The Battle of Dogger Bank (24 January 1915) was a naval engagement during the First World War near the Dogger Bank in the North Sea, between squadrons of the British Grand Fleet and the Kaiserliche Marine (High Seas Fleet). The British had intercepted and decoded German wireless transmissions, gaining advance knowledge that a German raiding squadron was heading for the Dogger Bank. Ships of the Grand Fleet sailed to intercept the raiders.
The British surprised the smaller, slower German squadron, that fled for home. During a stern chase lasting several hours, the British caught up with the Germans and engaged them with long-range gunfire. The British disabled Blücher, the rearmost German ship, and the Germans put the British flagship HMS Lion out of action. Due to inadequate signalling, the remaining British ships stopped the pursuit to sink Blücher; by the time the ship had been sunk, the rest of the German squadron had escaped.
The German squadron returned to harbour with several ships in need of extensive repairs. Lion made it back to port but was out of action for months. The British had lost no ships and suffered few casualties; the Germans had lost Blücher and most of her crew. After the battle, both sides replaced officers who were thought to have shown poor judgement and made changes to equipment and procedures according to the experience gained from the battle.
Background
Room 40
Before 1914, international communication was conducted via undersea cables laid along shipping lanes, most of which were under British control. Hours after the British ultimatum to Germany in August 1914, they cut the German cables. German messages could be passed only by Wireless, using cyphers to disguise their content. The Signalbuch der Kaiserlichen Marine (SKM) was captured from the German light cruiser SMS Magdeburg after she ran aground in the Baltic Sea on 26 August 1914. The German–Australian steamer Hobart was seized near Melbourne, Australia, on 11 August, and the Handelsverkehrsbuch (HVB) codebook, used by the German navy to communicate with merchant ships and within the High Seas Fleet, was captured. A copy of the book was sent to England by the fastest steamer, arriving at the end of October. During the Battle off Texel (17 October), the commander of the German destroyer SMS S119 threw overboard his secret papers in a lead-lined chest as the ship sank; but on 30 November, a British trawler dragged up the chest. Room 40 gained a copy of the Verkehrsbuch (VB) codebook, normally used by Flag officers of the Kaiserliche Marine.
The Director of the Intelligence Division of the Admiralty War Staff, Rear-Admiral Henry Oliver, established a code breaking organisation to decipher German signals, using cryptographers from academic backgrounds and making use of the windfalls taken from the German ships. At first, the inexperience of the cryptanalysts in naval matters led to errors in the understanding of the material. This lack of naval experience caused Oliver to make personal decisions about the information to be passed to other departments, many of which, particularly the Operations Division, had reservations about the value of Room 40. The transfer of an experienced naval officer, Commander H. W. W. Hope, remedied most of the deficiencies of the civilians' understanding. When Oliver later became Chief of the Admiralty War Staff he continued to treat Room 40 as a fiefdom and a source for the informal group of officers around the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, that received decoded messages but had insufficient authority to use them to best advantage.
German ships had to report their position every night by wireless and British listening posts along the east coast took cross-bearings on the transmissions to find the positions of the ships. This signals intelligence meant that the British did not need wasteful defensive standing patrols and sweeps of the North Sea but could economise on fuel and use the time for training and maintenance. The Admiralty also uncovered the German order of battle and tracked the deployment of ships, giving them an offensive advantage. The lack of a proper war staff at the Admiralty and poor liaison between Room 40, Oliver and the operations staff meant that the advantage was poorly exploited in 1915; it was not until 1917 that this was remedied. When German ships sailed, information from Room 40 needed to be passed on quickly but Oliver found it hard to delegate and would not routinely supply all decrypts; commanders at sea were supplied only with what the Admiralty thought they needed. Information could reach the Grand Fleet late, incomplete or mistakenly interpreted. When Jellicoe asked for a decryption section to take to sea, he was refused on security grounds.
German raid
With the German High Seas Fleet (HSF) confined to port after the British success at the Battle of Heligoland Bight in 1914, Admiral Friedrich von Ingenohl, the Commander-in-Chief of the HSF planned a raid on Scarborough, Hartlepool and Whitby on the east coast of England, with the I Scouting Group (Admiral Franz von Hipper), a battlecruiser squadron of three battlecruisers and a large armoured cruiser, supported by light cruisers and destroyers. Hipper opened fire at 08:00 on 16 December 1914, eventually killing 108 and wounding 525 civilians. British public and political opinion was outraged that German warships could sail so close to the British coast, shelling coastal towns with impunity; British naval forces had failed to prevent the attacks and also failed to intercept the raiding squadron. The British fleet had sailed but the German ships escaped in stormy seas and low visibility, assisted by British communication failures. The Germans had made the first successful attack on Britain since the 17th century and suffered no losses. Ingenohl was unjustly blamed for missing an opportunity to inflict a defeat on the Royal Navy, despite creating the chance by his offensive-mindedness.
British counter-action
The British had let the raid occur and appeared to the public to have been surprised (having been forewarned by decoded wireless messages) and then to have failed to sink the German raiding force on its way back to Germany. In 1921, the official historian Julian Corbett wrote,
Two of the most efficient and powerful British squadrons...knowing approximately what to expect...had failed to bring to action an enemy who was acting in close conformity with our appreciation and with whose advanced screen contact had been established.
The British had escaped a potential disaster caused by the British 1st Battlecruiser Squadron (Vice-Admiral Sir David Beatty) not being supported by the 2nd Battle Squadron (Vice-Admiral Sir George Warrender), when it failed to make contact with the raiding force.
The worst British failure was in the exploitation of the intelligence provided by the code breakers at Room 40 (Sir Alfred Ewing) that had given the British notice of the raid. Some intercepts decoded during the action had taken two hours to reach British commanders at sea, by when they were out of date or misleading. News of the sailing of the HSF was delivered so late that the British commanders thought that the Germans were on the way when they were returning. At sea, Beatty had sent ambiguous signals and some commanders had not used their initiative. On 30 December, the commander of the Grand Fleet, Admiral Sir John Jellicoe, gave orders that when in contact with German ships, officers were to treat orders from those ignorant of local conditions as instructions only but he and Beatty declined to implement Admiralty suggestions to loosen ship formations, for fear of decentralising tactical command too far.
Plan
German plan
Hipper suspected that the British had received advanced warning about earlier operations of the HSF from spy ships mingling with British and Dutch fishing boats operating near the German Bight and the Dogger Bank, to observe German fleet movements. Hipper considered that with the Dogger Bank mid-way on the short route to the English coast, a signal from a trawler could reach the British in time for the British battlecruisers to intercept a German sortie, certainly on the return journey. Hipper ordered German ships vigorously to enforce search and seizure rules, fishing boats being brought into Cuxhaven to be searched. Buoyed by the success of the raid on the English coast, Admiral Hipper planned an attack on the British fishing fleet on the Dogger Bank. The German fleet had increased in size since the outbreak of war, with the arrival in service of the König-class dreadnought battleships SMS König, Grosser Kurfürst, Markgraf and Kronprinz of the 3rd Battle Squadron and the Derfflinger-class battlecruiser Derfflinger.
Hipper intended to clear the bank of British fishing vessels, dubious neutrals and to attack any small British warships in the area, with the HSF covering the withdrawal of the battlecruisers. The limited nature of the operation conformed to the ban by the Kaiser on operations by the High Seas Fleet, that had been reiterated on 10 January. A slightly more aggressive strategy was permitted, within the policy of keeping the HSF in being, in which the fleet could sortie to attempt to isolate and destroy advanced British forces or to attack the Grand Fleet if in greater strength. On 19 January, Beatty had reconnoitred the area west of the German Bight and been seen by a German aircraft. The reconnaissance and British activity at the Dogger Bank led Ingenohl to order Hipper and the I Scouting Group to survey the area and surprise and destroy any light forces found there. The I Scouting Group contained the battlecruisers Seydlitz (flagship), Moltke, Derfflinger and armoured cruiser Blucher, four light cruisers and eighteen destroyers.
British plan
Wireless transmissions from German ships in the Jade Bight on 23 January 1915, intercepted and decoded by Room 40, alerted the British to a German sortie in force as far as the Dogger Bank. At the Admiralty, Wilson, Oliver and Churchill arranged a plan to confront the Germans with a superior opponent. A rendezvous was set for 24 January at 07:00, 30 nmi (56 km; 35 mi) north of the Dogger Bank and about 180 nmi (330 km; 210 mi) west of Heligoland. The battlecruisers comprised the 1st Battlecruiser Squadron (Beatty) with Lion (flagship) Tiger and Princess Royal. The new 2nd Battlecruiser Squadron (Rear-Admiral Gordon Moore deputy to Beatty) had New Zealand as flagship and Indomitable. Harwich Force (Commodore Reginald Tyrwhitt) sailed from Harwich with three light cruisers and 35 destroyers, to rendezvous with the battlecruisers at 07:00 on 24 January.
To cover the East Coast and act as distant support, the 3rd Cruiser Squadron and the seven pre-dreadnoughts of the 3rd Battle Squadron (Admiral Edward Bradford) sailed from Rosyth for an area in the North Sea, from which they could cut off the German force if it moved north. The Grand Fleet left Scapa at 21:00 on 23 January, to sweep the southern North Sea but could not be expected to arrive on the scene until the afternoon of 24 January. Soon after the German force sailed, the 1st Light Cruiser Squadron (Commodore William Goodenough) and the battlecruisers departed Rosyth, heading south; at 07:05 on 24 January, a clear day with good visibility, they encountered German screening vessels at the Dogger Bank.
Battle
24 January
Sighting the smoke from a large approaching force, Hipper headed south-east by 07:35 to escape but the battlecruisers were faster than the German squadron, which was held back by the slower armoured cruiser Blücher and the coal-fuelled torpedo boats. By 08:00, the German battlecruisers had been sighted from Lion but the older battlecruisers of the British 2nd Battlecruiser Squadron were lagging behind the 1st Battlecruiser Squadron. Chasing the Germans from a position astern and to starboard, the British ships gradually caught up—some reaching a speed of 27 kn (50 km/h; 31 mph)—and closed to gun range.
Beatty chose to approach from this direction so that the prevailing wind blew the British ships' smoke clear, allowing them a good view of the German ships, while German gunners were partially blinded by their funnel and gun smoke blowing towards the British ships. Lion opened fire at 08:52, at a range of 20,000 yd (11 mi; 18 km) and the other British ships commenced firing as they came within range, while the Germans were unable to reply until 09:11, because of the shorter range of their guns. No warships had engaged at such long ranges or at such high speeds before, and accurate gunnery for both sides was an unprecedented challenge but after a few salvos, British shells straddled Blücher.