1916 Jutland Hell
Translation of the article "Die Hölle auf See" published in a special issue of the magazine "Schiff Classic. Seydlitz", 2024.
Author: Torben Keitel (frigate captain)
Translation: Slug_BDMP
Translator's note.
110 years ago, from May 31 to June 1, 1916, one of the largest in stories The Battle of Jutland is one of the most iconic naval battles of all time. Numerous books and articles have been written about it, but authors most often focus on the technical and tactical aspects: gun calibers, armor thickness, admirals' decisions... Yet, in the shadow of these steel giants, cable lengths, knots, and points of reference, remain the men who fought and died on these ships. The material below is an attempt to give voice to the ordinary participants of the battle, to present the gigantic picture as a mosaic of small personal stories and experiences.
Seydlitz at the Battle of Jutland
Eyewitness accounts possess the irresistible power of direct perception. They offer insight into the barely imaginable events on board. Without unnecessary commentary, the text is complemented by photographs of the battlecruiser's severe damage.
Standing before a line of cadets at the United States Naval Academy, 45 years after the Battle of Jutland (the Battle of Skagerrak), President John F. Kennedy uttered a phrase that still serves as a measure of the training and self-awareness of sailors in many countries. fleets peace: “It is not ships that fight, but people.”
Drawing on his own bitter experience of war at sea, Kennedy thus emphasizes the importance of recognizing individual military valor, calling for more than just the technical aspects of naval combat. Some fifty years earlier, it was precisely this virtue that enabled the cruiser SMS Seydlitz and its 1,068 crew to survive unimaginable conditions.
Memory difficulties
While we can get a sense of the land battlefields and the millions of dead on the Western Front by visiting battlefields and burial sites at Verdun or the Somme, naval warfare is a different story. Even if we were to reach the coordinates of the Battle of Jutland, we would see nothing but an endless expanse of sea.
Only one museum ship from that battle remains in Europe—the light cruiser HMS Caroline in Belfast. This makes it difficult to fully appreciate the circumstances in which the men lived, worked, fought, and died on board. So we venture into the inner workings of the battle: a dark, damp, cramped environment filled with smoke and coal dust, where the noise is deafening and death is a constant threat.
Ignorance and uncertainty
After the battle, many eyewitnesses left behind their accounts of what happened. In the decades that followed, some of these accounts were distorted by propaganda, others were embellished. Still others were described with such poignant and graphic detail that they resemble a horror film.
All these descriptions share a feeling of uncertainty or helplessness. Were we hit? What was the blow? Where is the enemy? Emotional states fluctuate rapidly: from adrenaline-fueled euphoria to depression at the sight of wounds and the death of comrades, despair, and fear. Added to this are nausea from seasickness or inhalation of gunpowder gases, cold, fatigue, dampness, hunger, thirst, and pain.
On the command bridge
On the afternoon of May 31, 1916, after the first reports of enemy sightings, whose mastheads appeared on the horizon on the port side, the commander ascended to the bridge. Drummers throughout the Seydlitz sounded the command, "Prepare ship for battle!"
In this heavily armored, cramped, and gloomy refuge, he, along with several officers, the navigator, helmsmen, signalmen, and orderlies, peers out to sea. He peers through narrow viewing slits in the 35-centimeter-thick armored steel, capable of withstanding heavy hits; slits exactly the width of two binocular lenses. The enemy is there, and approaching fast. They are still 15 kilometers away, clearly visible against the sun in a light haze.
Just above the command bridge, in the same heavily armored control post artillery Corvette Captain Richard Förster, the Seydlitz's first gunnery officer, is under fire. He selects the third ship of the British line, HMS Queen Mary, as his target.
150 hectometers—the signal from the flagship: "Open fire!" "One more time, Seidlitz!"—the battle cry of an old cavalry general, which we also adopted as our motto; then the command: "Fire!" and with a sharp jolt, our 28-centimeter shells roar from the barrels. From that moment on, all the ship's guns tirelessly fired at the enemy at a rapid pace, firing a salvo approximately every 20 seconds.
Gunpowder smoke not only seeps into the control room, leaving a gunpowder taste on the tongue, but also increasingly obscures the view, obscuring both the enemy and friendly ships. Reports are coming in every minute. The well-oiled rhythm is suddenly interrupted by an excited shout from the conning tower. However, everyone had already seen what the port signalman shouted into the control room:
"Commander, the signalman reports! A British battlecruiser has blown up!"
Gunpowder smoke not only seeps into the control room, leaving a gunpowder taste on the tongue, but also increasingly obscures the view, obscuring both the enemy and friendly ships. Reports are coming in every minute. The well-oiled rhythm is suddenly interrupted by an excited shout from the conning tower. However, everyone had already seen what the port signalman shouted into the control room:
"Commander, the signalman reports! A British battlecruiser has blown up!"
Förster describes what came into view 20 minutes after the first salvo of the Seidlitz:
First, a bright red flame erupted in the bow. Then came an explosion in the bow, followed by a much more powerful explosion amidships; black fragments of the ship flew into the air, and then the entire vessel was engulfed in a monstrous explosion. The masts collapsed toward the center, and a cloud of smoke obscured everything and rose ever higher.
After a slight delay, a dull rumble and several loud detonations in the distance reach everyone. The Queen Mary has exploded, taking almost the entire crew with her into the abyss. Then the scene is interrupted by the deafening roar of another salvo of heavy artillery.
Seconds of tense anticipation pass, and Förster commands: "Shift fire to starboard" at the next battlecruiser. It seems the battle is proceeding exactly as it has been practiced dozens of times in exercises. However, the next report brings a fateful turn.
A desperate fight for survival
The British 5th Squadron of Queen Elizabeth-class battleships caught up with the combatants and entered the fray. 38-centimeter shells, rapidly covering their targets, landed around the German battlecruisers and detonated upon contact with the water, raising 150-meter-high columns of water. Every 10 to 20 seconds, five to ten such shells fell around the ship.
We can only guess what was going through the minds of the men in the conning tower, and especially the signalmen, lookouts, and fire crews on the upper deck, who just minutes earlier had seen two British battlecruisers blown to pieces. Now the Seydlitz was also taking heavy hits. Förster was suddenly knocked off his feet: "A terrible roar in the immediate vicinity of the conning tower, I flew up, hit my head on something, my vision went red; the ship listed heavily to one side and slowly righted itself." By this point, the ships had been firing continuously for over an hour. The paint on the gun barrels began to turn yellow-brown due to overheating.
The evening hours bring a completely different battle than the one that preceded it. The battlecruisers, by this time heavily battered and partially barely afloat, still lead the High Seas Fleet, taking hit after hit. The good visibility of the afternoon has given way to an oppressive atmosphere of fog, gunpowder smoke, artificial smoke screens laid by destroyers, and muzzle flashes illuminating the twilight around them.
Naval cadet Wilhelm Madsen-Bohlken on the bridge of SMS Hessen recalls:
The enemy fired at us like crazy. [...] Now the enemy was in a more advantageous position. He could see us perfectly, while we could only see his masts and smokestacks, or nothing at all, which, in fact, was the case for most of the time.
On the bridge, Förster has to endure endless minutes of inaction while the Seidlitz and other battlecruisers are mercilessly bombarded with 38-centimeter shells.
We're getting hit with one 38-centimeter-long shell after another, and we can barely defend ourselves because we can't aim or observe. With a deafening splash, the heavy shells hit the water right next to us, drenching the ship in veritable fountains.
The situation is becoming increasingly unclear. Due to severely limited visibility, it's difficult to even maintain visual contact with the ship ahead. Individual ships are missing or no longer visible. Many remain haunted by the question of the fleet's own losses right up until their return to Wilhelmshaven.
Death and horror
"Starboard casemate VI is out of action, the entire crew, except for the priest, is dead." Förster receives this report shortly before he sees the first wounded. Two bandaged figures climb onto the bridge: Lieutenant Fliess, commander of turret "C," and the priest.
Fliess was thrown onto the deck through the hatch by the air pressure created by the propellant explosion in the turret after a heavy hit. Despite severe burns—his head and hands were completely charred—he managed to reach the aft command post and report to the torpedo chief.
Förster then recounts his conversation with a priest who was standing near one of the 15-centimeter casemate guns when he was struck by a heavy shell. The blast threw him across the room and through a destroyed bulkhead, and a few minutes later he came to at the dressing station, where they quickly bandaged the shrapnel wounds on his legs and face.
Then comes a hit on the port side of Casemate IV. "The ship shudders and trembles; the below-deck floors and walls vibrate like thin sheet metal." At the aft funnel, a group of sailors from Turret "C" extinguishes a fire that threatens to interfere with aiming. Fenrich Schmidt, Reserve Boatswain's Mate Corinth, and several sailors run across the deck to the casemate and attempt to enter it from above through the coal hatch, as groans, wheezing, and cries for help are heard from within.
They manage to crawl along the side through a shell hole and into the casemate, and in the light of a hand torch, a horrific scene unfolds before them. Horribly mutilated bodies lie around the completely destroyed gun; it seems the entire gun crew was instantly killed by the shell's explosion. However, from the corner behind the gun, a mournful groan is heard again—four seriously wounded men lie there, motionless, pinned together by shell fragments.
Only by sheer luck do the wounded manage to reach the dressing station in time to receive treatment. But even those who do make it there receive only the most basic support. The scene described by the ship's surgeon, Dr. Robert Amelung, is horrifying. Temperatures exceeding 40 degrees Celsius, smoke fumes everywhere, no water—no drinking water, no water to wash bloody hands. Pools of blood on the floor, and no hope of helping the seriously wounded.
If I had wanted to operate on one of them... even anesthesia under the circumstances would not have been calm and reliable; asepsis was non-existent, so infection was inevitable; the guidance of a scalpel amid the constant rocking of the ship, under blows that more than once nearly knocked the wounded lying on the operating table to the floor; electric lighting [...], which went out several times.
Most of the seriously wounded die from their wounds that same night. About a fifth of all the wounded suffer severe burns and are in excruciating pain.
When Förster leaves the conning tower seven hours later, he finds his adjutant, Lieutenant Wieting, lying on the upper deck among the bodies of his signalmen, his arms and legs mangled. He's still shaking, clutching the signal log tightly to his chest. Many crew members wounded on the upper deck or in the service areas must endure hours of excruciating pain before they are found or it's too late.
In the engine room
Förster speaks with profound appreciation of the engine room staff. Figures blackened by dust toil in the coal bunkers; the space is almost deprived of light and air; there is no routine shift rotation during battle, as every man is constantly needed at his post. They toil by the sweat of their brows, shedding one garment after another; the boilers consume incredible quantities of coal. With no contact with the outside world, the stokers tirelessly shovel coal into the furnaces.
Standing knee-deep in water in places and in complete darkness, in some coal pits they are forced to perform arduous work amid clouds of toxic gases. Strong tremors announce the sound of their own artillery or enemy hits. What exactly is happening around the ship? Total uncertainty!
Furthermore, the stokers especially suffer from constant thirst, which becomes almost unbearable due to the backbreaking labor and heat in the boiler room. A torpedo hit in the bow has disabled the desalination plant. The water supplies in the bunkers will soon run out, and all the water at the battle stations has been used up.
The fight after the fight
Even after the battle, this grueling work continues with undiminished vigour. The boilers must be fed tirelessly. Everyone not directly employed in the stokehold must participate in survivability work and prop up the forward transverse bulkhead with wooden beams, which bears the weight of 4000 tons of seawater. If it were to collapse, the Seydlitz would be beyond saving.
A long way back
Uncertainty again. Where is the enemy? Have we managed to escape the British fleet? Has he outflanked us, taking up a position between our forces and the home port? The ship's bow is still ablaze. Fire crews are desperately trying to bring the blaze under control. Ultimately, the fire will be extinguished by water pouring into the bow through the holes sustained in the battle.
Förster is extremely worried: "We sailed through the dark night for some time like a blazing torch. And it was at this critical moment that a message came from the aft command post: ships with their lights extinguished appeared on the port side astern." The Seydlitz, like the rest of the fleet, only narrowly escaped detection by the British battle line. The German ships were to windward, and the wind was blowing smoke from their funnels toward the British, effectively concealing them from detection.
The ship could sink at any moment, as its bow sinks ever deeper. The damage control crews, despite extreme exhaustion, are working far beyond their capabilities. Saving the ship becomes a matter for the entire crew: even the gun crews are putting out fires and helping to patch holes. Only five days after the battle, the Seydlitz, having taken on over 5000 tons of water, reaches Wilhelmshaven...
Author: Torben Keitel. Translation: Slug_BDMP
Information