Jutland_The Unfinished Battle

by Nicholas Jellicoe

  The admirals’ camps divided. The officers and men of the battleships and the battle-cruisers were never that close anyway. An unhealthy rivalry had taken the place of earlier friendlier times. The battle-cruiser crews serving on Jacky Fisher’s greyhounds regarded their battleship counterparts as dinosaurs whose time was well past. Louis Mountbatten talked of how strong these attitudes were:

  I completely changed the immature emotional views I had absorbed about Jellicoe when I was a midshipman. I now realised what an outstandingly competent, brave and brilliant man he was, though I could still have wished that he had steered for the Horns Reef.138

  In his youth, Mountbatten, had been less than enthusiastic about Jellicoe: Jellicoe, in his words, was ‘without style and looking like a frightened tapir. Beatty had dash, élan and loads of style.’139

  The camp-followers exacerbated the debate in the weeks and months that followed, spurred on by press and politicians responding to the public clamour and search for scapegoats in the absence of the wild expectations of another Trafalgar. Jellicoe was sad to hand over command of the Grand Fleet, for sure, but as the new First Sea Lord, he felt that he could help find an answer to the increasingly pressing problem of the submarine threat. He was also very tired. But he would never have chosen Beatty as his successor – he had wanted Madden to take the position.

  When he was asked on 24 November 1916 by Balfour to take the position, Jellicoe arranged to meet him three days later in Rosyth, and accepted. Jellicoe felt that his services commanding the Grand Fleet could be spared and that Scheer would not attempt another sortie while he was repairing his fleet and while he focused all his efforts on the increasingly dangerous submarine campaign. He was, in Gibson and Harper’s words, ‘almost uncannily accurate in his predictions’. A day later on the 28th, Beatty wrote to his old friend Walter Cowan, from the very first day of his new command, expressing the opinion from which he never wavered: that the battle fleet had not been engaged: ‘As you will know, my heart will always be with the battle-cruisers who can get some speed but I’ll take good care that when they are next in it, up to the neck, this old Battle Fleet shall be in it too’.140

  Scheer had actually just been censured by the Kaiser for the further damage done to his beloved fleet. This was not only about Westfalen’s torpedo damage from E.23; on 4 November 1916 British torpedoes damaged Große Kurfürst and Kronprinz as well. The light cruisers Stettin and München had also been damaged on 10 October. Scheer promised to keep the High Seas Fleet behind the safety of defensive minefields while the submarine war was being played out.

  On 5 December Jellicoe took up his new role at the Admiralty. On the very same day the Asquith government resigned. This was a double blow. Jellicoe had lost an important political ally just when the vital challenges of, and vision for, his new position needed to be emphasised. ‘The duties of the First Sea Lord’, writes James Goldrick, ‘were monumental in both peace and war, and required enormous energy’.141 Jellicoe, despite being a very keen sportsman, was already exhausted after two gruelling years of command of the Grand Fleet. His move to a desk job was misunderstood – interpreted as some sort of public pillorying, especially in the light of Beatty’s moving into the position that Jellicoe had just vacated. With the change of government, however, and Lloyd George’s becoming prime minister, Jellicoe’s position became increasingly shaky. He and Lloyd George had never seen eye to eye: not, anyway, since their public confrontations over the 1909 Naval Estimates.

  * Commander RBC Hutchinson DSC of Achates wrote in his report: ‘I respectfully submit that in future the maximum amount of information may be given to destroyers as to the disposition of our own forces, observing the difficulty of recognition at night’. It was politely phrased but it was also, I think, a strongly implied criticism of Jellicoe’s failure to bring his subordinate commanders more into the picture (Taffrail, p155).

  † At this point, visibility was appalling, barely 1,300yds (1,200m). As the six destroyer flotillas took up their station astern of the battle fleet the visibility was down to three-quarters of a mile’ (Kemp, p91).

  * German searchlights were very much more efficient than British ones. The German searchlight had an iris shutter, allowing it to reach full power before opening up at full blaze on a target. The light could also be switched off in a second should the situation require it. By contrast, British searchlights were very basic: when ‘[we] switched off our searchlights we had to find tarpaulins to throw over them to hide the glowing carbons that stood out like full moons and gave the enemy the chance to have a bang at us’.

  * I am indebted to the Cayzer archivist, Susan Scott, for an explanation of the ‘Tuppenny Tube’ Apparently, it was the familiar term around 1900 for an early stretch of London’s Central Line underground system (ie long, dark, windowless tunnel). Sailors clearly adopted this nickname for their own long, dark, windowless corridor!

  * Spitfires official pendant number was ‘H41’ but only the ‘41’ is shown in the famous photo of her re-entering the Tyne, while there is also a ‘K’ painted on the rear funnel. After repairs had been carried out she was redesignated ‘H1A’ (Stern, p74). See special volume for 31 May–1 June 1916 and damage report of the Schiffbau-Ressort of the Kaiserliche Werft, Wilhelmshaven. The report held that the ramming destroyer left a portion of its bow in Nassau, but that instead of a painted number (the famous ‘41’) witnesses had seen a triangle on the destroyer mast and a flotilla flag: ‘die backbord Ankerklüse und ein großer Teil zusammengeschrumpfter Bordwand waren völlig in die Kante vom Backsdeck eingekeilt. Eine Nummer des Bootes war nicht zu sehen’.

  † Initially, Trelawny had reported that he had probably been involved with an older ship type, a Freya (Dispatches, p306). Four-funnelled destroyers that took part at Jutland included Faulknor, Broke, Marksman and Tipperary. Nassau had two funnels not three. She did have a large crane amidships, one on each side.

  * Luchting talked of the performance of the small torpedo boats. The 570-ton S.23 had seventy-five crew and was a ‘pretty fast boat, had done 37 knots in her trials’. The average age of her crew was only just over twenty-one (Imperial War Museum Collection, no 4168 BBC The Great War, Lt Edgar Luchting, German destroyer officer, recorded 1964).

  * The letter (and the accompanying typed report) which was sent to Rear Admiral Warrender in June 1916, were then purchased by a private collector from whom we tried, unsuccessfully, to acquire them for the Cayzer family archives. Very generously the same man has provided copies to the family.

  THE AFTERMATH

  11

  Opening Pandora’s Box: Unrestricted Submarine War

  ‘You kill him. I’ll bury him.’

  Lloyd George to Lord Northcliffe, talking about Jellicoe’s future, quoted in Robert Massie, Castles of Steel

  On 19 November 1916 the American president, Woodrow Wilson, put forward a plan for peace talks. His ideas fell on deaf ears. Lloyd George’s new government was already opposed to the secret German proposals which had been received just three days previously. Consequently, the prime minister was quick to reject Wilson’s olive branch, preferring, as he expressed it, to ‘put our trust rather in an unbroken army than in broken faith’.

  In fact, the situation was improving for Germany, particularly in the east. Pressure on Romania had come to a head and on 6 December Bucharest fell. Romanian oil came under German control. In one campaign, the Germans had gained an essential war commodity, abundant wheat supplies and an opportunity to shift much needed troops back to the Western Front where, under the new commanders, Paul von Hindenburg and Erich von Ludendorf, a new defensive line was being built, literally setting in concrete the terrible stalemate of war in the trenches.

  It was different in Germany itself. Morale was deteriorating. The effects of the British blockade were hitting the population hard. Many had barely survived the ‘Turnip Winter’ of 1916 and the feeling was one of near desperation.* The moment had come for Germany to boldly throw one last roll o
f the dice to try to win the war, rather than negotiate its ending. Holtzendorf’s plan for unrestricted submarine warfare was the key to the gamble.

  With a victory in her pocket, Germany now felt she could open negotiations. In a speech in the Reichstag on 12 December, Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg outlined a proposal, but put practically nothing on the table. Rather, it read as though it would be the Allies’ fault if the war dragged on because the Allies did not wish to negotiate. Three days later the French launched a strong counter-attack and pushed the Germans back from Verdun to where they had started. With the Tsar also rejecting the idea on the 20th, Wilson suggested that the Allies make their own proposals directly to the Germans. The German olive branch had fallen on very stony ground.

  Bethmann-Hollweg’s speech was not popular with either the army or the navy. In a memorandum dated 22 December, Holtzendorf outlined his thoughts on Britain’s vulnerability: “Now England’s mainstay is her shipping, which brings to the British Isles the necessary supplies of food and materials for war industries and ensures their solvency abroad’.1 Not only by directly hitting British and Allied shipping, but also in the belief that ‘at least two-fifths of neutral sea traffic will at once be terrorised into ceasing their journeys’, Holtzendorf calculated that within five months all shipping to and from England would be reduced by a massive 39 per cent. With the army now backing him, the last barriers to the chancellor’s opposition to Holtzendorf’s plan were removed. Scheer’s conclusive remarks to the Kaiser in June 1916 had finally found fertile ground.†

  On 1 February the new campaign was launched. Starting with around 142 submarines, the Germans were able to sink more than 2,000,000 tons of Allied shipping in the first three months.2 For the British, the prospect of a successful outcome to the war suddenly became very bleak indeed. But the German navy had not planned well for this sudden change of strategy – well enough, that is, to give the level of certainty that Holtzendorf needed‡ – even if new boats were being launched at a furious pace. While the campaign’s immediate successes secured political, financial and naval support and more than 250 new submarine orders were placed with German yards in 1917 (fifty-one in February, ninety-five in June and 120 in December)3, the question really was, would these new assets arrive too late?

  German Submarines Active in Primary Theatres, 1917

  As the campaign progressed, by design so did ‘sinkings without warning’. The sinking of still mostly unarmed merchant ships without surfacing and issuing a warning rose from 37 per cent to 60 per cent in the first three months.4 British outrage strengthened, and neutral opinion shifted sharply in favour of the Allied cause, fed by press stories of the atrocities of the total war at sea. It strengthened, rather than weakened, Allied resolve.

  Even before the new German submarine initiative was announced, Jellicoe acted. It was well ‘before either Lloyd George or Geddes would have been the reason’.5 It may have been that in 1914 ‘the Admirals of the Royal Navy remained contemptuous of the potential of the submarine’.6 Even Churchill, in writing to Fisher, argued against the latter’s case, though I’m sure he would later say that he qualified his conclusion: ‘There are a few points on which I am not convinced. Of these, the greatest is the question of the use of submarines to sink merchant vessels. I do not believe that this would ever be done by a civilized power.’7 For him it was also unlikely that the Germans would use unrestricted submarine war. In The World Crisis, he wrote: ‘Neither the First Lord (Battenberg) nor I shared Lord Fisher’s belief that the Germans would use submarines for sinking unarmed merchantmen without challenge or any means of rescuing crews. It was abhorrent to the moral law and practice of the sea.’

  Since he was writing in 1923 with the benefit of hindsight, I think Churchill’s inclusion of this correspondence was merely to emphasise that Germany was not a civilised nation and that she possessed no moral code of any worth. It should be pointed out, however, that Fisher anticipated this kind of total war with Germany in 1913.

  From the beginning, Jellicoe was of a very different ilk. He very clearly saw the dangers even if he did immediately not have the answers. He was clear that finding them would take time:

  The Admiralty can hold out little hope that there will be any reduction in the rate of loss … unless new methods which have been and are in the process of being adopted … result in the destruction of enemy submarines at a greater rate than that at which they are being constructed … On the latter point it would not be safe to anticipate benefit during the next two or three months.8

  Britain’s anti-submarine warfare (ASW) efforts had been floundering. Admiral Sir Henry Jackson, Jellicoe’s predecessor, wrote to Balfour, then First Lord, voicing his concern in 1916: ‘the methods which have been used in the past for attacking submarines are now not meeting with the success which had hitherto attended them’.9 Following his memo, Balfour gave him the position of First Sea Lord (1SL) in the hopes that he would find the solution with the help of ‘young officers who (were) prolific in ideas’, as Jackson had requested.

  Criticism of Jackson and the previous regime was strong. To Andrew Gordon, Jackson was ‘lacklustre’, and the Admiralty ‘comatose’.10 Even Jellicoe complained. In a letter to Beatty at the start of 1917 he said, ‘Everything has been left to the wait and see principle. The late government is to blame’.11 This kind of accusatory tone was unusual for Jellicoe and showed his mounting concern. Asquith finally moved: Arthur Balfour was out; in came Sir Edward Carson. The Ulster Unionist Member of Parliament joked, ‘I am here, gentlemen, because I know nothing at all about the job. My only great qualification for being put at the head of the Navy is that I am very much at sea’. He and Jellicoe would work well together from the first meeting.12

  Jellicoe was appointed to ‘sweep its hallowed corridors with (what was anticipated as) a stimulating sea-breeze’.13 And on 13 December Jellicoe set up the new Anti-Submarine Division under Rear Admiral Alexander Duff.14 A staff was added comprising of four commanders, three lieutenant commanders and two engineering officers, all from the Grand Fleet. Jellicoe himself then combined the role of First Sea Lord with Chief of Naval Staff. With him came Sir Henry Oliver (up till that point the Chief of the War Staff) serving as his Deputy Chief of Naval Staff (DCNS) with responsibility for operations while Duff became Assistant Chief of Naval Staff (ACNS) with the added responsibilities for the minesweeping and trade and convoys sections.*

  For Jellicoe, ‘there were only three ways of dealing with the submarine menace’. ‘The first, naturally, was to prevent the vessels from putting to sea; the second was to sink them after they were at sea; and the third was to protect the merchant ships from their attack’15 At a War Cabinet meeting in February 1917 he outlined some of his major findings and initiatives.

  In January 1917 Britain ‘did not possess a mine that was very effective against submarines’.16 One author described the British mine as ‘a cheap and ineffectual machine’ that, in addition to often not exploding, often sank. In fact, one-third failed to explode at all and in April 1917 a large number (20,000) had been kept back from use because their mooring systems were found to be faulty.17 Even Beatty was deeply despondent: urging Jellicoe to push for fast and effective research and development, he added, ‘we must think of it on the largest scale possible or we shall be done in and it will be the lack of foresight of the Navy that has caused our defeat’.18 The fastest means to improving the situation was to copy an effective mine. The answer was to adopt the German Herz horn type. By November 1917, after 100,000 of the new Mark H mines had been ordered, delivery of significant quantities started, and by the year end, around 20,000 were sown in the Heligoland Bight and in the Dover Straits.

  A second solution was to use an underwater net barrage, in combination with mines, to block the Dover Straits. This was tried early in the war but the difficulties attached to moorings and protection against the heavy channel storms were not inconsiderable; even heavy 3in cabling would be torn apart in bad weath
er.19 Until the arrival of effective mines, the barrage in itself was an abject failure. Ludwig von Schöder, admiral commanding the Flandern MarineKorps, found his submarines could quite easily get through the barrage.20 Between February and May 1917, U-boats successfully passed the barrier 122 times and on only two occasions (both because of destroyers) were their submarines lost.21

  The 1910 Admiralty Submarine Committee (SAC) looked at the idea of a ‘dropping bomb’, ‘launched over the stern of the attacking vessel and exploded at a pre-determined depth.’22 By June 1916 the central idea, that of incorporating a pre-determined explosion depth, was a reality, a simple hydrostatic valve making it possible. The results of these early ‘depth charges’ were good and, with increased availability, related submarine sinkings steadily increased from two in 1916, to twelve in 1917 and twenty-four in the first eleven months of 1918.23 What took considerably longer was finding a way to fire the bomb far enough away from the attacking vessel so that the latter would not suffer collateral damage. The pistol-fired Type D thrower overcame that problem. Even if with a 3001b (135kg) charge, the damage caused to a submerged boat was still minimal unless the targeting was spot on.24 In July 1917 the first depth-charge throwers capable of firing the charge 40yds (35m) were delivered, while, separately, ASW ‘howitzers’ which could reach between 1,200 and 2,600yds (1,100–2,400m) also started delivery,25 but in extremely small numbers. By the end of 1917 only 377 had been delivered. The high potential value of this system would be seen much later, in 1942, when it became the basis for the Royal Navy’s ‘hedgehog’ depth charge mortar.26