Battle of Jutland: The Naval Disaster That Won WWI

On May the 31st, 1916, the British and German fleets clashed in what would be the biggest and bloodiest naval battle of the First World War, and, in fact, of the whole of Royal Naval history, the Battle of Jutland. This was the era of the dreadnought, mighty battleships that far outclassed anything that had gone before. At the time, Britannia ruled the world's oceans, so when the fleets met, people in Britain were expecting a famous victory. But this was one battle that didn't go to plan. We'll discover how the commanders fought the battle with new technology but outdated tactics. We're going to be looking at hundreds of pieces of Jutland history, many of which have never been seen before. And hear first-hand the horror of being in the heart of the onslaught. Yes, when the guns are brought to the ready, you simply wait for the open fire. By the end of one day's battle, Britain had lost more than 6,000 men. We used the latest marine engineering to tackle the question, why did so many men die? We're there when, for the very first time, the Royal Navy charts the final resting place of the ships which hold so many graves at the bottom of the North Sea. I'm absolutely sure this is HMS Invincible. And after 100 years, we uncover shocking new evidence that rewrites history and reveals Jutland as the forgotten battle where the First World War was lost and won. At Portsmouth Historic Dockyard, we're preparing for a very special delivery. So this is a 15-inch shell. This is about 880 kilos. What?! That's like the weight of a small car. Absolutely. It's incredible. This is a naval shell from a World War I battleship. It's part of an exhibition at the National Museum of the Royal Navy to commemorate the centenary of the Battle of Jutland. So what kind of speeds would they have been fired at? So the muzzle velocity of a 15-inch gun is 749 metres per second. Wait, that's over double the speed of sound. It was shells like these that made 31 May 1916 the bloodiest day in the Royal Navy's history. Eagle has landed. On that day, the Royal Navy's Grand Fleet went head-to-head with the German High Seas Fleet in the middle of the North Sea. It was the first and only time they would meet in full-scale battle during the First World War. The British had 151 ships, the Germans 99, and Britain expected an easy victory. The battle only lasted 12 hours, but in that time the Royal Navy came off worse. 14 of their ships were sunk and more than 6,000 lives were lost. The cries of the wounded and burnt men were very terrible to listen to. They were brought in sometimes with feet or hands hanging off. Very soon the deck of the disputing station was packed with wounded or dying men. A greater number of injuries were caused by burns. Some men had all their head, hands and arms burned. This was a battle like no other in World War I. It was the deadliest day in Royal Navy history. Goes on. Two sides of the Royal Navy Memorial in Portsmouth are dedicated to sailors who died in that one battle. The Royal Navy was haunted by the catastrophic loss of life at Jutland. Shini and I want to investigate exactly why so many died. As an engineer, I want to know whether flaws in ship design played a part in the loss of all those young lives, as some argued at the time. Or was it in fact down to the commanders? Were the decisions they made on the day the reason for so many casualties? For generations, the significance of this brutal battle has been downplayed, treated as at best an irrelevance, at worst a humiliating disaster for the Allies. But I think we've had it wrong for a century and I'm on the trail of new evidence to show how important Jutland really was. But first, I'm heading out to the site of the battle itself, just off the coast of Denmark. Good morning, HMS Echo. This is the second officer to watch for your morning sit-rep. The weather is overcast... Unlike the battlefields on land, out here in the North Sea, there are no graves to visit and the exact positions of the final resting places of thousands of British sailors have never been officially marked on a chart... until now. OK, guys, gather round. Just go through quickly what the plan of action's going to be. On the Royal Navy's survey vessel HMS Echo, Lieutenant Commander James Windsor and his team are aiming for the first time to put precise coordinates on the graves of the 6,000 Allied sailors that died here. At the moment, they're all position approximate. We'd love to give a tied-down position of, yeah, that is a war grave, now we can protect it. There was guys just my age and younger, just like the guys and girls we've got on board, and, you know, I'd like to give them a final resting place. Stow all gear and report to HQ1. It's not long before we find our first wreck. So we're looking at two sections there, is that right? Yeah, that's right. We've got the main part of the ship here... Oh, my goodness, look at that! ..which appears to be broken in two with an upturned bow there and a stern end there. And then this would sort of be more at a floor level. Yeah. We absolutely know that HMS Invincible was hit, blew up amid ships and broke into two pieces when she sank. So, looking at the size of the ship and the condition of the wreck and marrying it up with the historical evidence, I'd say that I'm absolutely sure this is HMS Invincible. The sea is giving up its secrets. As you can see, you've got a few objects on the seabed. But there's one ship I want to find more than all the others. Oh, my goodness. That's really substantial, isn't it? It is, yes. Obviously, it's well broken up into the two distinct pieces at the moment. So what we're looking at here is the wreck of HMS Queen Mary. As we go further... 1,266 men died aboard the Queen Mary. It was the biggest single loss of life in the whole battle. She sank suddenly and catastrophically just two hours into the battle. She was only four years old and her loss was a complete disaster. By the end of the survey voyage, we have found the wrecks of six Royal Navy ships, including the five big warships that account for more than 80% of British dead at Jutland. Now we're able to pay our respects to the men who died that day at their final resting place. The sudden and dramatic loss of ships like the Queen Mary sent shockwaves through the whole fleet and eventually the nation. It seems to me, as the pride of the Royal Navy, understanding her fate may hold the key to understanding the battle as a whole and the controversies that have raged ever since. It's hard to equate HMS Echo's sonar images with the fighting machines at sea. If I am to understand whether the commanders were at fault, I need to see a World War I warship up close. By 1914, Britain had created a new and revolutionary ship, the Dreadnought. Today, there's only one place to find one. Texas. That is enormous. I've been fascinated by these mighty warships since I was a child, but obviously I've never seen one before. This is the world's only World War I-era Dreadnought. Imagine a whole fleet of those steaming out into the North Sea in line astern. The Dreadnought's battery of huge-calibre guns gave the commanders at sea unprecedented firepower. I mean, I've never seen guns as big as these. This is five turrets of 14-inch guns. Each one of these can fire a high-explosive projectile 12 miles. What you're looking at here is basically the most destructive and powerful weapons system the world had ever seen. This Dreadnought is 175 metres long. We're coming up on basically the part of the ship we like to call Main Street. Ranger Andy Smith is in charge of preserving this revolutionary piece of naval history. With a crew of more than 1,000 men, it was like a city at sea. Here you have the laundry. Got kind of hot with all this machinery. Amazing to think of guys during a campaign battle still in here scrubbing away. But what really marked these Dreadnoughts out was their power. They could travel at 21 knots, faster than any ship before them. This Dreadnought battleship, just how advanced was it compared to what had gone before? You come aboard this ship, most likely you came from someplace that had no electricity normally, no running water, and now you're on this that's lit up. Biggest guns ever made, biggest engines ever made. You know, that's the kind of technological leap that you're talking about. Once the Dreadnought was launched, the commanders had extraordinary technology at their disposal. But what interests me is that many of the sailors manning these high-tech machines were young and inexperienced, like Dale Churchett's great-uncle, Leonard Kilburn. So what have you got? Well, my great-uncle served on the HMS Queen Mary, and my dad found pictures. So this is your dad's uncle? Yes. His name is Albert Leonard Kilburn. I believe he was the eldest of a very large family. So how old was he at the Battle of Jutland? At the Battle of Jutland, he was 17 years old. 17! It's kind of poignant for me because my son is 17 this year, and there's a resemblance. I can't imagine a boy of that age doing the job in that war. A third of the crew on a Dreadnought like Leonard's ship, the Queen Mary, would have worked on the guns, many in the deep magazine. Look at the size of these shells! That's more than half a tonne of high explosives. So you've got to get these, 1,500 pounds, about four storeys up. You can see this trolley system attached to the monorails, pad eye hooks on here. This lifts it up like an elevator. The deep magazine would have been full of shells, each packed with high explosive. Next door, there was more combustible material. OK, Dale, so this is the powder magazine. Each of these bags held the explosive powder needed to propel the shells out of the guns. And four of these for every one round fired. So we have ten guns, 40 of these bags to fire a full broadside. And they need to get all the way from here, all the way up. It took 70 men to operate each gun, from magazine to gun house. So, you all ready to go up? Come on. Shells, powder and crew all use the same shaft up to the gun house above. Wow, that's quite a climb. So the shell comes up from down below? Correct. They can push that 1,500-pound round into the breach and then we still have to put four powder bags in. Then we put these on. Right. And then for that, we actually use the old ramrod. The old ramrod. 19th-century technology still survives. Exactly. It is a pretty confined space. Actually, I've got a description as a midshipman who was in one of these turrets when the Queen Mary was hit. It's pretty brutal. After all the men had gone out of the turret, I went up myself and found the ship lying on her side. All around us, men were falling off into the water. A few moments afterwards, a tremendous explosion occurred in the forepart of the vessel, which must have blown the bowels to atoms. The stern gave an enormous lurch, throwing me into the water. Very grim stuff. Knowing he lost his life in that, you just kind of don't want to think of him going down drowning. Although that's a distinct possibility, you'd kind of rather him just be underneath the shell. So he just didn't know anything about it. Not a good way to go. Leonard Kilburn's ship sank in minutes, as did four other big Royal Navy ships lost at Jutland. As an engineer, I want to find out whether flaws in design were the reason for these catastrophic losses, as some people argued after the battle. The Queen Mary was one of the newest and most advanced ships at the Battle of Jutland, the pride of the Royal Navy. And here at the National Maritime Museum, they've got a beautiful scale model. The Queen Mary represented yet another advance in warship technology, the battlecruiser. Wow! The museum's curator of maps and models, Dr Andrew Cheung, is an expert on battleship design. Wow, here she is. Yes. The Queen Mary. So this was a battlecruiser? Yes. She's designed for speed and to be hard-hitting. She looks so elegant, but yet so powerful. This ship coming online would have represented the latest triumph of the Royal Navy and of British engineering over the Germans. To investigate her design, I've asked to see the Queen Mary's original drawings. The detail really is there. I mean, the annotations. Yes, and actually you can tell that this document is a work in progress. So clearly there were changes while they were making these plans. In this period, technology was simply not standing still, and in fact, around the time Queen Mary herself was being built, the next generation of fast battleships were actually being designed and laid down. Wow. The Queen Mary was at the cutting edge of ship technology, built for power and armoured against attack. But even as she was being launched, they were adapting her. This makes me wonder if they knew there were flaws in her design. Astonishingly, the Queen Mary sank after only seven hits, while German ships took far more punishment. At Southampton University, there's a whole department dedicated to testing just that, why some ships stay afloat and others don't. So what do you do in the tow tank, then? Well, in the tow tank, we drag ship models along. Professor of ship dynamics, Philip Wilson, is going to help me compare British and German ship design, and we're going to take to the water to put it to the test. So I have a plan of HMS Queen Mary. OK. I want to compare the Queen Mary to a German ship that was her near equivalent, and in fact helped to sink her, the Seidlitz. There it is, the Seidlitz. It's about 700 feet long, so similar in length, similar in beam, similar armament, but the difference will be where the watertight compartments are. So how many watertight compartments were there in the Queen Mary? OK, so... Battleships were divided into internal watertight sections. This prevented any flooding caused by shell damage from spreading to keep the ship afloat. 15, 16, 17. So, crucial question, how does that compare to the Seidlitz? So we've got 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18. 18. So just one more. The Seidlitz damage is really well documented. Gosh. So the Germans took photographs of every single hit. I mean, trefor number 18. This one's pretty impactful. Trefor number 14. Horrendous. This is why I'm so intrigued, because the Seidlitz was able to limp back to port, even though it was hit 24 times. A reef! Yeah, that picture is incredible. Isn't it just? How many times were the Queen Mary hit? The Queen Mary was only hit seven times, and it sank. And it sank? So I'm determined to know what the difference was. OK. We're going to use the Queen Mary's plans to build an engineering model of the ship's hull and test it in the towing tank. With the information we have on the damage to the Seidlitz and the help of a computer simulation, we can subject the Queen Mary model to the same flooding damage to see how quickly she sinks. For the first time, we can use computer-aided engineering to put the theory of inferior British design to the test. But after my visit to the Dreadnought warship in Texas, I'm investigating another theory for the huge loss of life at Jutland. The British admirals had astonishing firepower and speed at their command. So why weren't they able to exploit those technological advantages? Could their tactics be to blame? Hello, Dan. How are you doing? Very good to see you. At the time of Jutland, none of the admirals had fought a major battle. And despite their high-tech ships, their greatest influence was a man who'd been dead for a century, Lord Nelson. Great grand entrance, the great man himself. Yes. He was an iconic character. He was crucial for the Navy through the 19th century and into the 20th century, still till today. Admiral Lord West believed Nelson cast a very long shadow, here in the Admiralty and out at sea. Nelson gave the Royal Navy this habit of victory. And when the First World War came, the country and the Navy thought, there'll be another Trafalgar, we'll wipe out a German fleet, you know, this is what we do. And, of course, that didn't happen. This is the Admiralty boardroom, which I used as First Sea Lord for the Navy board meetings. Another Nelson portrait looking down. Yet again, looking down. Just in case you forget. So, when you sat in that chair, you were sitting in the chair that some very illustrious admirals had been in before. At the Battle of Jutland, the Royal Navy was led by two key men. In overall charge was Admiral Sir John Jellicoe, commander of the Grand Fleet. His deputy was Vice-Admiral Sir David Beatty. Jellicoe was very much a detailed man. It weighed heavy on his shoulders. He knew that he could lose the war for Britain in one day. And Beatty was much more gung-ho. He saw himself very much as a Nelson, actually. Engage the enemy more closely, let's get in there and fight them. And that meant firing hard and fast, just like his predecessor. The interesting thing is, Nelson's very celebrated, but he always faced inferior enemy commanders. In fact, these two faced tough opposition in these Germans. They were Vice-Admiral Reinhard Scheer, recently appointed commander of Germany's High Seas Fleet, and his deputy, Vice-Admiral Franz von Hipper. Scheer was very, very intent on there being a fleet action to try and whittle down the size of the Grand Fleet. He said, we must make a part of the Grand Fleet come towards us and destroy it piecemeal, then we can finally have a real battle against the Grand Fleet. He wanted to lure the British out, whittle away at their numerical superiority. Absolutely. On the eve of battle, the British commanders seemed to have all the advantages. More ships, bigger guns, and what should surely have proved decisive, better intelligence. In a room here in the Admiralty that was so secret, some in the naval hierarchy couldn't even work out where it was, a group of codebreakers was working on intercepted German messages. That room was called Room 40. I've always loved the sound of Room 40. It just conjures up all sorts of images of James Bond and secret services. It was where the Admiralty assembled German speakers who could make sense of the messages that were being intercepted by the Navy's wireless telegraphy stations. That makes it the ancestor of Bletchley Park, Enigma, GCHQ, so all of the world of cyber and intercepts that we live with today. GCHQ historian Tony Comer has a copy of a captured German codebook which enabled staff in Room 40 to start decrypting enemy signals. To understand why the commanders didn't push home their intelligence advantage, we need to look at the hours immediately before the battle. What we've got here is an original German naval chart of the North Sea from the First World War. Early in the morning of the 30th May, there are a couple of intercepted messages which are decrypted that the German fleet is to be assembled in the Outer Roads by 9pm. So here we go, let's put the German fleet in the Outer Roads here. The Brits know they're there. At the moment they're on top of the game, they know what's going on. This intelligence prompts Jellicoe and Beatty's fleets out to sea. Beatty's coming out of here, the 3rd, the 4th. Jellicoe's back. He's bringing the might of the super dreadnoughts down here from Orkney and they're going east, right, so they're sort of hoping to ambush them somewhere around here. This is hundreds of years of history turned its head when what you did in the old days was go out to sea, have a look to see if you could see the enemy ships and then go and fight them. This is just a new world. But the British commanders weren't ready to relinquish some of their control, especially to civilians. The intercepted messages are being handed to the cryptanalysts. That causes some difficulties between the professional naval officers and their new civilian colleagues. This requires a level of central control from London that the Navy is just not used to. You've got somebody afloat thinking, what on earth does this guy in London know about my job? And to some extent they were right, because the intelligence was not always clear. A telegram goes from the Admiralty to Jellicoe. No definite news, enemy. It was thought a fleet had sailed, but directional signals place its flagship on the Jade. OK, on the river. Hang on. OK, I'm going to move these guys back into their river harbour. But due to a breakdown in communication between Room 40 and Admiralty chiefs, this intelligence was wrong. The German fleet had, in fact, already sailed. But do the Brits leave harbour? They still leave harbour. But of course, although the British are at sea, they're not expecting to find the Germans. Jellicoe advanced slowly to save fuel, and his deputy Beatty forged ahead, not realising this was playing into Scheer's hands. So the intelligence aspect of Germany is a bit of a tragedy really, isn't it? Being able to decrypt intercepted German messages should have given the British a clear advantage. But it was a technological leap too far for the admirals at sea, who didn't trust it and failed to exploit it. Jellicoe's deputy, Admiral Beatty, was steaming east, spoiling for a fight. And that same afternoon, on May 31st, his wish was granted when a scouting party from his battlecruiser squadron came face to face with the enemy. At 2.20pm, HMS Galatea sent a wireless message to Beatty's battlecruiser fleet. They had sighted the foremost elements of the German high seas fleet. The Battle of Jutland had begun. The atmosphere is good. The crew, numbering about 16, have all got their individual jobs. The guns being loaded. The next order was passed. Bring the guns to the ready. When the guns are brought to the ready, you simply wait for the open fire. We were looking forward to a chance to have a crack at the enemy. We were keen. This was the day we were waiting for. In the very first moments of the battle, you can see how modern practices had not been fully embraced by the admirals at sea. Beatty was eager to pursue the enemy, and he sent a crucial message for his fleet to change course. But instead of using newly invented wireless, he used signal flags. This was a tried and tested system, dating from the Age of Sail. But with the new dreadnought warships, the whole concept of naval battles had changed, and so had the size of the battlefield. Hi, Dan, how are you doing? Good to see you. A vital part of Beatty's fleet, the 5th Battle Squadron, a group of powerful super-dreadnoughts, were following five miles behind. But just how easy is it to read a flag signal at that distance? I'm heading out with the Navy on their training ship HMS Exploit to find out. And Nick is going to fly a flag signal from South Sea Castle in Portsmouth. Look at the size of these flags. South Sea Castle, this is warship Exploit. We're on our way over. We've reached our target, but even with the help of Chief Petty Officer Dan Powdich, I can't see a thing. What's... The visibility's less than five miles, isn't it? Well under five miles at the moment. You see, that's interesting, because at the Battle of Jutland, ships were spread well over five miles, so in conditions like this, they wouldn't have been able to even see their admiral. Not at all. At the moment, Nick, we can't see the shore, let alone the flags, so I think we'd better close for about three miles. HMS Exploit. I mean, it is a hazy day today, isn't it? But then we're told the Battle of Jutland was very murky, very cloudy, and there was all the huge amounts of smoke being created by all the battleships themselves. At three miles, I'm still having problems. So we close in to two. Black and white lighthouse, and it's just to the right of that. There's a pennant, a white pennant with some red on it, then there's a Union Jack with a border, and then there's a yellow with a black spot, a big one at the bottom. Look, we can refer to this, which was the 1913 Fleet Signal Book. So the white pennant comes as leading ships together, the rest in succession, to the point or degree indicated. So he's ordering a change of course. Together, Delta and Hotel indicated the direction south-south-east. So we think we've worked it out. We have to multi-course the leading ships and the rest turning in succession to south-south-east. How about that? That's spot-on, Dan. Absolutely correct. In the days of Nelson's victory at Trafalgar, the battlefield would have been mere metres wide. But by Jutland, the ships were stretched out over miles and the air was thick with coal smoke. When Beatty signalled to his fleet to change course, the message wasn't picked up by the 5th Battle Squadron, five miles away. By the time they took action, they'd fallen ten miles behind. His use of flag signals and his gung-ho attitude in steaming ahead without the super-dreadnoughts had put his whole fleet, including the Queen Mary, at risk. This didn't faze Admiral Beatty. After all, his battlecruisers were faster and had superior weaponry to the Germans. But here's the problem. In this new age of fast-moving super-dreadnoughts with powerful long-range guns, hitting a target was more difficult than it had ever been. Today, before any Royal Navy warship, like HMS Portland, sets off on a mission, it does weeks of training. I've come on board Portland just as they're about to conduct what they call their gunnery serial. They'll be firing all their guns, large and small, checking they all work and also practising hitting a target. But in the run-up to Jutland, Beatty's squadron had been stationed at Rosyth in the shelter of the Firth of Forth and had barely been able to practise firing their guns at all. To watch these powerful guns up close, I'm in full safety gear. The sound, that's a shockwave that hits you. It passes straight through your body. It's like an electric shock almost. And that is a fraction of the size of the guns they were using at Jutland. To get these guns firing, most of the important work happens down below in the operations room. Nowadays, the captain is down here in the bowels of the ship. This is the ops room, this is the brains of the operation. Back then, of course, it was on the bridge. They needed to see. The best equipment they had for monitoring the enemy's position was the eyeball. 02, engage. But they did have a new piece of technology at Jutland to help them hit the target. An optical engineer, Alan Ray, from Thales, has brought one on board today. Right, Alan, what have you got here? OK, this is an FT-37 rangefinder. It's very representative of the rangefinding technology which was used at the Battle of Jutland. So they actually had some kit that helped them to calculate how far the ships were away. Absolutely. This was state-of-the-art technology in 1916. And these guys would have been right up in the top of the ship, above the smoke, hopefully, and they'd try and pick out the enemy ships. So there's a tanker there. OK, I've got that tanker in my eyepiece right now. And if you adjust that control there, that will move the prisms at either end. You'll see the target slowly starting to align. You then make the measurement in the left-hand eyepiece. OK, sounds complicated. This is the worst job on the ship. I'd rather clean out the bilges. Remember, you're under fire as well. Thank you. It's so fiddly, but I actually am getting it slightly. You can see, like, there's a ghost ship and then the real ship. You've just got to try and get them to overlap. Get them to line up. So I'm going to take a punt here, Alan. I reckon it's about 4,200 metres. Where's Keith? Keith, have you got a distance to that ship? Lieutenant Commander Keith Bowers has used a laser rangefinder to measure the distance. We've gone through at 4,040 metres at the moment. That's not bad, is it, for an amateur, a novice. Very good, very close, only 160 metres out. Of course, if you're in Jutland now, in a turret, the ship would be pitching around, no stabilisation. We're on a quite calm, stable platform at the moment, so it makes it a lot easier for you today. I'm patting myself on the back, but I've still missed the ship. Absolutely. This gets you close, but you've got to get those shells on such a tiny target. And you've got to be able to hit that target before it hits you. You've got to remember the distances at Jutland were much, much more than 4,000 metres. They were distances of over 20,000 yards. The enemy ships would have been obscured, and the haze and the gun smoke, the crew would have been deafened and distracted. I'm amazed they got any shells anywhere near their targets. Rangefinding technology had not kept pace with gunnery. Though Beatty's guns could fire further than his enemy, he had to delay shooting until his men could fix their target, by which time he had lost that advantage. In the first phase of the battle, it was the Germans who registered far more hits. And to compensate for their lack of practice and the difficulty of rangefinding, Beatty demanded his gunnery teams did everything possible to increase the rate of fire. After sighting the enemy, Beatty turned his fleet in pursuit, unaware they were drawing him towards the rest of the high seas fleet. Within two hours, he'd lost two of his battlecruisers, Indefatigable and Queen Mary. And more than 2,000 British sailors were dead. I want to work out whether so many British sailors died at Jutland not because of tactics, but because the ships they sailed in were inherently unsafe. At the time, many believed German ships were more resilient than British ones and therefore safer. Back at Southampton University, Professor Philip Wilson and his colleague Dr John Downs have built an engineering model of the hull of the battlecruiser HMS Queen Mary, which they're launching in their towing tank. So what's the plan for the experiment? Well, the plan is to use the Queen Mary model to mimic what happened to the Seydlitz. So would the Queen Mary have sunk had it had the same number of hits as the Seydlitz had, which didn't sink? The German battlecruiser Seydlitz was hit 24 times, but still managed to limp badly damaged back into port. We're going to subject our model to the same damage and a computer programme will simulate how it causes the ship's compartments to flood. So if I run that, you can see there the first five hits have got a very small amount of water entering the vessel. Following the computer's calculations, we're pouring an equivalent quantity of water into the areas of the ship that would have been flooded after those first five hits. The next six or seven hits did very little damage as well because they hit in the superstructure. Then we come to a major hit amid ships. The 12th hit on the Seydlitz caused serious flooding. We can see that the vessel is beginning to sink lower in the water there. That's it, keep it coming, keep it coming. It's amazing how much water you can get on this ship and it's not really changing where it sits in the water. No, it's gone down only a very small amount and we've taken a lot of damage there. 12 hits. And that's more than the Queen Mary took altogether. The Queen Mary was hit only seven times before she sank. Here, as the hit count reaches 20, she's still afloat. The big one's to come yet. The final hit to the Seydlitz came from a torpedo which struck near the bow. Gosh, I think it's going to sink. Now it puts our model under serious strain. You can see the bow going way down now. But still she doesn't sink. So the Queen Mary has had all the hits that the Seydlitz had and yet she's still afloat. All 24 hits. So there really doesn't seem to be any difference between the designs. Yes. By the end of our experiment, a century-long debate has been put to rest. British ship design was not intrinsically inferior to German. It was not the reason why so many British ships sank while their German equivalents limped home to port. So if ship design wasn't at fault, what was? The five largest British ships had one thing in common. Witnesses described catastrophic explosions on board before they sank. There's a powerful account of the Queen Mary's last moments from a German officer who watched her go down. Black debris of the ship flew into the air and immediately afterwards the whole ship blew up with a terrific explosion. A gigantic cloud of smoke rose, the mast collapsed inwards and the smoke cloud hid everything and rose higher and higher. Finally, nothing but a thick black cloud of smoke remained where the ship had been. It seems to me such a devastating explosion could only have been caused by a direct hit on the ship's magazine, full of high-explosive shells and propellant, or cordite. A direct hit might just explain one loss, but could all five British ships have been so unlucky? This is the deep magazine where they stored the ammunition. Now, as the name suggests, it's right down in the bottom of the ship. We are below the waterline now, and that meant it could be a very unpleasant place to be in a battle. The deep magazine holds hundreds of high-explosive shells, and at Jutland they were purposely overstocked because of their fast-firing tactics. On HMS Portland, Chief Petty Officer Simon Piles is in charge of ammunition. OK, that is your classic shell there. Yeah. Can I have a go? How heavy is it? Give it on the old legs, brother. Oh, my... OK. So that, in there, that's the cordite, right? Yeah, yeah. Nowadays, the cordite and the high explosive are all encased in one shell. But at Jutland, cordite was added to the shell in the gun turret. Four big bags for every shot. That's incredibly dangerous. Dangerous, yeah, very dangerous. So on a big battleship in Jutland, they'd have had hundreds, over 1,000 shells. Over 1,000, I would say, yeah. Also, you'd be trying to get from shells and the cordite to the gun as quickly as possible, because it's not as safe as it could have been. The high rate of fire meant a constant supply of shells and bags of cordite had to be kept ready in the confined space of the gun turret. Magazine doors were propped open to speed up the process. Royal Navy crews were bypassing safety procedures to achieve the high rates of fire being asked of them. It sounds highly risky, and I want to find out what the consequences could have been. We're at Cranfield University's weapons testing range on Salisbury Plain. I guess, I mean, that's what's so fascinating about Jutland, is how those big ships blow up, and obviously there's plenty of potential. They were crammed with high explosives. We know there were massive explosions on board. What we don't know is whether cordite played a role in sending those ships to the bottom of the sea. We're meeting explosives expert Trevor Lawrence. OK, so what we've got here is a modern-day equivalent of cordite. So would it have been in this kind of formula? Yes, and this is a typical way that you would keep a gun propellant in this sort of stick form inside these bag charges. If I put a match to that, what would happen? Stand by. Three, two, one, firing. Set alight in open air, cordite produces a flame that seems easy to control. OK. A lot of smoke. Yes, indeed. But as you can see, that burnt really slowly, especially in explosive terms. Now Trevor is setting light to the same amount of propellant but enclosed in a metal ammunition box. Firing. Confined in a box or a gun barrel, the cordite behaves very differently. It explodes. So those three little bags did this kind of damage? Indeed, and that's all because we confined it. There's been a big pressure build-up inside there, and when that happens, it becomes strong enough that it overcomes the confinement and it vents. The lid flew off. Exactly. At Jutland, there were hundreds of big sacks of cordite, but most of them were down in the magazine, protected by the ship's armour from anything but a direct hit. So now we've built a mini version of that part of the ship, along with the gun turret, to try and find out what might have happened in the battle. Right, Trevor, there's our battleship. There it is, ready to go. Our gun turret magazine. So I've got a cross-section of the Queen Mary here. Right. So basically a slice straight down the middle. So this represents the gun turret, where there would be a small amount of propellant ready for use there. So that's that bit on the drawing. That's it up here, exactly. This represents our revolving hoist, which is the link between the gun turret and the magazines that store the main amount of propellant. Yeah, the Queen Mary's magazines would have been absolutely stuffed with high explosives. Yeah, exactly. I mean, they're going into a major battle. We're going to load our makeshift magazine, just like the ships at Jutland. So, Trevor, how much are we putting in here? We're putting about 30kg of propellant in the main container. We need to save six of these, because they're going to go into the turret box. We're mimicking the conditions at Jutland as closely as possible. Cordite in the gun house, and the doors to the deep magazine left open. So, propellant in the gun turret, OK. The lift is open, and the magazines are stashed. OK, we're all good to go then. Now Trevor's going to set light to the propellant just in the top compartment to simulate a hit on the gun turret. OK, Shinny. I'm getting nervous here. Firing in three, two, one. Fire. Whoa. It's blown it up. That would sink a ship, wouldn't it? Yeah. Structural damage. The Ranger's slow-motion cameras show how quickly the fire spreads from the smaller to the larger compartment. You can clearly see the flash travelling down from our gun turret down into the magazine. Such is the power of the explosion up in the turret there, it can just drive it down into the hull of the ship. It's got nowhere else to go. So it's taking the path of least resistance. Exactly. So it's had to vent out the best route it's got, which is down into the magazine, the last place you'd want it to be going. In the heat of the battle, if the cordites stacked in the armoured turrets were set alight, the pressure would have forced a flash fire down the shaft into the magazine below, packed full of high explosive. That build-up of pressure has bowed the whole thing, and it's started to fail along that seam there. And it has effectively ripped this in half down either side, which is exactly what happened to those battlecruisers at Jutland. Exactly. If it had been a little bit more highly confined, then it would have torn the whole thing apart. At Jutland, the ship's armour would only have increased the force of the explosion. When you think of those battlecruisers, how armoured they were, I mean, they were just solid metal boxes. I think that the armour that was put on the outside to protect from the outside threat actually made the internal event that much worse. The commanders had put firepower before safety. Bags of cordite stacked in the gun turret, some split in the haste to reload. Magazine doors propped open against safety procedure. All created the perfect conditions for a catastrophic explosion. Far from being destroyed by the might of the German onslaught, it's likely that the biggest British ships at Jutland sank because of their own unsafe practices. The result was a death toll of more than 6,000 men. Such large numbers of deaths can be hard to grasp. So for my exhibition, I've been meeting relatives of those who died at Jutland to get a sense of what individual men went through. Well, here are the two brothers. Yep. And this is Archie, my uncle, and this is my father, Bertie. Bertie survived. Serious, don't they? And Archie was a casualty of Queen Mary. Elizabeth Dixon lost her uncle to one of the battle's devastating explosions. Archie had followed his brother Bertie into the navy. He was just 16. 16. Yes, very young. And Dad was maybe just 18, and he discovered about the death of his brother when he was looking through the periscope, expecting to see Queen Mary. And he knows at that point that his brother's gone. I must show you this. Every bereaved family was sent a commemorative plaque. There's Britannia and this big lion. Yours is obviously much loved and cherished, but some families really resented receiving this as some sort of compensation for a lost child. Letters reveal the pain of losing a son. These are your grandmother's letters to Bertie. How poignant is that? My dearest and only boy. He wasn't the only boy, was he, until the Battle of Germany? No. We can't tell each other in writing what we are feeling today. My world was divided into three parts, and a third has crumbled away. Absolutely heartbreaking, isn't it? Isn't it? Archie's mother, Kathleen, was desperate to find out how her son died. There were only 18 survivors of the Queen Mary. Jocelyn's story is one of them, and they started up a correspondence. He had to convey which appalling fate Archie suffered, whether he was burned to death in this turret. There's another survivor, Humphrey Durrant. She goes to see him in hospital, and she says, he was just able to speak to me. And he died about five days later. Kathleen questioned why Archie, and so many others, had to die. My grandmother was not someone given to anger, but she did say about Admiral Beatty and his tactics, for no other reason than to demonstrate British pluck, he would deserve to be shot. Goodness. And this is because she believed that Archie would be still with her if the strategy hadn't followed the lines that it did, and therefore she speaks for so many other women. The explosion on the Queen Mary, probably caused by the mishandling of cordite, left more than 1,000 families with no grave to visit to mourn their loved ones, and little or no information about how they had died. Just after the Queen Mary sank so catastrophically, Beatty turned his battered battlecruisers north, leading the German High Seas Fleet straight into the path of Admiral Jellicoe's Grand Fleet. Now the navies went head to head. Two more big British ships, defence and invincible, sank following gigantic explosions. By the end of the battle, Britain had lost a total of 14 ships, while Germany had lost 11. 6,094 British sailors had died and 2,551 German. But the might of Jellicoe's Grand Fleet, once it joined the battle, was too much for the Germans. Under cover of darkness, their High Seas Fleet fled back to port and never challenged the British again for the rest of the war. We're steamed over the scene of the action. We passed masses of floating wreckage, spars, ditty boxes, fragments of lifeboats and many bodies. After steaming about this gruesome locality, the scene of many triumphs and losses for many hours, we shaped course for home. Despite the German retreat, in Britain, because of the huge loss of life, Jutland was viewed by many as a humiliating defeat and an irrelevant sideshow to the war on land. But I think there's another way of judging the importance of the Battle of Jutland. The Royal Navy's key objective was to enforce a blockade of the North Sea, Germany's only shipping route. Blocking it stopped vital resources from reaching them. And despite British losses at Jutland, the blockade stood firm. At the Imperial War Museum, curator Ian Kikuchi has a collection of artefacts that give clues about how effective it was. So this first object is actually a pair of wartime bloomers. Bloomers? And they're actually made of woven paper. So they have no cotton. This is the blockade really starting to bite them. This is a roll of lace that had been cut up for use as a bandage. So this is basically lace from clothing? Clothing or possibly curtains or something like that. That's not going to go down very well at home, is it? If you were asked to sacrifice your curtains... Yes, that's... You know things aren't going well. German propaganda posters hold more evidence of how resources were running thin. So this is a poster for a product called Hecker, which was a kind of Fleischersatz, a meat substitute, yeast and potato soup. Sounds absolutely disgusting. So this is a society that's starting to run out of food? Yes, this is... By this point the blockade has been called the hunger blockade. It's causing hunger in Germany. It's masking a really quite desperate situation. It's hard to gauge just how desperate things became in Germany because most of our information comes from government propaganda. So this is presented as the impact of blockade on Germany. We've got five children, five brothers. The numbers they carry are their ages. Now they're going to be like two normal children. Two normal children, OK, who are significantly bigger. I mean, that's pretty traumatic. Yeah, it's really sad. So this is malnutrition? Yeah. Dr Mary Cox, a historian at Oxford University, was looking for reliable evidence to measure how the blockade affected German health. She came across a rare book, which revealed the true extent of the deprivation children had suffered. Somebody collected the heights and weights of schoolchildren from different schools across the country. We have records for 23 different cities, so almost 600,000 schoolchildren. If deprivation is of long enough duration and severe enough, we would expect that it would actually change the growth patterns of children. $64,000 question is, does it? Yeah. OK. So here, in this column, we have the age of the child and then the mean height for specific years. So if we look at 6½ to 7-year-old children, the mean height of children that age in 1913 was 115cm. OK. And if you look from 1915 to 1916, it goes to 114. Dramatic, isn't it? And 113. What we're seeing just here, in this small example, by just in a matter of a couple of years, they're 2cm smaller. And there's evidence of a sharp decline after the Battle of Jutland. So in particular, the winter of 1916-1917 is known as the turnip winter. Turnips were foodstuff that were primarily eaten by pigs. People in Germany were so hungry that they were... Being forced to eat pig food. Yeah. So this is a letter written in Essen in August 1917. This woman is writing a letter to her husband and she comments on their daughter, Erika. Erika loses more and more weight and looks bad. She is no longer the healthy, strong child of whom we were so proud. In the last six months, we've just had too little fat in the food. This winter will be even worse. You ought to hear her whine for buttered bread. So this blockade is effective and it's being waged against the civilian population. The blockade was also affecting German troops on the front line. And however unacceptable we find it today, starving people of resources and food was a vital weapon in winning the war. Jutland showed the Germans they couldn't break the blockade by going head-to-head with the Royal Navy and they never risked it again. The Battle of Jutland was certainly no glorious victory. But here in Trafalgar Square, in the shadow of Nelson's Column, the British admirals at Jutland have a place of honour. Statues of Jellicoe and Beatty are testament to its significance to the First World War. And the fountains are also dedicated to their memory. The reality is that we won that war because of the pressure of naval power and Jutland was the key victory. That victory ensured that Britain would not be defeated and that Germany ultimately would be defeated. And therefore I see it as the most important battle that Britain fought in in the First World War. But that was small comfort for the families of the thousands of men who died in the grey wastes of a cold ocean far from home. Families that had no grave to visit and just a small bronze plaque to record their loss. Many of those that died were so young, like Archie Dixon and Leonard Kilburn, barely out of childhood. We can now better understand why there was such a huge loss of life on that spring day. Why some of the Royal Navy's newest ships sank so quickly. And how that could have been avoided. But after 100 years, perhaps it's time to recognise the true importance of the Battle of Jutland. A last great and terrible clash of battleships. A battle which ultimately led to Allied victory in the First World War.