AT SEA: Jutland No. II

AT SEA “Jutland No. II”

Oldtimers on the north tip of Denmark remember a special kind of sea thunder, which they heard during the late afternoon and night of May 31, 1916. It was the firing of heaviest naval ordnance and it came from the Battle of Jutland (Germans call it the Battle of the Skagerrak).

Hearing that the British Fleet was being divided to protect its coasts from submarine raids, Admiral Scheer of the bottled-up German High Seas Fleet determined to venture an attack from his bases back of Helgoland. The British caught on, steamed to meet the Germans, and Admiral Beatty’s battle cruisers encountered Admiral Hipper’s cruisers when both sent scouts to investigate a small merchantman about 2 p.m. Beatty, with the western light at his back, took a shellacking from the German guns. When Admiral Jellicoe got there with the Grand Fleet, Scheer turned directly about and fled southwest, while the British got between him and his bases. In trying to head toward home under cover of mist and smoke screens, he ran into the British rear-ships and fled westward again.

Jellicoe strung out to prevent Scheer’s return, rather than pursue him and risk a night battle. Scheer took that risk and, due to balled-up British orders and wireless, got through the British destroyers with loss of only one battleship. Each side claimed victory. The loss score was: German—one battleship, one battle cruiser, four light cruisers, five destroyers, a total of eleven. British—three battle cruisers, three armored cruisers, eight destroyers, total of 14. The British decorated a lot of their Admirals.* The Germans, though their fleet never emerged again until it was time to surrender, later made May 31 a national holiday.

Last week inhabitants of Laesö island (see map), east of Denmark’s northern tip, again heard heavy gun-thunder. They counted at least 200 shots and old-timers said it surely must be another great sea battle. Firing sounded either deep in the Skagerrak where a line of British destroyers had been reported, or farther east on the Kattegat. The police chief of Laesö Island said he saw, through field glasses from a high hill, a thin line of ships in the northeast. Two reporters ventured out in a fast motorboat but found nothing.

Sweden denied that the firing was her Navy or Army at artillery practice. The British Admiralty maintained its usual taciturnity. Nor was there any explanation for prolonged heavy firing heard four days later off Bergen, Norway. There mighty detonations shook houses of fisherfolk. and reverberations of small-calibre firing sounded for 14 hours. But the British Admiralty said it knew of no naval engagement in the area. So the “Second Battle of Jutland” remained a mystery. But it revived talk that perhaps some day soon the British would try to force their way into the Baltic, to cut off Germany’s seaborne supplies from Scandinavia and Russia, perhaps to land troops on Germany’s northern coast.

Plans for such an attempt were actually laid before the British War Council in 1914. They were offered as an alternative to the Dardanelles Campaign for attacking Germany from the rear. They were drafted by John Arbuthnot, Admiral Baron Fisher of Kilverstone who proposed a fleet of 612 shallow-draft boats, mostly transports, which would transit the Baltic approaches at whatever cost and land Russian troops picked up at Riga, on the Pomeranian Coast. The transports’ passage around Denmark would be protected by the British Fleet’s engaging the German Fleet.

“It is the Russians we want to enter Berlin,” explained Lord Fisher, “not the French or English.” But even though the Russians were then on Britain’s side, even though enemy airplanes then offered small hazard, Lord Fisher’s plan never got to first base. Bitterly he observed: “The unparalleled Armada of 612 vessels constructed to carry out this decisive act in the decisive theatre of war was diverted and perverted to the damned Dardanelles.”

Lord Fisher’s biographer represents the Germans as scared to death in 1914-18 that the British would force the Baltic Gate, which they considered weak. He says they derided the British Navy’s stupidity for not attempting it. It is not likely that such sentiments prevail now in Berlin or that a British naval attempt at the Baltic will be seen in World War II. Though the German Navy is this time far weaker (42 ships v. 254 for the Allies), this time the Russians (with 28 more ships) cannot be counted on to join a march against Berlin, even if a shallow-draft armada should push through. Besides submarines, the Gate-crashers would now have to cope with large minefields at the outlet of the three narrow channels to the Baltic, as well as bombing planes.

*Admiral Edward Barry Stewart Bingham, 58, who commanded the destroyers and whose ship was sunk at 5 p.m., got the Victoria Cross. He died last week.