Battle of Dogger Bank (1915)
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| Battle of Dogger Bank | |||||||
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| Part of the First World War | |||||||
 The sinking SMS Blücher rolls over onto her side |
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| Combatants | |||||||
| Britain | German Empire | ||||||
| Commanders | |||||||
| David Beatty | Franz von Hipper | ||||||
| Strength | |||||||
| Five battlecruisers | Three battlecruisers, one armoured cruiser |
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| Casualties | |||||||
| 15 killed 21 wounded |
One armoured cruiser sunk 974 killed 260 wounded |
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| North Sea 1914-1918 |
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| 1st Heligoland Bight – Dogger Bank – Jutland – 2nd Heligoland Bight |
The Battle of Dogger Bank was a naval battle fought near the Dogger Bank in the North Sea that took place on 24 January 1915, during the First World War, between squadrons of the British Grand Fleet and the German High Seas Fleet.
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[edit] Origins
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 armoured cruiser Blücher, supported by light cruisers and destroyers. The raid took place on 16 December 1914 at 9am, and resulted in the death of 18 civilians at Scarborough, causing further damage at Whitby and Hartlepool.
British public and political reaction was outraged that the German Fleet could sail so close to the British coast and proceed to shell coastal towns.
Buoyed by the success of the raid, Admiral Hipper resolved to repeat the exercise by attacking the British fishing fleet on the Dogger Bank the following month. He was however intercepted by the British on 24 January 1915 at the Dogger Bank, midway between Germany and Britain.
Through intercepted German radio traffic analysed by Room 40 of British Naval Intelligence, the British knew of Hipper's proposed sortie on 23 January. 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 24 January.
[edit] Battle
Realising he was overpowered, Hipper attempted to escape, believing the British battlecruisers to be slower than his[citation needed]. But Beatty's ships were distinctly faster than the German squadron, which was held back by the slower armoured cruiser SMS Blücher and his coal-fired torpedoboats. 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. Battle started half an hour later.
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. Supposedly the sailor Wilhelm Heidkamp saved the ship, when he desperately opened the glowing valves although he burnt his hands and his lungs. He never recovered form his his severe injuries and died a few years later. The Kriegsmarine named a destroyer after him.
By 09:50, Blücher was also badly damaged and began to fall further and further behind the faster German battlecruisers. Indomitable was ordered to intercept her. 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 so that Lion began to lag behind and half an hour later came to a standstill when she had to stop her port engine, taking no further part in the battle after 11:00. By about 10:30, Hipper decided to leave Blücher to her fate.
Nevertheless, the annihilation of the German squadron appeared likely until at 10:50 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. He then wanted 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, as an 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 792 men.
Beatty had now lost control of the battle and so the opportunity of an overwhelming victory was lost.
[edit] Aftermath
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. Signalling 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.
[edit] The rival squadrons
[edit] Britain
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.
[edit] Germany
1st Scouting Group: Seydlitz, Moltke, Derfflinger and Blücher.
2nd Scouting Group: Four light cruisers
Two flotillas of eighteen torpedo boats combined.
[edit] Sources
- Bennett, Geoffrey. Naval Battles of the First World War. (London, 1968).
- Gordon, Andrew. The Rules of the Game - Jutland and British Naval Command. ISBN 0-7195-5542-6
- Marder, Arthur J. From The Dreadnought To Scapa Flow, Volume II. (Oxford, 1965).
- Corbett, Sir Julian S. Official History of The War. Naval Operations, Volume II. (London, 1922).
