If only RN had had better shells a few German dreadnoughts and probably most of their battlecruisers wouldn't have made it home
Dread Nought but the Fury of the Seas
- Thread starter sts-200
- Start date
Absolutely ... the vestiges of the Victorian Navy ... don't get the torpedoes wet, it might damage them.
The point about production is spot on. I hinted at it somewhere far back in the thread; without surface gun attacks the Germans would have had great difficulty sustaining unrestricted submarine warfare, as they couldn't build enough torpedoes.
Yes, I agree.
All other things unchanged, I suspect:
If they'd followed proper magazine drill, Jutland might have been a minor British victory (I'd guess Lutzow & Seydlitz for Indefatigable).
If 1&2 BCS had practiced gunnery, that could be a totally different battle, but if it ran out vaguely as in reality, I would have thought 2:3 (in the Germans' favour, but with Seydlitz sunk), or maybe 3 all - with Derfflinger sunk too.
Get all three right, and I suspect we'd have seen several generations of HMS Jellicoe and HMS Beatty by now.
To be fair being stingy with torpedoes and having a limited production capability as related to them is a problem that has plagued navies ever since they were introduced...especially for the minor navies.
Heck the last two KGVs(1937) were laid down as the Jellicoe and Beatty
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Man I'm still hoping Beatty gets his ass kicked I mean the Germans are going to get hurt but I really hope they don't totally loose
In order for the Germans to get completely thrashed they have to not 'pick up their ball and go home'
Basically it's on them to stay around and get killed by the Grand Fleet
And given the disparity in strength - I do not see Sheer doing that and quite rightly so
I mean he erred twice OTL but managed to last till sun down but ultimately he is trying to isolate a small portion of the British fleet - as soon as he saw the entire British fleet on the Horizon it was obvious that this plan had failed hard and there was little to be gain and much to lost by 'not' running for night and then the Jade.
''Reducing speed would not be convenient at present, Chief; the whole German Fleet’s behind us'.'
I love this so much
I love this so much
Stavanger 8 – The Channel
Stavanger 8 – The Channel
‘Guns to the Right of them, Guns to the Left of them … through the Channel of Death sailed the Fifth Battle Squadron’ - anon.
On Royal Oak’s bridge, Captain Earle had heard only sketchy damage reports relayed to his officers through the voice-pipes and Navy-phones. However, his ship was noticeably down by the stern and had a list to starboard. He was engaging the fifth in the German line to port, a solid-looking ship with two closely spaced funnels, obviously one of their new ‘Baden’ class. Meanwhile, the German battlecruisers were turning and would soon re-engage with him to starboard. Obviously, the situation was grave and his men were hard-pressed, but he wasn’t satisfied with the information he was receiving, and he decided to send his Executive Officer aft, to inspect the damage and oversee any emergency repairs.
For Commander Farrington, that would not be as simple as trotting down a few ladders and walking back through the ship. He was stationed in the ship’s auxiliary control position inside B-turret and had a choice between the direct route outside along the deck, or an indirect one down through the turret and magazine and along inside the ship. Despite the thunder of the guns and the occasional ping of shrapnel outside, he decided on the quick route. However, this was a decision he almost instantly regretted, as a helpful gunner opened the turret’s rear top hatch. The man gave him a cheery, ‘Good Luck Sir’ and was in the process of helping him through the hatch when the ship shuddered under an impact, and the ‘help’ abruptly turned into a firm shove which propelled him out onto the top of the turret and sent him rolling head-over-heels. He just had time to look back up at the range-finder cupola as the gunner yelled ‘Sorry Sir’, before slamming the hatch shut.
As he raised himself to a crouch and made off down the ladder at the side, both 15” guns went off. He wasn’t sure if it was the noise or the actual blast that threw him to the deck, but when he got up and scrambled back aft towards the superstructure, he couldn’t hear anything other than a ringing in his ears. All external hatches were all clipped shut from the inside, and as he made his way aft an enemy shell screeched through the fore-funnel, sending splinters whirring off the steel structure around him. He stopped, hunched down and pulled up his collar, before thinking what a stupid action this was. Even Grieve’s best cloth wouldn’t do anything to stop a German shell.
He stayed hunched down as he continued to head aft towards the widest part of the ship, when he thought he smelled food. A few steps further on and the smell was stronger, like freshly roasted lamb. Then he saw smoke drifting from a hole in the superstructure ahead, and bits of reddish meat scattered across the deck. In an instant he felt his blood run cold, suddenly sick with the realisation that it might not be cooked lamb that he was smelling. Summoning the determination to drag his feet forward, the relief was just as physical a feeling as the sickness had been, when he realised that it wasn’t what he’d feared. The forward meat store had been hit, setting a fire and sending fragments of carcasses across the side of the shelter deck.
He half-laughed, half-dry-heaved with sudden joy as he saw a perfectly undamaged pork pie sitting in the middle of the deck. Almost instinctively, he picked it up, noting that his hands were shaking violently as he tried to open the flap of his jacket pocket to secure it for later. The thought of eating now made him feel ill, but allowing the pie to be lost to the sea or the German fire just didn’t seem right.
Twenty yards further back, almost to the fore-funnel, he found a hatch cracked open with a half-dozen Marines behind it peeking out to watch the battle. As they noticed him, they pushed open the hatch and pulled him in, and once he’d regained his feet and taken a deep breath, he ordered them to close it, and keep it closed. The irony that they should never have opened the hatch that had allowed him to enter and order them to seal it was not lost on anyone, as he made his way down and aft, now inside the relative safety of the ship’s hull.
Once the German battlecruisers had completed their turn, Hipper's five remaining ships resumed firing at the rear of the British line. Partly shielded by the smoke and haze, Hipper had made a wide turn when the British had made a sharp one, and even though the Germans had fallen behind, the two battlecruiser fleets were now at a much closer range. It was now as little as 12,500 yards, and Hipper had continued the turn to take his battered ships steadily away from the British. However, with the British engaged to both port and starboard, he was not in as much danger as he might otherwise have been.
The relative positions of the two lines had changed and visibility was patchy, so his ships resumed firing at whoever they saw. HMS Indefatigable was the subject of Lutzow's accurate fire and sustained her first significant damage of the battle as an underwater hit abeam A-turret flooded wing compartments. Derfflinger made an immediate contribution as she hit Lion twice in her first half-dozen salvos, ripping open feedwater tanks, flooding a shaft tunnel and wrecking the auxiliary steering gear. Splinters from the second hit ignited secondary charges aft and destroyed hoist machinery, but the decks and armour kept the fragments out of the engine room.
With only four guns operation, Seydlitz's contribution could not be great, but she claimed two hits on Barham, one of which exploded forward, starting a fire. In between the clouds of smoke, Goeben fired at one of the ships of 5BS (after the war, it was confirmed as the Valiant), hitting her a remarkable four times in ten full salvos. Unfortunately, three of the shells failed to explode, although one of these obliterated the second starboard 6" gun by hitting it directly. The one that exploded did so just above the waterline near the bow, leading to holes in both sides of the ship and minor flooding through the chain lockers.
At the closest range of all, Von der Tann's six remaining guns were aimed at Royal Oak, and she scored three hits. Two shattered harmlessly against the battleship's thick armour belt, but the last opened up a hole astern, leading to more localised flooding.
Aboard Royal Oak, the effects of fires and earlier damage were becoming increasingly perilous, as a crewman in the magazine of Y-turret was scalded by liquid lead dripping down from the ceiling. As his crewmates tended to him, more liquid could be seen falling through seams and out of cable ducts, dripping down next to a bundle of exposed Cordite that was on its way up to the guns. In one corner of the compartment, the deck plates above their heads were almost red hot, and just seconds later, acrid smoke started to pour into the magazine. Fortunately for the rest of the ship's crew, no time was lost in opening the valves and starting to flood the compartment. Above them, fire surrounded part of Y-turret’s barbette and the compartments next to it, melting electrical cables that led down into the ship, and setting fire to the insulation as it did so.
Two decks above them, Commander Farrington had reached the after barbettes and soon ordered hoses to be diverted onto the holes in the deck above the fires. Steam spattered up from the hot plates, before the water poured down towards the fires below. Unfortunately, with everyone’s focus on the hoses and the rising steam and smoke, no-one saw what happened to Marine Cooper, they just heard a,
‘Whoa … Ahh … Thud …’, and the muffled language that followed these noises.
On turning around and looking back for the man who had been feeding the hoses forward to the firefighters, it soon became very clear what happened. Cooper hadn’t been looking where he was standing and had fallen through a hole in the deck made by a German shell. Mercifully, he hadn’t fallen into the fire that was still raging below.
There was near-hysterical laughter from men who desperately needed some relief from the stress of battle. The fire crew let the hose wander as they looked back, redoubling their laughs as Cooper poked his head up through the shell hole he had just fallen through, and said with a broad grin, ‘there’s not s’posed ‘be an hole there, is there?’.
He then grabbed at the fire hose to pull himself up, unhelpfully as it turned out, as the pull on the hose turned the jet of water around and hit Commander Farrington straight in the chest, knocking him over. He too had been distracted by Cooper’s antics and was laughing just as hard as the men, so he couldn’t blame them when they grinned and sniggered at his bad luck with the hose.
Picking himself up, he bellowed, ‘Steady there’, and the hose was rapidly trained back through the holes in the deck, renewing the plumes of steam and smoke that came up through them, but this time producing a satisfying hiss as the fire was overwhelmed by the water.
Then there was a flash that momentarily blinded him, and he fell to the deck again as a ‘whumppph’ of pressure, heat and sound pulsed through the compartment. Stunned, he didn’t even feel himself fall to the deck, and with his eyes full of water and dust, the first thing he was aware of was a sailor kneeling over him, asking him if he was alright. He tried to speak and managed to groan something as he started to haul himself upright, his ears still ringing. His vision slowly cleared as he blinked, and he started to pay attention to the compartment around him. The firefighting team were still aft, but their hoses weren’t working. Looking for’ard, he could see why. There was a jagged hole in the bulkhead and the hoses were shredded. He rose to his feet, still a little unsteady but with his senses returning fast. No-one in the compartment was laughing any more, as amid the jagged steel and shattered fittings, there was a man, or what was left of him.
Cooper wouldn’t be cheerily poking his head through any more holes in the deck. He no longer had one.
While the battleships of the Fifth Battle Squadron were firing at the High Seas Fleet, Beatty's leading battlecruisers kept shooting at Hipper's ships, which were now on starboard quarter. Despite their recent enforced reduction in speed, the British were still faster than the Germans, as the accumulated effects of damage and clinkered firebars had slowed the ships of the 1st Scouting Group to about 22 knots. At increasing range, with damaged and listing ships being pushed to their utmost speed, the British fire was not very effective. Beyond a few minor leaks aft, Lutzow suffered little from two hits by Lion, while Indefatigable managed a single hit on Von der Tann, destroying two of her port 88mm guns and completing the destruction of the upper deck near the bow. However, as the damage was well above the waterline, so far it had little effect on her speed.
‘Guns to the Right of them, Guns to the Left of them … through the Channel of Death sailed the Fifth Battle Squadron’ - anon.
On Royal Oak’s bridge, Captain Earle had heard only sketchy damage reports relayed to his officers through the voice-pipes and Navy-phones. However, his ship was noticeably down by the stern and had a list to starboard. He was engaging the fifth in the German line to port, a solid-looking ship with two closely spaced funnels, obviously one of their new ‘Baden’ class. Meanwhile, the German battlecruisers were turning and would soon re-engage with him to starboard. Obviously, the situation was grave and his men were hard-pressed, but he wasn’t satisfied with the information he was receiving, and he decided to send his Executive Officer aft, to inspect the damage and oversee any emergency repairs.
For Commander Farrington, that would not be as simple as trotting down a few ladders and walking back through the ship. He was stationed in the ship’s auxiliary control position inside B-turret and had a choice between the direct route outside along the deck, or an indirect one down through the turret and magazine and along inside the ship. Despite the thunder of the guns and the occasional ping of shrapnel outside, he decided on the quick route. However, this was a decision he almost instantly regretted, as a helpful gunner opened the turret’s rear top hatch. The man gave him a cheery, ‘Good Luck Sir’ and was in the process of helping him through the hatch when the ship shuddered under an impact, and the ‘help’ abruptly turned into a firm shove which propelled him out onto the top of the turret and sent him rolling head-over-heels. He just had time to look back up at the range-finder cupola as the gunner yelled ‘Sorry Sir’, before slamming the hatch shut.
As he raised himself to a crouch and made off down the ladder at the side, both 15” guns went off. He wasn’t sure if it was the noise or the actual blast that threw him to the deck, but when he got up and scrambled back aft towards the superstructure, he couldn’t hear anything other than a ringing in his ears. All external hatches were all clipped shut from the inside, and as he made his way aft an enemy shell screeched through the fore-funnel, sending splinters whirring off the steel structure around him. He stopped, hunched down and pulled up his collar, before thinking what a stupid action this was. Even Grieve’s best cloth wouldn’t do anything to stop a German shell.
He stayed hunched down as he continued to head aft towards the widest part of the ship, when he thought he smelled food. A few steps further on and the smell was stronger, like freshly roasted lamb. Then he saw smoke drifting from a hole in the superstructure ahead, and bits of reddish meat scattered across the deck. In an instant he felt his blood run cold, suddenly sick with the realisation that it might not be cooked lamb that he was smelling. Summoning the determination to drag his feet forward, the relief was just as physical a feeling as the sickness had been, when he realised that it wasn’t what he’d feared. The forward meat store had been hit, setting a fire and sending fragments of carcasses across the side of the shelter deck.
He half-laughed, half-dry-heaved with sudden joy as he saw a perfectly undamaged pork pie sitting in the middle of the deck. Almost instinctively, he picked it up, noting that his hands were shaking violently as he tried to open the flap of his jacket pocket to secure it for later. The thought of eating now made him feel ill, but allowing the pie to be lost to the sea or the German fire just didn’t seem right.
Twenty yards further back, almost to the fore-funnel, he found a hatch cracked open with a half-dozen Marines behind it peeking out to watch the battle. As they noticed him, they pushed open the hatch and pulled him in, and once he’d regained his feet and taken a deep breath, he ordered them to close it, and keep it closed. The irony that they should never have opened the hatch that had allowed him to enter and order them to seal it was not lost on anyone, as he made his way down and aft, now inside the relative safety of the ship’s hull.
Once the German battlecruisers had completed their turn, Hipper's five remaining ships resumed firing at the rear of the British line. Partly shielded by the smoke and haze, Hipper had made a wide turn when the British had made a sharp one, and even though the Germans had fallen behind, the two battlecruiser fleets were now at a much closer range. It was now as little as 12,500 yards, and Hipper had continued the turn to take his battered ships steadily away from the British. However, with the British engaged to both port and starboard, he was not in as much danger as he might otherwise have been.
The relative positions of the two lines had changed and visibility was patchy, so his ships resumed firing at whoever they saw. HMS Indefatigable was the subject of Lutzow's accurate fire and sustained her first significant damage of the battle as an underwater hit abeam A-turret flooded wing compartments. Derfflinger made an immediate contribution as she hit Lion twice in her first half-dozen salvos, ripping open feedwater tanks, flooding a shaft tunnel and wrecking the auxiliary steering gear. Splinters from the second hit ignited secondary charges aft and destroyed hoist machinery, but the decks and armour kept the fragments out of the engine room.
With only four guns operation, Seydlitz's contribution could not be great, but she claimed two hits on Barham, one of which exploded forward, starting a fire. In between the clouds of smoke, Goeben fired at one of the ships of 5BS (after the war, it was confirmed as the Valiant), hitting her a remarkable four times in ten full salvos. Unfortunately, three of the shells failed to explode, although one of these obliterated the second starboard 6" gun by hitting it directly. The one that exploded did so just above the waterline near the bow, leading to holes in both sides of the ship and minor flooding through the chain lockers.
At the closest range of all, Von der Tann's six remaining guns were aimed at Royal Oak, and she scored three hits. Two shattered harmlessly against the battleship's thick armour belt, but the last opened up a hole astern, leading to more localised flooding.
Aboard Royal Oak, the effects of fires and earlier damage were becoming increasingly perilous, as a crewman in the magazine of Y-turret was scalded by liquid lead dripping down from the ceiling. As his crewmates tended to him, more liquid could be seen falling through seams and out of cable ducts, dripping down next to a bundle of exposed Cordite that was on its way up to the guns. In one corner of the compartment, the deck plates above their heads were almost red hot, and just seconds later, acrid smoke started to pour into the magazine. Fortunately for the rest of the ship's crew, no time was lost in opening the valves and starting to flood the compartment. Above them, fire surrounded part of Y-turret’s barbette and the compartments next to it, melting electrical cables that led down into the ship, and setting fire to the insulation as it did so.
Two decks above them, Commander Farrington had reached the after barbettes and soon ordered hoses to be diverted onto the holes in the deck above the fires. Steam spattered up from the hot plates, before the water poured down towards the fires below. Unfortunately, with everyone’s focus on the hoses and the rising steam and smoke, no-one saw what happened to Marine Cooper, they just heard a,
‘Whoa … Ahh … Thud …’, and the muffled language that followed these noises.
On turning around and looking back for the man who had been feeding the hoses forward to the firefighters, it soon became very clear what happened. Cooper hadn’t been looking where he was standing and had fallen through a hole in the deck made by a German shell. Mercifully, he hadn’t fallen into the fire that was still raging below.
There was near-hysterical laughter from men who desperately needed some relief from the stress of battle. The fire crew let the hose wander as they looked back, redoubling their laughs as Cooper poked his head up through the shell hole he had just fallen through, and said with a broad grin, ‘there’s not s’posed ‘be an hole there, is there?’.
He then grabbed at the fire hose to pull himself up, unhelpfully as it turned out, as the pull on the hose turned the jet of water around and hit Commander Farrington straight in the chest, knocking him over. He too had been distracted by Cooper’s antics and was laughing just as hard as the men, so he couldn’t blame them when they grinned and sniggered at his bad luck with the hose.
Picking himself up, he bellowed, ‘Steady there’, and the hose was rapidly trained back through the holes in the deck, renewing the plumes of steam and smoke that came up through them, but this time producing a satisfying hiss as the fire was overwhelmed by the water.
Then there was a flash that momentarily blinded him, and he fell to the deck again as a ‘whumppph’ of pressure, heat and sound pulsed through the compartment. Stunned, he didn’t even feel himself fall to the deck, and with his eyes full of water and dust, the first thing he was aware of was a sailor kneeling over him, asking him if he was alright. He tried to speak and managed to groan something as he started to haul himself upright, his ears still ringing. His vision slowly cleared as he blinked, and he started to pay attention to the compartment around him. The firefighting team were still aft, but their hoses weren’t working. Looking for’ard, he could see why. There was a jagged hole in the bulkhead and the hoses were shredded. He rose to his feet, still a little unsteady but with his senses returning fast. No-one in the compartment was laughing any more, as amid the jagged steel and shattered fittings, there was a man, or what was left of him.
Cooper wouldn’t be cheerily poking his head through any more holes in the deck. He no longer had one.
While the battleships of the Fifth Battle Squadron were firing at the High Seas Fleet, Beatty's leading battlecruisers kept shooting at Hipper's ships, which were now on starboard quarter. Despite their recent enforced reduction in speed, the British were still faster than the Germans, as the accumulated effects of damage and clinkered firebars had slowed the ships of the 1st Scouting Group to about 22 knots. At increasing range, with damaged and listing ships being pushed to their utmost speed, the British fire was not very effective. Beyond a few minor leaks aft, Lutzow suffered little from two hits by Lion, while Indefatigable managed a single hit on Von der Tann, destroying two of her port 88mm guns and completing the destruction of the upper deck near the bow. However, as the damage was well above the waterline, so far it had little effect on her speed.
Now that you mention it, where is Grand Fleet? Unless Jellicoe shows up, a few of Beatty's battlecruisers may get away, but 5th Battle Squadron looks like it is toast. Granted, there hasn't been that much damage yet, but when they are out numbered 3 or 4 to 1, unless they can out run the HSF, they are going down.
Note: since HSF has 17 dreadnoughts and 6 pre-dreadnoughts, 5th BS is only outnumbered 3.4 to 1 in dreadnoughts. Assuming we count a pre-dreadnought as half a dreadnought, it goes up to 4 to 1.
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Will we be getting anything similar to the Warspites famous accidental circling maneuver?
Somewhere to the northwest. Perhaps 30 miles, perhaps 45 ...
For Lion, Panther, Repulse, Warspite and Royal Oak, that difference almost certainly now matters.
Not quite as bad as that. The Funf Minute Schiffen are where they belong - dawdling in the rear. Even I Geschwader were barely able to engage, as they're not fast enough. Even so, its still 5:5 on battlecruisers, and 9:5 on battleships, with the German battleships being practically undamaged and the British already having 'seen some action'.
Both Beatty's 1BCS and Hipper's 1SG are pretty beaten up (the 'Dash to the south' was worse for the Germans than the Jutland equivalent).
Happily no, as the hit that buckled that bulkhead hasn't happened.
In present circumstances, no-one is very likely to get away with any circling or slowing down.
Fully agree. The tension is building. Hopefully it gets relieved before the Admiralty sends out a message like "Where is Grand Fleet? The world wonders".*
Thanks for the clarification. It is not as bad as 4 to 1, but it is still pretty bad. Assuming 5th BS is engaging Scheer and Beatty is still fighting Hipper, that means that there are four unengaged German battleships able to shoot undisturbed at Evan-Thomas. IIRC it was that undisturbed shooting by Derfflinger in OTL that was credited with the loss of Queen Mary. Granted, the German BBs do have to sort out their own shell splashed from their sisterships, this is still a bad situation for 5th BS.
* In the highly unlikely event he received such a signal, my mind is boggling at the idea of Jellicoe taking off his hat and jumping on it ala Halsey.
Oh, no. The Admiralty would be doing something much more useful ... such as telling Jellicoe the HSF was still in harbour, hours after it had sailed on 31st May.
With even better timing, you could easily have had something along the lines of;
Adm: 'DK currently located Wilhelmshaven'
CinC: 'Thank you. Enemy in sight. Fleet action imminent.'
That would be an amazing moment to be a fly on the wall back at the Admiralty.