Original subtitles

May 31st, 1916.

250 ships and 100,000 men were engaged in the Battle of Jutland, the

largest naval battle of the First World War. It was a battle that the British

and German navies wanted, the chance to unleash the power of their latest

warships.

Yet when the Titanic confrontation finally happened, Britain lost one in

three of its battlecruisers. More than 6,000 British sailors died, most of them

killed in unprecedented catastrophic explosions.

Using the latest forensic analysis, we'll discover why the best navy in the

world suffered such terrible losses of both ships and men.

the iconic images of the first world war show men in trenches hopelessly dashing

across no man's land but the seas off northern europe were as

brutal as the bloody battlefields of the western front both sides had an

absolute mania They saw themselves doing their duty in the cause of the king or

the Kaiser, blowing some enemy battle cruiser or battleship out of the water.

That's what they prayed for, wanted, dreamed of.

The Battle of Jutland lasted an intense 12 hours and left the British in shock.

With their larger fleet and greater experience, they expected to decisively

beat the German navy.

But in this battle, the Germans had lost fewer ships and men than the British.

This was a serious blow, but even worse than that, three of the Royal Navy's

nine battlecruisers had exploded and sank within minutes.

They were capital ships.

These were battle-winning big-gun warships, the heart of the Royal Navy.

Capital ships could make the difference between victory and defeat.

in a battle at sea.

HMS Queen Mary was one of the casualties.

Queen Mary is an enormous ship, one of the best ships in the fleet.

She is the most high value British ship lost in the First World War.

And she blows up.

Even today, after all the nuclear bombs, it still is the most cataclysmic

explosion.

The ship itself is over 600 feet long, and it's dwarfed by this enormous

mushrooming cloud that rises to at least 800 feet.

Now, inside that cloud, well over 1,000 British sailors were dying.

This was a dreadful disaster.

The British Admiralty was horrified that the battlecruisers proved so vulnerable

to German shellfire.

Ships were designed to take dozens of hits before they sank.

They just weren't meant to blow up.

Why did these tragic losses occur to the best navy in the world?

Bill Jerens, an expert in marine forensics, has come to England to

investigate.

His first port of call...

is the Imperial War Museum in London.

Over the 90 years since Jutland, the museum has collected first-hand accounts

of the battle.

Father T.F. Bradley compiled an enormous and very detailed journal.

Curator Nick Hewitt has selected some items for jurors to assess, including

documents which belong to a naval chaplain.

He was on a nearby ship when the first battlecruiser, HMS Indefatigable, blew

apart.

Now, Father Bradley acquired this. It's the action plot showing the movements of

nearly all the ships in the battle that he was directly connected to. And we can

see right here the position of Indefatigable. is marked exactly where

it went down. Just after 4 o'clock, wasn't it, when she went?

Mm-hmm.

More than 1,000 men were on board.

Hewitt plays a rare recording from one of only two survivors.

We'd been in action roughly about two hours when there was a traffic explosion

aboard a ship. The magazines went. I see the guns go up, the bodies and

everything. And within half a minute, the ship turned right over.

He saw the guns go up, and that would indicate an explosion deep inside the

turret, which lifted the guns free.

And secondly, he said that we turned right over, and here is the ship.

turning over, and that's indicative of a ship that is really very, very severely

damaged. And that sort of damage only occurs when a large part of the hull is

missing, you know, due to a magazine explosion or something of that nature.

The evidence points to a huge blast in its explosive store, known as the

magazine.

The Navy's most modern battlecruiser, the Queen Mary, suffered the same fate

as Indefatigable.

This photo shows how rapidly the explosion occurred and how tremendously

destructive it was. And one has apparently the funnel smoke still here

as the ship was steaming ahead.

And then the entire ship disappears.

Indefatigable and Queen Mary were lost in the first clash between British and

German ships.

A third battle cruiser, HMS Invincible, exploded several hours later.

again under heavy German fire.

Clearly the written accounts and the oral accounts and the photographs are

all consistent in describing a catastrophic explosion of the main

magazines. Nothing else would fit all those descriptions.

But no one was prepared for the battle cruisers to explode. The Germans

weren't, and very certainly the British weren't. So it was a total surprise.

Evidence at the Imperial War Museum is supported by the work of marine

archaeologists who have dived on the site of the battle.

The wrecks lie 180 feet below the surface of the North Sea.

Damage to the superstructure is so great that in some parts the remains are

hardly recognizable as a warship.

Shells litter the seabed and fractured gun turrets reveal the ferocity of the

magazine explosions that tore the ships apart.

But just how violent were these explosions?

On a military test range, Jurins teams up with Lieutenant Colonel Simon West of

the Royal Artillery to simulate the blasts on the battlecruisers.

Magazines were storage rooms for a propellant called cordite.

This was highly explosive material used to propel shells from ships' guns.

Bill, what we've set up here is a steel box representing a magazine, and we've

filled it with artillery propellant.

Very similar to the cordite being used at Jutland to fire the guns.

With 20 pounds of explosives stacked in the box, they're using the maximum

amount permitted on the range.

Stand by.

Okay. Three, two, one, firing.

Well, there we go.

Fantastic. It was interesting, as you saw, there was an initial burn, and then

inside the container, the flames were getting going, more and more pressure

was being created, and eventually it had enough energy to blow the whole thing

apart.

There's a slight delay while things build up, but within a second or two,

the situation has been decided.

And the decision, if one can put it that way, and the part of the propellant is,

when do I explode?

Once the explosives had been ignited, the blast was inevitable.

Some mess, eh?

Well, I can see how this has been ran to sunder so violently, and this is not a

lightly built box. This is a fairly substantial thing here.

That's a fairly large piece of steel. And we see the same thing with the

battle cruisers on the bottom, except that, you know, instead of a thing the

size of a kit box or a refrigerator, we see something the size of a house or

whole pieces the size of automobiles scattered across the bottom, rent apart

in exactly the same way, unrecognizable, most of them, but very, very similar to

what we see here.

This test represented only a fraction of the explosives that would have been

stored on the battle cruisers.

Each ship would have carried over a quarter of a million pounds of cordite.

Eyewitness accounts, marine archaeology, and the mini-magazine test show the

power of the magazine explosions.

The blasts were so devastating that three huge ships and most of the men on

board were lost in minutes.

While the evidence for the loss of these ships is beyond doubt, The exact cause

of these explosions was a mystery.

How did such a disaster happen, especially to the best navy in the

world?

The British Navy's dominance of the world's oceans was unquestionable until

the events of May 31, 1916.

The British lost three battlecruisers.

torn apart by massive magazine explosions.

Ships had been lost in naval battles before, but no one had ever seen

explosions on the scale witnessed at Jutland.

Designers of capital ships were aware of the dangers, but they were convinced

they'd built the best ships ever invented.

What capabilities made them so powerful?

The only World War I capital ship still in existence is in Houston, Texas.

Each ship required crews of more than a thousand men and could travel at speeds

of 25 knots.

With armor up to a foot thick, These ships were built to withstand hits from

shells fired from the horizon.

The USS Texas has 14-inch main battery.

When she was launched in 1914, those were indeed the largest guns on a

warship in the world.

Firing the guns is like launching a compact car 10, 12, 15 miles.

When it gets downrange, A high-capacity shell will leave a crater the size of a

tennis court 10 or so feet deep. It's a very powerful weapon, and you do not

want to be on the business end of these guns.

The Germans were also building huge warships, so hundreds of these guns were

to face each other at the Battle of Jutland.

Capital ships brought all the finest qualities of warship designed together

on one hugely powerful vessel.

They had big guns, were fast, and had armor to protect them from enemy fire.

But the British battlecruisers that exploded were different.

The battlecruiser was a really strange ship. It had very powerful engines, but

it had very little armor.

Speed would be its armor.

Battlecruisers were designed to destroy anything they could catch, and they were

very fast.

And if they ran across anything that had bigger guns or heavier armor, they were

really supposed to run away.

At the Battle of Jutland, the British battlecruisers did not run away.

Why were they put in such a vulnerable position?

With almost twice as many capital ships, Britain's Royal Navy was much stronger

than Germany's fleet and was extremely confident going into this battle.

The British had more ships, bigger guns, the whole weight of history behind them.

It was awesome. The German Navy had grown up in Britannia's shadow.

They were intimidated.

Germany would have to sink a lot of British warships.

and capital ships in particular, to win the war.

German Commander-in-Chief Admiral Reinhard Scheer had a plan to even the

numbers.

Admiral Scheer had a more aggressive strategy, drawing parts of the Grand

Fleet to change the unfavorable ratio between the British and German side.

The German high seas fleet was based in the port of Wilhelmshaven.

Most of Britain's ships were based at Scapa Flow off the north coast of

Scotland.

A smaller battlecruiser fleet was moored at Rosyth near Edinburgh.

If the German admiral could avoid a confrontation with the whole of the

British fleet, he stood a chance of victory.

His idea was to provoke a response, to poke, poke, pokey at the Grand Fleet

until they made a mistake.

He wanted to cut off a small part of the Grand Fleet and destroy it.

Scheer's target was the smaller battlecruiser fleet based at Rosyth.

This fleet of 50 ships comprised 10 capital ships and a flotilla of smaller

ships in support.

It was commanded by Vice Admiral David Beattie.

Beatty came from landed gentry.

He was fabulously rich since his marriage to the daughter of

the Chicago chain store millionaire.

Beatty did what he liked when he liked.

Scheer knew of Beatty's reputation as a brash commander and came up with an

ingenious plan.

Scheer wanted to lure Beatty's fleet out of port and then mount a surprise

attack.

Just after midnight on May 31st, a small group of German ships sailed north,

heading for the Norwegian coast, hoping to tempt Beatty's fleet out of their

base.

The main German fleet followed. They would be ready to pounce if Beatty's

ships took the bait.

Ninety-nine ships strong, the Germans outnumbered the smaller battlecruiser

fleet two to one.

What Scheer didn't know was that the British were reading and decoding all

his wireless signals.

They'd been tracking the German codes right since the start of the war.

They knew what the Germans were doing.

As a result of intercepting German signals, 150 Royal Navy ships were

hurriedly dispatched.

Beattie's fleet was sailing to the south of the main force.

They were isolated and therefore more vulnerable to attack.

The British Navy's plan was to rendezvous in the North Sea before

attacking the Germans.

The rendezvous never happened because the enemy was already in sight.

As soon as the Germans were sighted, Beattie leapt into action. This was his

moment. He must have been excited.

And he just reacted instantly. He changed course towards the Germans and

darted off.

This was not as foolhardy as it appeared.

Although isolated, Beatty was full of confidence.

He commanded six battlecruisers and four of the Royal Navy's very latest ships,

known as Super Dreadnoughts.

These were fantastic ships.

They had eight huge 15-inch guns. They had engines that would drive them along

at 24 knots. Best of all, they had 13-inch armor over the vital parts of

the ship.

The Super Dreadnoughts were stationed five miles behind Beatty.

Beatty sent a flag signal to these ships that the enemy was sighted and they

should change direction and follow him.

But he didn't wait for confirmation that the signal was received and disappeared

towards the horizon.

The officer in command of the four super dreadnoughts was Rear Admiral Hugh Evan

Thomas. There's no way he was part of the fast and flashy, beaty club. In

personality and in background, he was completely different.

Evan Thomas did things by the book. He didn't see the signal.

and wasn't going to act without an order.

Instead of immediately following Beatty and the battle cruisers, Evan Thomas

went sailing off in entirely the wrong direction.

Beatty underestimated the problems of communicating orders at this distance.

But was this an avoidable mistake?

Lieutenant Commander Brian Bilverston.

has enlisted the help of sea cadets on board the sailing ship Royalist to

demonstrate the difficulties of communicating by signal flags.

Flag signaling has its own inherent problems.

One is simply the distances involved.

The further away a ship is, the smaller the flags appear.

Light can affect it, mist, fog.

In those days, the ships were all powered by coal. There was a lot of

smoke about, and therefore it could be very difficult to see the signal.

The Royalist represents Beatty's ship HMS Lion.

A small team remains behind. They will represent the position that Evan Thomas'

ship was in when Beatty sent the signal to follow him into battle.

The Royalist sails out to one mile, a position regularly used for successful

flag signal communication.

Royalist, this is Blockhouse. Hoist, over.

It's sending the same flag signal relayed by Beatty.

At this distance, Beatty's signal flag is clear.

Alter course to the south-southeast and follow the enemy.

But Beatty was over five miles from the Super Dreadnoughts.

The Royalist sails out to an equivalent distance.

Right, I can see the top flag's a pennant, but I can't see which one it

is. I see the bottom one, it looks like yellow.

Can you see any detail?

No. Yeah, I think that's pretty conclusive, isn't it? Yeah.

Around the time of World War I, Britain's ships were the cutting edge in

warship design.

But they did rely on methods of communication more than a century old.

Beatty made a crucial mistake.

He should have known his signal might not be understood.

Evan Thomas continued to sail in the wrong direction.

As Beatty raced towards the German ships, the gap between his

battlecruisers and the Super Dreadnaughts doubled from five to ten

miles, leaving Beatty's ships exposed to attack.

Why had Beatty taken such a risky decision?

Either Beatty was being extremely careless, or he simply wanted to do the

job on his own with his own force.

It turned out that the German ships Beatty's crew spotted weren't part of

the main fleet.

They were the small scouting group sent by Scheer to tempt the British out of

port.

Beatty was convinced he could take these on alone.

His battlecruisers outnumbered the German force six to five. He had bigger

guns with a three-mile longer range.

With these advantages, Beatty seemed to have made the correct tactical decision.

But before nightfall, two of his battlecruisers had blown up.

More than 2,000 sailors lost their lives.

Once Beatty had attacked the Germans, was there anything he could have done to

prevent this disaster?

May 16th, 1916.

Admiral Beatty's battlecruiser fleet was racing towards a small group of German

ships. The Admiral was vulnerable because he'd left the bigger and better

Super Dreadnoughts trailing behind.

Beatty clearly wanted to get the upper hand, to be the first to unleash the big

guns.

What we have here is a situation where ships are firing at long range.

12, 15 miles, at targets that are often at or beyond the horizon.

They're very tiny little grey dots, and they're often covered by smoke,

visibility is poor, all sorts of things are interfering with your ability to

hit, even see where your shells are coming down.

So hitting targets was very difficult, especially when ships were continually

changing position and pitching at sea.

BT ships used an early type of computer called a fire control table to get the

guns on target.

This is in fact a direct descendant of fire control tables in New St. Jutland.

At this end of the table, successive ranges were plotted on the moving paper

strip. And once sufficient of them had been recorded, it was possible to deduce

how rapidly the range was changing.

Getting the guns on target is very important. Keeping them on target is

even more important. Hitting early, hit hard, hit fast, hit often.

The person who hit the first had the advantage. It's like getting the first

blow in in a bar fight.

From then on, you have the upper hand.

Beattie's guns had a longer range, potentially a key advantage.

But as he sailed closer to the Germans, his guns remained silent.

Why was this?

Now, visibility affected everything.

It made it more difficult to take ranges. It made it more difficult to

spot the fall of shot.

Bad visibility could have a very considerable effect on accuracy.

The German ships were difficult to spot.

But the position of the sun backlit the British ships, showing them as dark

shapes silhouetted against the horizon.

This made them an easier target for the Germans, who opened fire.

The force which had the lighter guns with the shorter maximum range is

actually open fire first.

As a result, Beatty had lost the advantage which he should have gained

from his heavier and longer range guns.

Ready to shoot!

When Beatty's ships did eventually open fire, not only was their hit rate poor,

in some cases their guns were overshooting the Germans by three miles.

A big miscalculation.

The British battlecruisers made at most 11 hits on their opponents, whereas in

return the German ships made at least 34 hits. That is a very

considerable disparity.

Was bad visibility the only explanation for Beatty's poor gunnery?

Professor Andrew Lambert visits England's National Archive to

investigate Admiralty records from the battle.

As soon as Beatty saw the German forces, he made an immediate, impetuous decision

to turn to contact at full speed and engage the enemy.

The problem was that in the process, he made a maneuver so radical that the

gunnery calculations of his ships were entirely thrown off.

In his haste to bring his ships into action, Beatty hadn't taken account of

the technical demands of accurate gunnery.

In Beatty's fleet, it's quite clear that range finding was not being taken very

seriously. They weren't taking enough ranges and the ones they were getting

weren't accurate.

Added to the technical challenges was the fact that the battle cruisers had no

facilities for target practice.

But the crews aboard the Super Dreadnoughts were crack shots.

When things started to go badly wrong for Beatty, he desperately needed those

ships.

With the super-dreadnoughts trying to catch up, Indefatigable and Queen Mary

exploded.

Beatty's numerical advantage had been wiped out.

It was at this point that Beatty turned to his flag captain and said, There

seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today.

And shortly after that, he said, and with our bloody system. And that was

absolutely right. The system had failed catastrophically. And the man

responsible was David Beatty.

Beatty's signaling had gone disastrously wrong.

His ship's gunnery was well below the standard required in battle.

But these factors alone couldn't rip a ship apart.

The Admiral's mistakes compounded, creating the conditions in which the

thinly armoured battlecruisers were vulnerable to the German shells.

Magazines could explode if they took a direct hit, but what were the chances of

this happening?

Long-range gunnery was not a precise art.

The overall percentage hit rate was only a few percent.

It can be said to literally have been, in many respects, a somewhat hit-and

-miss affair.

Magazines, the storage rooms for explosives, were protected by armor.

They were located deep inside the ship, at the base of the turret, making the

likelihood of a direct hit on a magazine remote.

For all three battlecruisers to be lost this way was inconceivable.

What was to blame?

The British Navy was in shock.

Two of their battlecruisers had been destroyed, torn apart by huge

explosions.

This was the most powerful Navy in the world. They'd expected to be victorious.

How had such a disaster happened?

When a shell hits a target, Energy is released in the form of a phenomenon

called flash.

Could this have triggered the explosions?

Back at the test facility, marine forensics expert Bill Juerens teams up

with Lieutenant Colonel Simon West to demonstrate just how potent flash is.

A 12-foot long transparent tube is used to contain the explosion.

Juerens and West will record the results with a high-speed camera.

Well,

that was a very spectacular demonstration of how rapidly flash

propagates. I mean, it just shot out the end like a rocket.

The flash traveled the length of the tube at a speed of 1,000 feet per

second.

You saw that sort of wall of energy, wasn't it? It was quite a rapid release.

You know, clearly from this demonstration, it looks to me like Flash

is an unstoppable force in terms of the amount of energy it delivers so rapidly.

And there's nothing one can do to react to it.

So very dangerous on board a ship.

Clearly, it's a force to be reckoned with.

Flash was a dangerous force.

Doors and hatches had been built into the design of battlecruisers to contain

any blast.

Had a crucial failure of these systems made the ships susceptible to lethal

explosions?

Safety systems were crucial in gun turrets because they had a direct link

to the explosive store, the magazine.

On board the World War I battleship Texas, Barry Ward explores a turret to

show the safety mechanisms that were in place to prevent explosions.

We are in the magazine for the 14-inch guns at the bottom of the aft turret on

the battleship Texas.

In this space would have been stored floor to ceiling the projectile charges.

The charges were manually carried out of the magazine.

From this point onwards, they would have been vulnerable to the slightest spark.

Now, here we are at the powder scuttle. This will safely transport the powder

charge from the magazine area into the area where the process of actually

loading it into the main battery will begin.

You're talking about 104 pounds of explosive here, highly explosive

material. Four of these bags were required for each projectile to be fired

downrange.

50 men worked in a turret.

Each explosive charge was passed between them a number of times before it was

loaded into the gun.

We've gone through two fireproof hatches.

We've gone to the hoist. It has to travel up 35 feet.

This is trying to be accomplished in about 45 seconds.

It's hot, it's very loud, and the mental pressure is significant. If you don't

perform well, you can lose your life.

or the life of your comrades.

With all of these safety systems in place, the only way magazines could

explode was if they took a direct hit.

The chances of this occurring were remote.

Sailors were aware of the dangers of flash, but at Jutland, they were

preoccupied with fighting the battle.

On board Beatty's battlecruisers, they were under huge pressure to fire

quickly. Shoot!

The British had made almost a fetish of firing as fast as possible, trying to

compensate for the fact that their fire wasn't very accurate. The idea being

that if you fire a lot of shells, you'll score some hits.

The problem was, in order to achieve the rapid speed of fire demanded by Beatty,

the men ignored and bypassed the very safety systems that were in place to

protect them.

The British had cut every corner they could.

They would open doors that were meant to be shut. In fact, they would remove

doors. But every time they removed a flash precaution, they were planting the

seeds of their own destruction.

Not only were safety mechanisms being ignored, but the British sailors were

stacking highly volatile cordite throughout the turret.

You ran a tremendous risk if enemy fire did penetrate the armor of the turret

itself. of actually igniting cordite that was casually stored like this.

Without this sitting here, any penetration is still quite serious. But

with it here, it is almost certainly catastrophic.

Beatty's ship, the battlecruiser HMS Lion, was hit on a turret.

So why wasn't there an explosion there too?

The Lion had been hit and her middle turret had the roof blown off.

There'd been a fire.

Most of the turret crew had been killed, but there hadn't been a flash.

The gunnery officer on Lion found that many of the regulations had been bent.

Chordite handling and storage wasn't as good as it could be.

He had the gunhouse swept up as a demonstration to the crew that

cleanliness and discipline was important in handling these propellant materials.

With a turret hit, There was every chance Beatty's ship could suffer the

same fate as other battlecruisers, but sailors on HMS Lion had stored

explosives safely.

Beatty was lucky that his ship did not blow up, too.

This luck was about to run out. The main German battle fleet was approaching.

He'd been led into a trap.

Beatty had no choice.

If he wasn't to lose any more ships, he had to get his fleet out of danger.

When Admiral Beatty turned to the north, he was of the opinion, it's absolutely

necessary for me to draw the German fleet to the Grand Fleet.

If Beatty could draw the Germans northwards, he could redeem himself by

delivering them into the path of the main British fleet.

The super dreadnoughts protected the rear of his battle line.

Under intense German fire, could these ships avoid the same fate as the

battlecruisers?

Beatty's ships fled north from the might of the German high seas fleet.

The super dreadnoughts were at the rear of Admiral Beatty's battle line.

The Super Dreadnoughts came under the concentrated fire of the whole of the

German fleet.

HMS Warspite was hit by something like 24, 25 German heavy shells.

It was just hell on earth inside the Warspite. But nothing got through

anything important.

Although under heavy fire, Super Dreadnoughts like the Warspite didn't

explode.

Why were they more resilient to German shell fire?

They were more survivable.

None of them exploded, and that's probably because they were simply more

heavily armored.

Thicker armor on board Super Dreadnoughts prevented German shells

from getting through to the magazines.

With such protection, the crew would have been able to contain any damage,

minimizing the potential for catastrophe.

At a simulator in Portsmouth, England, today's Royal Navy trains crews in the

vital skills needed to save a sinking ship.

The start of the exercise will be an NBCD state one condition Zulu. We're all

happy with that.

So all doors and hatches will be closed.

The training in the unit is very realistic.

Internally, it's exactly the same as a ship. And what we look to do is we flood

two compartments.

Let's get this first stage leak stopping done as quickly and aggressively as

possible because that's our saving actions what's going to stop us from

sinking.

60 tonnes of water is cycled through the unit.

We often put the lights out and the actual unit itself moves to replicate

the movement of the ship.

We use soft wood wedges. We also use blankets and mattresses and also wooden

shoring.

Some of the techniques are very similar to the Battle of Jutland.

Those particular techniques and tools were used then and are still used today.

As the Super Dreadnoughts came under heavy fire, their crews would have been

doing everything possible to stem the flow of water into the ship in order to

prolong its fighting life.

The next few minutes would decide the course of the battle.

The Super Dreadnoughts withstood everything the Germans had to throw at

them and threw it back with interest.

As the German ships steamed north, they were preoccupied with catching and

destroying Beatty's fleet.

They didn't realize that Beatty was leading them into the path of the hugely

powerful British Grand Fleet. For the first time in the battle, the tables

were about to turn in Beatty's favor.

The leading ships of the High Seas Fleet steam up into a semicircle of fire.

They're surrounded, and all they can see are the flashes of the British guns.

and very quickly the British ships start to hit and the German ships are badly

damaged.

Just as it seemed the Grand Fleet had the upper hand, another British tragedy

unfolded.

Consumed by a massive fireball, the battlecruiser HMS Invincible exploded

with the loss of another thousand lives.

At the Imperial War Museum, Curator Nick Hewitt shows Juerens a photograph

capturing the moment of this explosion.

One can see the spherical effect of the shockwave coming out here.

So you're actually looking at a shockwave? You're actually looking at

the side of the bubble, which is spherical and coming towards you, and

that originates right at the center of the ship, which is exactly the part of

the ship that's missing.

The expanding shockwave can be clearly seen.

A handful of survivors claim that the fatal shell struck a central turret and

burst inside.

The shell's impact caused a flash which ignited charges stacked in the turret.

This mini-blast raced unhindered down the turret to the magazine.

Here, hundreds of charges were stored.

With the safety doors open, there was nothing to stop the charges igniting.

The explosion was so strong it split HMS Invincible in two.

There's probably a couple of hundred men actually in these ends of the ship that

are still alive.

I'm wondering what happened and wondering, I suppose, what was going to

happen next.

There's no way to get out, so how long they had before the ship slowly...

sank and drowned them or they froze in the cold waters is hard to say.

The horror of the loss of the Invincible was visible for all to see.

The British fleet was no longer seen as an unstoppable force.

At Jutland, their ships were fallible, the fleet was vulnerable.

After Jutland, when three battlecruises blew up and sank, They became very

controversial ships.

Were they a good design?

Were they strong enough for the job?

Were they not some folly?

The problem with the battlecruisers wasn't their firepower or their speed or

their protection.

It was the way they were being operated.

Vice Admiral Beatty had made fatal errors in command.

His sailors had compromised safety.

Would it be fair to put the blame on these men alone?

The loss of the battlecruisers represents

a failure of a design system. Overall, the ships were too lightly armored in

order to be really proof against German shell at the ranges that they were

engaged. They really needed more armor.

Did the loss of these ships affect the outcome of the battle?

As the fleet sailed back to port, both sides claimed victory.

On the German side, especially among the naval officers, there was a widespread

opinion we were the winner of the Battle of Jutland.

Whether it's in terms of shots delivered, shots received, hits, misses,

ships sunk, men lost, locally, tactically, that is very much a German

victory.

Nearly a century after the battle, the controversy continues.

The British clearly won the Battle of Jutland.

Not tactically, not on ships sunk, not on men, killed or not killed.

At the end of the battle, the status quo prevailed. The German Navy had assaulted

their jailer, but were back in jail.

In terms of the strategic picture, I don't see how you call it anything but a

British victory. The Germans never sallied in strength again, and indeed,

Britain retained rule of the waves.

It had the reputation as the best navy in the world. It should have secured a

famous victory.

But the outcome of Jutland was both unsatisfying and worrying for the

British Admiralty.

Their inquiries blamed the loss of the battlecruisers on dangerous practices

and critical design flaws.

Beatty avoided blame.

He was eventually promoted.

Despite what occurred at Jutland, the British Navy still inflicted enough

damage on German ships to stop them from sailing in any strength again.

The Royal Navy remained the dominant force at sea for the rest of the First

World War.