Chapter 25: Root Out the Weeds, Exterminate the Evil

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As the Majestic began belching thick smoke laced with flames, this brutal, point-blank exchange between a battlecruiser and a pre-dreadnought had decisively ended.

Before setting out, Rear Admiral Hipper had understood perfectly that the true difficulty of the operation lay in making a concealed surprise attack and closing with the enemy successfully. Once the battle had actually begun, victory was almost inevitable. The only question was how great a price his side would have to pay.

Lelouch, watching the battle beside Rear Admiral Hipper, still did not understand naval warfare very well. Unable to restrain himself, he seized an opening to ask:

“Admiral, why did you fire full-speed half-salvos just now without waiting for the range-finding results from the previous shells, shortening the scale by three hundred yards with each salvo? What kind of tactic is that?”

Hipper had already done everything required of him. All that remained was to await the outcome, so he did not mind enlightening his young friend.

“It’s simple. In a medium- or long-range engagement, you certainly couldn’t fight that way. When firing on a high trajectory, precise range measurement is crucial.

“But we’ve already closed to such a short distance that the trajectories are practically flat. Even if you aim too far when laying the guns on the hull, you may still catch the enemy’s superstructure in the line of fire and hit something by sheer luck. So once you know your shells are falling long, simply shorten the range as quickly as possible. There’s no need to obsess over exactly how far long they fell.”

Lelouch was Lelouch, after all. His mathematics had been good enough that, even if he could not get into the fine arts department, he would still have qualified to transfer into architecture. With his grounding in geometry, he grasped the essence of the tactic almost immediately.

He felt that he had learned a great deal, and his impression of General Hipper’s ability to adapt his command to changing circumstances deepened considerably.

All the German battlecruisers entered rapid-fire mode, pouring down a storm of shells.

The 305-millimeter shells struck one after another within the area protected by the Majestic’s 228-millimeter nickel-chromium-steel main belt. At a fighting distance of less than five kilometers, the shells could easily tear through every layer of protection possessed by this class of pre-dreadnought.

The central machinery spaces were pierced repeatedly. Numerous steam pipes in the propulsion system were blown apart, sending superheated, high-pressure steam—at temperatures of several hundred degrees—racing through the ship and rapidly cooking countless engine-room sailors who had rushed to carry out emergency repairs.

The battery deck above the machinery spaces was even less fortunate. Those lightly armored, densely packed sections were smashed to pieces by the 305-millimeter shells, and several secondary guns, along with fragments of the battery deck, were hurled into the air.

A few shells stored near several of the secondary-gun positions also detonated sympathetically. The explosion of 152-millimeter shells was not enough to sink the warship, but it was more than sufficient to obliterate the upper fire-control positions and the bridge.

Vice Admiral Hastings was hurled into the sky in the process. The commander of the Britannia Channel Fleet met his end then and there.

The Majestic’s main turrets, at least, proved tough enough. Even after several minutes of punishment, there was no sign of a turret penetration or a catastrophic detonation of the main-gun ammunition. But with both fire control and power lost, the turrets could neither receive targeting data nor use hydraulic power to rotate. They could do nothing but fire futilely at fixed positions.

The ship had, for all practical purposes, become a floating dead fish. Only the reserve buoyancy of her hull remained sufficient to keep her afloat.

Shells in this era could rapidly destroy a battleship’s superstructure and render it incapable of fighting. Yet unless the magazines or boilers exploded, it was difficult to break the hull apart and send the ship rapidly to the bottom.

For a swift sinking through flooding, one still had to rely on torpedoes or mines.

…

At the same time, the enemy’s other capital ship, the Revenge, was locked in a desperate battle with the two Blücher-class battlecruisers under Hipper’s command.

The engagement unfolded much like the other. After receiving new main guns, the Revenge had turrets of the same type as the Majestic, but her fire-control system had not yet been modernized or properly worked in. As a result, the Revenge’s gunnery was even less accurate, and her aim was slower.

The only two differences were that the German Blücher-class ships still carried 280-millimeter main guns, an inch smaller than those of the Derfflinger class, while the Revenge possessed a far thicker main armor belt than her younger sister, the Majestic. At its thickest, it reached an astonishing 450 millimeters.

The armor itself, however, was far inferior in type and quality. As a Royal Sovereign-class ship, she still used Harvey steel dating from the early 1890s, not even nickel-chromium steel. Her effective defensive strength was therefore reduced by roughly twenty to thirty percent.

And everything came at a price. An armor belt 450 millimeters thick at its strongest meant that the area covered by that thickness was much smaller. Only a very narrow strip near the waterline possessed 450-millimeter armor; slightly above the waterline, the thickness dropped sharply to 356 millimeters.

The Blücher-class 280-millimeter guns could indeed do nothing to penetrate the armor at the waterline. But just a little higher, they passed through it with ease.

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Thus, at almost exactly the same time, the Revenge was also blasted into a floating iron shell. She had not sunk, but had completely lost her ability to fight.

While the two pre-dreadnoughts were being utterly crippled, Hipper’s own force suffered only a single significant hit. The Seydlitz was struck by one of the enemy’s 305-millimeter main-gun shells in the aft central section of her broadside battery deck.

The shell blew two 150-millimeter secondary guns into the air, tore away a section of the battery deck, and destroyed the davits above the deck along with several lifeboats.

Apart from that, the German battlecruisers were hit by only five or six 150-millimeter shells from the enemy’s secondary guns over the entire engagement. None of those shells could penetrate the main armor belt; they merely damaged some peripheral facilities.

…

Just as Hipper was preparing to turn toward the weakest of the enemy’s capital ships, the Hood, after crippling two of their principal vessels at negligible cost, he suddenly discovered that his battlecruisers had scarcely needed to act at all. The Hood had already lost most of her combat power.

During the battlecruiser engagement, the two German Scharnhorst-class armored cruisers had not been assigned specific tasks. Hipper had allowed them to fire freely and support the main force.

Those two Scharnhorsts, with their sixteen 210-millimeter guns sweeping the decks, had stripped the Hood of her main-gun fire in only a few salvos.

It turned out that the Hood was a sister ship of the Revenge, but she had never undergone a modernization of her main armament. To this day, she still carried the open-mounted 343-millimeter guns installed more than twenty years earlier—guns without enclosed turrets or roofs, exposed directly to the air above.

Such protection meant catastrophe even against plunging fire from an armored cruiser’s 210-millimeter guns.

That was precisely what happened in the battle. Not long after the firing began, the Hood was struck in both her forward and aft main-gun positions, one hit each from the Scharnhorst and the Gneisenau.

The gunners in those positions were completely unprotected and were killed to the last man. The four 343-millimeter shells already waiting to be loaded also detonated. Under such circumstances, even if the gun barrels themselves had not been completely destroyed, there was no one left to fire them.

One could only say that such rubbish—so far behind the times and originally destined only for shore-bombardment missions—was bound to become a tragedy in a battle between capital ships.

With matters having reached this point, Hipper could have slowly finished off the crippled enemy ships one by one, using them to practice his gunnery.

But he was in a hurry. He therefore ordered his ships to continue firing while detaching three destroyers to rush the enemy vessels that had lost their guns and finish them with torpedoes—a swift and decisive solution.

The three German destroyers received their orders and immediately charged head-on at high speed. Once they had closed to roughly three kilometers, each spread a fan of torpedoes across the enemy.

There was no need to approach any closer, lest a few surviving rapid-fire guns on the enemy ships still pose a threat to the destroyers. The enemy vessels had generally slowed to a crawl and had lost their command systems. At three kilometers, the torpedoes might well prove impossible to evade.

A few minutes later, four torpedoes erupted, throwing towering columns of water up along the enemy hulls. The Revenge took two hits, while the Majestic and the Hood took one each. All three began flooding and listing. The Revenge sank completely first, and the other two soon followed her to the bottom.

…

“We’ve sunk three enemy pre-dreadnoughts, three light cruisers, and two destroyers, while damaging three more destroyers. We’ve killed at least five thousand men. This is a heaven-sent achievement! Admiral, you were magnificent. Shall we continue and intercept the squadron to the west, or withdraw while we are ahead? We must consider the time, after all.”

With the sinking of the Revenge, several trusted officers beside Rear Admiral Hipper, along with the captain of the Derfflinger, immediately began praising and flattering him with heartfelt enthusiasm.

They were not necessarily being sycophantic. Many genuinely admired him. Others, concerned for the safety of their own force and hoping to withdraw while victory was assured, had no choice but to praise the achievements of the battle as forcefully as possible.

After all, if the victory was not glorious enough, the admiral might become greedy for further laurels and linger in battle.

There was no doubt that they could finish off the force before them and pursue the remnants. But the longer they delayed, the greater the chance that David Beatty might intercept them on their route home.

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One could not consider only the immediate situation; the larger picture had to be taken into account.

Amid the praise, Hipper did not lose his composure. He understood perfectly well what everyone was thinking.

He asked himself: if he had not discussed matters with Lelouch earlier, if Lelouch had not inspired him with the idea of a “third retreat route,” then he would probably have chosen to withdraw while ahead.

From the moment the Germans opened fire, David Beatty had known their coordinates. He was already racing toward them at full speed. The later they left, the more likely they were to be intercepted.

The remnants of the Channel Fleet before them were nothing to fear. But Beatty’s six or seven modern battlecruisers were genuinely capable of taking lives.

Yet now that they possessed the previously unimaginable option of “retreating to Antwerp,” the possibility of wiping out the enemy completely had become real.

Seeing that his subordinate commanders did not understand his deeper intentions, Hipper looked around the room. In the end, he ordered all ships to first engage the enemy’s other squadron to the west, then wait and see how circumstances developed. There was no need to hurry.

After sending the other officers away, he deliberately kept Lieutenant Lelouch, the duke’s special envoy, behind. In the tone of someone testing a pupil, he asked for his advice:

“What do you think? Should we pursue them to the bitter end, or withdraw while we are ahead?”

Lelouch had kept a low profile all this time and had never interfered in the battle’s decisions. But when Hipper asked him so directly, he no longer held back.

“I recommend pursuing them to the bitter end! The other commanders are seeking safety because they know nothing about Antwerp’s situation, nor do they know how the army can coordinate with the navy. I have told those things only to you, so only you can make a sufficiently comprehensive judgment.

“Second, when I reported the alternative plan of retreating to Antwerp, you yourself pointed out that the greatest danger was this: ‘If the warships are seriously damaged during the engagement, Antwerp has an excellent harbor but lacks a professional large naval shipyard. We might arrive there only to find that we can berth, but cannot receive proper repairs.’

“But the results are already in. We have taken no more than a few hits from six-inch guns in total, and only the Seydlitz was struck once by a twelve-inch shell. None of that matters. Since we do not require major repairs, the greatest danger of retreating to Antwerp has been eliminated. What remains are advantages, with no disadvantages.”

Hipper had already begun to waver under the united pleas of his commanders. Lelouch’s encouragement cleared his thoughts once more.

That was right. The others could not make a comprehensive judgment because, for reasons of secrecy, he had not told them the full situation. In particular, only he knew the information Lelouch had provided about coordination between the army and the navy.

After the battle, Hipper still needed to continue the intelligence deception. He had to prevent the enemy from realizing that the Germans already knew their wireless codes had been compromised. Everything that happened today had to be presented as his own act of disobedience and unauthorized advance.

To make that performance convincing, he naturally had to deceive even his trusted subordinates. They needed to know what he was doing, but not why he was doing it.

The objective actions could be made public. The subjective motives had to remain concealed. If he could keep even one person in the dark, so much the better.

“Quite right. Only you and I can judge this matter from the height of the entire situation. The others do not even know all the necessary conditions, so why should we listen to them? Sometimes history depends on one or two people to change it. I’ve decided. We pursue them to the bitter end! Kill as many as we can! To hell with Beatty’s interception. When the time comes, we’ll retreat directly to Antwerp!”

—

P.S. Two updates again today, totaling roughly six or seven thousand words.

I promise to finish the naval battle today. I have learned my lesson and am doing my best to speed things up. Today I will definitely return to the land-war scenes and the protagonist’s promotion plans, so please do not stop following or commenting.

I have already cut and compressed this chapter again and again to ensure that Hastings’s entire main force was destroyed within it. The necessary strategic deliberations and decision-making process truly could not be omitted. There was no way around it.

I bow my head and plead guilty. Naval battles really are slow to write, mainly because this is my first time writing one. There is a great deal that needs to be established, and readers who have not been following the earlier sections closely also need to understand the current situation.

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