleet
1st Scouting Group: Seydlitz, Moltke, Derfflinger and Blücher.
2nd Scouting Group: Four light cruisers
Two flotillas of eighteen torpedo boats combined.

With the German home fleet effectively bottled up by Admiral Beatty’s success at Heligoland Bight, German Admiral Franz Hipper decided to launch a raid upon three British East coast towns with his battlecruiser squadron, comprising three battlecruisers and the large armored cruiser Blücher, supported by light cruisers and destroyers. On December 16, 1914 at 9am, Hipper launched his raid against Scarborough, which resulted in the death of 18 civilians. The raid also caused further damage at Whitby and Hartlepool.

The British government, along with its population, was outraged that the German Fleet could sail so close to the British coast and proceed to shell coastal towns.
With the success of the Scarborough raid, Admiral Hipper planned a second raid, this time on the British fishing fleet on the Dogger Bank. Only this time, the British were waiting for Hipper. Through intercepted German radio traffic analyzed by Room 40 of British Naval Intelligence, the British knew of Hipper’s proposed sortie on January 23. Acting Vice Admiral Beatty set sail with five battlecruisers, supported by six light cruisers, to meet Hipper’s three battlecruisers. Joined by additional cruisers and destroyers from Harwich, Beatty headed south before meeting Hipper’s screening vessels at 7:20am on the morning of January 24.

Realizing he was overpowered, Hipper attempted to escape, believing the British battlecruisers to be slower than his. But Beatty’s ships were distinctly faster than the German squadron, which was held back by the slower armored cruiser SMS Blücher and his coal-fired torpedo boats. The British ships reached their extreme firing range by 9 am, with the older battlecruisers of the 2nd Battlecruiser Squadron somewhat behind the 1st Battlecruiser Squadron.

The battle started half an hour later when the British fire was concentrated on two of the German ships, Hipper’s flagship battlecruiser SMS Seydlitz at the head of the line and the old Blücher at the rear. With five big ships to the German four, Beatty intended that his two rear ships, HMS New Zealand and HMS Indomitable, should engage Blücher, while his leading three engaged their opposite numbers. But Captain H.B. Pelly of the newly commissioned battlecruiser HMS Tiger assumed that two ships should concentrate on the leading German ship and engaged the Seydlitz, leaving SMS Moltke unmolested to fire at HMS Lion. Worse, Tiger’s fire was ineffective as she mistook Lion’s shell splashes for her own (when her shots were actually falling 3,000 yards clear of Seydlitz).
At 09:30 Seydlitz was hit by a 13.5-inch shell from Lion, which penetrated the working chamber of her after turret barbette. The resulting explosion knocked out the rear turret and worse, thanks to an open door to the adjacent, superimposed turret, knocked out that turret too with the loss of the 160 men. Only the prompt action of her executive officer in flooding the magazines saved the Seydlitz from a massive magazine explosion that would have destroyed the ship. By 09:50, the badly damaged Blücher began to fall further and further behind the faster German battlecruisers. Sensing an opportunity to finish the Blücher off, the Indomitable was ordered to intercept her. By about 10:30, Hipper decided to leave Blücher to her fate.

The British ships were still relatively unscathed until at 10:18 SMS Derfflinger hit Beatty’s flagship HMS Lion with three 12-inch shells, damaging her engines to the extent that Lion began to lag behind and half an hour later came to a stop. With the annihilation of the German squadron within his grasp, Beatty, believing he saw a submarine’s periscope on Lion’s starboard bow, ordered a sharp turn of 90 degrees to port to avoid a submarine trap. It seems probable that the periscope was surfacing torpedo launched by a German destroyer. Realizing that so sharp a turn would open the range too much, he then ordered ‘Course NE’ to limit the turn to 45 degrees, wanting to add Nelson’s order ‘Engage the enemy more closely’. Noticing that this order was not in the signal book, he decided to order ‘Engage the enemy’s rear’ as the order that came closest to his intentions. With Lion’s electrics destroyed by further hits from the German ships, she was forced to signal using flag hoists.
But the combination of the signal of ‘Course NE’ (which happened to be the direction of the Blücher) with the signal to engage the rear was misunderstood by Beatty’s second-in-command, Rear Admiral Moore. Not knowing that the order was flawed, Moore order for all the battlecruisers to finish off the cripple. The remaining British battlecruisers broke off the pursuit of the fleeing German squadron and rounded on Blücher, sinking her with the loss of 782 men.
Beatty had now lost control of the battle. Rear-Admiral Moore lacked the vision needed to disobey a flawed order, and so the opportunity of an overwhelming victory was lost.

Although a few Germans clung to the hope that one of the British battlecruisers had been sunk, it was clear that the battle was a serious reverse. Kaiser Wilhelm issued an order that all further risks to surface vessels were to be avoided. Admiral von Ingenohl, commander of the High Seas Fleet, was replaced. The Germans took the lessons of the battle to heart, particularly the damage to the Seydlitz which revealed flaws in the protection of her magazines. The defect was corrected in all of Germany’s battleships and battlecruisers in time for the Battle of Jutland the following summer. Although the Germans realized that the appearance of the British squadron at dawn was too remarkable to be mere coincidence, they suspected an enemy agent near their base in Jade was responsible, rather than their wireless procedures.
Although the battle was not greatly consequential of itself, it boosted British morale. But while the Germans learned their lessons, the British failed to do the same. The unfortunate Rear Admiral Moore was quietly replaced, but Beatty’s flag lieutenant (responsible for hoisting Beatty’s two commands on one flag hoist, therefore allowing them to be read as one) remained. Signaling on board the Lion was equally poor in the early stages of the Battle of Jutland the following summer. Nor did the battlecruisers learn their lesson about fire distribution.

I was certain that HMS Lion had a similar turret fire as Seydlitz suffered, but I guess that was at Jutland. I thought that the British had had some kind of turret hit at Dogger Bank, so they should have been able to learn from their mistakes as the Germans did, but I can't find it now.

Funny how some ships names just seem to be doomed. Ships named Blucher certainly didn't do well for the Germans in WWI or WWII.

It's hard to believe that a navy with the fighting tradition of Nelson so revered didn't have the signal, "Engage the Enemy more closely" in the signal books.

The Brits certainly didn't do as well as should have been expected in this first major action. I blame about 100 years of peace giving them a false sense of complacency.

Hi Gator,

Just finished reading this battle in a book called 'Castles of Steel' (WWI Royal Navy and Imperial German Navy) by Robert K. Massie.

I most point out that the problem with the signal was that Lion had two of the four signal hoists shot away so they were raised next to each other. On its own that is not a problem as a signal is only acted on when its lowered, but there was the problem in that both were lowered together.

The speed of the the British BC's on paper was not a match for the Germans but with the slow SMS Blucher (23Knots) as you have said they were stuck with the speed of the slowest ship. As it happened the British pushed their BC's past their design speed so as to catch up, and when there was the risk of a German torpedo attack it was only the new British 'M' class destroyers (30Knots) that could gain on the charging British BC's as the rest of the British fleet was doing all it could to keep up with the BC's.

I'm now on to the Dardanelles and Gallipoli what a thing hindsight is, to know that if only the British and French had attacked the narrows for one day more they could have got through due to the Turkish guns being down to less than 25% of their ammunition and none on its way.


One note, the signal 'Engage the enemy more closely' was put back in the signal book after this battle.


Ciao
Luciano