World War I Page 5

  The funnels and firing guns of the British cruisers were creating so much smoke that it was impossible for the crew of the Agincourt to calculate the German ships’ range, the distance to target. This information was vital to calculate the tilt of the guns to the correct degree, so that when they were fired the shells would land on the target and not fall either long or short.

  As well as being right in the other British ships’ line of fire, the 1st Cruiser Squadron’s flagship HMS Defence almost caused a friendly collision by swinging too close to the battlecruiser HMS Lion. At last, the Defence and its squadron started sailing out of the way of the British fleet – and straight for the Germans.

  ‘What are they up to, sir?’ asked one of Cunninghame-Graham’s men, as they watched the scene unfold.

  ‘They’re sailing closer to the enemy,’ replied Cunninghame-Graham. This was typical of the squadron’s wild commander, Admiral Sir Robert Arbuthnot, a thrill-chasing motorcyclist and champion boxer who had a reputation for beating up any members of his crew who disagreed with his orders.

  ‘They’re doomed!’ cried another man.

  He said nothing, but Cunninghame-Graham knew the man was right.

  Arbuthnot’s mad dash for glory subjected the 1st Cruiser Squadron – whose ships were mostly obsolete and no match for the advanced German battlecruisers and dreadnoughts – to a murderous bombardment.

  Cunninghame-Graham and his men watched in horror as missiles rained down on the Defence, tearing through her poorly protected decks and striking one of her ammunition magazines, setting off a series of catastrophic explosions. Three of the squadron’s four ships – the Defence, the Warrior and the Black Prince – were all sunk, the Defence immediately and the others later.

  Only the Duke of Edinburgh managed to get away. It was later confirmed that around two thousand men, including Arbuthnot himself, drowned in the attack. Many of them were Cunninghame-Graham’s friends.

  But this wasn’t the time to worry about the consequences of Arbuthnot’s actions. While the Cruiser Squadron was being blasted out of the way by the Germans, the Agincourt’s view became clearer. The enemy was in range and on target. It was 6.24pm.

  Switches were pushed, levers were pulled and dials were twisted. Primitive mechanical computers whirred and clunked, and messages were transmitted from station to station. The guns in No 4 turret were sighted and corrected, ranged and trained, until they pinpointed what was reckoned to be the correct spot. Then the final order was given: ‘Fire!’

  The order pulsed down electric wires to the Fire Gongs, the two signalling devices next to each gun.

  TING! TING! went the metal gongs.

  Then a pause.

  BOO-BOOM!

  There was a bright flash as both 12-inch guns fired. The shells shot into the sky with a monstrous, bone-shaking ROARRR! The men knew to leap aside as the huge barrels, each one the length of a Viking galley, recoiled several feet backwards. A sheet of flame momentarily covered the entire length of the Agincourt as all fourteen heavy guns fired in unison. The ship shuddered and groaned. Each pair of shells had the combined weight of a motor car, and they raced through the air above the rolling waves at more than twice the speed of sound.

  For a few moments Cunninghame-Graham and his men were enveloped in a cloud of smoke that covered their clothes, hair, moustaches and skin in soot. Their ears throbbed.

  But there was no time to relax. With metallic clanging, squeaking, scraping and slamming noises, the guns were swiftly reloaded. The deep, thick-toothed cylindrical breeches of the barrels were unlocked and swung open like the doors of bank vaults by men working with slick, well-drilled precision. Cloth bags of cordite – the sweet, nail-varnish-smelling propellant used to fire the missiles – were thrust into the gun chambers, along with two fresh, plump missiles.

  TING! TING!

  BOO-BOOM! ROARRR!

  The turret fired twelve or thirteen salvos like this, with both guns firing each time. Cunninghame-Graham watched through his periscope as the Agincourt’s missiles landed around and about what looked like a German Lutzow-class battlecruiser.

  The enemy responded in turn. Every now and then Cunninghame-Graham’s line of sight was blocked by a sudden wall of seawater and a muffled booming sound as German missiles landed in the waves just short of the Agincourt, sending up towering plumes of crystalline froth. If the enemy gunners had calculated the correct range, the Agincourt would have been done for.

  No 4 turret continued to fire, each barrel now being loosed off one at a time to conserve ammunition. As the fire-control orders came through, Cunninghame-Graham’s crew made alterations in the ranging and training of the guns based on their own observations as they hunted for the correct distance that would secure a hit – and hopefully a sinking.

  Cunninghame-Graham continued to scan the battlefield, but his view was obscured by smoke and mist. It was impossible to tell whether he and his crew had been successful. Had the enemy battlecruiser been sunk or just disappeared into the gloom, preparing for a new attack?

  There was a lull in the fighting. The guns seemed to go quiet, and still Cunninghame-Graham couldn’t see much. The periscope lens had become shaded and slimy with smoke dust and spray.

  There was some movement, though. He could just make out the grey outlines of the enemy ships emerging from the mist and murk for a few moments, like ghosts, only to vanish again before there was a chance to calculate their position and open fire.

  Then came the blast.

  BOOM!

  It sounded as if the Agincourt had been hit. The whole vessel shuddered and shook. There was consternation among the turret crew as Cunninghame-Graham searched with his periscope for signs of damage.

  This was the moment he had been dreading, the moment that left him wondering if they were all headed for a watery grave.

  ‘Steady, men,’ he said at last, after scouring the length and breadth of the ship. ‘We’ve not been hit. The starboard battery has just opened fire with all ten guns – hence the racket.’

  ‘What’s their target, sir?’ someone asked.

  ‘Our boys have engaged enemy destroyers closing in to starboard …’ He swivelled the periscope round. ‘Hang on, we’ve hit one!’

  The men cheered.

  ‘And another!’

  But they all knew victory was not yet within their grasp.

  The Agincourt was soon buffeted again by incoming missiles that mercifully fell either long or short, exploding under the waves and sending thousands of gallons of seawater high into the sky like hellish fountains.

  They steamed slowly on past the wreck of HMS Invincible, a British battlecruiser that had just been hit. A German missile had slammed into one of the Invincible’s gun turrets, piercing its armour and combusting bundles of cordite sticks stored in the turret’s magazine.

  Like the Defence before it, the resulting catastrophic explosion had torn the Invincible apart. Its hull was now bottom-up in the icy grey sea. Cunningham-Graham tried not to think about the thousand men drowned or drowning as it sank.

  Meanwhile, one of the lookouts at the top of the Agincourt spotted something else.

  In the gun turret, the telephone rang. ‘Torpedo incoming!’

  Every man knew what a torpedo strike below the waterline would mean. The gun crew looked at each other, wondering if their luck was about to run out, snared in a deadly trap like a pack of hunted animals. Their cold fear intensified the smell of sweat, seawater, oil and cordite.

  Up on the bridge, the captain ordered the Agincourt to change course immediately in an attempt to outwit the German attack. Still the underwater menace came at the ship, surging through the waves like a metal sea-monster, leaving a frothy trail behind it.

  The Agincourt was put under helm, meaning the ship’s wheel was spun and locked to make another drastic turn. The vessel tilted sharply. In the cabins and on the mess decks, any crockery or picture frames not lashed down were sent crashing to the floor.

 
Down in the turret, Cunninghame-Graham and the others held on tight, braced for the impact of the torpedo against the hull.

  Then, without any warning, the weapon seemed to run out of power. It surfaced for a moment, then sank without trace.

  News of the torpedo’s demise rippled across the ship. There were cries of joy and relief. But nerves were soon stretched taut again when a German light cruiser was spotted within range. It had been disabled in an earlier skirmish, yet was still capable of doing the British ships damage.

  Cunninghame-Graham’s gunners spun back into action and fired off a couple of salvos, then quickly shifted their fire as a much bigger adversary came into view.

  All of a sudden the mist had cleared around the vast form of a Kaiser-class battleship – a serious threat, but also a tremendous prize if she could be sunk. Clearly visible at a range of 11,000 yards and closing, she was asking for trouble. No 4 turret gave it to her.

  BOO-BOOM!

  After a few salvos, Cunninghame-Graham lost the enemy ship for a few moments amid the smoke and spray. He waited until the periscope lens cleared a little and the sea’s bulging grey surface came back into view.

  Quickly he located the German ship. It was now heading away from them. He peered at his prey, looking for smoke or some other sign of damage. He soon found it.

  ‘I think we hit her,’ he said.

  ‘Hurrah!’ cheered the gun crew in unison. The exhausted men shook hands, slapped each other on the shoulder and embraced.

  Cunninghame-Graham decided to save the celebrations for later. He kept his eyes on the retreating battleship as best he could until, at a range of 14,000 yards, she vanished into the mist.

  By now, the periscope lens was almost black.

  ‘I’ll take care of it, sir!’ said Cunninghame-Graham’s range-taker.

  He climbed out of the turret and wiped clean the smeared lenses of the periscope and the guns’ range-finder, then climbed back inside.

  Cunninghame-Graham gave him the thumbs up. He could see more clearly, but there was not a great deal left to see. Night was descending like a shroud.

  By 11pm things had quietened down enough for the gun crews to get some relief. Officers and men were sent, two turrets at a time, on a fifteen-minute break to get some food.

  Upon their return they witnessed the dying embers of the action. On the Agincourt’s starboard quarter, in the distance, the crew could see and hear tell-tale flashes and bursts of heavy firing. But the gaps between the assaults were growing longer.

  Cunninghame-Graham could not relax. Instinct told him that day’s battle was not yet over, and he was right. There was one last fright. A large ship – the men in the turret couldn’t identify it – loomed out of the darkness and passed close by, only to be swallowed up by the night.

  Dawn the next morning was calm, bright and misty. Gentle wavelets slapped against the Agincourt’s hull as she rocked almost imperceptibly on the light swell. Cunninghame-Graham cast his gaze around the sea to take in the flotsam and jetsam left behind by yesterday’s battle.

  Floating stark and solid against the two-tone liquid backdrop of ocean and mist were the three other ships in the division – Marlborough, Revenge and Hercules. The rest of the battle squadron – in fact, the rest of the fleet – was nowhere to be seen. The German fleet had vanished too. The remaining four British ships were completely alone.

  Cunninghame-Graham had expected to re-engage the enemy at first light and he couldn’t help finding the empty sea a sad disappointment.

  A torpedo attack had damaged the Marlborough and left her unable to sail at speed. So while she limped back to Scotland, the Agincourt, Revenge and Hercules lingered to see if there was any last action to be had.

  They didn’t have long to wait. Right on cue, a new arrival was sighted. Not on the waves this time, but hanging in the sky above – a Zeppelin airship.

  Cunninghame-Graham reacted instantly. Besides being a turret commander he was also the Agincourt’s anti-aircraft officer. He quickly manned the ship’s only anti-aircraft weapon – a three-inch, twelve-pounder gun, angled high at the sky.

  The vast, cigar-shaped German aircraft was still miles away, just a speck in the sky and well out of range. But one lucky strike was all it would take to burst its skin and ignite the hydrogen gas inside, bringing it and its reconnaissance crew crashing down into the ocean in a ball of flame. The temptation was too much.

  As Cunninghame-Graham’s gun blasted away at the sky, the airship was also spotted by the Revenge, which let rip with her own fifteen-inch guns at maximum elevation.

  ‘Nobody’s going to hit that Zeppelin at this range, sir!’ shouted one of the men.

  ‘No, but we can have some good fun trying!’ replied Cunninghame-Graham, to roars of laughter.

  Apart from the glimpse of the airship, which got away unharmed, it became obvious that the Germans were now long gone. The High Seas Fleet was on its way back to base in Wilhelmshaven.

  The crew of the Agincourt felt relief at still being in one piece – the ship had sustained only minor damage – and pride for having acquitted themselves well during the engagement. It was now time to rejoin the Grand Fleet and return to Scapa Flow to prepare to fight another day.

  As the Agincourt turned to sail home, however, Cunninghame-Graham, like many of the crew members, felt his high spirits evaporate. He looked out on floating patches of oil, ammunition cases, empty lifebelts and other debris which he knew marked the watery graves of thousands of his fellow sailors.

  The full extent of the horror was only felt later, back at base in Orkney, where the cold hard facts were revealed. Fourteen ships lost and around six thousand men dead – and that was just on the British side.

  In the meantime, there was still an important sailor who needed to be stood down from his battle station and told that the coast was clear.

  Cunninghame-Graham went below deck to find Hoots blinking, panting and yapping. The little dog had just survived one of the greatest naval battles of all time, but all that mattered to him was that his master had returned.

  WAR REPORT

  Personnel: Angus Cunninghame-Graham was born in 1893 and joined the Royal Navy when he was twelve years old. He began his career as a cadet at the junior Royal Naval College on the Isle of Wight, off England’s south coast, and was then sent 150 miles west to the senior naval college at Dartmouth, in Devon.

  Cunninghame-Graham left college as a midshipman – a junior officer – on board HMS Vincent. One of his first jobs was to sit on top of a heavy naval gun and try to make notes about how the gun performed while it went off right underneath him. He did well and was made a sub-lieutenant.

  In 1912 Cunninghame-Graham served on HMS Achilles, a Warrior-class armoured cruiser. The Achilles sailed out into the North Atlantic in April that year – around the same time as the Titanic was sunk by an iceberg in the same ocean – and arrived at the archipelago of St Kilda, 110 miles west of the Scottish mainland. The villagers on the islands were starving and Cunninghame-Graham’s job was to help deliver supplies of oatmeal, butter, sugar, tea and other humanitarian aid.

  When the First World War broke out in 1914, Cunninghame-Graham was posted to HMS Agincourt and fought as a gun-turret commander in the Battle of Jutland of 1916. During the war he became very interested in signalling – how ships communicate with each other – and made this his specialism.

  During the Second World War he commanded the cruiser HMS Kent, escorting Allied convoys in the North Atlantic and Arctic oceans, and protecting them from attack by German U-boat submarines. By the end of the war he was a Rear-Admiral and second-in-command of the British home fleet.

  Although Cunninghame-Graham grew up mainly in England, he was a member of a wealthy Scottish landowning family and spent a lot of time in his ancestral homeland. Eventually he inherited the Dunbartonshire estate of his uncle, R. B. Cunninghame-Graham – a famous author, international adventurer and radical Scottish politician.

  Angus
Cunninghame-Graham’s last naval posts were as Admiral Superintendent of the Royal Navy dockyard at Rosyth, in Fife, and as Flag Officer, Scotland – the most senior Royal Navy officer in the country. Thanks to his privileged landowning family background – as well as his own talent, success and loyalty to his Scottish roots – he was made Lord Lieutenant of Dunbartonshire and Keeper of Dumbarton Castle, to which his uniform and wartime medals were donated after he died in 1981.

  Event Log: The Battle of Jutland was fought in the North Sea, about 250 miles east of Scotland, on 31 May and 1 June 1916. The battle pitted the British Royal Navy’s Grand Fleet against the Imperial German Navy’s High Seas Fleet. It was the largest sea battle fought during the First World War, and one of the biggest naval battles in history.

  It was also the only time during the war that battleships – the largest and most powerful warships ever built until modern aircraft carriers – were engaged in full-scale combat.

  The build-up to the battle began in the summer of 1914, when the war began. The British Grand Fleet was assembled at Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands. It was positioned there to respond to any attack by the German fleet, which was based at Wilhelmsaven on Germany’s North Sea coast.

  A thousand years previously the fleets assembled at Scapa Flow were those of the Vikings, Scandinavian raiders from across the North Sea come to conquer northern Scotland in ornate wooden longships propelled by manned oars. Now it was home to ships of such enormous size, technological sophistication and immense firepower as only the Viking gods could have possessed in their time.

  After almost two years spent practising, the Grand Fleet’s moment finally came. The German fleet, whose masterplan was to seize control of the North Sea, was discovered making an advance out into the North Sea off the coast of Jutland.

  The Germans did not intend to face the whole British fleet in battle. They had hoped to lure out the smaller British battlecruiser squadron, also based in Scotland, from Rosyth naval base on the River Forth and destroy it.