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On May the 31st, 1916, the British and German fleets clashed | 0:00:02 | 0:00:08 | |
in what would be the biggest and bloodiest naval battle | 0:00:08 | 0:00:11 | |
of the First World War | 0:00:11 | 0:00:12 | |
and in fact, of the whole of Royal Naval history. | 0:00:12 | 0:00:16 | |
The Battle Of Jutland. | 0:00:16 | 0:00:18 | |
This was the era of the dreadnought, mighty battleships that far | 0:00:20 | 0:00:24 | |
outclassed anything that had gone before. | 0:00:24 | 0:00:27 | |
At the time, Britannia ruled the world's oceans. | 0:00:27 | 0:00:30 | |
So when the fleets met, | 0:00:30 | 0:00:32 | |
people in Britain were expecting a famous victory. | 0:00:32 | 0:00:36 | |
But this was one battle that didn't go to plan. | 0:00:36 | 0:00:39 | |
We'll discover how the commanders fought the battle | 0:00:40 | 0:00:43 | |
with new technology, but outdated tactics. | 0:00:43 | 0:00:46 | |
We're going to be looking at hundreds of pieces | 0:00:47 | 0:00:50 | |
of Jutland history, | 0:00:50 | 0:00:51 | |
many of which have never been seen before. | 0:00:51 | 0:00:53 | |
And hear first-hand the horror of being in the heart of the onslaught. | 0:00:53 | 0:00:58 | |
"When the guns are brought to the ready, | 0:00:58 | 0:01:00 | |
"you simply wait for the open fire." | 0:01:00 | 0:01:02 | |
GUNFIRE | 0:01:02 | 0:01:04 | |
By the end of one day's battle, | 0:01:04 | 0:01:06 | |
Britain had lost more than 6,000 men. | 0:01:06 | 0:01:09 | |
We use the latest marine engineering to tackle the question, | 0:01:09 | 0:01:14 | |
why did so many men die? | 0:01:14 | 0:01:16 | |
We're there when, for the very first time, the Royal Navy charts | 0:01:17 | 0:01:22 | |
the final resting place of the ships which hold so many graves | 0:01:22 | 0:01:26 | |
at the bottom of the North Sea. | 0:01:26 | 0:01:28 | |
I'm absolutely sure this is HMS Invincible. | 0:01:28 | 0:01:31 | |
And after 100 years, we uncover shocking new evidence | 0:01:31 | 0:01:35 | |
that rewrites history and reveals Jutland as the forgotten battle, | 0:01:35 | 0:01:40 | |
where the First World War was lost and won. | 0:01:40 | 0:01:43 | |
At Portsmouth Historic Dockyard, we're preparing for | 0:01:58 | 0:02:01 | |
a very special delivery. | 0:02:01 | 0:02:03 | |
So this is a 15-inch shell, this is about 880 kilos. | 0:02:08 | 0:02:12 | |
-What?! -That's like the weight of a small car. | 0:02:12 | 0:02:14 | |
-Absolutely. -It's incredible. | 0:02:14 | 0:02:16 | |
This is a naval shell from a World War I battleship. | 0:02:18 | 0:02:21 | |
It's part of an exhibition at the National Museum of the Royal Navy | 0:02:23 | 0:02:27 | |
to commemorate the centenary of the Battle Of Jutland. | 0:02:27 | 0:02:31 | |
So what kind of speeds would they have been fired at? | 0:02:31 | 0:02:35 | |
So the muscle velocity of a 15-inch gun is 749 metres per second. | 0:02:35 | 0:02:40 | |
Wait, that's over double the speed of sound. | 0:02:40 | 0:02:43 | |
It was shells like these that made the 31st of May 1916 | 0:02:44 | 0:02:49 | |
the bloodiest day in the Royal Navy's history. | 0:02:49 | 0:02:52 | |
The eagle has landed. | 0:02:52 | 0:02:53 | |
On that day, the Royal Navy's Grand Fleet went head-to-head with | 0:02:58 | 0:03:02 | |
the German High Seas Fleet in the middle of the North Sea. | 0:03:02 | 0:03:07 | |
It was the first and only time they would meet in full-scale battle | 0:03:07 | 0:03:10 | |
during the First World War. | 0:03:10 | 0:03:12 | |
The British had 151 ships, the Germans 99, | 0:03:14 | 0:03:19 | |
and Britain expected an easy victory. | 0:03:19 | 0:03:21 | |
The battle only lasted 12 hours, | 0:03:22 | 0:03:25 | |
but in that time, the Royal Navy came off worse. | 0:03:25 | 0:03:28 | |
14 of their ships were sunk and more than 6,000 lives were lost. | 0:03:28 | 0:03:33 | |
"The cries of the wounded and burnt men were very terrible to listen to. | 0:03:34 | 0:03:38 | |
"They were brought in, sometimes with feet or hands hanging off. | 0:03:38 | 0:03:42 | |
"Very soon, the deck of the distributing station was | 0:03:42 | 0:03:45 | |
"packed with wounded or dying men. | 0:03:45 | 0:03:47 | |
"The greater number of injuries were caused by burns. | 0:03:48 | 0:03:52 | |
"Some men had all their head, hands and arms burned." | 0:03:52 | 0:03:56 | |
'This was a battle like no other in World War I. | 0:04:00 | 0:04:03 | |
'It was the deadliest day in Royal Navy history.' | 0:04:04 | 0:04:08 | |
It goes on. | 0:04:09 | 0:04:10 | |
'Two sides of the Royal Navy Memorial in Portsmouth | 0:04:10 | 0:04:13 | |
'are dedicated to sailors who died in that one battle. | 0:04:13 | 0:04:17 | |
'The Royal Navy was haunted | 0:04:20 | 0:04:21 | |
'by the catastrophic loss of life at Jutland. | 0:04:21 | 0:04:24 | |
'Shini and I want to investigate exactly why so many died.' | 0:04:25 | 0:04:28 | |
As an engineer, I want to know | 0:04:31 | 0:04:33 | |
whether flaws in ship design played a part in the loss | 0:04:33 | 0:04:36 | |
of all those young lives, as some argued at the time. | 0:04:36 | 0:04:39 | |
Or was it, in fact, down to the commanders? | 0:04:40 | 0:04:43 | |
Were the decisions they made on the day | 0:04:43 | 0:04:46 | |
the reason for so many casualties? | 0:04:46 | 0:04:48 | |
For generations, the significance of this brutal battle | 0:04:49 | 0:04:52 | |
has been downplayed. | 0:04:52 | 0:04:54 | |
Treated as, at best, an irrelevance, | 0:04:54 | 0:04:56 | |
at worst, a humiliating disaster for the Allies. | 0:04:56 | 0:05:00 | |
But I think we've had it wrong for a century, and I'm on the trail | 0:05:01 | 0:05:05 | |
of new evidence to show how important Jutland really was. | 0:05:05 | 0:05:08 | |
But first, I'm heading out to the site of the battle itself, | 0:05:10 | 0:05:14 | |
just off the coast of Denmark. | 0:05:14 | 0:05:16 | |
Good morning, HMS Echo, | 0:05:19 | 0:05:21 | |
this is the Second Officer Watch of your morning sit rep. | 0:05:21 | 0:05:23 | |
The weather is overcast, the conditions are favourable... | 0:05:23 | 0:05:26 | |
Unlike the battlefields on land, out here in the North Sea there are | 0:05:26 | 0:05:30 | |
no graves to visit, and the exact positions | 0:05:30 | 0:05:32 | |
of the final resting places of thousands of British sailors | 0:05:32 | 0:05:36 | |
have never been officially marked on a chart. | 0:05:36 | 0:05:38 | |
Until now. | 0:05:38 | 0:05:40 | |
OK, guys, gather round. | 0:05:41 | 0:05:42 | |
We'll just go through quickly what the plan of action's going to be... | 0:05:42 | 0:05:45 | |
'On the Royal Navy survey vessel, HMS Echo, | 0:05:45 | 0:05:48 | |
'Lieutenant Commander James Windsor and his team | 0:05:48 | 0:05:50 | |
'are aiming for the first time to put precise co-ordinates | 0:05:50 | 0:05:53 | |
'on the graves of the 6,000 Allied sailors that died here.' | 0:05:53 | 0:05:57 | |
At the moment, they're all positioned approximate. | 0:05:57 | 0:06:00 | |
We'd loved to give a tied-down position, of, | 0:06:00 | 0:06:02 | |
"Yeah, that is a war grave, now we can protect it." | 0:06:02 | 0:06:04 | |
There was guys just my age and younger, | 0:06:04 | 0:06:07 | |
just like the guys and girls we've got on board, | 0:06:07 | 0:06:10 | |
and you know, I'd like to give them a final resting place. | 0:06:10 | 0:06:12 | |
So we'll gear and report to HQ1. | 0:06:12 | 0:06:14 | |
'It's not long before we find our first wreck.' | 0:06:17 | 0:06:21 | |
So we're looking at two sections there, is that right? | 0:06:21 | 0:06:23 | |
Yeah, that's right, we've got the main part of the ship here... | 0:06:23 | 0:06:26 | |
Oh, my goodness, look at that! | 0:06:26 | 0:06:28 | |
..which appears to be broken in two, with an upturned bow there. | 0:06:28 | 0:06:31 | |
-And the stern end there. -Extraordinary. | 0:06:31 | 0:06:33 | |
-And then this would sort of be more of a floor level. -Yeah. | 0:06:33 | 0:06:37 | |
We absolutely know that HMS Invincible was hit, | 0:06:37 | 0:06:41 | |
blew up amidships and broke into two pieces when she sank. | 0:06:41 | 0:06:45 | |
So looking at the size of the ship and the condition of the wreck | 0:06:45 | 0:06:48 | |
and marrying it up with historical evidence, | 0:06:48 | 0:06:50 | |
I'd say that I'm absolutely sure this is HMS Invincible. | 0:06:50 | 0:06:53 | |
'The sea is giving up its secrets.' | 0:06:56 | 0:06:59 | |
So you can see you've got a few objects on the seabed. | 0:06:59 | 0:07:02 | |
'But there's one ship I want to find more than all the others.' | 0:07:02 | 0:07:06 | |
My goodness. | 0:07:06 | 0:07:07 | |
That's really substantial, isn't it? | 0:07:07 | 0:07:09 | |
It is, yes. Obviously, it's well broken up | 0:07:09 | 0:07:12 | |
into the two distinct pieces at the moment. | 0:07:12 | 0:07:14 | |
So what we're looking at here is the wreck of HMS Queen Mary. | 0:07:14 | 0:07:19 | |
And as we go further... | 0:07:19 | 0:07:20 | |
'1,266 men died aboard the Queen Mary.' | 0:07:20 | 0:07:24 | |
It was the biggest single loss of life in the whole battle. | 0:07:24 | 0:07:28 | |
She sank suddenly and catastrophically, | 0:07:28 | 0:07:32 | |
just two hours into the battle. | 0:07:32 | 0:07:34 | |
She was only four years old, and her loss was a complete disaster. | 0:07:34 | 0:07:38 | |
By the end of the survey voyage, we have found the wrecks | 0:07:43 | 0:07:46 | |
of six Royal Navy ships, | 0:07:46 | 0:07:48 | |
including the five big warships that account for more than | 0:07:48 | 0:07:51 | |
80% of British dead at Jutland. | 0:07:51 | 0:07:54 | |
Now we're able to pay our respects to the men who died that day | 0:07:57 | 0:08:00 | |
at their final resting place. | 0:08:00 | 0:08:03 | |
The sudden and dramatic loss of ships like the Queen Mary | 0:08:13 | 0:08:16 | |
sent shock waves through the whole fleet, and eventually, the nation. | 0:08:16 | 0:08:20 | |
It seems to me, as the pride of the Royal Navy, understanding her fate | 0:08:24 | 0:08:29 | |
may hold the key to understanding the battle as a whole, | 0:08:29 | 0:08:33 | |
and the controversies that have raged ever since. | 0:08:33 | 0:08:36 | |
It's hard to equate HMS Echo's sonar images | 0:08:41 | 0:08:44 | |
with the fighting machines at sea. | 0:08:44 | 0:08:46 | |
If I'm to understand whether the commanders were at fault, | 0:08:47 | 0:08:51 | |
I need to see a World War I warship up close. | 0:08:51 | 0:08:54 | |
By 1914, Britain had created a new and revolutionary ship. | 0:08:55 | 0:09:00 | |
The dreadnought. | 0:09:01 | 0:09:02 | |
Today, there's only one place to find one. | 0:09:03 | 0:09:06 | |
Texas. | 0:09:06 | 0:09:08 | |
That is enormous. | 0:09:13 | 0:09:16 | |
I've been fascinated by these mighty warships since I was a child, | 0:09:16 | 0:09:20 | |
but obviously, I've never seen one before. | 0:09:20 | 0:09:22 | |
This is the world's only World War I-era dreadnought. | 0:09:22 | 0:09:26 | |
Imagine a whole fleet of those | 0:09:27 | 0:09:29 | |
steaming out into the North Sea, in line astern. | 0:09:29 | 0:09:32 | |
The dreadnought's battery of huge-calibre guns | 0:09:35 | 0:09:39 | |
gave the commanders at sea unprecedented fire power. | 0:09:39 | 0:09:42 | |
I mean, I've never seen guns as big as these. | 0:09:43 | 0:09:46 | |
Five turrets of 14-inch guns. | 0:09:46 | 0:09:48 | |
Each one of these can fire a high explosive projectile 12 miles. | 0:09:48 | 0:09:53 | |
What you're looking at here is basically the most destructive | 0:09:55 | 0:09:57 | |
and powerful weapon system the world had ever seen. | 0:09:57 | 0:10:00 | |
This dreadnought is 175 metres long. | 0:10:03 | 0:10:07 | |
We're coming up on, basically, the part of the ship | 0:10:07 | 0:10:10 | |
we like to call Main Street... | 0:10:10 | 0:10:11 | |
'Ranger Andy Smith is in charge of preserving this revolutionary | 0:10:11 | 0:10:15 | |
'piece of naval history. | 0:10:15 | 0:10:17 | |
'With a crew of more than 1,000 men, it was like a city at sea.' | 0:10:17 | 0:10:22 | |
Here you have the laundry. It got kind of hot with all this machinery. | 0:10:22 | 0:10:26 | |
Oh, I bet it did. Amazing to think of guys during a campaign, | 0:10:26 | 0:10:29 | |
a battle, still in here scrubbing away. | 0:10:29 | 0:10:33 | |
But what really marked these dreadnoughts out was their power. | 0:10:33 | 0:10:38 | |
They could travel at 21 knots, faster than any ship before them. | 0:10:38 | 0:10:43 | |
This dreadnought battleship, | 0:10:43 | 0:10:45 | |
just how advanced was it compared to what had gone before? | 0:10:45 | 0:10:47 | |
You come aboard the ship, most likely | 0:10:47 | 0:10:49 | |
you came from some place that had no electricity normally, | 0:10:49 | 0:10:53 | |
no running water, and now you're on this, that's lit up. | 0:10:53 | 0:10:56 | |
Biggest guns ever made, biggest engines ever made. | 0:10:56 | 0:10:59 | |
That's the kind of technological leap that you're talking about. | 0:10:59 | 0:11:03 | |
Once the dreadnought was launched, | 0:11:03 | 0:11:05 | |
the commanders had extraordinary technology at their disposal. | 0:11:05 | 0:11:09 | |
'But what interests me is that many of the sailors manning these | 0:11:10 | 0:11:14 | |
'hi-tech machines were young and inexperienced. | 0:11:14 | 0:11:17 | |
'Like Dale Churchett's great-uncle, Leonard Kilburn.' | 0:11:17 | 0:11:20 | |
-So what have you got? -Well, my great-uncle served | 0:11:20 | 0:11:24 | |
on the HMS Queen Mary. | 0:11:24 | 0:11:25 | |
-And my dad found pictures. -So this is your dad's uncle. -Yes. | 0:11:27 | 0:11:31 | |
His name is Albert Leonard Kilburn. | 0:11:31 | 0:11:33 | |
I believe he was the eldest of a very large family. | 0:11:33 | 0:11:36 | |
So how old was he at the Battle Of Jutland? | 0:11:36 | 0:11:38 | |
-At the Battle Of Jutland, he was 17 years old. -17. | 0:11:38 | 0:11:41 | |
It's kind of poignant for me | 0:11:41 | 0:11:42 | |
because my son is 17 this year, and there is a resemblance. | 0:11:42 | 0:11:47 | |
I can't imagine a boy at that age | 0:11:47 | 0:11:52 | |
doing the job in that war. | 0:11:52 | 0:11:54 | |
'A third of the crew on a dreadnought like Leonard's ship, | 0:11:57 | 0:12:00 | |
'the Queen Mary, would have worked on the guns. | 0:12:00 | 0:12:04 | |
'Many in the deep magazine.' | 0:12:04 | 0:12:07 | |
Look at the size of these shells! | 0:12:07 | 0:12:09 | |
That's more than half a tonne of high explosives. | 0:12:10 | 0:12:13 | |
So you've got to get these, 1,500lbs, about four storeys up. | 0:12:13 | 0:12:18 | |
You can see this trolley system attached to the monorails. | 0:12:18 | 0:12:22 | |
Pad-eye hooks on here. This lifts it up. | 0:12:22 | 0:12:25 | |
Like an elevator. | 0:12:25 | 0:12:26 | |
'The deep magazine would have been full of shells. | 0:12:26 | 0:12:29 | |
'Each packed with high explosive. | 0:12:29 | 0:12:32 | |
'Next door, there was more combustible material.' | 0:12:32 | 0:12:35 | |
OK, Dale, so this is the powder magazine. | 0:12:35 | 0:12:38 | |
'Each of these bags held the explosive powder needed to | 0:12:38 | 0:12:41 | |
'propel the shells out of the guns.' | 0:12:41 | 0:12:44 | |
And four of these for every one round fired, | 0:12:44 | 0:12:47 | |
so we have ten guns, 40 of these bags to fire a full broadside. | 0:12:47 | 0:12:52 | |
And they need to get all the way from here, all the way up. | 0:12:52 | 0:12:56 | |
It took 70 men to operate each gun, from magazine to gunhouse. | 0:12:56 | 0:13:01 | |
-So, are you all ready to go up? -Come on. | 0:13:01 | 0:13:03 | |
'Shells, powder | 0:13:04 | 0:13:06 | |
'and crew all used the same shaft up to the gunhouse above.' | 0:13:06 | 0:13:11 | |
Wow, that's quite a climb. So the shell comes up from down below? | 0:13:11 | 0:13:15 | |
Correct. They can push that 1,500lb round into the breach, | 0:13:15 | 0:13:20 | |
and then we still have to put four powder bags in. | 0:13:20 | 0:13:22 | |
-And then we put these on. -Right. | 0:13:22 | 0:13:23 | |
-And then for that, we actually use the old ramrod. -The old ramrod. | 0:13:23 | 0:13:29 | |
-19th-century technology still survives. -Exactly. | 0:13:29 | 0:13:32 | |
It's a pretty confined space here. | 0:13:32 | 0:13:34 | |
Actually, there's a description, it's a midshipman who was in | 0:13:34 | 0:13:38 | |
one of these turrets when the Queen Mary was hit. It's pretty brutal. | 0:13:38 | 0:13:42 | |
"After all the men had gone out of the turret, | 0:13:42 | 0:13:44 | |
"I went up myself and found the ship lying on her side. | 0:13:44 | 0:13:46 | |
"All around us, men were falling off into the water. | 0:13:46 | 0:13:49 | |
"A few moments afterwards, | 0:13:49 | 0:13:50 | |
"a tremendous explosion occurred in the forepart of the vessel, | 0:13:50 | 0:13:53 | |
"which must have blown the bows to atoms. | 0:13:53 | 0:13:56 | |
"The stern gave an enormous lurch, throwing me into the water." | 0:13:56 | 0:14:00 | |
Pretty grim stuff. | 0:14:01 | 0:14:03 | |
The night he lost his life in there, | 0:14:03 | 0:14:05 | |
you just kind of don't want to think of him going down drowning. | 0:14:05 | 0:14:09 | |
Although that's a distinct possibility, | 0:14:09 | 0:14:12 | |
you'd kind of rather him just be underneath the shell, | 0:14:12 | 0:14:15 | |
so he just didn't know anything about it. | 0:14:15 | 0:14:18 | |
Not a good way to go. | 0:14:18 | 0:14:19 | |
Leonard Kilburn's ship sank in minutes, | 0:14:22 | 0:14:24 | |
as did four other big Royal Navy ships lost at Jutland. | 0:14:24 | 0:14:29 | |
As an engineer, I want to find out | 0:14:29 | 0:14:31 | |
whether flaws in design were the reason | 0:14:31 | 0:14:33 | |
for these catastrophic losses, as some people argued after the battle. | 0:14:33 | 0:14:37 | |
The Queen Mary was one of the newest | 0:14:39 | 0:14:41 | |
and most advanced ships at the Battle Of Jutland, | 0:14:41 | 0:14:44 | |
the pride of the Royal Navy, | 0:14:44 | 0:14:46 | |
and here at the National Maritime Museum | 0:14:46 | 0:14:48 | |
they've got a beautiful scale model. | 0:14:48 | 0:14:51 | |
The Queen Mary represented yet another advance in warship | 0:14:51 | 0:14:55 | |
technology - the battle cruiser. | 0:14:55 | 0:14:58 | |
'The museum's curator of maps and models, Dr Andrew Choong, | 0:14:58 | 0:15:02 | |
'is an expert on battleship design.' | 0:15:02 | 0:15:05 | |
-Wow, and here she is. -Yes. | 0:15:05 | 0:15:08 | |
-The Queen Mary. So this was a battle cruiser. -Yes. | 0:15:08 | 0:15:12 | |
She is designed for speed and to be hard-hitting. | 0:15:12 | 0:15:15 | |
She looks so elegant, but yet so powerful. | 0:15:15 | 0:15:19 | |
And this ship coming online would have represented the latest triumph | 0:15:19 | 0:15:23 | |
of the Royal Navy and of British engineering over the Germans. | 0:15:23 | 0:15:27 | |
To investigate her design, | 0:15:28 | 0:15:30 | |
I've asked to see the Queen Mary's original drawings. | 0:15:30 | 0:15:33 | |
The detail really is there. I mean, the annotations. | 0:15:35 | 0:15:39 | |
Yes, and actually you can tell that this document is a work in progress. | 0:15:39 | 0:15:43 | |
So, clearly there were changes while they were making these plans. | 0:15:43 | 0:15:48 | |
In this period, technology was simply not standing still. | 0:15:48 | 0:15:52 | |
And in fact, around the time Queen Mary herself was being built, | 0:15:52 | 0:15:56 | |
the next generation of fast battleships were actually | 0:15:56 | 0:15:59 | |
-being designed and laid down. -Wow. | 0:15:59 | 0:16:04 | |
The Queen Mary was at the cutting edge of ship technology. | 0:16:04 | 0:16:07 | |
Built for power and armoured against attacks. | 0:16:07 | 0:16:09 | |
'But even as she was being launched, they were adapting her. | 0:16:11 | 0:16:14 | |
'This makes me wonder if they KNEW there were flaws in her design.' | 0:16:14 | 0:16:18 | |
Astonishingly, the Queen Mary sank after only seven hits, | 0:16:23 | 0:16:27 | |
while German ships took far more punishment. | 0:16:27 | 0:16:30 | |
At Southampton University, | 0:16:31 | 0:16:33 | |
there's a whole department dedicated to testing just that - | 0:16:33 | 0:16:37 | |
why some ships stay afloat and others don't. | 0:16:37 | 0:16:40 | |
So what do you do in a tow tank, then? | 0:16:40 | 0:16:42 | |
Well, in a tow tank, we drag ship models along... | 0:16:42 | 0:16:44 | |
'Professor of Ship Dynamics Phillip Wilson is going to help me | 0:16:44 | 0:16:48 | |
'compare British and German ship design.' | 0:16:48 | 0:16:51 | |
We're going to take to the water to put it to the test. | 0:16:51 | 0:16:54 | |
-So I have a plan of HMS Queen Mary. -OK. | 0:16:54 | 0:16:58 | |
'I want to compare the Queen Mary | 0:16:58 | 0:17:00 | |
'to a German ship that was her near equivalent, | 0:17:00 | 0:17:03 | |
'and in fact helped to sink her - the Seydlitz.' | 0:17:03 | 0:17:06 | |
There it is, the Seydlitz. | 0:17:07 | 0:17:09 | |
It's about 700 feet long, so similar in length, | 0:17:09 | 0:17:12 | |
similar in beam, similar armament, but the difference will be | 0:17:12 | 0:17:16 | |
where the watertight compartments are. | 0:17:16 | 0:17:19 | |
-So how many watertight compartments were there in the Queen Mary? -OK... | 0:17:19 | 0:17:22 | |
'Battleships were divided into internal watertight sections. | 0:17:22 | 0:17:27 | |
'This prevented any flooding caused by shell damage | 0:17:27 | 0:17:29 | |
'from spreading, to keep the ship afloat.' | 0:17:29 | 0:17:32 | |
..15, 16, 17. | 0:17:32 | 0:17:35 | |
So, crucial question... | 0:17:35 | 0:17:39 | |
How does that compare to the Seydlitz? | 0:17:39 | 0:17:41 | |
Let's have a see. So we've got 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, | 0:17:41 | 0:17:45 | |
-16, 17, 18. -18. | 0:17:45 | 0:17:48 | |
So just one more. The Seydlitz's... | 0:17:48 | 0:17:52 | |
-damage is really well documented. -Gosh. | 0:17:52 | 0:17:55 | |
So the Germans took photographs of every single hit. | 0:17:55 | 0:17:59 | |
Treffer number 18. | 0:17:59 | 0:18:03 | |
This one's pretty impactful. | 0:18:03 | 0:18:06 | |
-Treffer number 14. -Horrendous. | 0:18:06 | 0:18:08 | |
This is why I'm so intrigued because the Seydlitz was able to limp back | 0:18:08 | 0:18:13 | |
-to port, even though it was hit 24 times. -Good grief! | 0:18:13 | 0:18:17 | |
Yeah, that picture is incredible. | 0:18:17 | 0:18:18 | |
Isn't it just? And how many times was the Queen Mary hit? | 0:18:18 | 0:18:21 | |
-The Queen Mary was only hit seven times. And it sank. -And it sank. | 0:18:21 | 0:18:25 | |
-So I'm determined to know what the difference was. -OK. | 0:18:25 | 0:18:29 | |
We're going to use the Queen Mary's plans to build | 0:18:31 | 0:18:33 | |
an engineering model of the ship's hull, | 0:18:33 | 0:18:35 | |
and test it in the towing tank. | 0:18:35 | 0:18:37 | |
With the information we have on the damage to the Seydlitz, | 0:18:40 | 0:18:43 | |
and the help of a computer simulation, we can subject the | 0:18:43 | 0:18:46 | |
Queen Mary model to the same flooding damage | 0:18:46 | 0:18:49 | |
to see how quickly she sinks. | 0:18:49 | 0:18:50 | |
For the first time, we can use computer-aided engineering to | 0:18:53 | 0:18:56 | |
put the theory of inferior British design to the test. | 0:18:56 | 0:19:00 | |
But after my visit to the dreadnought warship in Texas, | 0:19:06 | 0:19:10 | |
I'm investigating another theory for the huge loss of life at Jutland. | 0:19:10 | 0:19:14 | |
The British admirals had astonishing firepower | 0:19:15 | 0:19:18 | |
and speed at their command. | 0:19:18 | 0:19:20 | |
So why weren't they able to exploit those technological advantages? | 0:19:20 | 0:19:24 | |
'Could their tactics be to blame?' | 0:19:24 | 0:19:26 | |
-Hello, Dan. -How are you doing? | 0:19:26 | 0:19:28 | |
Very good to see you. | 0:19:28 | 0:19:29 | |
'At the time of Jutland, none of the admirals had fought a major battle. | 0:19:29 | 0:19:33 | |
'And, despite their hi-tech ships, | 0:19:33 | 0:19:35 | |
'their greatest influence was a man who'd been dead for a century. | 0:19:35 | 0:19:40 | |
'Lord Nelson.' | 0:19:40 | 0:19:42 | |
-A very grand entrance. The great man himself. -Yes. | 0:19:42 | 0:19:45 | |
He was an iconic character. | 0:19:45 | 0:19:47 | |
He was crucial for the Navy through the 19th century | 0:19:47 | 0:19:50 | |
and into the 20th century, still until today. | 0:19:50 | 0:19:52 | |
'Admiral Lord West believes Nelson cast a very long shadow | 0:19:52 | 0:19:56 | |
'here in the Admiralty and out at sea.' | 0:19:56 | 0:19:59 | |
Nelson gave the Royal Navy this habit of victory, | 0:19:59 | 0:20:02 | |
and when the First World War came the country | 0:20:02 | 0:20:05 | |
and the Navy thought, "There'll be another Trafalgar, | 0:20:05 | 0:20:07 | |
"we'll wipe out a German fleet - this is what we do." | 0:20:07 | 0:20:10 | |
And of course that didn't happen. | 0:20:10 | 0:20:12 | |
This is the Admiralty boardroom, | 0:20:14 | 0:20:17 | |
which I used as First Sea Lord for the Navy board meetings. | 0:20:17 | 0:20:20 | |
-Another Nelson portrait, looking down. -Yet again looking down. | 0:20:20 | 0:20:23 | |
Just in case you forget. | 0:20:23 | 0:20:24 | |
So when you sat in that chair, you were sitting in the chair | 0:20:24 | 0:20:27 | |
that some very illustrious admirals had been in before. | 0:20:27 | 0:20:32 | |
'At the Battle Of Jutland, the Royal Navy was led by two key men. | 0:20:32 | 0:20:36 | |
'In overall charge was Admiral Sir John Jellicoe, | 0:20:36 | 0:20:39 | |
'Commander of the Grand Fleet. | 0:20:39 | 0:20:41 | |
'His deputy was Vice Admiral Sir David Beatty.' | 0:20:41 | 0:20:44 | |
Jellicoe was very much a detail man. | 0:20:44 | 0:20:47 | |
It weighed heavily on his shoulders. He knew he could | 0:20:47 | 0:20:51 | |
lose the war for Britain in one day. | 0:20:51 | 0:20:54 | |
Beatty was much more gung-ho, | 0:20:54 | 0:20:56 | |
he saw himself as very much as a Nelson, actually. | 0:20:56 | 0:20:58 | |
"Engage the enemy more closely, let's get in there and fight them." | 0:20:58 | 0:21:01 | |
'And that meant firing hard and fast, just like his predecessor.' | 0:21:03 | 0:21:07 | |
The interesting thing is Nelson is very celebrated, | 0:21:07 | 0:21:10 | |
but he always faced inferior enemy commanders. | 0:21:10 | 0:21:12 | |
In fact, these two faced tough opposition in these Germans. | 0:21:12 | 0:21:17 | |
'They were Vice Admiral Reinhard Scheer, | 0:21:17 | 0:21:20 | |
'recently appointed commander of Germany's High Seas Fleet, | 0:21:20 | 0:21:24 | |
'and his deputy, Vice Admiral Franz Von Hipper.' | 0:21:24 | 0:21:27 | |
Scheer was very, very intent on there being a fleet action to try | 0:21:27 | 0:21:31 | |
and whittle down the size of the Grand Fleet. | 0:21:31 | 0:21:34 | |
He said, "We must make a part of the Grand Fleet come towards us | 0:21:34 | 0:21:37 | |
"and destroy it piecemeal. | 0:21:37 | 0:21:38 | |
"Then we can finally have a real battle against the Grand Fleet." | 0:21:38 | 0:21:41 | |
So he wanted to lure the British out, | 0:21:41 | 0:21:44 | |
-whittle away at their numerical superiority. -Absolutely. | 0:21:44 | 0:21:48 | |
On the eve of battle, | 0:21:48 | 0:21:49 | |
the British commanders seemed to have all the advantages. | 0:21:49 | 0:21:53 | |
More ships, bigger guns and what should surely have proved decisive - | 0:21:53 | 0:21:58 | |
better intelligence. | 0:21:58 | 0:22:00 | |
In a room here in the Admiralty that was so secret | 0:22:00 | 0:22:03 | |
some in the naval hierarchy couldn't even work out where it was, | 0:22:03 | 0:22:06 | |
a group of code-breakers was working on intercepted German messages. | 0:22:06 | 0:22:11 | |
'That room was called Room 40.' | 0:22:13 | 0:22:15 | |
I've always loved the sound of "Room 40". | 0:22:15 | 0:22:18 | |
It just conjures up all sorts of images of James Bond | 0:22:18 | 0:22:21 | |
and secret services. | 0:22:21 | 0:22:23 | |
It was where the Admiralty assembled German speakers who could | 0:22:23 | 0:22:27 | |
make sense of the messages that were being | 0:22:27 | 0:22:30 | |
intercepted by the Navy's wireless telegraphy stations. | 0:22:30 | 0:22:34 | |
That makes it the ancestor of Bletchley Park, Enigma, GCHQ, | 0:22:34 | 0:22:40 | |
all of the world of cyber and intercepts that we live with today. | 0:22:40 | 0:22:44 | |
'GCHQ historian Tony Comer has a copy of a captured German | 0:22:46 | 0:22:51 | |
'code book, which enabled staff in Room 40 | 0:22:51 | 0:22:54 | |
'to start decrypting enemy signals. | 0:22:54 | 0:22:57 | |
'To understand why the commanders didn't push home their intelligence | 0:22:57 | 0:23:01 | |
'advantage, we need to look | 0:23:01 | 0:23:03 | |
'at the hours immediately before the battle.' | 0:23:03 | 0:23:06 | |
What we've got here is an original German naval chart | 0:23:06 | 0:23:08 | |
of the North Sea, from the First World War. | 0:23:08 | 0:23:11 | |
Early in the morning of the 30th of May, | 0:23:11 | 0:23:14 | |
there are a couple of intercepted messages, which are decrypted, | 0:23:14 | 0:23:18 | |
that the German fleet is to be assembled in the outer roads by 9pm. | 0:23:18 | 0:23:23 | |
So here we go, let's put the German fleet in the outer roads here. | 0:23:23 | 0:23:26 | |
The Brits know they are there. | 0:23:26 | 0:23:28 | |
So, at the moment, they're on top of the game, | 0:23:28 | 0:23:30 | |
they know what's going on. | 0:23:30 | 0:23:32 | |
'This intelligence prompts Jellicoe and Beatty's fleets out to sea. | 0:23:32 | 0:23:36 | |
-Beatty is coming out of here. -Beatty comes out. | 0:23:36 | 0:23:38 | |
Jellicoe, but he's bringing the might of the super-dreadnoughts | 0:23:38 | 0:23:42 | |
down here from Orkney. And they're going east, right? | 0:23:42 | 0:23:45 | |
So they're hoping to ambush them somewhere around here. | 0:23:45 | 0:23:47 | |
This is hundreds of years of history turned on its head, | 0:23:47 | 0:23:50 | |
when what you did in the olden days was go out to sea, | 0:23:50 | 0:23:52 | |
have a look to see if you can see the enemy ships | 0:23:52 | 0:23:54 | |
and then go and fight them. This is just a new world. | 0:23:54 | 0:23:57 | |
'But the British commanders weren't ready to relinquish | 0:23:57 | 0:24:00 | |
'some of their control, especially to civilians.' | 0:24:00 | 0:24:04 | |
The intercepted messages are being handed to the cryptanalysts. | 0:24:04 | 0:24:08 | |
That causes some difficulties between the professional | 0:24:08 | 0:24:12 | |
naval officers and their new civilian colleagues. | 0:24:12 | 0:24:16 | |
This requires a level of central control from London | 0:24:16 | 0:24:18 | |
that the Navy is just not used to. | 0:24:18 | 0:24:20 | |
I mean, you've got somebody afloat thinking, | 0:24:20 | 0:24:22 | |
"What on earth does this guy in London know about my job?" | 0:24:22 | 0:24:26 | |
'But to some extent they were right, | 0:24:26 | 0:24:28 | |
'because the intelligence was not always clear.' | 0:24:28 | 0:24:31 | |
The telegram goes from the Admiralty to Jellicoe. | 0:24:31 | 0:24:33 | |
"No definite news, enemy. It was thought fleet had sailed, | 0:24:33 | 0:24:37 | |
"but directional signals places flagship on the Jade at 11:10." | 0:24:37 | 0:24:41 | |
On the river. Hang on. OK, | 0:24:41 | 0:24:42 | |
I'll move these guys back into their river harbour. | 0:24:42 | 0:24:46 | |
'But, due to a breakdown in communication between Room 40 | 0:24:46 | 0:24:49 | |
'and Admiralty chiefs, this intelligence was wrong. | 0:24:49 | 0:24:53 | |
'The German fleet had in fact already sailed.' | 0:24:53 | 0:24:56 | |
Do the Brits leave harbour? | 0:24:56 | 0:24:58 | |
They still leave harbour, but although the British are at sea | 0:24:58 | 0:25:00 | |
they're not expecting to find the Germans. | 0:25:00 | 0:25:03 | |
'Jellicoe advanced slowly to save fuel. | 0:25:03 | 0:25:06 | |
'And his deputy, Beatty, forged ahead, | 0:25:06 | 0:25:09 | |
'not realising this was playing into Scheer's hands.' | 0:25:09 | 0:25:13 | |
So the intelligence aspect of Jutland is a bit of a tragedy, | 0:25:13 | 0:25:16 | |
really, isn't it? | 0:25:16 | 0:25:17 | |
'Being able to decrypt intercepted German messages should have | 0:25:17 | 0:25:21 | |
'given the British a clear advantage. | 0:25:21 | 0:25:25 | |
'But it was a technological leap too far for the admirals at sea, | 0:25:25 | 0:25:29 | |
'who didn't trust it and failed to exploit it.' | 0:25:29 | 0:25:32 | |
Jellicoe's deputy, Admiral Beatty, | 0:25:35 | 0:25:37 | |
was steaming east, spoiling for a fight. | 0:25:37 | 0:25:40 | |
And that same afternoon, on May 31st, his wish was granted | 0:25:40 | 0:25:45 | |
when a scouting party from his Battlecruiser Squadron came | 0:25:45 | 0:25:48 | |
face-to-face with the enemy. | 0:25:48 | 0:25:50 | |
At 2:20pm, HMS Galatea sent a wireless message to Beatty's | 0:25:52 | 0:25:57 | |
battle cruiser fleet. | 0:25:57 | 0:25:59 | |
"Urgent, five cruisers, probably hostile, in sight, | 0:25:59 | 0:26:02 | |
"bearing east southeast, course unknown." | 0:26:02 | 0:26:05 | |
'They had sighted the foremost elements | 0:26:05 | 0:26:07 | |
'of the German High Seas Fleet. | 0:26:07 | 0:26:09 | |
'The Battle Of Jutland had begun.' | 0:26:09 | 0:26:13 | |
"The atmosphere is good. | 0:26:13 | 0:26:15 | |
"The crew, numbering about 16, have all got their individual jobs. | 0:26:15 | 0:26:20 | |
"The guns being loaded, the next order was passed. | 0:26:20 | 0:26:24 | |
" 'Bring the guns to the ready.' | 0:26:24 | 0:26:26 | |
"When the guns are brought to the ready, | 0:26:26 | 0:26:28 | |
"you simply wait for the open fire. | 0:26:28 | 0:26:31 | |
"We were looking forward to a chance to have a crack at the enemy. | 0:26:31 | 0:26:35 | |
"We were keen. This was the day we were waiting for." | 0:26:35 | 0:26:38 | |
In the very first moments of the battle, you can see how | 0:26:43 | 0:26:46 | |
modern practices had not been fully embraced by the admirals at sea. | 0:26:46 | 0:26:50 | |
Beatty was eager to pursue the enemy | 0:26:51 | 0:26:54 | |
and he sent a crucial message for his fleet to change course. | 0:26:54 | 0:26:58 | |
But instead of using newly invented wireless, he used signal flags. | 0:26:58 | 0:27:04 | |
This was a tried-and-tested system dating from the age of sail. | 0:27:04 | 0:27:08 | |
But with the new dreadnought warships, the whole concept | 0:27:10 | 0:27:13 | |
of naval battles had changed, and so had the size of the battlefield. | 0:27:13 | 0:27:17 | |
Hi, Dan, how are you doing? Good to see you. | 0:27:18 | 0:27:22 | |
A vital part of Beatty's fleets, the Fifth Battle Squadron, | 0:27:22 | 0:27:26 | |
a group of powerful super-dreadnoughts, | 0:27:26 | 0:27:29 | |
were following five miles behind. | 0:27:29 | 0:27:31 | |
But just how easy is it to read a flag signal at that distance? | 0:27:33 | 0:27:37 | |
I'm heading out with the Navy on their training ship, | 0:27:37 | 0:27:40 | |
HMS Exploit, to find out. | 0:27:40 | 0:27:43 | |
And Nick is going to fly a flag signal | 0:27:43 | 0:27:45 | |
from Southsea Castle in Portsmouth. | 0:27:45 | 0:27:47 | |
Look at the size of these flags. | 0:27:47 | 0:27:49 | |
Southsea Castle, this is warship Exploit, we're on our way. Over. | 0:27:51 | 0:27:54 | |
HE BLOWS WHISTLE | 0:27:57 | 0:27:59 | |
We've reached our target, but even with | 0:28:01 | 0:28:03 | |
the help of Chief Petty Officer Dan Powditch, I can't see a thing. | 0:28:03 | 0:28:08 | |
What's... Visibility is less than five miles, isn't it? | 0:28:08 | 0:28:10 | |
Well under five miles at the moment. | 0:28:10 | 0:28:12 | |
You see, that's interesting, because at the Battle Of Jutland, | 0:28:12 | 0:28:15 | |
ships were spread well over five miles, so conditions like this, | 0:28:15 | 0:28:18 | |
-they wouldn't have been able to even see their admiral. -Not at all. | 0:28:18 | 0:28:21 | |
At the moment, Nick, we can't see the shore, let alone the flag, | 0:28:21 | 0:28:24 | |
so I think we better close for about three miles. Over. | 0:28:24 | 0:28:28 | |
-Amidships. -Amidships. | 0:28:28 | 0:28:29 | |
It is a hazy day today, isn't it? | 0:28:31 | 0:28:32 | |
But then we're told the Battle Of Jutland was very murky, very cloudy. | 0:28:32 | 0:28:35 | |
And there was all the huge amounts of smoke being created by all | 0:28:35 | 0:28:38 | |
the battleships themselves. | 0:28:38 | 0:28:40 | |
At three miles, I'm still having problems. So we close into two. | 0:28:41 | 0:28:47 | |
Black and white lighthouse, it's just to the right of there. | 0:28:47 | 0:28:50 | |
There's a pennant, a white pennant with some red on it. | 0:28:50 | 0:28:54 | |
Then there's a Union Jack with a border, and then there's | 0:28:54 | 0:28:57 | |
a yellow with a black spot, a big one, at the bottom. | 0:28:57 | 0:29:00 | |
We can refer to this, which was the 1913 Fleet Signal Book. | 0:29:00 | 0:29:04 | |
So the white pennant comes as leading ships together, | 0:29:04 | 0:29:07 | |
the rest in succession to the point or degree indicated. | 0:29:07 | 0:29:11 | |
So he's ordering a change of course. | 0:29:11 | 0:29:15 | |
'Together, Delta and Hotel indicated the direction south-southeast.' | 0:29:15 | 0:29:19 | |
OVER RADIO: So we think we've worked it out. | 0:29:19 | 0:29:21 | |
We have to alter course, leading ships, and the rest turning | 0:29:21 | 0:29:25 | |
in succession to south-southeast. | 0:29:25 | 0:29:27 | |
-How about that? -That's spot-on, Dan, absolutely correct. | 0:29:27 | 0:29:31 | |
In the days of Nelson's victory at Trafalgar, | 0:29:33 | 0:29:36 | |
the battlefield would have been mere metres wide. | 0:29:36 | 0:29:39 | |
But by Jutland, the ships were stretched out over miles | 0:29:39 | 0:29:42 | |
and the air was thick with coal smoke. | 0:29:42 | 0:29:45 | |
When Beatty signalled to his fleet to change course, the message | 0:29:46 | 0:29:50 | |
wasn't picked up by the Fifth Battle Squadron five miles away. | 0:29:50 | 0:29:54 | |
By the time they took action, they'd fallen ten miles behind. | 0:29:54 | 0:29:58 | |
His use of flag signals | 0:30:00 | 0:30:01 | |
and his gung-ho attitude in steaming ahead without the super-dreadnoughts | 0:30:01 | 0:30:06 | |
had put his whole fleet, including the Queen Mary, at risk. | 0:30:06 | 0:30:10 | |
This didn't faze Admiral Beatty. | 0:30:12 | 0:30:15 | |
After all, his battle cruisers were faster | 0:30:15 | 0:30:17 | |
and had superior weaponry to the Germans. | 0:30:17 | 0:30:21 | |
But here's the problem - | 0:30:21 | 0:30:23 | |
in this new age of fast-moving super-dreadnoughts, with powerful | 0:30:23 | 0:30:26 | |
long-range guns, | 0:30:26 | 0:30:28 | |
hitting a target was more difficult than it had ever been. | 0:30:28 | 0:30:31 | |
Today, before any Royal Navy warship, like HMS Portland, | 0:30:33 | 0:30:37 | |
sets off on a mission, it does weeks of training. | 0:30:37 | 0:30:41 | |
I've come on board Portland just as they're about to conduct what | 0:30:41 | 0:30:44 | |
they call their gunnery serial. | 0:30:44 | 0:30:46 | |
They'll be firing all their guns, large and small, | 0:30:46 | 0:30:49 | |
checking they all work, and also practising hitting a target. | 0:30:49 | 0:30:53 | |
But in the run-up to Jutland, Beatty's squadron had been | 0:30:57 | 0:31:00 | |
stationed at Rosyth, in the shelter of the Firth of Forth, | 0:31:00 | 0:31:03 | |
and had barely been able to practise firing their guns at all. | 0:31:03 | 0:31:07 | |
To watch these powerful guns up close, I'm in full safety gear. | 0:31:09 | 0:31:13 | |
Four, five, about to function. | 0:31:13 | 0:31:15 | |
Four, five, about to function. | 0:31:15 | 0:31:17 | |
Oh! | 0:31:20 | 0:31:21 | |
The sound, there's a shock wave that hits you, it passes | 0:31:23 | 0:31:26 | |
straight through your body, it's like an electric shock, almost. | 0:31:26 | 0:31:29 | |
And that is a fraction of the size of the guns | 0:31:29 | 0:31:33 | |
they were using at Jutland. | 0:31:33 | 0:31:35 | |
To get these guns firing, | 0:31:37 | 0:31:38 | |
most of the important work happens down below, in the operations room. | 0:31:38 | 0:31:43 | |
JSA bearing 234, range 22,400 yards, going to start a safety check. | 0:31:43 | 0:31:47 | |
Nowadays, the captain is down here in the bowels of the ship. | 0:31:47 | 0:31:51 | |
This is the ops room, this is the brains of the operation. | 0:31:51 | 0:31:53 | |
Back then, of course, it was on the bridge, they needed to see. | 0:31:53 | 0:31:56 | |
The best equipment they had for monitoring the enemy's position | 0:31:56 | 0:31:59 | |
was the eyeball. | 0:31:59 | 0:32:00 | |
-Zero two, engage. -Zero two, shoot. | 0:32:00 | 0:32:03 | |
But they did have a new piece of technology at Jutland to | 0:32:07 | 0:32:10 | |
help them hit the target. | 0:32:10 | 0:32:12 | |
And optical engineer Alan Ray from Thales | 0:32:12 | 0:32:15 | |
has brought one on board today. | 0:32:15 | 0:32:17 | |
-Right, Alan, what have you got here? -OK, this is an FT37 rangefinder. | 0:32:17 | 0:32:21 | |
It's very representative of the range-finding technology | 0:32:21 | 0:32:24 | |
which was used at the Battle Of Jutland. | 0:32:24 | 0:32:26 | |
So they actually had some kit that helped them | 0:32:26 | 0:32:28 | |
-to calculate how far the ships were away? -Absolutely. | 0:32:28 | 0:32:31 | |
This was state-of-the-art technology in 1916. | 0:32:31 | 0:32:34 | |
And these guys would have been right up at the top of the ship, | 0:32:34 | 0:32:36 | |
above the smoke, hopefully, | 0:32:36 | 0:32:38 | |
and they'd try and pick out the enemy ships? | 0:32:38 | 0:32:40 | |
So there's a tanker there. | 0:32:40 | 0:32:43 | |
OK, I've got that tanker in my eyepiece right now. | 0:32:43 | 0:32:47 | |
And if you adjust that control there, that will | 0:32:47 | 0:32:49 | |
move the prisms at either end. | 0:32:49 | 0:32:51 | |
You'll see the targets slowly starting to align. | 0:32:51 | 0:32:54 | |
You then make the measurement in the left-hand eyepiece. | 0:32:54 | 0:32:57 | |
OK, sounds complicated. | 0:32:57 | 0:33:00 | |
This is the worst job on the ship. | 0:33:00 | 0:33:02 | |
I'd rather clean out the bilges. | 0:33:02 | 0:33:05 | |
-Remember, you're under fire as well. -Thank you! | 0:33:06 | 0:33:10 | |
Oh, it is so fiddly, but I actually am getting it slightly. | 0:33:10 | 0:33:14 | |
You can see, there's a ghost ship, and then the real ship, | 0:33:14 | 0:33:16 | |
and you've just got to try and get them to overlap. | 0:33:16 | 0:33:18 | |
-Get them to -line up. So, I'm going to take a punt here, Alan. | 0:33:18 | 0:33:21 | |
I reckon it's about 4,200 metres. Where's Keith? | 0:33:21 | 0:33:25 | |
Keith, have you got a distance to that ship? | 0:33:25 | 0:33:28 | |
'Lieutenant Commander Keith Bowers has used a laser rangefinder | 0:33:28 | 0:33:32 | |
'to measure the distance.' | 0:33:32 | 0:33:34 | |
4,040 metres at the moment. | 0:33:34 | 0:33:36 | |
That's not bad, is it? For an amateur, a novice. | 0:33:36 | 0:33:40 | |
Very good, very close. Only 160 metres out. | 0:33:40 | 0:33:43 | |
Of course, if you were in Jutland now in a turret, | 0:33:43 | 0:33:45 | |
the ship would be pitching around, | 0:33:45 | 0:33:47 | |
no stabilisation. We're on a quite calm, stable platform at the moment. | 0:33:47 | 0:33:50 | |
It makes it a lot easier for you today. | 0:33:50 | 0:33:52 | |
I'm patting myself on the back, | 0:33:52 | 0:33:53 | |
-but I've still missed the ship, haven't I? -Absolutely. | 0:33:53 | 0:33:56 | |
This gets you close, but you've got to get those | 0:33:56 | 0:34:00 | |
shells on such a tiny target. | 0:34:00 | 0:34:03 | |
And you've got to be able to hit that target before it hits you. | 0:34:03 | 0:34:06 | |
You've got to remember, the distances at Jutland were much, much | 0:34:08 | 0:34:11 | |
more than 4,000 metres, they were distances of over 20,000 yards. | 0:34:11 | 0:34:15 | |
The enemy ships would be obscured in the haze, in the gun smoke. | 0:34:15 | 0:34:19 | |
The crew would have been deafened and distracted. | 0:34:19 | 0:34:23 | |
I'm amazed they got any shells anywhere near their targets. | 0:34:23 | 0:34:26 | |
Range-finding technology had not kept pace with gunnery. | 0:34:29 | 0:34:33 | |
Though Beatty's guns could fire further than his enemy, | 0:34:33 | 0:34:36 | |
he had to delay shooting until his men could fix their target, | 0:34:36 | 0:34:40 | |
by which time he had lost that advantage. | 0:34:40 | 0:34:42 | |
In the first phase of the battle, | 0:34:44 | 0:34:46 | |
it was the Germans who registered far more hits. | 0:34:46 | 0:34:49 | |
And to compensate for their lack of practice | 0:34:50 | 0:34:52 | |
and the difficulty of range-finding, Beatty demanded his gunnery | 0:34:52 | 0:34:56 | |
teams did everything possible to increase the rate of fire. | 0:34:56 | 0:35:00 | |
After sighting the enemy, Beatty turned his fleet in pursuit, | 0:35:06 | 0:35:10 | |
unaware they were drawing him towards | 0:35:10 | 0:35:12 | |
the rest of the High Seas Fleet. | 0:35:12 | 0:35:14 | |
Within two hours, he'd lost two of his battle cruisers, | 0:35:16 | 0:35:19 | |
Indefatigable and Queen Mary, | 0:35:19 | 0:35:22 | |
and more than 2,000 British sailors were dead. | 0:35:22 | 0:35:25 | |
I want to work out | 0:35:30 | 0:35:31 | |
whether so many British sailors died at Jutland not because of | 0:35:31 | 0:35:34 | |
tactics, but because the ships they sailed in were inherently unsafe. | 0:35:34 | 0:35:38 | |
At the time, many believed German ships were more resilient | 0:35:40 | 0:35:43 | |
than British ones, and therefore safer. | 0:35:43 | 0:35:46 | |
Back at Southampton University, Professor Philip Wilson | 0:35:47 | 0:35:50 | |
and his colleague, Dr Jon Downes, | 0:35:50 | 0:35:52 | |
have built an engineering model of the hull of the battle cruiser | 0:35:52 | 0:35:56 | |
HMS Queen Mary, which they're launching in their towing tank. | 0:35:56 | 0:36:00 | |
So what's the plan for the experiment? | 0:36:02 | 0:36:04 | |
Well, the plan is to use the Queen Mary model to mimic what | 0:36:04 | 0:36:08 | |
happened to the Seydlitz. So, would the Queen Mary have sunk had | 0:36:08 | 0:36:12 | |
it had the same number of hits as the Seydlitz had, which didn't sink? | 0:36:12 | 0:36:16 | |
The German battle cruiser, Seydlitz, was hit 24 times, | 0:36:16 | 0:36:20 | |
but still managed to limp badly damaged back into port. | 0:36:20 | 0:36:24 | |
We're going to subject our model to the same damage, | 0:36:25 | 0:36:29 | |
'and a computer program will simulate | 0:36:29 | 0:36:31 | |
'how it causes the ship's compartments to flood.' | 0:36:31 | 0:36:34 | |
So if I run that, you can see there the first five hits | 0:36:35 | 0:36:40 | |
have got a very small amount of water entering the vessel. | 0:36:40 | 0:36:43 | |
Following the computer's calculations, we're | 0:36:43 | 0:36:46 | |
pouring an equivalent quantity of water into the areas of the | 0:36:46 | 0:36:49 | |
ship that would have been flooded after those first five hits. | 0:36:49 | 0:36:53 | |
The next six or seven hits did very little damage as well | 0:36:55 | 0:36:58 | |
because they were hitting the superstructure. | 0:36:58 | 0:37:01 | |
Then we come to a major hit, amidships. | 0:37:01 | 0:37:03 | |
The twelfth hit on the Seydlitz caused serious flooding. | 0:37:03 | 0:37:06 | |
We can see the vessel is beginning to sink lower in the water there. | 0:37:08 | 0:37:11 | |
That's it, keep it coming, keep it coming. | 0:37:11 | 0:37:14 | |
It's amazing how much water you can get on this ship, | 0:37:14 | 0:37:17 | |
and it's not really changing where it sits in the water. | 0:37:17 | 0:37:20 | |
No, it's gone down only a very small amount. | 0:37:20 | 0:37:23 | |
-And we've taken a lot of damage there. -12 hits. | 0:37:23 | 0:37:25 | |
And that's more than the Queen Mary took altogether. | 0:37:25 | 0:37:28 | |
The Queen Mary was hit only seven times before she sank. | 0:37:28 | 0:37:32 | |
Here, as the hit count reaches 20, she's still afloat. | 0:37:32 | 0:37:35 | |
The big one is to come yet. | 0:37:37 | 0:37:39 | |
The final hit to the Seydlitz came | 0:37:39 | 0:37:41 | |
from a torpedo which struck near the bow. | 0:37:41 | 0:37:43 | |
Gosh, I think it's going to sink. | 0:37:47 | 0:37:50 | |
'Now it puts our model under serious strain.' | 0:37:50 | 0:37:52 | |
You can see the bow going way down now. | 0:37:55 | 0:37:57 | |
'But still she doesn't sink.' | 0:37:57 | 0:37:59 | |
So the Queen Mary has had all the hits that the Seydlitz had. | 0:37:59 | 0:38:03 | |
-And yet she's still afloat. -All 24 hits. | 0:38:03 | 0:38:06 | |
So there really doesn't seem to be any difference between the designs. | 0:38:06 | 0:38:09 | |
Yes. | 0:38:09 | 0:38:11 | |
By the end of our experiment, | 0:38:11 | 0:38:12 | |
a century-long debate has been put to rest. | 0:38:12 | 0:38:16 | |
British ship design was not intrinsically inferior to German. | 0:38:16 | 0:38:20 | |
It was not the reason why so many British ships sank | 0:38:22 | 0:38:24 | |
while their German equivalents limped home to port. | 0:38:24 | 0:38:28 | |
So if ship design wasn't at fault, what was? | 0:38:33 | 0:38:37 | |
The five largest British ships had one thing in common. | 0:38:37 | 0:38:40 | |
Witnesses described catastrophic explosions on board | 0:38:41 | 0:38:44 | |
before they sank. | 0:38:44 | 0:38:46 | |
There's a powerful account of the Queen Mary's last moments | 0:38:47 | 0:38:51 | |
from a German officer who watched her go down. | 0:38:51 | 0:38:53 | |
"Black debris of the ship flew into the air and immediately afterwards | 0:38:55 | 0:38:58 | |
"the whole ship blew up with a terrific explosion. | 0:38:58 | 0:39:01 | |
"A gigantic cloud of smoke rose, the mast collapsed inwards | 0:39:02 | 0:39:06 | |
"and the smoke cloud hid everything and rose higher and higher. | 0:39:06 | 0:39:10 | |
"Finally, nothing but a thick black cloud of smoke remained | 0:39:11 | 0:39:15 | |
"where the ship had been." | 0:39:15 | 0:39:18 | |
It seems to me such a devastating explosion could only have | 0:39:18 | 0:39:21 | |
been caused by a direct hit on the ship's magazine, | 0:39:21 | 0:39:25 | |
full of high-explosive shells and propellant, or cordite. | 0:39:25 | 0:39:29 | |
A direct hit might just explain one loss, | 0:39:32 | 0:39:35 | |
but could all five British ships have been so unlucky? | 0:39:35 | 0:39:38 | |
This is the deep magazine where they store the ammunition. | 0:39:39 | 0:39:43 | |
Now, as the name suggests, | 0:39:43 | 0:39:44 | |
it's right down in the bottom of the ship. | 0:39:44 | 0:39:46 | |
We are below the water line now, and that meant it could be | 0:39:46 | 0:39:50 | |
a very unpleasant place to be in a battle. | 0:39:50 | 0:39:53 | |
The deep magazine holds hundreds of high-explosive shells. | 0:39:55 | 0:39:59 | |
And at Jutland, they were purposely overstocked | 0:39:59 | 0:40:02 | |
because of their fast-firing tactics. | 0:40:02 | 0:40:04 | |
On HMS Portland, Chief Petty Officer Simon Piles | 0:40:05 | 0:40:09 | |
is in charge of ammunition. | 0:40:09 | 0:40:11 | |
Here we go, OK. That is your classic shell there. | 0:40:12 | 0:40:15 | |
-Yeah. -Can I have a go? How heavy is it? | 0:40:15 | 0:40:18 | |
Give it on the old legs rather than... Oh, my...! | 0:40:18 | 0:40:20 | |
OK. HE LAUGHS | 0:40:20 | 0:40:22 | |
-So that... -Yeah. | 0:40:22 | 0:40:24 | |
In there, that's the cordite, right? | 0:40:24 | 0:40:26 | |
Yeah. | 0:40:26 | 0:40:27 | |
'Nowadays, the cordite and the high explosive | 0:40:27 | 0:40:31 | |
'are all encased in one shell.' | 0:40:31 | 0:40:33 | |
But at Jutland, cordite was added to the shell in the gun turret. | 0:40:34 | 0:40:38 | |
Four big bags for every shot. | 0:40:38 | 0:40:42 | |
-That's incredibly dangerous. -Yeah, very dangerous. | 0:40:42 | 0:40:44 | |
I'll put that back. So on a big battleship in Jutland, | 0:40:44 | 0:40:48 | |
they'd have had hundreds, over 1,000 shells. | 0:40:48 | 0:40:50 | |
Over 1,000, I would say, yeah. | 0:40:50 | 0:40:52 | |
Also you'd be trying to get shells and the cordite to the gun | 0:40:52 | 0:40:54 | |
-as quickly as possible. -Yeah. | 0:40:54 | 0:40:56 | |
Perhaps it's not as safe as it could have been. | 0:40:56 | 0:40:58 | |
The high rate of fire meant a constant supply of shells | 0:40:58 | 0:41:02 | |
and bags of cordite had to be kept ready in the confined space | 0:41:02 | 0:41:05 | |
of the gun turret. | 0:41:05 | 0:41:08 | |
Magazine doors were propped open to speed up the process. | 0:41:08 | 0:41:12 | |
'Royal Navy crews were bypassing safety procedures | 0:41:18 | 0:41:22 | |
'to achieve the high rates of fire being asked of them. | 0:41:22 | 0:41:25 | |
'It sounds highly risky and I want to find out | 0:41:25 | 0:41:28 | |
'what the consequences could have been. | 0:41:28 | 0:41:30 | |
'We're at Cranfield University's weapons testing range, | 0:41:30 | 0:41:34 | |
'on Salisbury Plain.' | 0:41:34 | 0:41:35 | |
I guess, I mean, that's what's so fascinating about Jutland | 0:41:35 | 0:41:38 | |
is how those big ships blew up. | 0:41:38 | 0:41:39 | |
There's plenty of potential, they were crammed with high explosives. | 0:41:39 | 0:41:42 | |
We know there were massive explosions on board. | 0:41:42 | 0:41:45 | |
What we don't know is whether cordite played a role | 0:41:45 | 0:41:48 | |
in sending those ships to the bottom of the sea. | 0:41:48 | 0:41:51 | |
We're meeting explosives expert, Trevor Laurence. | 0:41:53 | 0:41:57 | |
OK, so what we've got here is a modern-day equivalent of cordite. | 0:41:57 | 0:42:00 | |
So would it have been in this kind of form, then? | 0:42:00 | 0:42:03 | |
Yes, this is a typical way that you would keep a gun propellant, | 0:42:03 | 0:42:05 | |
in this sort of stick form inside these bag charges. | 0:42:05 | 0:42:08 | |
If I put a match to that, what would happen? | 0:42:08 | 0:42:11 | |
Standby. Three, two, one, firing. | 0:42:11 | 0:42:15 | |
Set alight in open air, cordite produces a flame | 0:42:18 | 0:42:21 | |
that seems easy to control. | 0:42:21 | 0:42:22 | |
-OK. -Lot of smoke. -Yes, indeed. -Yeah! | 0:42:22 | 0:42:25 | |
But as you can see, that burned really slowly. | 0:42:25 | 0:42:28 | |
Especially in explosive terms. | 0:42:28 | 0:42:30 | |
Now Trevor is setting light to the same amount of propellant, | 0:42:30 | 0:42:34 | |
but enclosed in a metal ammunition box. | 0:42:34 | 0:42:37 | |
Firing... | 0:42:38 | 0:42:39 | |
Confined in a box or a gun barrel, | 0:42:42 | 0:42:44 | |
the cordite behaves very differently. | 0:42:44 | 0:42:46 | |
It explodes. | 0:42:46 | 0:42:47 | |
So those three little bags did this kind of damage. | 0:42:49 | 0:42:52 | |
Indeed, and that's all because we confined it. | 0:42:52 | 0:42:54 | |
There's a big pressure build-up inside there. | 0:42:54 | 0:42:56 | |
When that happens, it become strong enough | 0:42:56 | 0:42:58 | |
that it overcomes the confinement and it vents. | 0:42:58 | 0:43:01 | |
-The lid blew off. -Exactly. | 0:43:01 | 0:43:03 | |
At Jutland, there were hundreds of big sacks of cordite. | 0:43:05 | 0:43:09 | |
But most of them were down in the magazine, | 0:43:09 | 0:43:11 | |
protected by the ship's armour from anything but a direct hit. | 0:43:11 | 0:43:14 | |
So now we've built a mini version of that part of the ship, | 0:43:20 | 0:43:22 | |
along with a gun turret, | 0:43:22 | 0:43:24 | |
to try and find out what might have happened in the battle. | 0:43:24 | 0:43:28 | |
Right, Trevor, there's our battleship. | 0:43:28 | 0:43:30 | |
-There it is. Ready to go. -A gun turret and magazine. | 0:43:30 | 0:43:33 | |
So I've got a cross-section of the Queen Mary here. | 0:43:37 | 0:43:39 | |
OK. Right. | 0:43:39 | 0:43:41 | |
So basically a slice, straight down the middle. | 0:43:41 | 0:43:44 | |
So this represents the gun turret, | 0:43:44 | 0:43:46 | |
where there would be a small amount of propellant ready for use there. | 0:43:46 | 0:43:50 | |
-So that's that bit on the drawing. -That's it up here, exactly. | 0:43:50 | 0:43:53 | |
This represents our revolving hoist, | 0:43:53 | 0:43:55 | |
which is the link between the gun turret and the magazines | 0:43:55 | 0:43:58 | |
that store the main amount of propellant. | 0:43:58 | 0:43:59 | |
So the Queen Mary's magazines | 0:43:59 | 0:44:01 | |
would have been absolutely stuffed with high explosives. | 0:44:01 | 0:44:03 | |
Yeah, exactly. They're going into a major battle. | 0:44:03 | 0:44:06 | |
We're going to load our makeshift magazine | 0:44:10 | 0:44:12 | |
just like the ships at Jutland. | 0:44:12 | 0:44:13 | |
So Trevor, how much are we putting in here? | 0:44:13 | 0:44:15 | |
We're putting about 30kg of propellant in the main container. | 0:44:15 | 0:44:20 | |
We need to save six of these, | 0:44:20 | 0:44:21 | |
cos they're going to go into the turret box. | 0:44:21 | 0:44:24 | |
We're mimicking the conditions at Jutland as closely as possible. | 0:44:26 | 0:44:30 | |
The cordite in the gun house | 0:44:30 | 0:44:32 | |
and the doors to the deep magazine left open. | 0:44:32 | 0:44:35 | |
-So propellant in the gun turrets. -OK. | 0:44:35 | 0:44:37 | |
The lift is open. | 0:44:37 | 0:44:39 | |
And the magazines are stashed. | 0:44:39 | 0:44:42 | |
OK, we're all good to go, then. | 0:44:42 | 0:44:44 | |
Now Trevor's going to set light to the propellant, | 0:44:45 | 0:44:48 | |
just in the top compartment, to simulate a hit on the gun turret. | 0:44:48 | 0:44:52 | |
-OVER RADIO: -'Roger. Ready.' | 0:44:52 | 0:44:54 | |
OK, Shini. I'm getting nervous here. | 0:44:54 | 0:44:57 | |
Firing in three, two, one. Firing. | 0:44:57 | 0:45:02 | |
Whoa! | 0:45:12 | 0:45:15 | |
It's blown it up. | 0:45:15 | 0:45:16 | |
-That would sink a ship, wouldn't it? -Yeah. | 0:45:16 | 0:45:19 | |
Structural damage. | 0:45:19 | 0:45:20 | |
The range's slow-motion cameras show how quickly the fire spreads | 0:45:22 | 0:45:25 | |
from the smaller to the larger compartment. | 0:45:25 | 0:45:28 | |
You can clearly see the flash travelling down from our gun turret | 0:45:28 | 0:45:32 | |
down into the magazine. | 0:45:32 | 0:45:34 | |
Such is the power of the explosion up in the turret, | 0:45:34 | 0:45:36 | |
it can just drive it down into the hull of the ship. | 0:45:36 | 0:45:39 | |
It's got nowhere else to go. | 0:45:39 | 0:45:41 | |
-So it's taking the path of least resistance. -Exactly. | 0:45:41 | 0:45:44 | |
So it's had to vent out the best move it's got, which is | 0:45:44 | 0:45:47 | |
down into the magazine, the last place you'd want it to be going. | 0:45:47 | 0:45:50 | |
In the heat of the battle, | 0:45:52 | 0:45:53 | |
if the cordite stacked in the armoured turrets was set alight, | 0:45:53 | 0:45:56 | |
the pressure would have forced a flash fire down the shaft | 0:45:56 | 0:46:00 | |
into the magazine below, packed full of high explosive. | 0:46:00 | 0:46:03 | |
That build-up of pressure has bowed the whole thing, | 0:46:09 | 0:46:12 | |
-and it's started to fail along that seam here. -Yeah. | 0:46:12 | 0:46:15 | |
And it has effectively ripped this in half down either side, | 0:46:15 | 0:46:19 | |
which is exactly what happened to those battle crews at Jutland. | 0:46:19 | 0:46:22 | |
Exactly. If it had been a little bit more highly confined, | 0:46:22 | 0:46:25 | |
then it would have torn the whole thing apart. | 0:46:25 | 0:46:27 | |
At Jutland, the ship's armour | 0:46:29 | 0:46:30 | |
would only have increased the force of the explosion. | 0:46:30 | 0:46:33 | |
And when you think of those battle cruisers, | 0:46:33 | 0:46:36 | |
how armoured they were, | 0:46:36 | 0:46:37 | |
I mean, they were just solid metal boxes. | 0:46:37 | 0:46:40 | |
It's interesting to think that the armour that was put on the outside | 0:46:40 | 0:46:43 | |
to protect from the outside threat | 0:46:43 | 0:46:44 | |
actually made the internal event that much worse. | 0:46:44 | 0:46:47 | |
The commanders had put firepower before safety. | 0:46:50 | 0:46:53 | |
Bags of cordite stacked in the gun turret, | 0:46:55 | 0:46:57 | |
some split in the haste to reload. | 0:46:57 | 0:47:00 | |
Magazine doors propped open, against safety procedure. | 0:47:00 | 0:47:04 | |
All created the perfect conditions for a catastrophic explosion. | 0:47:04 | 0:47:09 | |
Far from being destroyed by the might of the German onslaught, | 0:47:12 | 0:47:15 | |
it's likely that the biggest British ships at Jutland sank | 0:47:15 | 0:47:19 | |
because of their own unsafe practices. | 0:47:19 | 0:47:22 | |
The result was a death toll of more than 6,000 men. | 0:47:22 | 0:47:26 | |
-NICK: -Such large numbers of deaths can be hard to grasp, | 0:47:32 | 0:47:36 | |
so for my exhibition I've been meeting relatives of those | 0:47:36 | 0:47:39 | |
who died at Jutland to get a sense of what individual men went through. | 0:47:39 | 0:47:44 | |
-Well, here are the two brothers. -Yeah. | 0:47:44 | 0:47:47 | |
And this is Archie, my uncle. | 0:47:47 | 0:47:51 | |
And this is my father, Bertie. | 0:47:51 | 0:47:53 | |
They look so serious, don't they? | 0:47:53 | 0:47:55 | |
Bertie survived, and Archie was a casualty of Queen Mary. | 0:47:55 | 0:48:00 | |
'Elizabeth Dickson lost her uncle | 0:48:00 | 0:48:02 | |
'to one of the battle's devastating explosions. | 0:48:02 | 0:48:05 | |
'Archie had followed his brother Bertie into the navy.' | 0:48:05 | 0:48:09 | |
-He was just 16. -16? | 0:48:09 | 0:48:11 | |
Yes, very young, and Dad was maybe just 18. | 0:48:11 | 0:48:15 | |
And he discovered about the death of his brother | 0:48:15 | 0:48:20 | |
when he was looking through the periscope, you know, | 0:48:20 | 0:48:23 | |
expecting to see Queen Mary. | 0:48:23 | 0:48:24 | |
And he knows at that point that his brother's gone. | 0:48:24 | 0:48:27 | |
I must show you this. | 0:48:29 | 0:48:30 | |
'Every bereaved family was sent a commemorative plaque.' | 0:48:30 | 0:48:35 | |
There's Britannia and this big lion. | 0:48:35 | 0:48:37 | |
-Yours is obviously much-loved and cherished. -Yes. | 0:48:37 | 0:48:40 | |
But some families really resented receiving this | 0:48:40 | 0:48:42 | |
as some sort of compensation for a lost child. | 0:48:42 | 0:48:46 | |
'Letters reveal the pain of losing a son.' | 0:48:48 | 0:48:51 | |
-These are your grandmother's... -Yes. -..letters to Bertie. | 0:48:51 | 0:48:54 | |
How poignant is that? "My dearest and only boy." | 0:48:54 | 0:48:57 | |
-"My dearest and only boy." -He wasn't the only boy, was he, | 0:48:57 | 0:48:59 | |
-until the Battle Of Jutland. -No. | 0:48:59 | 0:49:01 | |
"We can't tell each other in writing what we are feeling today. | 0:49:01 | 0:49:06 | |
"My world was divided into three parts. | 0:49:06 | 0:49:11 | |
"And a third has crumbled away." | 0:49:11 | 0:49:13 | |
Goodness. Absolutely heartbreaking, isn't it? Isn't it? | 0:49:13 | 0:49:16 | |
Archie's mother, Kathleen, was desperate to find out | 0:49:18 | 0:49:21 | |
how her son died. | 0:49:21 | 0:49:23 | |
There were only 18 survivors of the Queen Mary. | 0:49:23 | 0:49:26 | |
Jocelyn Storey is one of them, and they started up a correspondence. | 0:49:28 | 0:49:32 | |
He had to convey which appalling fate Archie suffered, | 0:49:32 | 0:49:37 | |
whether he was burned to death in this turret. | 0:49:37 | 0:49:41 | |
There's another survivor, Humphrey Durrent. | 0:49:41 | 0:49:45 | |
She goes to see him in hospital, | 0:49:46 | 0:49:49 | |
and she says, "He was just able to speak to me." | 0:49:49 | 0:49:54 | |
And he died about five days later. | 0:49:54 | 0:49:56 | |
Kathleen questioned why Archie and so many others had to die. | 0:49:58 | 0:50:02 | |
My grandmother was not someone given to anger, | 0:50:02 | 0:50:05 | |
but she did say about Admiral Beatty and his tactics, | 0:50:05 | 0:50:12 | |
"For no other reason than to demonstrate British pluck, | 0:50:12 | 0:50:16 | |
"he would deserve to be shot." | 0:50:16 | 0:50:19 | |
Goodness. | 0:50:19 | 0:50:20 | |
And this is because she believed that Archie would be still with her | 0:50:20 | 0:50:25 | |
if the strategy hadn't followed the lines that it did. | 0:50:25 | 0:50:29 | |
And therefore, she speaks for so many other women. | 0:50:29 | 0:50:33 | |
The explosion on the Queen Mary, | 0:50:37 | 0:50:39 | |
probably caused by the mishandling of cordite, | 0:50:39 | 0:50:42 | |
left more than 1,000 families | 0:50:42 | 0:50:44 | |
with no grave to visit to mourn their loved ones. | 0:50:44 | 0:50:47 | |
And little or no information about how they had died. | 0:50:47 | 0:50:51 | |
Just after the Queen Mary sank so catastrophically, | 0:51:02 | 0:51:05 | |
Beatty turned his battered battle cruisers north, | 0:51:05 | 0:51:08 | |
leading the German High Seas Fleet | 0:51:08 | 0:51:11 | |
straight into the path of Admiral Jellicoe's Grand Fleet. | 0:51:11 | 0:51:14 | |
Now the navies went head-to-head. | 0:51:16 | 0:51:18 | |
Two more big British ships, Defence and Invincible, | 0:51:18 | 0:51:22 | |
sank following gigantic explosions. | 0:51:22 | 0:51:24 | |
By the end of the battle, | 0:51:26 | 0:51:28 | |
Britain had lost a total of 14 ships, while Germany had lost 11. | 0:51:28 | 0:51:33 | |
6,094 British sailors had died, and 2,551 German. | 0:51:33 | 0:51:39 | |
But the might of Jellicoe's Grand Fleet, once it joined the battle, | 0:51:41 | 0:51:45 | |
was too much for the Germans. | 0:51:45 | 0:51:47 | |
Under cover of darkness, their High Seas Fleet fled back to port | 0:51:47 | 0:51:52 | |
and never challenged the British again for the rest of the war. | 0:51:52 | 0:51:55 | |
"We steamed over the scene of the action. | 0:51:57 | 0:52:00 | |
"We passed masses of floating wreckage, spars, ditty boxes, | 0:52:00 | 0:52:04 | |
"fragments of lifeboats and many bodies. | 0:52:04 | 0:52:07 | |
"After steaming about this gruesome locality, | 0:52:08 | 0:52:11 | |
"the scene of many triumphs and losses, for many hours, | 0:52:11 | 0:52:15 | |
"we shaped course for home." | 0:52:15 | 0:52:17 | |
Despite the German retreat, | 0:52:20 | 0:52:22 | |
in Britain, because of the huge loss of life, | 0:52:22 | 0:52:25 | |
Jutland was viewed by many as a humiliating defeat. | 0:52:25 | 0:52:29 | |
And an irrelevant sideshow to the war on land. | 0:52:29 | 0:52:32 | |
But I think there's another way of judging | 0:52:34 | 0:52:37 | |
the importance of the Battle Of Jutland. | 0:52:37 | 0:52:39 | |
The Royal Navy's key objective | 0:52:40 | 0:52:42 | |
was to enforce a blockade of the North Sea, | 0:52:42 | 0:52:45 | |
Germany's only shipping route. | 0:52:45 | 0:52:47 | |
Blocking it stopped vital resources from reaching them. | 0:52:47 | 0:52:51 | |
And, despite British losses at Jutland, the blockade stood firm. | 0:52:52 | 0:52:57 | |
At the Imperial War Museum, | 0:52:58 | 0:53:00 | |
curator Ian Kikuchi has a collection of artefacts | 0:53:00 | 0:53:03 | |
that give clues about how effective it was. | 0:53:03 | 0:53:06 | |
So this first object is actually a pair of wartime bloomers. | 0:53:06 | 0:53:12 | |
Bloomers? | 0:53:12 | 0:53:13 | |
They're actually made of woven paper. | 0:53:13 | 0:53:16 | |
So they have no cotton. | 0:53:16 | 0:53:17 | |
This is the blockade really starting to bite them. | 0:53:17 | 0:53:20 | |
This is a roll of lace that's been cut up for use as a bandage. | 0:53:20 | 0:53:25 | |
So this is basically lace from clothing? | 0:53:25 | 0:53:27 | |
Clothing or possibly curtains or something like that. | 0:53:27 | 0:53:30 | |
That's not going to go down very well at home. | 0:53:30 | 0:53:32 | |
-If you were asked to sacrifice your curtains... -Yes. | 0:53:32 | 0:53:34 | |
..you know things aren't going well. | 0:53:34 | 0:53:36 | |
'German propaganda posters hold more evidence | 0:53:36 | 0:53:40 | |
'of how resources were running thin.' | 0:53:40 | 0:53:43 | |
So this is a poster for a product called He-Ka, | 0:53:43 | 0:53:45 | |
which was a kind of Fleischersatz, a meat substitute. | 0:53:45 | 0:53:48 | |
Yeast and potato soup. | 0:53:48 | 0:53:50 | |
Sounds absolutely disgusting. | 0:53:50 | 0:53:52 | |
So this is a society that's starting to run out of food. | 0:53:52 | 0:53:55 | |
Yes, this is... By this point the blockade is being called | 0:53:55 | 0:53:58 | |
the hunger blockade, it's causing hunger in Germany. | 0:53:58 | 0:54:01 | |
It's masking a really quite desperate situation. | 0:54:01 | 0:54:04 | |
It's hard to gauge just how desperate things became in Germany, | 0:54:04 | 0:54:09 | |
because most of our information comes from government propaganda. | 0:54:09 | 0:54:12 | |
So this is presented as the impact of blockade on Germany. | 0:54:12 | 0:54:17 | |
And we've got five children, five brothers. | 0:54:17 | 0:54:20 | |
'The numbers they carry are their ages.' | 0:54:20 | 0:54:23 | |
Now they're going to bring out two normal children. | 0:54:23 | 0:54:26 | |
Two normal children. Here you are, significantly bigger. | 0:54:26 | 0:54:28 | |
-I mean, that's pretty dramatic. -Yeah, it's really sad. | 0:54:28 | 0:54:31 | |
-So this is malnutrition. -Yeah. | 0:54:31 | 0:54:34 | |
'Dr Mary Cox, a historian at Oxford University, | 0:54:34 | 0:54:37 | |
'was looking for reliable evidence | 0:54:37 | 0:54:39 | |
'to measure how the blockade affected German health. | 0:54:39 | 0:54:42 | |
'She came across a rare book | 0:54:44 | 0:54:46 | |
'which revealed the true extent | 0:54:46 | 0:54:47 | |
'of the deprivation children had suffered.' | 0:54:47 | 0:54:50 | |
Somebody collected the heights and weights of schoolchildren | 0:54:50 | 0:54:53 | |
from different schools across the country. | 0:54:53 | 0:54:55 | |
We have records for 23 different cities. | 0:54:55 | 0:54:58 | |
Almost 600,000 schoolchildren. | 0:54:58 | 0:55:01 | |
If deprivation is of long enough duration, and severe enough, | 0:55:01 | 0:55:04 | |
we would expect that it would change the growth patterns of children. | 0:55:04 | 0:55:07 | |
OK. 64 thousand dollar question is, does it? | 0:55:07 | 0:55:10 | |
-Yes, yeah. -OK. | 0:55:10 | 0:55:11 | |
So here, in this column we have the age of the child. | 0:55:11 | 0:55:15 | |
-Yeah. -And then the mean height for specific years. | 0:55:15 | 0:55:19 | |
So if we look at 6½- to 7-year-old children, | 0:55:19 | 0:55:21 | |
the mean height of children that age in 1913 was 115 centimetres. | 0:55:21 | 0:55:26 | |
-OK. -And if you look from 1915 to 1916, it goes to 114 then 113. | 0:55:26 | 0:55:30 | |
OK. It's dramatic, isn't it? | 0:55:30 | 0:55:32 | |
What we're seeing just here, in this small example, | 0:55:32 | 0:55:35 | |
just in a matter of couple of years, they're two centimetres smaller. | 0:55:35 | 0:55:39 | |
'There's evidence of a sharp decline after the Battle Of Jutland.' | 0:55:39 | 0:55:43 | |
So in particular the winter of 1916-1917 | 0:55:43 | 0:55:46 | |
is known as the "turnip winter". | 0:55:46 | 0:55:48 | |
Turnips were a foodstuff that were primarily eaten by pigs. | 0:55:48 | 0:55:52 | |
-OK. -But people in Germany were so hungry that they were... | 0:55:52 | 0:55:54 | |
-Being forced to eat pig food. -Yeah. | 0:55:54 | 0:55:56 | |
So this is a letter written in Essen in August 1917. | 0:55:56 | 0:56:00 | |
This woman is writing a letter to her husband, | 0:56:00 | 0:56:03 | |
and she comments on their daughter, Erica. | 0:56:03 | 0:56:05 | |
"Erica loses more and more weight and looks bad. | 0:56:05 | 0:56:08 | |
"She's no longer the healthy, strong child of whom we were so proud. | 0:56:08 | 0:56:12 | |
"In the last six months, we've just had too little fat in the food. | 0:56:12 | 0:56:16 | |
"This winter will be even worse. | 0:56:16 | 0:56:18 | |
"You ought to hear her whine for buttered bread." | 0:56:18 | 0:56:20 | |
So this blockade is effective | 0:56:20 | 0:56:23 | |
and it's being waged against the civilian population. | 0:56:23 | 0:56:26 | |
The blockade was also affecting German troops on the front line. | 0:56:27 | 0:56:31 | |
And, however unacceptable we find it today, | 0:56:31 | 0:56:34 | |
starving people of resources and food | 0:56:34 | 0:56:37 | |
was a vital weapon in winning the war. | 0:56:37 | 0:56:39 | |
Jutland showed the Germans they couldn't break the blockade | 0:56:41 | 0:56:45 | |
by going head-to-head with the Royal Navy, | 0:56:45 | 0:56:47 | |
and they never risked it again. | 0:56:47 | 0:56:50 | |
The Battle Of Jutland was certainly no glorious victory. | 0:56:54 | 0:56:57 | |
But here in Trafalgar Square, in the shadow of Nelson's Column, | 0:56:58 | 0:57:02 | |
the British admirals at Jutland have a place of honour. | 0:57:02 | 0:57:06 | |
Statues of Jellicoe and Beatty | 0:57:06 | 0:57:09 | |
are testament to its significance to the First World War. | 0:57:09 | 0:57:12 | |
And the fountains are also dedicated to their memory. | 0:57:12 | 0:57:16 | |
The reality is that we won that war | 0:57:17 | 0:57:19 | |
because of the pressure of naval power, | 0:57:19 | 0:57:22 | |
and Jutland was the key victory. | 0:57:22 | 0:57:25 | |
That victory ensured that Britain would not be defeated | 0:57:25 | 0:57:28 | |
and that Germany ultimately would be defeated. | 0:57:28 | 0:57:30 | |
And therefore I see it as the most important battle | 0:57:30 | 0:57:33 | |
that Britain fought in the First World War. | 0:57:33 | 0:57:35 | |
But that was small comfort for the families of the thousands of men | 0:57:37 | 0:57:41 | |
who died in the grey wastes of a cold ocean, far from home. | 0:57:41 | 0:57:46 | |
Families that had no grave to visit | 0:57:46 | 0:57:48 | |
and just a small bronze plaque to record their loss. | 0:57:48 | 0:57:51 | |
Many of those that died were so young, like Archie Dickson, | 0:57:51 | 0:57:56 | |
and Leonard Kilburn, barely out of childhood. | 0:57:56 | 0:57:59 | |
We can now better understand | 0:58:01 | 0:58:03 | |
why there was such a huge loss of life on that spring day. | 0:58:03 | 0:58:06 | |
Why some of the Royal Navy's newest ships sank so quickly. | 0:58:07 | 0:58:10 | |
And how that could have been avoided. | 0:58:12 | 0:58:14 | |
But, after 100 years, perhaps it's time to recognise | 0:58:17 | 0:58:20 | |
the true importance of the Battle Of Jutland, | 0:58:20 | 0:58:23 | |
a last great and terrible clash of battleships, | 0:58:23 | 0:58:27 | |
a battle which ultimately led to Allied victory | 0:58:27 | 0:58:30 | |
in the First World War. | 0:58:30 | 0:58:33 |