The Dreadnoughts of Scapa Flow War at Sea: Scotland's Story

Eight miles north of the Scottish mainland lies the island of Hoy.

The south east corner of the Orkney Islands.

Five days before Britain declared war,

this remote community was already on red alert.

In the early hours of July 30th 1914,

ten soldiers from the Orkney Garrison were dispatched here,

the tiny village of Rackwick.

Orkney was to be placed under direct military rule.

These ten soldiers were on a mission of national importance.

They were to take immediate control of the telegraph station.

The one vital link between the Admiralty in London

and Orkney's great natural harbour.

Scapa Flow.

Scapa was to become the base

of the most powerful fighting force in all history.

The British Grand Fleet.

Already, the great ships, the mighty dreadnoughts of the Royal Navy,

had left Portsmouth en route to Orkney.

Their role was crucial, protecting vital British cargos,

and protecting Britain from invasion.

Command of the sea was something Britain just could not lose.

Lose command of the sea, we've had it.

What was to follow was a naval war of industrialised superpowers,

a war of terrifying technologies.

Between two sides separated by one savage body of water.

The North Sea.

For the Royal Navy, this would be a war like none before.

Fighting a new enemy, with new weaponry,

from a new, Scottish base.

VOICES OVER RADIO

The Northern Hemisphere's greatest natural harbour. Scapa Flow.

You've got 120 miles of water ringed by beautiful islands.

For centuries, ships had come here,

seeking shelter from the vicious waters

where the Atlantic meets the North Sea.

To a harbour said to be big enough for all the ships

of all the navies of all the world.

To a place forever linked to the great ships of the Great War.

On the last day of July 1914, in broad daylight,

the entire fleet sailed through that narrow channel -

and into Scapa Flow.

This was a fighting force of more than 40,000 men.

In charge of that force was Admiral George Callaghan.

But he would not remain so for long.

Two days after the fleet arrived at Scapa Flow, Callaghan's friend

and second in command, Admiral John Jellicoe, arrived from London.

And 48 hours later, on the very day Britain declared war,

Jellicoe opened a letter from First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill.

A letter that appointed Jellicoe commander in chief.

He was due to succeed Sir George Callaghan

in two and a half months anyway.

So it was only bringing it ahead by a matter of weeks, you might say.

And Callaghan was aware of this?

No, it came as a bit of a shock.

You have to think of this in the context of a new Trafalgar

was expected daily, right at the beginning.

And Callaghan kind of assumes that he would be leading

the fleet that he had trained into the new Trafalgar.

Jellicoe, what was his leadership style?

I would say the only Nelsonic aspect to Jellicoe's character

was the rapport he had with his men. He was very good at names and faces.

He knew every job on board.

If you were painting a bulkhead, he would come along and talk to you

about it and say, this is a better way to do it,

and he would probably know your name.

He was very nervous of his command,

because he now commanded, in the Grand Fleet,

pretty much the whole of the Royal Navy's fleet capability

and Jellicoe, as Churchill said, cleverly,

was the only man who could lose the war in an afternoon.

That burdened Jellicoe - he didn't carry his responsibility lightly.

Jellicoe had been promoted to a position

of immense national responsibility.

The Royal Navy had long been the figurehead

of Britain's imperial might.

But in the first years of the 20th century,

this was a fighting force on the cusp of change.

Coming to terms with a new balance of world power.

You could say that the navy was in the process of shifting its gaze.

Before the 20th century, the traditional enemies

were across the channel - France and also Spain,

but by the First World War, the navy was looking at a new threat -

the gathering naval power of Germany across the North Sea

in Wilhelmshaven and Kiel, so you have bases becoming more important

in Dover, in Harwich, in Rosyth, in Cromarty in Scotland,

and in Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands.

So in a sense, this was an institution,

-the Royal Navy, in transition?

-Yes.

Going from low-tech to high-tech. How did they cope with that?

It was a very complex time.

The Royal Navy in the First World War - you still have sailors mopping

the decks, you still have a daily issue of rum,

you still have men sleeping in hammocks,

but at the same time, it's at the forefront of a whole host

of technologies - long range gunnery, torpedoes,

aircraft, submarines.

We have the institution, the Royal Navy, now based in Scapa, we have the men -

do we have the ships to win the war?

Well, Britain was the pre-eminent naval power of the period

so if Britain didn't have the ships, no-one did.

In 1906 HMS Dreadnought was launched,

which was the first of a new series of all big gun battleships

and because Britain also had the industrial might,

it was possible to drive these into production with great speed

so that the British had more ships than the Germans

at the start of the war and continued to outbuild them during it.

Before and during the Great War, Britain built 35 dreadnoughts.

But to see one today, I've had to come to the USA.

This is the only world's only remaining dreadnought-type battleship - the USS Texas.

Now a museum piece, she was built in Virginia to a very British design.

I grew up around ships, I've made films about them,

but this is the most deadly and awe-inspiring ship I've ever experienced.

It's something cooked up in the imagination of HG Wells.

Even the name says it. She's a dreadnought.

And the sight of one of these coming over the horizon towards you

must have sent a shiver of fear down the spine of every seaman.

And in her day, she was quite simply the most powerful weapon of war

ever conceived and built by man.

Well, the dreadnought was a great leap forward,

it was the space shuttle of its time.

All big guns,

they had the main calibre main battery

which made gunfire so much easier.

They unleashed devastation.

You would launch a ton, half a ton,

projectile, ten, 15 miles.

When it hit its target, it left a hole the size of a tennis court,

so times ten, it's just unfathomable,

the amount of destructive force these ships could unleash on a target.

They were also heavily armoured and faster,

so the HMS Dreadnought, when it was launched

had a turbine engine which was a lot faster

than the previous engines and it was a technological leap forward,

and made these ships like the dreadnought, to their namesake -

they feared nothing, they dread not.

That power came at a price.

Each dreadnought cost the British treasury around £2 million.

In today's terms,

Admiral Jellicoe's 1914 Dreadnought Fleet cost over £4 billion.

Yet the dreadnoughts were considered essential

to maintaining the supremacy of Britain and her Empire.

The purpose of dreadnoughts was to find an answer,

a technical answer, to Britain's increasing numerical threat,

by other industrialising nations. France, Russia, Germany, America.

Britannia was still supreme but no longer head and shoulders supreme.

So dreadnought was this fantastic technical ploy

to trump Britain's competitors.

That day at Scapa Flow, when Admiral Jellicoe opened the envelope

that promoted him to commander of the British Grand Fleet,

he had 21 dreadnought battleships.

His opposite number, the German Admiral Ingenohl, had 13.

But as he took command, Jellicoe's first concern wasn't

how to sink those German ships. It was how to protect his own.

A new danger had emerged from under the waves.

The German Navy's fleet of ocean-going U-boats.

And in the seas off Scotland's south east coast,

just one month into the war, the U-boats claimed a famous victory.

17 years before he would write Brave New World,

the 20-year-old Aldous Huxley

was on holiday in the village of St Abbs, just north of Berwick.

He stayed with family here at Northfield House.

On the afternoon of the 5th of September 1914,

he heard a tremendous noise...

LOUD ECHOING BANG

..the sound of a torpedo exploding in the magazine

of the British light cruiser HMS Pathfinder.

The torpedo had been fired by the U-boat U-21,

which had, that moment, become the first German submarine

to sink a British warship.

250 British sailors were killed.

In a letter to his father dated nine days later,

Huxley described the scene.

He called the explosion...

"A great white cloud with its foot in the sea.

"The St Abbs lifeboat came in

"with the most appalling account of the scene.

"They brought in a sailor's cap with half a man's head inside."

At Scapa Flow, Admiral Jellicoe was shocked to discover

that his new base was wide open to submarine attack.

A solution had to be found that would allow the fleet

to move freely whilst keeping the U-boats out.

In 1914, German submarines could carry and fire six torpedoes.

A single U-boat could potentially devastate Jellicoe's fleet.

Well, that essentially was Jellicoe's worst nightmare.

when he arrived here

and found that he'd brought

his surface fleet to a place

that had no defences to speak of

against a submarine or anything else.

And that's why he took his Grand Fleet on a tour

-round the Western Isles and Northern Ireland...

-Absolutely.

He spent the first months -

in fact, the first year - of the war

virtually steaming up and down the west coast of Scotland,

down to Northern Ireland and back again,

until they were able to get the main fleet base

into some defensive order.

In November 1914, the Royal Navy began to close off

the narrow channels leading from the open sea into Scapa Flow...

..with deliberately scuttled ships -

blockships.

The schooner Reginald was built in Govan in 1878...

..and sacrificed in 1914.

So, they got these blockships on this side of the flow

within the first few months of the war.

By the end of 1914, we had 17 of these in position

and another six at the north end.

They were strung together

so that they weren't just isolated hulks.

There would be a net between them

that would stretch right across, from shore to shore,

so that they were actually... It's like a big chain.

So even if there were little gaps between the sunken ships,

they were netted to make sure...

They were netted to make sure.

They did a report on them

within a year of dropping them in the first place,

in September 1915,

and they described this one as "likely to last".

THEY CHUCKLE

Well, they were proven right.

All aboard the Reginald.

It's great. Touching a 100-year-old wreck -

a ship that was built in 1878 in Glasgow...

..and now it's a rusting hulk.

And you can actually peel layers of the iron off...

All the rolled iron is just splitting.

-At least she went down with no hands on board, eh?

-Absolutely.

The blockships were the perfect way

to keep U-boats out of Scapa Flow's narrow inlets.

But the main southern entrance, Hoxa Sound,

was a mile and a half wide.

It was the Grand Fleet's main entry and exit point.

It called for an altogether different solution.

Hoxa Sound was the key to the security of Scapa Flow.

It is the most vital waterway in this whole system.

This is a coast battery.

It's one of 13 coast batteries that were built in Orkney,

and its job is to act as the shore defences.

There were guns emplaced here to cover the anti-submarine booms,

which are like big net curtains

that are strung across these channels.

The booms had gates which would be opened for friendly ships,

and the gates were operated by small boats that would sit,

that would just be on station all the time.

The booms and batteries were in place by early 1915.

With the blockships closing access to smaller channels,

Jellicoe could end his Hebridean cruises

and safely anchor his warships.

His growing fleet of dreadnoughts,

his high-speed battlecruisers,

the hunter-killers...

and his smaller ships - the nimble destroyers and long-range cruisers.

Like this - HMS Caroline.

Docked in Belfast,

she's the only ship from Jellicoe's fleet still afloat.

And deep inside, it's still possible to get a sense of life on board

during the Great War.

You know, it's quite amazing...

We're in the engine room.

There are two massive steam turbines here

and two in the forward chamber

with a great steam condenser in the middle.

If you can just imagine being down here

as one of the men who worked in the engine room -

the noise, the vibration, the heat.

They must have been continually pouring with sweat.

There's one place on HMS Caroline

that must have been particularly terrifying.

In battle, the emergency steering compartment would be used

to manoeuvre the ship...

when everything else had been blown apart.

Eight to ten men would be down in this chamber,

with the hatch locked, following orders that came down from above.

You can imagine the sheer, SHEER power needed

to turn these gigantic wheels in this massive ship.

Being trapped down here in the heat of battle,

rocking and rolling,

and the blasts from shells, torpedoes...

It wouldn't be a pleasant place to be,

and then suddenly, you could be sinking to the bottom,

trapped in a cage of steel.

The men on board these ships

had come from Britain's bustling naval towns -

Portsmouth, Plymouth and Chatham.

Some as young as 14.

Most had signed up for 12 years.

Over 40,000 of them.

They came to a remote, windswept place of farmers and fishermen...

and outnumbered the local population by almost two to one.

It took the island and turned it upside down and shook it.

It must have done. So, how did the locals react?

Was it a positive reaction?

Well, you have to remember, I suppose,

that society was very different in those days,

and if you were helping the fleet,

then you were doing your part for the country, you know?

There was that kind of patriotism,

which you might not necessarily get these days.

But...I have to say, though,

it was lucrative.

Farming was in decline on the run up to World War I,

and then, suddenly, there's, like, a small city

floating in the middle of the islands...

-and needing to be fed.

-And they need to be fed and watered.

For Orkney's tenant farmers,

selling produce directly to the navy

was a new and welcome form of income.

This was the first opportunity they had

to have real money in their pockets,

that they could spend

on whatever they wished.

That's quite a dramatic difference, isn't it?

Oh, it was very liberating.

What about the social exchange between people?

Did much of that go on?

Recreation was provided on shore for a lot of the fleet,

and there was dances and concerts,

and land was requisitioned for turning into football pitches.

The fleet's main recreation centre was on the tiny island of Flotta,

now dominated by an oil terminal.

A hundred years ago,

King George faced Admiral Jellicoe on Flotta's improvised golf course.

But not all activities were quite so distinguished.

The navy catered to all tastes.

They organised boxing matches...

And, I mean, these things were massive.

They were fleet boxing matches,

so you were fighting for the honour of your ship.

And there is a photograph of it...

-and it's just... I mean, there are...

-I've seen it.

-Yeah.

It looks like 100,000 people.

Yeah, watching this boxing match going on in the middle of it.

The men on board made the best of things,

but for the young sailors,

Orkney lacked the attractions of southern harbours.

They'd complain that Scapa was too cold, too windy, too far away.

But for now, it was home.

And from here, the most powerful navy in the world

would square up to the second most powerful navy in the world

for control of the North Sea.

The Imperial German Navy was based in the harbour towns of Kiel

and Wilhelmshaven.

And German warships patrolling near Wilhelmshaven were

the target for the first British naval attack of the war.

At first light on the morning of the 28th of August 1914,

a British force of eight light cruisers and a destroyer escort

sailed into German waters just a few miles north of here.

Alerted to the intruders, Admiral Franz Hipper, in charge

of German defences, dispatched ten of his light cruisers.

By lunchtime, only seven remained...

..as first the Mainz, then the Ariadne and Kohl were sunk.

The short-lived Battle of Heligoland Bight was Britain's first

naval success of the war.

Crowds gathered to cheer the ships home.

But the effects of the attack were much more profound in Germany,

and in particular with the German leader, Kaiser Wilhelm.

Well, the Kaiser was rather horrified. That was his toy.

The Navy was his toy.

This should not have happened.

And he decided that no German ships were to sail out into the North Sea

to seek out the Royal Navy

unless they had express permission from him personally.

So, all these wonderful ships are essentially cooped up here

in Wilhelmshaven or in Kiel.

The great irony was that Germany's leader was an honorary admiral...

of the Royal Navy.

His grandmother, Britain's Queen Victoria,

had given him the title in 1889.

A quarter of a century later, Germany's idiosyncratic leader

seemed to be running scared of the Royal Navy.

A situation that suited the British perfectly.

"We don't actually have to fight you

"because if you don't want to fight us, we still run the world.

"That's OK. If we catch you, watch out -

"you're going to get the drubbing of your lives."

For four months, the German ships were ordered to remain in harbour.

But ten days before Christmas, 1914, the Kaiser allowed Admiral Hipper

to take his battle cruiser fleet to sea.

The next morning, the 16th of December,

Hipper ordered his ships to open fire on the town of Scarborough.

Whitby and Hartlepool were next.

For the first time in almost two and a half centuries, British men

and women had been killed, on British soil, by enemy warships.

The final death toll was 137.

Jellicoe's boss, the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill,

called the Germans "baby killers".

The Royal Navy had left Scarborough undefended.

Jellicoe's fleet was 300 miles to the north, 15 hours away.

Something had to be done.

So, five days before Christmas, 1914,

the still incomplete Rosyth Dockyard became the base

for the Royal Navy's newest and fastest ships -

the battle cruisers.

The Navy's ferocious hunter-killers.

The best possible protection against further attacks

by Hipper's German battle cruisers.

These five glamorous ships were placed under the command

of a glamorous 43-year-old Vice Admiral - David Richard Beatty.

Beatty was careless, he was dashing,

he bore his command responsibilities lightly.

As a junior officer, he hadn't bothered much with his exams.

It was as if either he didn't care much about his naval career or

he assumed that circumstance would just enable him to rise to the top.

He sounds a very different character from Jellicoe.

Very different character from Jellicoe.

Jellicoe was an absolute by the rule book, honourable,

completely honest...

Everything, in a way, that Beatty wasn't.

Seven miles east of Rosyth,

Beatty rented a house in the village of Aberdour.

He lived there with his wife,

a fabulously wealthy American divorcee, Ethel Field.

Both husband and wife were notoriously promiscuous.

Beatty was a frequent visitor to Edinburgh

and to this one fashionable hotel.

As an individual, some people say that the word "cad",

he's a perfect definition of the word "cad".

He was almost a rakish, raffish individual.

He visited this building, the North British Hotel in Edinburgh,

on many occasions, not just to drink coffee as well,

but to visit his mistress.

So he was a very... dynamic individual,

but in the rather discreet days of Edwardian Britain,

he could carry out his liaison without too much publicity.

Can you describe the difference to me -

there must be quite a marked difference from being based up

-at Scapa Flow and based in Rosyth...

-Yeah.

-..close to Edinburgh?

Well, I think that's right.

Scapa Flow was a rather remote location. Not many... No big urban

areas with entertainment facilities close at hand, so I think the

officers had a much more pleasant time when they were based at Rosyth.

They were very close to a number of landed estates, at Dalmeny...

Hopetoun House - the gardens of Hopetoun House on this side

of the Forth were made available to them, and lots of opportunities

for walking and other activities. Beatty himself...

And walking being the least of them, I'd imagine!

Walking maybe being the least of Beatty's favourite activities.

The Belfast-born war artist, Sir John Lavery,

depicted these sailors returning to their ships on the Forth.

The area offered a host of distractions,

but there remained serious work to be done.

And just weeks into the New Year, Beatty's battle cruiser

fleet would be called to action.

Just before 6pm, on the afternoon of the 23rd of January 1915,

Admiral Hipper again lead his battle cruiser fleet

out of Wilhelmshaven.

British naval intelligence alerted Vice Admiral Beatty,

who brought his battle cruiser fleet out of the Forth.

The next morning, at 7am,

at Dogger Bank in the middle of the North Sea...

..the two came together,

and the German Admiral had no idea who he was up against.

Hipper feared that he had stumbled upon Jellicoe's Grand Fleet.

He ordered his ships to turn 180 degrees and head for home.

14 miles behind, Beatty - on board HMS Lion - began the chase.

They started a pursuit action at the Dogger Bank.

And this was a classic thing that battle cruisers were meant for.

Beatty's ships were faster than their German equivalents.

Just before 9am, the rearmost German ship

came into range of HMS Lion.

At a distance of 20,600 yards, almost 12 miles,

Beatty gave the order to open fire.

In the battle that followed, Hipper's flagship, Seydlitz,

lost two of its five guns.

Beatty's flagship, Lion...

..lost both port engines and half her speed.

On board, the journalist, Filson Young,

timed the trajectory of the German shells approaching his ship.

When he saw the flash from the German guns, he started his watch.

"It is strange to think that I have perhaps 23 seconds to live.

"When the little hand reaches that mark, then, oblivion."

Young survived,

but HMS Lion was critically injured.

Meanwhile, the rearmost German ship, the Blucher,

began to slip astern and was pounded by the British.

Now, just minutes before 11am, both sides were one ship down.

Beatty still had the balance of power,

four ships to three.

But at that crucial moment at 10.54am, Beatty blinked.

Without warning, Beatty ordered a major course change,

because he thought he saw a submarine.

There weren't any submarines there.

Minutes later, using flag signals, Beatty issued a second order.

It read, "Attack the rear of the enemy."

So all the other British battle cruisers then teamed up,

ganged up on Blucher, pounded her, torpedoed her, sank her.

As Admiral Hipper's three remaining battle cruisers made their escape,

Beatty's ships dispatched the crippled Blucher

and over 700 of her crew.

They didn't need three battle cruisers to do that.

It needed a few destroyers to do that.

In effect, they were almost finding an excuse

not to chase after the Germans.

As the Blucher disappeared, British destroyers moved in

and attempted to pull German sailors from the water.

But the British ships were themselves

attacked by a German airship and forced to withdraw,

leaving the German sailors to their fate.

The British newspapers would portray the Battle of Dogger Bank as

a great victory - revenge on Hipper and the baby killers of Scarborough.

But for Beatty's many critics, it was never that.

For them, the cavalier Vice Admiral had missed his chance.

But really what went wrong at Dogger Bank was the signalling

mistake which appeared to order the battle cruisers to stop

pursuing the fleeing enemy - that wasn't what he intended at all.

And he blamed everybody else he could possible incriminate.

Vice Admiral Beatty was using the same signal flag technology

that Admiral Nelson had used on HMS Victory at Trafalgar...

110 years before.

Messages had to be communicated, and we're talking about an age where

radio and, at the time, wireless telegraphy, was in its infancy.

So you had to use visual signalling methods - flags,

semaphore, and flashing lights.

So, was radio that imperfect at the time of the Great War?

Yes, it was for naval use.

It has to be coded, it has to go down to the wireless office,

be transmitted. You have to hope that allowing for

the primitive equipment it is received by the

ship at the other end.

It all eats into time, and in a battle, tactical communications

is very time sensitive. With flags you can go, "TURN TO PORT NOW,"

and it is almost as quick as going, "Turn to port now."

Duncan, give me a simple explanation of how flag communication

physically works.

Every letter in the alphabet has a flag,

every numeral has a flag. Say you

want to turn all your ships at the same time 90 degrees to port.

You hoist a flag to indicate that it was going to be a turn

and all of the other ships would acknowledge that they had received

and understood the signal.

The moment you pull them down

all of the ships will turn 90 degrees to the left together.

Such was the system.

It had served the Royal Navy for centuries.

110 years before, Nelson's flags at Trafalgar

had famously expected, "Every man to do his duty."

But by 1915

the limitations of this venerable system were becoming clear.

Admirals were used to being able to fight with all of their ships

in sight of each other. That was the system that

flag signalling particularly suited.

But you have parts of the battle now that are going on over the horizon.

Perhaps the biggest shortcoming in the Royal Navy's command

and control system in the

First World War were the brains behind it,

not necessarily the means of articulating the orders.

For Vice Admiral Beatty, the Battle of Dogger Bank

had been a signal failure.

But the new year would bring another opportunity...

..and the chance to defeat the entire German navy.

By the early summer of 1916,

the Naval Base at Rosyth had been completed

and Vice Admiral Beatty's fleet had almost doubled in size.

He had been given command of the five

Queen Elizabeth-class battleships...

..called the super-dreadnaughts, the pride of the fleet.

The strategic importance of the Forth had increased substantially.

And so, in turn, had its defences.

Rosyth, the dockyard at the heart of the base was enormous,

and it took from 1903 to the middle of the

First World War to actually complete it.

But the fleets based here were so enormous that first of all

they started being berthed on the west side,

upriver from the railway bridge, but very soon the number of ships

berthed here meant that the ships were berthed downriver as well,

below the bridge. And there were huge defences in place to protect

this fleet from submarines and from surface ships.

And where is it we are actually heading towards?

We are heading to the island of Inchgarvie, and the central

pier of the rail bridge sits on one end of the island and that was

the centre of the innermost line of defence of the naval base.

And by the middle of the war was mounting four 4-inch guns to

protect the base from fast moving motor torpedo boats.

-And why are you taking me to Inchgarvie?

-Every other island,

virtually every other battery was re-armed in the Second World War,

and changed. Inchgarvie is virtually

unchanged from when they walked away from it in the early 1920s.

Not many people get onto it so there's very little damage or

vandalism, its pretty well in perfect condition.

Every day tens of thousands of people pass above the island.

But only a handful ever get to visit.

You can see the magazines are under there.

From this wonderful vantage point, can you point out to me the

strength of the outward defences from the bridge eastward?

From where we are standing there were anti-submarine nets under

the railway bridge and guns on Inchgarvie

where we are standing. There were batteries on

the shore to the north and south of the island.

The middle defences, almost four miles downriver from here,

ran from a battery at Braefoot on the north shore

out to Inchcolm and Inchmickery and the southern shore at Cramond Island.

These guns also covered the anti-submarine boom that

blocked the river from shore to shore.

All these batteries had powerful search lights to illuminate

targets at night.

Some of these were movable.

Others shone a fixed beam and the guns were ranged on these in advance.

And then way out in the distance you can see

Inchkeith, the big island, the headquarters of

the defences of the Forth.

All the defences were linked by telephone to Inchkeith

and the observers there would be able to assess what

sort of attack was coming.

What was the worst case scenario, what were

we defending ourselves against?

The defences are designed to tackle a whole range of

levels of attack.

From the heavy guns out on the outer defences to where

we are on the inner defences, quick-firing guns which were

intended to tackle fast-moving motor torpedo boats and destroyers

coming in very quickly

to raid, fire off torpedoes into a very densely packed anchorage where

it would have been very difficult to miss a target, turn and run for it.

Four miles downriver the defences on the island

of Inchmickerry shape a rather familiar profile.

From a distance it looks remarkably like a battleship.

Well, the story is it was designed to look like that

but I think that is people trying to explain it in retrospect.

Particularly before the

Second World War battery control tower was built,

I don't think it looked particularly ship-like.

There is the story that a German airplane dropped a torpedo at it

because they thought it was a ship, but I can't find any evidence

that that is anything other than an apocryphal story.

Here on the Forth, on the afternoon of the 30th of May 1916,

Admiral Beatty received an intelligence report.

It indicated that the pugnacious new commander-in-chief of the

German High Seas Fleet,

Admiral Scheer, was taking his ships to sea.

Immediately Beatty and Jellicoe were to set out and hunt him down.

Jutland, the biggest sea battle of the war, was now just hours away.

Overnight, the two British fleets sailed

towards their rendezvous point.

Jellicoe's force of 70

warships included 24 dreadnoughts and three battlecruisers.

Beatty's force of 50 warships included six battle cruisers

and four Queen Elizabeths.

On Beatty's port side was the light cruiser Galatea.

At 2:15pm,

she received a signal from Beatty to turn to the north.

Just seconds before that signal,

the lookout saw a shape on the horizon.

The captain disregarded the order and pressed on.

Straining through his binoculars he saw a neutral Danish steamer.

And just behind that two German cruisers slowly came into view.

At 2:28pm,

HMS Galatea fired the first shots of the Battle of Jutland.

The two battlecruiser fleets,

commanded by Beatty and Hipper, had come together again.

Hipper had five battlecruisers.

Beatty had six, plus his four Queen Elizabeths.

At 3:28pm Hipper turned his ships through

180 degrees attempting to lure Beatty's ships towards the south.

Lying in wait, 50 miles to the south,

was Admiral Scheer's High Seas Fleet.

This remarkable photograph, taken that very day from

a German airship, shows one section of his 16 dreadnoughts.

Unaware of their position,

Beatty signalled for his ships to follow Hipper's ships.

But once again, his signals didn't work

and the Queen Elizabeths were left behind.

The battleships stationed

five miles northwest of Beatty, for various reasons...

did not understand

the signal being too far away and not specifically addressed to them.

Finally when they turn round to the southeast

they are actually ten miles apart instead of five miles apart.

Beatty had lost touch with four of his ten ships.

But as he closed on Hipper, he maintained a one-ship advantage.

At 3:45, at a range of nine miles, Chatfield,

the captain of Beatty's flagship, HMS Lion, gave the order to fire.

Beatty's ships start losing a gunnery

duel with Hipper's battle cruisers.

Beatty's ships were short on gunnery practice,

the German ships were better at gunnery.

The rearmost ship in Beatty's line,

the battlecruiser Indefatigable, was hit and blown apart.

She sank in minutes.

For Beatty, five battlecruisers remained.

Then four as the Queen Mary imploded.

The Queen Mary disappeared in a very few seconds.

She folded inwards.

People noticed bizarre things like a blizzard of paperwork coming

out of the quarterdeck hatch.

It took a minute and then it was gone, just gone.

Beatty turned to Chatfield, the captain of the Lion

and gave voice to the most famous words of the battle,

"There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today."

This is Beatty just being a stiff upper lip about

watching his friends being killed in huge numbers.

Already over 2,000 British sailors were dead or dying.

At 4:38 Beatty received a priority radio

signal from his light cruiser squadron, alerting him to the

presence of Scheer's Highs Seas Fleet.

Immediately, Beatty ordered an about turn.

Hipper followed,

unaware that Jellicoe's dreadnoughts lay just 40 miles to the north.

Jellicoe was coming down from the north

as fast as he possibly could.

He had received signals from Beatty and the light cruisers.

Beatty's great achievement was to bring the German High Seas Fleet

to Jellicoe in spite of the losses he suffered on the run to the south.

Jellicoe's plan was to deploy his ships

side-on to the oncoming German dreadnoughts.

A technique called crossing the enemy "T",

that would bring his 200 heavy guns into action.

His job was to

get his fleet from cruising formation which is six columns of four ships

into a single battle line so that the enemy

comes in such a fashion at them that the enemy has his "T" crossed.

So the head of the enemy line gets beaten in by the whole

panoply of the British 25 ships.

And he did it very well.

Beatty assembled his fleet into a single arced line, six miles long.

The official historian of the

Royal Navy, Sir Julian Corbett, would

describe this as, "The supreme moment of the naval war".

And just moments later,

the German dreadnoughts came into the range of Jellicoe's guns.

At 6:17, at a range of seven and a half miles,

his dreadnoughts opened fire on the German High Seas Fleet.

When the German admiral gets the fright of his life

and finds the Grand Fleet spread out across an 80 degree arc in front

of him, the German admiral reverses course and sends in his destroyers.

Now Jellicoe has only one response to a destroyer attack

and that's to turn away.

Probably what Jellico should have done is to turn towards

and combed the torpedo tracks. By getting all ships

to turn towards together,

he might have lost two or three ships but the payoff might have been

the annihilation of the German High Seas Fleet.

He wasn't prepared to take that chance.

He could lose the war in an afternoon.

He wasn't going to do that. Maybe we should be grateful that he doesn't.

But the idea has rankled ever since,

that had Beatty been in command of the battle fleet,

Beatty would have known, as Nelson said, to leave something to chance.

Beatty might have turned the whole fleet towards.

And might have destroyed the High Seas Fleet.

At 6:30pm, the British lost another battlecruiser.

The third of the day, as the Invincible was blown in two.

Half an hour later, Admiral Scheer

ordered his dreadnought fleet back towards Jellicoe.

For the second time, he was overpowered and turned away.

And overnight his wounded ships crept back to Wilhelmshaven.

Just as damaged British ships began to arrive on the Forth.

A junior midshipman on HMS Warspite,

a man called Bill Fell, described the reception the sailors received

bringing their wounded ships home.

He wrote, "As we passed under the bridge all the railway people

"were lined along it.

"To our dismay they shouted 'Cowards! Cowards! You ran away!'

"They chucked lumps of coal at us."

The Battle of Jutland had been marked by poor signals.

As ships continued to arrive in Rosyth, this signal flag,

the letter D, served a grim purpose.

It was used to cover the wounded when the ships came in

after Jutland, as they were being brought into the dockyard at Rosyth.

In a fleet action in the First World War,

you get this terrible destruction on board ship, men are...

burned alive.

But the other thing about this is that it's not clean.

We have textile conservation experts who could clean this

if we wanted to.

-Why do you choose not to?

-Because this is the dirt

and the grime from the ships, so it's part of the story of the battle.

Just wondered if there was still a smell...

..of the battle.

So the smoke and the grime from over 100 years ago are still

-embedded in this flag.

-And that moment when the ships came in

and the people waiting didn't know the outcome of the battle.

And they see damaged British battleship,

damaged British battlecruisers coming back

and the wounded coming off and there's no news of victory.

There was concern that the British navy had been

defeated which would have

been catastrophic for the British war effort, possibly terminal.

In the days immediately following the Battle of Jutland,

a key question remained unanswered.

Just who had won? Admiral Scheer had twice turned his ships away.

But around the world, newspapers printed German reports

of a German victory.

You can see why they claimed victory,

they sunk more ships, they killed more men.

6,500 or thereabouts British sailors drowned, little over 2,000

on the German side, but in the end none of that matters greatly.

What matters is the overall strategic balance between the two

navies, and that hasn't changed.

The Germans know that they cannot challenge the Royal Navy,

the Royal Navy effectively has command of the North Sea.

After Jutland, the great ships of the

Imperial German Navy would scarcely leave harbour.

And yet across the North Sea, no-one could claim that

Jutland was a great British triumph.

A strategic victory, a tactical embarrassment.

And it lead to a lot of recriminations and a lot

of people considering that actually we need Beatty as commander-in-chief.

Five months after Jutland in November 1916, Beatty

was promoted to admiral, placed in charge of the Grand Fleet.

The man he replaced, Jellicoe, reluctantly became First Sea Lord.

As Jellicoe left his flagship at Scapa Flow, one witness

recalled that every officer on the quarterdeck was in tears.

Together Jellicoe, Beatty, their officers and men,

had negated the threat of the German High Seas Fleet.

By not winning the Battle of Jutland, Britain had

nonetheless won the war of the dreadnoughts.

What remained, what was still to come, was the war under the sea,

the war of the U-boats.