Forbidden History - Beneath Cold Waters: The Battle of Jutland

Episode Date: July 15, 2025

In 1916, two great fleets met in the cold, grey waters of the North Sea in what became the largest naval battle of the First World War. This episode of the Forbidden History podcast explores the conflicting legacy of the Battle of Jutland - a clash as shadowed by fog as it was by uncertainty. Cast List: Chuck Meide: Maritime Archaeologist Brendan Burke: Maritime Archaeologist Nicholas Jellicoe: Author, Jutland the Unfinished Battle  Guy Walters: Author & Historian Andrew Choong: Curator, National Maritime Museum Nick Hewitt: Head of Exhibitions & Collections, The National Museum of The Royal Navy  Eric Meyers: Narrator Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Forbidden History Podcast. This program is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It contains adult themes. Listener discretion is advised. World War I, the British and the German navies face off in the freezing North Sea off the coast of Denmark. The largest sea battle in history ends with the remains of 25 shipwrecks scattered across the ocean bed. These ghostly images of these huge battleships, these majestic vessels, can't help but make you think about the violence of that day and how many lives were lost.

Now, advances in underwater technology and previously concealed documents are answering questions still being asked more than 100 years after the battle. Why were so many British ships broken in two? And why did the British lose such a high number of vessels. I imagine that the Germans were looking with great glee, not expecting to see British capital ships just coming apart before them. Why is that the case?

In this episode of the Forbidden History podcast, we follow a team of experts as they try to understand why the greatest ships in the powerful British fleet lie rusting on the seabed in an attack nobody saw coming. Who was to blame? And what were the flaws in the British ships that led to the deaths of thousands. The ship broke into how powerful a force it must have been to destroy these ships. Some of them are just devastated.

Torn apart, you can understand some of the shock of these British officers as they saw their ships, which they had felt were part of the invincible British naval power, these ships just blowing up. This was 20th century murderous technology introduced to naval warfare in a new new and horrible manner. Florida-based Chuck Mead is examining footage he has gathered of HMS Queen Mary, which sunk trying to intercept a German force during the Battle of Jutland. He is trying to understand what happened on that bloody day more than 100 years ago.

The main surviving section of the Queen Mary stands pretty proud of the seafloor higher than many of the other wrecks. decking still survives. You can see a number of shells, massive projectiles, you know, could have weighed up to 2,000 pounds and been fired, you know, at a distance of miles away. So these were what made a battleship, you know, gave it its might, its power. But Chuck's closer examination of the wreck footage reveals something very strange.

Much of the ship is completely missing. The aftermost section is pretty heavily damaged, but it's a very heavily damaged, It's somewhat intact. The forward section really is almost non-existent other than debris. The ship must have disintegrated with the impact of the explosion. Chuck has discovered that he's looking at less than half of the 650-foot-long HMS Queen Mary. It seems to have broken in two around the ship's central turret. What went wrong within British command to allow the Germans to all but obliterate this battle

cruiser? The First World War had been raging for almost two years, but as yet, the British Royal Navy and the German fleet hadn't even faced each other in a decisive battle. The war in the North Sea had two sets of expectations. Those on the behalf of the central powers who wanted to break out, be able to get supplies from the rest of the world, and keep their commerce alive. The second set of expectations were the Allied powers to keep the Germans in, to prevent them from getting war material and touching a larger world.

In a move to break the blockades imposed on them, the German fleet launched a deadly ambush on the British. For the sailors on both sides at Jutland, many of them had not seen combat. They had heard the horrors of trench warfare, which was now becoming World War I's most defining characteristic. Instant death. The British Navy's response was dogged by mistakes, resulting in massive unexpected losses. Eight and a half thousand men were killed, and that was not all.

Both navies had these massive fleets that had been trained and trained and trained. They were ready for that battle. Jutland provided that. But it wasn't really supposed to be. In February 1916, the cautious German Admiral von Poul died. His replacement, Admiral Shear, was a very different commander, who would dramatically alter the shape of the war at sea. Reinhardt Shear, he wanted to see an aggressive use of submarines and zeppelins supporting a sortie out onto the North Sea of the High Seas fleet.

Together with his Vice Admiral Franz Hipper, Shear formed a daring plan to draw out and destroy the British fleet. On May 30th, 1916, the British secretly intercepted messages, revealing that the German battle cruiser fleet was heading out to sea. Shear's plan appeared to be working. A showdown at sea seemed to be close at hand. We have some of the most advanced ships with some of the largest guns, thousands of sailors, and two empires clashing each other on the high seas.

The British fleet headed out to confront them. Their battle cruiser squadron was commanded by Vice Admiral Beattie, and the Grand Fleet, the most powerful section of the Royal Navy, was under Admiral Lord Jellico. Did the characters of these two men contribute to so many British losses? Admiral Jellico's grandson, Nicholas Jellico, has a fascinating take on the personalities of the two British commanders. You could not have found two people more different than Jellico and Beattie.

Jellico was a very, very intelligent man, very cerebral. Bitti, on the other hand, had a very strong charisma. Yet the two admirals would need to work together if they were to defeat the dynamic new German commander. British naval forces set out to the North Sea for a meeting point just off the Danish coast. The main battle fleet coming from Scapa Flow, some other elements from Cromerty and the battle cruisers from the fourth.

They were sent out at around 9 o'clock in anticipation of meeting a battle cruiser force, which would be coming north into the North Sea. During the opening phase of the battle, known as the Run to the South, it was Admiral Beattie's fleet that first made contact with the Germans. When the battle cruisers meet, that's the battle. That's the first act in this play. And that's where you have the run to the south. And that's the British forces chasing the German forces.

The strategy of the German high seas fleet was to bring the British fleet out piecemeal. They couldn't take them on on at once. They pull them out in bites and eat them, devour them, and move on to the next. Scheer knew that he could not simply go toe to toe with the British. Meade's mission is to discover just why and how so many British ships were lost. As we have approached and now surpassed a century since the battle, there's been increasing interest by divers. So there have been more and more expeditions, more divers getting footage. We'll get a changing perspective. And so we'll see things that we haven't seen before,

and that may reveal secrets or better understanding of things that we didn't fully understand before. Today, less than 30 miles from where the British and German navies first made contact, the wrecks of the British ships HMS Indefatigable and HMS Queen Mary lie on the ocean bed. HMS Queen Mary was one of the most modern, well-equipped ships in the Royal Navy. Around 4.30 in the afternoon, the ship was engulfed in flames and sunk. This loss came as a terrible shock to the British. How did the star of their fleet meet its end? This was what happened to Jutland.

Ships exploded in a mushroom cloud, and in just seconds, mere seconds, thousands of lives were vaporized. For sailors to see that must have been absolutely terrifying. It would have knocked the patriotism right out of their hearts at that moment. What must have been going through Beatism mind at this point is hard to tell. But when Queen Mary exploded at that, at 426, he turned round to his flag captain and was heard to mutter what now has become a very famous statement, there's something wrong with our bloody ships today.

Some argue it came down to British Admiral Beatty's terrible timing. He failed to engage the German battle cruisers and threw away a two-to-one numerical advantage, instead fighting one-on-one. Had Beatt Beattie just held off a moment, consolidated his force, he would have entered this engagement with overpowering strength. Had he engaged earlier and used the speed of his ships, he actually probably could have saved both Indefatigable and Queen Mary from their untimely destruction.

But the mysterious explosions of the Queen Mary and the indefatigable were just the first of the British losses at Jutland. The battle had only just begun. worse was to come. There's smoke from all the coal fires, there's smoke from ships on fire, their sun is in some people's eyes, and communications are not being paid attention to.

It's hard to see a flag when your ship's on fire. What the sailors on the British ships didn't know was that Beattie was unwittingly leading them straight into the jaws of the powerful German high seas fleet. Complete disaster was only averted when Beattie received the message from one of his own advanced ships, warning of the danger ahead. This gave B to the vital information he needed.

Now he knew he was heading it straight into a trap. That signal probably saved many lives. Yet the message really should have come from the Admiralty. Recently declassified documents revealed that the British actually had a huge advantage over the Germans that day. Historian Guy Walters is uncovering long from forgotten secrets from the British National Archives. His mission is to discover how and why the British were able to decipher and decode German

messages. He finds that the answer lies with an unexpected event that occurred two years before the Battle of Jutland. In August 1914, the German warship, the SMS Magdeburg, runs the ground off the coast of Finland, and it's boarded by some Russians, and on board they find three codebooks. Now I've got a copy of one of them here. Now until that point the British had no idea of how to decrypt German signals traffic. But when you've got a book like this, this gives you all the secrets. It's like a cheat sheet. Now this is sent to a room in the Admiralty, a very

secret room called Room 40. The British could scarcely believe their luck. So we've got 36AXK and that means ventilation shaft. You just have to go through it. It's basically almost every word in the German language is here and the code for it. And of course the Germans had no clue that the British had it. So they might as well have been shouting at each other just in plain English frankly because the Brits knew everything they were saying. This is absolutely invaluable in the time of war.

So the British could and should have been able to tell their ships exactly what was going on. But there was a setback that would have tragic consequences. Part of the problem with signals intelligence as it was back then was that the Admiralty's operations division and the codebreakers were not very closely integrated. And so at Jutland, the wrong questions were being asked by the British Navy and the wrong answers were being given by the codebreakers. Not only that, but the Germans were also giving false call signs to confuse British intelligence. So despite the British decoding the German messages and orders, this vital information

failed to get to where it was most needed. It was now up to Bedi to think on his feet. He ordered a 180-degree turn, heading north towards the British Grand Fleet, commanded by Admiral Jellico. Behind Beattie, the Germans followed in hot pursuit. Bidi then made a huge mistake. He didn't think to inform Jellico what he was doing. Jellico actually signals him and says, so where is the enemy battle fleet? I can hear this firing going on, but I don't know precisely where it is. He doesn't get any information. It was only down to Jellico's judgment and a stroke of luck that he was able to

to break the Germans' pursuit of Bidi, surrounding the enemy with a semicircle of guns. The Germans were suddenly faced by a five-mile line of British battleships, about to turn their firepower upon them. This was the last thing that they wanted to see was the entire Grand Fleet assembled in front of them. And when out of a fog bank appeared more naval firepower than had ever been assembled on the high seas before.

Admiral Jellico had the upper hand, He had the weather gauge. He had the sun to his back. He had the Germans to his front and was able to bring the full might of his guns down on Admiral Shearer and pound them into pieces. Now the real battle had just begun. If that was the case, why are so many British ships littered on the seabed? The reason for this was a remarkable German tactical maneuver.

Frankly, at this point, Shear did something that was incredibly gutsy. He ordered what he called a battle turn. And the battle turn was an idea that each ship would turn on its own position, not one after the other, but all of them at the same time, away from the British line, away from the British guns, and frankly back into the mist. So Jellica was looking at, you know, available gunnery targets one moment, and then four minutes later there was nothing. It was just missed.

Essentially this was like a fast handbrake turn in a car. Now the guns of the German Navy were turned back on the British fleet, and the results were catastrophic. Two salvos struck HMS Defense, its magazine exploded, and the ship rapidly sank. Not a single member of its 900 strong crews survived. HMS Defense was just one of many British ships lost that day. Along with the Queen Mary and the indefatigable, HMS Invincible, was hit by three Salvos. from German ships and it sunk within 90 seconds. Their wrecks still lie at Jutland.

Why did these mighty ships, the pride of the British Navy, sink so quickly? The dramatic images of HMS Invincible sinking suggests that, like HMS Queen Mary, the ship had broken in two. Chuck is now examining detailed modern footage of the wreck, looking for clues and answers. answers. Pretty intact though. There's a lot of scattered wreckage around what looks like cables, and I can see sections of plating and things like that. It's a mess, definitely. There's a lot of

stuff. I mean, you know, probably some of the superstructure has collapsed. Chuck finds some clues around the ship's central turret. The roof of the turret is missing. Once the turret was penetrated, the explosion was powerful enough that it tore the ship into two pieces, much like the Queen Mary. Like the Queen Mary, HMS Invincible seems to have been the victim of an enormous turret explosion. Chuck tries to piece together what might have happened. These are smaller guns than some of the others we've seen, probably these seven and a half inch guns. It looks like the roof of the turret is blown off, which makes sense.

sense if we know the magazines caught fire and exploded. If both ships suffered a similar fate, why does the wreck of the defense look so different? At least some of the vessel looks somewhat intact for the way it was sunk. Again, there's a lot of tangled, broken wreckage, but I could see large parts of the deck where the wooden decking was still in place.

The differences in damage to the wreck lie in their designs. The main magazines on Queen Mary, indefatigable and invincible, were located in the center of the ships. It is most likely that the huge explosions here caused the ships to break in two. But HMS defense had 9.2-inch turrets at the front and back.

The explosion, rather than breaking the ship in two, destroyed both ends of the ship, leaving the middle on the ocean floor. on the ocean floor. Did the design of the ships contribute to their doom? More coming up after the break. The wrecks of World War I's largest naval battle are scattered beneath the depths of the North Sea.

Expert analysis and new technology begin to reveal that the reason could have been an unseen flaw in the British ship's design. The evidence from dive footage suggests there were weak spots around the turrets. Andrew Chung is curator at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich London, which holds the original plans for the Queen Mary, the second of the ships to sink.

A great many features were worked into ensuring the safety and survivability of this ship. The Queen Mary was one of the better protected of the British battle cruisers, with one exception she had the strongest side armour. There were multiple levels of safety designed to keep and minimise physical damage, but also the damage through fire, which was the greatest fear in a space where lots of ammunition would be stored.

The plans confirm that the British ship HMS Queen Mary was built with an array of modern design features to protect it from enemy shells. If the plans and underwater images show that the ship was so well designed, what could have caused it to suddenly accept it? to suddenly explode. HMS Caroline, the last surviving ship of the Battle of Jutland, is docked safely in Belfast in Northern Ireland, and could hold the key to what exactly caused the Queen Mary to sink. The shell rooms were where the high explosive six-inch shells were stored.

This was potentially one of the most dangerous areas in the ship. If it was in these vulnerable turrets that the explosions occurred, what could be Can HMS Caroline reveal about how deadly shells were handled? It's an incredibly physical environment on board HMS Caroline. There aren't much in the way of mechanical aids to move things around. It's people physically lifting these shells, putting them on the hoist, moving them up through three or four decks to get to the guns. They would feel the change of the ship's movement as she changed course.

They might hear shell fire in the distance alongside, but fundamentally fundamentally they don't know what's going on. The way in which the shells were brought up to the guns on deck was very similar to the much larger Queen Mary. Ships like Queen Mary were designed with a multi-stage system of passing ammunition from the magazines up into the gunhouse. Shells at the lowest level would be placed on a hoist. They would then pass through an armoured scuttle with a closing fireproof hatch. As a vital safety measure, the doors on every level should have been closed each time the hoist passed through

to act as fireproof barriers. However, this critical safety feature left the ship with a major disadvantage. The only problem with this system was that it prevented a rapid rate of fire. It was deliberate, it was carefully designed, and it was really meant to ensure the safety of the ship. It seemed that there was a choice for the British ships.

A rapid rate of fire or a compromise in safety. So did they decide to leave the fire hatches open? This worked in the sense that it was possible to get shells and cordite bags up into the turret more rapidly, but it also meant that there was now an exposed passage for any fire to travel all the way from the turret gunhouse right to the magazine at the bottom of the ship. When the German shells hit the turret, the fire ripped through the open hatches to the ammunition below. Huge explosions tore the ships apart. Queen Mary, invincible and indefatigable, broke down the middle,

while in HMS defense, the explosions ripped off both of the ship's ends. The footage from the wreck dive supports the fire hatch theory, but more evidence is still needed to solve the mystery once and for all. The tragedy for the British was that German systems for cordite handling and safety were not really too dissimilar from theirs, but the crucial difference is the Germans adhered to their rules, and, to a large degree, the British did not. Everything becomes about feeding the guns as fast as possible, and that, of course, on the bigger ships, on the battle cruises, leads ultimately to disaster. While turret explosions destroyed the lead ships, what other factors contributed to? to the sinking of these doomed vessels.

German Admiral Scheer's fleet made two charges at the British line, firing a wave of torpedoes. British Admiral Jellico's response provided the war with one of its greatest controversies. My grandfather has been most criticized probably for what he then did. He decided to turn the ships of the Grand Fleet away from a threat, the torpedo threat that was unleashed. This is not in the Nelson traditional. of closing with the enemy.

He'd even said that he knew he would probably incur the odium of the public because it might be misunderstood. Jellico seemed to be playing it safe. He can be criticized for other things, but on this I think he was right. As night fell, both the British and the Germans headed south.

He feels that any superiority he has he has is probably going to be risked by the chance of a night engagement. His fleet hasn't trained in night tactics, and the searchlights that they use are definitely inferior to the German iris searchlight. Jellicoe positioned a screen of destroyers to protect his ships until first light. Now at night you have these destroyers that are crossing in and amongst each other. You have ships dashing about. These are pre-radar days.

It was hard to see who was who at night and relying on visual signals, blinker lights and all that in fog and smoke. Chaos of battle that the fleet action by night magnified the horrors of the day. How would his ships rejoin the battle in the morning? The key was to cut off the German's route back to port, but it wasn't straightforward. As commander of the German high seas fleet, Admiral Scheer had many options. Which one would he choose? One of those options might be for him to actually tail back and go up to the score and then through the Skagarak into the Baltic and back to keel.

One other alternative might be heading south. Jellico made the decision to block Schier's direct route to Wilhelmshaven. So Jellico has really put all his eggs into one basket. He thinks that there's going to be the possibility of an engagement. of an engagement with the German fleet as light comes back anywhere after 2.30 in the morning. But Shear had other ideas. What he decides to do is to actually cut across Jellico's blocking line and try and get his ships back into the Horn's Riff and then back in behind the protective minefields.

As Jellico and Bedee commanded the British forces to head south, Admiral Shear was able to smash his way through the rear of the British line and head back to port. The hunt was over. The Germans had escaped. Perhaps Jellico had made a fatal misjudgment, but in the National Archives in London, historian Guy Walters has found documents revealing that the blame may not have rested entirely with him.

All the decrypts received and translated, and this is the Battle of Jutland in real time. This is what the Germans are saying to each other, and it's decoded almost on the spot and then sent to the Navy for them to evaluate. This is as good, in modern terms, as having a drone right above your enemy. You can see exactly what they're up to, but you can also see what the enemy is planning to do. You can see into the future. Questions remain. If the British had the vital decoded German messages, then how were they unable to avenge their losses that day and allow the enemy to escape?

The German fleet are heading in a kind of south-southeasterly direction to a place called Horn's Reef. Our main body proceed course south-south-east to Horn's Reef. Be assembled by 4 a.m. at Horn's Reef on course around squaw. On and on they go. was little room for doubt. Admiral Shear, commander of the German high seas fleet, was ordering his forces towards Horn's Reef. Now I'm looking at all these signals. Admiral Jellico should have been looking at all these signals, but he never did. Because what happens to them, they get decrypted in room 40, they get passed to Admiralty operations, and it's they who

decide which signals that Jellico gets. Now extraordinarily, operations sit on most of these signals. There are 16 signals here which say Horn's Reef. It couldn't be more explicit, but they only sent three to Jellico. Given the problems with decoded messages from Admiralty Operations earlier in the battle, Jellico probably didn't entirely trust them. Why doesn't he trust operations? Because earlier in the day, operations had said to him, oh, don't worry, you know, the German fleet, it's all at port still.

And he's now run into it. So he's thinking, anything I'm hearing from operations is probably nonsense. so I'm going to ignore it. There were captains on other destroyers who could see perfectly well what Shear was doing. Unfortunately, their sightings weren't reported to Jellico. The most crucial element of the night actions is that the destroyers on the whole

failed to report what was happening to them. And it was only shortly before 3 in the morning that a proper contact report with a position was actually dispatched by the last. last British ships to engage the Germans. As the German Navy began arriving back in port and Dawn broke over the North Sea, Jellicoe realized that he'd been hoodwinked. Back in Britain, the people were faced with an uncomfortable truth.

The British Navy was no longer the only major power at sea. Jutland has always had a very controversial place inside a British naval history. Initially, it was to do with the expectations of the British public. I mean, they'd been awaiting a Trafalgar-like victory, and when this wasn't the case, that immediately set the scene. An unfortunate consequence of this was that returning British sailors were booed and jeered, some had things thrown at them in the streets, the vast swathes of the British public were convinced

that the Navy had lost the battle and had let them down. The Battle of Jutland shook the confidence of Britain. It was indecisive at first. The Royal Fleet comes back and there are minus 14 ships. They're minus 6,700 sailors. How do you declare a victory when you suffer three-quarters of the loss of the battle? And that was something that at first was attempted to be covering up, knowing that it would shake the foundations of British involvement in World War I.

More than 100 years later, all we have left are the wrecks and the now declassified documents. They alone hold the key to understanding why a battle that was supposed to deliver a British victory turned into a humiliating nightmare. But the ships that were once powerful symbols of British naval might are still there, albeit deep beneath the waves. And they are gradually revealing their secrets and the answers to questions that have echoed down the years. The reputations of men such as Admiral's Jellico and Beattie are still held within those wrecks. What was reprehensible about the postscript of Junkland

was the vitriolic war of words that went on between the two camps of followers, Jellikers and Beetis. The new footage of the wrecks reveals the flaws in ship design, which contributed to the sinking of the ships. These would never have been acknowledged at the time when the Navy was casting around for reasons to explain what happened at Jutland. The fact that vital signals intelligence was not passed on to Jellico would not be revealed until the documents themselves became declassified many years later. And the turret explosions caused by poor weapons practice were blamed on the ships the ships the

themselves. The nature of naval warfare was changing so rapidly with technology that some of the basic tenets of good communication and naval gunnery were forgotten. The fog of war, the introduction of massive new types of technology helped cripple the British fleet at Jutland, preventing the concise victory they saw, and the same for the Germans. The status quo was the same the very next day. The British really had to push to try to try to tell their population that they still controlled the seas.

Britannia still ruled the waves. In the short term, the British re-armored a lot of their ships, sending them in for refits to have extra armor placed over the crowns of the magazines. And this was a bit of a waste of time because in practical terms, the extra armor applied to many of these ships would not have prevented the same sort of damage from happening again. It was the deciding battle for both sides. and it resulted in changes in naval technology,

naval gunnery, and how we commit war against each other. The Battle of Judlin was a clash of Titans. It was the greatest naval battle of World War I. Modern underwater technologies have given a fresh insight into the events of this battle and have helped piece together the mystery of how these ships came to lie beneath the waves of the North Sea. As the wrecks continue their unstoppable

slow demise as bulk ed's collapse and iron plating falls off that that will reveal things that we couldn't otherwise easily see. So continuing to dive on these shipwrecks, continuing to try to understand their current physical condition and what that tells us about the details of their sinking. We will continue to learn more about the Battle of Jutland from these ghost hulks that still survive at the bottom of the sea. As for Admiral Jellico, He fell out of favor with the Navy and retired, and his job was taken by the ambitious Beattie. His reputation and the stories of the stricken ships that sealed it

may well have been sunk forever. Thanks for exploring the past with us today. If you like this episode, please be sure to follow for more. We post new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday. Don't forget to leave a comment below, and feel free to leave us a rating or review. Your feedback helps us reach more listeners like you. And for more from the Like a Shot Network,

check out Where Did Everyone Go, Histories of the Abandoned, a deep dive into the incredible stories behind forgotten places, available now on your favorite podcast platforms. Thanks for listening.