What is interesting about the German official histories, in comparison to the British, was that the writers were all serving or former officers.
Newbolt’s A Naval History of the War
As a successor to Julian Corbett, Sir Henry Newbolt was an odd choice. He was known as a poet and writer, but not as a naval historian. When Corbett died in September 1922, Newbolt took over the work and immediately was able to bring attention to the lack of signals intelligence passed to Jellicoe during the battle. This was not possible in Corbett’s earlier history. It pointed the finger perhaps too directly at the Admiralty.
Volume II of the Jellicoe Papers
In 1966, on the fiftieth anniversary of the battle, it seemed as if we had suddenly returned to the acrimony of the 1920s. The second volume of Jellicoe’s papers, which included a full account of the Harper story, was released. A copy went to The Times. On Saturday, 14 December a review of the work by Basil Gringell appeared under the unnecessarily provocative headline, ‘Beatty shown as falsifier of the Jutland record’.54 Beatty was portrayed in the worst light: as a commander who consciously doctored documents that would enter into the historical record of the battle. The 2nd Earl Beatty replied to the piece in a letter to the newspaper. Even the young Nicholas Beatty (‘aged seven and a half at the time’) wrote a letter of objection.55
The papers were speedily followed by American naval professor Arthur Marder’s five-volume opus, From the Dreadnought to Scapa Flow, whose third volume is often regarded as the seminal work on Jutland. He was greatly helped by Stephen Roskill, who not only agreed not to bring out a rival work at the same time, but to hand Marder much of his research, including one file of the decipher transcripts for the days and nights of the Jutland action that he had been given by Edward Clarke of Room 40, as well as a rare copy of the Appreciation that he had received from Jellicoe’s secretary. (The subsequent fall-out between the two historians was described in Barry Gough’s Historical Dreadnoughts: Arthur Marder, Stephen Roskill and Battles for Naval History, which appeared in 2010.)
Marder ended up criticising Beatty and, to a lesser extent Jellicoe, in different ways, but was also full of approval when he saw fit. He was critical of the failure to concentrate the 5th Battle Squadron into the initial battle-cruiser line, but strongly praised Beatty’s performance when he led the German battle-cruisers, closely followed by the High Seas Fleet, to Jellicoe in the run to the north. Yet for the most part, Marder was outraged at how Jellicoe had been treated post-war: He was ‘most unfairly blamed for not doing miracles at Jutland. He was as brave and enterprising as the best of them, and did the best that was possible.’56
The pendulum soon tipped the other way. In Pan Books’ popular Grand Strategy Series, Geoffrey Bennett published Naval Battles of the First World War that gave the British credit for Beatty’s tactical victory in the run to the north by bringing Hipper and Scheer unsuspectingly into Jellicoe’s hands; but then he fully criticised Jellicoe when, after the deployment, ‘he twice failed to follow his opponent when he recoiled, the second time being after the German C-in-C’s ill judged return to the east’.57
Bennett was at least sympathetic to Jellicoe’s difficulties. He gave my father a copy of his book, Jutland, inscribed with a very clear message of support58 and quoted Jellicoe’s frustration at the amount of armchair theorising done after the battle by the likes of Churchill: ‘None of my critics appear to have realised the extent to which the absence of information regarding the High Seas Fleet, and the lack of visibility, affected my handling of our fleet’.59 ‘If it had only been about 6pm instead of nearly dark,’ Jellicoe later said, ‘and clear instead of thick, we should have had a second Trafalgar.’60 At the end, however, Bennett got caught up with the idea that Jellicoe’s caution, combined with exhaustion, made him unsuitable as a war leader. He needed to be replaced, but was not so convinced that the replacement should be Beatty: ‘If Jellicoe lacked fire in his belly, Beatty had it to excess: if the High Seas Fleet had come out he might have been as reckless in handling the whole Grand Fleet as he was with the Battle Cruiser Fleet during the initial stages of Jutland’.61
Richard Hough’s The Great War at Sea: 1914–1918 tried to be less partisan than Bennett’s account. Hough’s central focus was what he saw as the inflexibility of the Grand Fleet Battle Orders; he compared Jellicoe’s ‘orders’ with Beatty’s Grand Fleet Battle Instructions, written in 1917. The mere use of the word ‘instructions’ in place of ‘orders’ encapsulates much of the difference between his and Jellicoe’s style of fleet command. It suggested that individual commanders in action had more flexibility and independence of decision-making. In particular, independent, proactive initiative was encouraged from destroyer commanders. ‘By definition rules restrict, and they restrict initiative as much as they define conduct and lead to centralisation and leader dependence … The GFBOs reveal in almost every line the subordination of offensive spirit to the defensive spirit.’62
As Jellicoe himself explained, the policy of centralisation was necessary. Unlike Nelson at Trafalgar, he doubted the abilities of individual commanders and ships raised in the tradition of the Victorian Navy to function effectively. In the battle conditions on the day, when even close-quarter combat was often carried out with serious questions as to whether indeed the target being engaged was an enemy, the risk of ensuing chaos was just too high.
Only one admiral took exception to the deployment to port (and, by inference, the single line of battle). That was Sturdee, who also openly tried to change Jellicoe’s opinions about following a retreating enemy. It seems that Jellicoe was misinformed on German destroyers potentially laying minefields in front of any chase: ‘German destroyers did not in fact carry mines at Jutland’.63 Hough got closer to the truth when he said that there was ‘a tragic irony in the fact that Jellicoe commanded a fleet built on the calculated policy of risk: more and bigger guns to destroy the enemy at the cost of protection from enemy gunfire’.64
There was substance in this; but the real truth lay in the disjuncture between Jacky Fisher’s vision and the time that was needed to change a hundred years of a culture that came increasingly to reinforce the complete opposite. Gunnery technology was still not up to par (with the exception of the director system), and training was underrated and under-utilised (especially in the Battle Cruiser Fleet – also to Beatty’s concern). The much newer German navy did not have to overcome the stultifying effects of this nineteenth-century legacy. Its superior efficiency and co-ordination in night-fighting equipment (star-shells and iris-shutter lenses), as well as the co-ordination between searchlight and secondary armament gun crews, was a notable example of the high level of training in the High Seas Fleet.
Andrew Gordon’s The Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command was published in 1996. This fascinating and extremely readable book reignited the decades-old debate. To Keith Yates, the fact that a review of the book in the Sunday Times could so naively repeat hook, line and sinker the untruths of the Appreciation was astonishing: ‘Admiral Jellicoe’s Grand Fleet was barely engaged, was not struck by a single shell and suffered only two dead and five wounded from shrapnel. Most of the fighting … was between the subordinate Battle Cruiser Fleet and elements of the High Seas Fleet.’65
In Flawed Victory: Jutland, 1916 (2000), Keith Yates gets straight to the point: ‘It is nothing less than amazing that this canard is still being perpetuated 80 years after the battle. The facts remain that Jellicoe’s battleships fired more heavy shells at the enemy in their two brief engagements than Beatty’s battle-cruisers did all day, and moreover scored nearly as many as three times as many direct hits on the ships of the High Seas Fleet. Scheers fleet may have only had to face the full might of Jellicoe’s Grand Fleet for less than an hour altogether, but that was quite long enough for Scheer to decide never to risk it again.’66
In 2005 John Brooks finally added a very detailed technical discussion in Dreadnought Gunnery at the Battle of Jutland: The Qu
estion of Fire Control. With the level of technical expertise that Brooks brings as an engineer to the subject, it was and will remain a seminal work.
Meanwhile, using the letters of Commander Le Mesurier as her source, Harriet Bachrach wrote on the battle in 2006, in Jutland Letters: June-October 1916, and picked up one of the self-criticisms that Jellicoe himself made in 1932. This was his decision not to send Le Mesurier’s 4th Light Cruiser Squadron ahead to scout the forward German fleet elements before the deployment to port decision.
There have been numerous German accounts of the battle, but very few have made it into English (which is not true the other way around). The official German war account, Der Krieg zur See 1914–1918 by Kapitän Otto Groos, was not written until after the war and only translated into English in 1926; it was never published in English (although it was translated both by the ONI, the American Office of Naval Intelligence, as well as by the RN). It was a far more balanced affair, critical of Beatty’s performance, but nevertheless not conceding any overall victory to Jellicoe or the British. Hough commented that this work was ‘stately and irreplaceable’; Scheer’s Germany’s High Seas Fleet in the World War was ‘egocentric, idiosyncratic, unreliable and execrably translated but should be read’.67
Hases account of the battle from his perspective as the chief gunnery officer of Derfflinger long continued to serve as an anchor for the German version of events. Beatty’s fire control and fire allocation were much criticised. The effectiveness of the firing from Evan-Thomas’s ships was singled out by Hase as causing them considerable alarm – but this was only one man’s point of view.
The battle was, of course, an excellent propaganda platform for Germany. The simple arithmetic of the battle supported the easy claim that Britain’s centuries-long dominance of the seas had been broken by the German navy. Jutland may have been the start of the decline of the British Navy, but not for Scheer’s stated reasons: it was not because he had defeated the Royal Navy in a great sea fight, but because he had failed to do so. More to the point, Scheer correctly concluded that a decisive change in strategy was needed. The balance of material losses (111,000 tons against Germany’s 62,000) and casualties (6,784 officers and men killed and wounded on the British side against German losses of 3,058) was always the mainstay of the German case. However, in his report to the Kaiser on 4 July 1916, Scheer came close to what he really thought: ‘There can be no doubt that even the most successful outcome of a fleet action in this war will not force England to make peace’. The real effort, he added, should be aimed at ‘the defeat of British economic life – that is, by using the U-boats against British trade’.68
Jellicoe’s and Beatty’s mistakes
In 1932 John Jellicoe, with the benefit of sixteen years of hindsight, wrote about what he felt had gone wrong on the day. He had also tried to update and rerelease a new version of his 1919 The Grand Fleet, but his publisher, Cassell, was not interested. To my knowledge Beatty never wrote a self-critique, neither did Scheer nor Hipper.
Jellicoe was not above apportioning some of the blame to himself, though he was clear that Beatty had failed on many fronts and had gone on to blame others. In the main, he identified his own failure not as the one for which he has been most criticised, the turn-away. It was in not using his scouting capabilities fully, or making it clear that battlefield intelligence was of the utmost importance. He felt that he should have sent Le Mesurier’s force ahead (as per Bachrach above), as Beatty had so successfully used Goodenoughs 2nd Light Cruiser Squadron in the opening battle-cruiser actions. He also felt that he had made a mistake in placing his scouting forces on the disengaged side of the line of battle after he had successfully crossed Scheer’s ‘T’, twice. On both occasions this disposition had left him less reaction time and could have been used immediately before or during the turn-away.
The night actions proved to be one lost opportunity after another. Jellicoe had no ‘night-fighting intentions’. A synopsis to his captains of what his intentions were and the need for instantaneous communication of information and the permission to break WT silence would have had important consequences. Even if he did not want to fight a night action, it was critical, if he were to resume action at dawn, that he prevent the Germans breaking through his blocking line. To do that he needed to know where they would probe. None of the destroyer captains, bar one, made it a priority to get that information back to Iron Duke.
Like Scheer and Beatty, he made some mistakes in the disposition of his forces and particularly in the inclusion of slower, more vulnerable ships such as Defence, Warrior and Black Prince with the battle fleet. They should not have been there. Similarly, the torpedoed Marlborough only slowed the line – she should have been sent back immediately after she had been hit, though I imagine Jellicoe did not like the idea of losing the destroyers that she would have required as escorts.
Something that Jellicoe himself never commented on (as far as I am aware) was the question of why he submitted to Beatty’s signal that he could bag the entire German fleet. He was not even sure that Beatty had contact. The day had already shown that this was not one of Beatty’s strong points. Yet Beatty’s biggest shortcoming was his character. Fierce independence of thinking led to too many battlefield decisions that reduced the overall effectiveness of a combined Grand Fleet and Battle Cruiser Fleet working in tandem.
Beatty’s failure to pass on vital intelligence has been well documented. It led to the fleets fighting almost as two independent entities, rather than as one. The failure to send any scouting intelligence back to his commander-in-chief was especially the case before the deployment and during the critical hours up to darkness. No contact information was transmitted at 20:20. Beatty’s not communicating the loss of Indefatigable and Queen Mary still leaves many questions. Had he done so, he would not have been giving the Germans anything that they did not know. Surely he should have let Jellicoe know earlier?
There also seems to have been the issue of how Beatty communicated with his captains – how he communicated his intentions on the battlefield. For Evan-Thomas, communication was non-existent. Others might have been, but Evan-Thomas was certainly not treated as one of a ‘band of brothers’. After Beatty had fought so hard to get the 5th BS within his command, he ignored its rear admiral. For the others it was built only around the concept of ‘conforming on the flagship’, Lion, but Evan-Thomas was not sure about what his role was supposed to be at that point.
Beatty’s most fundamental errors were, then, based on allowing his aggressive character to take precedence over more considered decision. Not consolidating his forces before taking on Hipper in the first battle-cruiser engagement was the example of what Jellicoe had feared. Beatty’s main difference from Jellicoe lay in his aversion to centralisation and in his placing ‘a higher premium of initiative and individual action. Often, this boldness translated into ill-prepared action. The Germans knew his character and that they could probably rely on this weakness. Jellicoe was happy to take risks that were carefully calculated. By contrast, he saw in Beatty character flaws that he feared could be exploited. In a letter to him after Dogger Bank, Jellicoe warned him of what would, as it turned out, happen at Jutland:
I imagine that the Germans will try to entrap you by risking their battle-cruisers as a decoy. They know that the odds are that you will be 100 miles away from me, and can draw you down to the Heligoland Bight without my being in effective support. This is all right if you keep your speed, but if some of your ships have their speed badly reduced in a fight with their battle-cruisers, or by submarines, their loss seems inevitable if you are drawn into the High Seas Fleet with me too far off to extricate them before dark. The Germans know you very well and will try to take advantage of that quality of not letting go when you have once got hold, which you possess, thank God. But one must concern oneself with the result to the country of a serious decrease in relative strength. If the game looks worth the candle the risks can be taken. If not, one’s duty is to be cau
tious. I believe you will see what is the proper course and pursue it victoriously.69
Having the 5th Battle Squadron in the line, covering the longer range from the rear, would have given him near-impregnability. It is quite possible that Beatty would not have survived the episode without very courageous support from Evan-Thomas’s 5th Battle Squadron.
The failure to engage with the range advantage, even if the gunnery conditions were not what he had hoped for on the day, is debatable. Certainly it seemed that Chatfield wanted to fire much earlier. Later, in his Battle Cruiser Fleet Instructions, Beatty specifically talked about using the range advantage of the Queen Elizabeths. Maybe this was one of the things that Beatty himself learnt from the day.
Appalling signalling practices at Jutland have been much discussed. Beatty himself said that Seymour had cost him ‘three battles’, despite which he kept him on as his signals officer.70 Why, at least, was he not better supported if his capabilities were not trusted? Ironically, Beatty was very clear that not being able to choose good people was one of Jellicoe’s problems. A year after Jutland, he wrote that Jellicoe was ‘absolutely incapable of selecting good men because he dislike[d] men of character who ha[d] independent views of their own’.71 This was not accurate. Jellicoe was eminently capable of working with men of ‘independent views’, although Dewar said this about him as well.
The two men, great and courageous admirals, died within months of each other and now lie almost side by side, in St Paul’s Cathedral. Jellicoe had been loved by the men around him, especially the ranks. He had been seen as kind, fair, strikingly intelligent, but modest; Beatty had been admired for his style, good looks and charisma.
Jutland_The Unfinished Battle Page 52