by John Keegan
Scheer’s decision to take the whole of the High Seas Fleet into the North Sea, something never ventured before, was predicated on the belief that the British would not have foreknowledge of his movements. Room 40’s success in penetrating his signals therefore laid the basis for a great victory, since, with Jellicoe’s and Beatty’s ships advancing to an encounter likely to occur too far from port for Scheer to escape to safety during daylight hours, he risked the danger of being overwhelmed, or cut off from his line of retreat by superior force. Jellicoe’s initial advantage was compromised at an early stage, however, by a procedural failure at the Admiralty in London. Mistrusting Room 40’s ability to make operational judgements, the responsible staff officer asked a veiled question and concluded from the answer that Scheer’s battleships were still in harbour. He transmitted that false information to Jellicoe who, in consequence, and in order to conserve fuel, limited his speed southward while allowing Beatty and the battlecruisers to forge ahead. Room 40 had correctly informed the naval staff that Scheer’s wireless call sign could still be located in his home port; since the question had not been asked, however, the intelligence officers did not say that, on going to sea, it left its harbour call sign behind and adopted another. At the critical stage of the preliminaries of what would prove the largest naval encounter of the war, therefore, Jellicoe was making less than best speed to a junction with the enemy, while his reconnaissance fleet of battlecruisers was hurtling to an early and potentially disastrous encounter with a superior force.
Jutland, as the impending battle would be called (by the British; to the Germans it would, contentiously, be known as “the victory of the Skaggerak”), promised not only to be the largest naval encounter of the war but of naval history thus far. No sea had ever seen such a large concentration of ships or of ships so large, so fast and so heavily armoured. The High Seas Fleet, which had cleared the Heligoland Bight in the early morning of 31 May, consisted of sixteen Dreadnoughts, six pre-Dreadnoughts, five battlecruisers, eleven light cruisers and sixty-one destroyers. The Grand Fleet and the Battle Cruiser Fleet, which had left Scapa Flow and Rosyth the previous evening, included twenty-eight Dreadnoughts, nine battlecruisers, eight armoured cruisers, twenty-six light cruisers, seventy-eight destroyers, a seaplane-carrier and a minesweeper.17 Both sides also had submarines at sea, in the hope that the enemy might present a target to a lucky shot. Scheer’s plan, indeed, was predicated on the chance of drawing the British into a U-boat trap by showing his battlecruisers off Jutland. No such chance came, however, nor were any of the navies’ associated aircraft or airships able to play a role.18 Jutland, in consequence, was to be both the biggest and the last purely surface encounter of main fleets in naval history. The spectacle they presented never left the memory of those who took part, the densely ranked columns of battleships, grey against the grey water and sky of the North Sea, belching clouds of grey smoke from their coal-stoked boilers, the flash of white from the bows of the faster light cruisers and destroyers in attendance, as all pressed onward to action. So large was the number of ships hurrying forward that the more distant formations blurred into the horizon or were lost to sight in the play of cloud and rain squall on the observer’s field of vision.
Jutland and the war in the North Sea
Jutland is the most written about battle of naval history and the most disputed between scholars. Each segment, almost every minute of the two fleets’ engagement have been described and analysed by historians, official and unofficial, without any reaching agreement about exactly what happened or why, or whether, indeed, the outcome was a British or a German victory. That it was a British victory of some sort is not now denied. That it was less than a decisive victory is not denied either. It was the disparity between British expectations of victory and the success actually achieved that led to the detailed dissection of the battle’s events and the controversy that persists to this day. The Royal Navy, undefeated in a major fleet action since Trafalgar, sailed for Jutland in the sure belief that, should a junction of battlefleets ensue, another Trafalgar would occur. The inconclusiveness of the event has continued to haunt the mind of the Royal Navy ever since.
Yet Jutland is not, in outline, complex at all. It falls into five phases: in the first Beatty’s Battle Cruiser Fleet made a “run to the south” on encountering the weaker German battlecruiser force; then a “run to the north” when, on meeting the German Dreadnoughts, it turned back to draw them into Jellicoe’s Grand Fleet; then two encounters between the Dreadnoughts, broken by a German “turning away” as heavier British firepower told; and finally, after the German Dreadnoughts had sought escape from destruction, a night action in which the light forces of both sides sought to inflict crippling damage by torpedo attack.19
In the first phase Beatty’s Battle Cruiser Fleet passed through Scheer’s patrol line of U-boats without loss to arrive within fifty miles of his opposite number Hipper’s First Scouting Group, undetected. Chance then directed them towards each other. Their light forces diverted to investigate a neutral merchant ship, found each other and brought the two groups of battlecruisers into contact. Fire was opened and, because of bad British signalling, the German told more heavily. It fell, moreover, on ships defective in armoured protection and in prudent ammunition-handling. First Indefatigable, then Queen Mary suffered penetrations, which set off fires in handling-rooms where too many intrinsically unstable propellant charges were lying ready to be sent into the turrets. Both blew up and sank. Beatty’s superiority in numbers instantly disappeared.
The appearance of his four supporting fast battleships reversed the imbalance but then they and the surviving battlecruisers of the Battle Cruiser Fleet found that they had run down on to the main body of German Dreadnoughts. When they turned back towards Jellicoe’s Grand Fleet, the “run to the north” began. During it the 15-inch gunfire of the fast battleships inflicted heavy damage on the following Germans—the unlucky Seydlitz, so heavily hit at the Dogger Bank, was hit again—so that Scheer’s battleline was in disarray when his Dreadnoughts unwittingly fell under the fire of Jellicoe’s a little after six o’clock in the evening. They were to inflict one more act of destruction, when Invincible was blown up, through the same causes that had devastated Indefatigable and Queen Mary. Then the concentration of British superior weight of shell proved so overwhelming that Scheer hastily ordered a retreat and disappeared into the gathering gloom of a misty North Sea evening.
There might have ended, inconclusively, an already unsatisfactory encounter. Scheer, however, then decided to turn back, perhaps to come to the assistance of the damaged light cruiser Wiesbaden which had been left behind, perhaps because he judged that he could pass astern of Jellicoe’s fleet as it continued its advance towards the Heligoland Bight, while he made his escape through the Skaggerak into the Baltic. Jellicoe, however, once again reduced speed, with the result that the German Dreadnoughts, heading north-east, encountered the British heading south-east, and steering to pass their rear so as to cut them off from safety. At the moment of encounter moreover, the British were deployed in line abreast, the Germans in line ahead, a relative position, known as “crossing the enemy’s T,” that greatly favoured the British. More of their guns could be brought to bear than could those of the German fleet, ranked one ship behind the other, which thus also presented an easier target. Ten minutes of gunnery, in which the Germans suffered twenty-seven hits by large-calibre shells, the British only two, persuaded Scheer to turn away again into the dark eastern horizon, leaving his battlecruisers and lighter ships to cover his retreat in a “death ride.” The torpedo threat they presented caused Jellicoe to turn away also—for which he has ever afterwards been reproached—and, by the time he turned back, Scheer had put ten miles between his Dreadnoughts and the pursuit. Many German ships remained to cover Scheer’s flight, including his squadron of vulnerable pre-Dreadnoughts, and in a series of dusk and night actions they suffered losses. So, too, did the British cruisers and destroyers that remain
ed in contact. By the morning of 1 June, when Scheer had his fleet home, he had lost a battlecruiser, a pre-Dreadnought, four light cruisers and five destroyers. Jellicoe, though remaining in command of the North Sea, had lost three battlecruisers, four armoured cruisers and eight destroyers; 6,094 British sailors had died, 2,551 German.
The disparity in losses caused the Kaiser to claim a victory. Scheer, his sailors and ships had undoubtedly acquitted themselves well, while the battle had revealed serious defects in British ship design and tactical practice, particularly in inter-ship and inter-squadron signalling. Beatty had failed to report promptly and accurately in the encounter stage, gunnery had not been directed effectively during the Dreadnought engagements.20 Nevertheless, Jutland was not a German victory. Though the High Seas Fleet had lost fewer ships than the Grand Fleet, it had suffered more damage to those that survived, so that in the aftermath its relative strength in heavy units fell from 16:28 to 10:24. In those circumstances it could not risk challenging the Grand Fleet for several months nor, when it resumed its sallies from port, dared it venture outside coastal waters.21 Contrary to conventional belief, Jutland was not the German fleet’s last sortie, nor its last action. There was an encounter between German Dreadnoughts and British battlecruisers near Heligoland on 17 November 1917, while the High Seas Fleet steamed as far as southern Norway on 24 April 1918. It had accepted the verdict of Jutland nevertheless, pithily summarised by a German journalist as an assault on the gaoler, followed by a return to gaol.22 Inactivity and discontent would eventually lead to serious disorder among the crews of Scheer’s surface ships, beginning in August 1917 and culminating in full-scale mutiny in the last November of the war. After 1 June 1916, Germany’s attempt to win a decision at sea would be conducted exclusively through the submarine arm.
OFFENSIVES ON THREE FRONTS
In the early summer of 1916, Germany saw as yet no need to reverse the policy of restricting U-boat operations it had adopted, for diplomatic reasons, the previous year, nor did the Allies apprehend the deadly danger that such a reversal would bring. Their thoughts were concentrated on the great offensives they jointly planned to deliver in the west and east, offensives which they believed would, after eighteen months of stalemate in France and Belgium, a year of defeats in Poland, and six months of frustration in Italy, bring them decisive victories. On 6 December 1915, representatives of the Allied powers met at French headquarters at Chantilly to agree plans. Joffre presided but had no power to impose a single strategy, only to encourage co-ordination. In that he succeeded. It was easily decided that the minor fronts, in Salonika, Egypt and Mesopotamia (though there events were suddenly to take a turn for the worse), should not be reinforced. On the major fronts, by contrast, the Russians, the Italians and the British and French bound themselves to mount attacks so timed as to prevent the Central Powers from transferring reserves between theatres and with all the forces available to each army.
The Allied forces had grown considerably since the beginning of trench warfare. Italy, industrially and demographically the weakest of the major allies, had succeeded by early 1916 in raising its number of infantry battalions from 560 to 693 and of field artillery pieces from 1,788 to 2,068; the army in the zone of combat had grown in strength since 1915 from a million to a million and a half.23 Russia, despite the terrible fatalities of 1914–15 and the large loss of soldiers to captivity after Gorlice-Tarnow, had been able to fill the gaps with new conscripts, so that by the spring of 1916 it would have two million men in the field army. Almost all, moreover, would be properly equipped, thanks to a striking expansion of Russian industry. Engineering output increased fourfold between the last year of peace and 1916, chemical output, essential to shell-filling, doubled. As a result there was a 2,000 per cent increase in the production of shells, 1,000 per cent in that of artillery, 1,100 per cent in that of rifles. Output of the standard field-artillery shell had risen from 358,000 per month in January 1915 to 1,512,000 in November. The Russian armies would in future attack with a thousand rounds of shell available per gun, a stock equivalent to that current in the German and French armies, and its formations were acquiring plentiful quantities of all the other equipment—trucks, telephones and aircraft (as many as 222 per month)—essential to modern armies.24
In France, too, there had been a war-industrial revolution. Thanks in part to the mobilisation of women for factory work—the number employed in the metal industries rose from 17,731 in 1914 to 104,641 in July 1916—shell output reached 100,000 per day in the autumn of 1915. Between August and December 1915, production of field guns rose from 300 to 600, while daily production of rifles in that month totalled 1,500; output of explosive had increased sixfold since the beginning of the war.25 There had not been a comparable expansion of the fighting force. Because of the small size of the national demographic base, relative to Germany’s, and high proportion of men conscripted and held in the reserve in peacetime, over 80 per cent of those of military age, France lacked the capacity to expand its field army to the extent possible in Germany or Russia, where the pre-war military intake was less than half the age group. Nevertheless, by skilful reorganisation and redeployment of soldiers to the front from employment in the rear, twenty-five new infantry divisions were formed between February 1915 and the spring of 1916. The French army of 1916 was stronger than that of 1914 by more than 25 per cent.26
The major addition to the fighting strength of the Allies, however, was British. On 7 August 1914, Lord Kitchener, on appointment as Secretary of State for War, had issued an appeal for a hundred thousand men to enlist for three years, or the duration of the war, which he believed would be long. Further appeals for “hundred thousands” followed, and were met with an overwhelmingly enthusiastic response, in part because the promise was given that “those who joined together would serve together.” As a result men from the same small locality, workplace or trade went to the recruiting offices in groups, were attested and then went forward to training and eventually active service in the same unit.27 Many called themselves “Chums” or “Pals” battalions, among which the largest group was the Liverpool Pals of four battalions, largely raised from the shipping and broking offices of the city. Smaller towns supplied single battalions, like the Accrington Pals, the Grimsby Chums and the Oldham Comrades; others were raised by occupation, the Glasgow Tramways Battalion, or nationality; Newcastle-on-Tyne, the English industrial city, produced four battalions each of Tyneside Scottish and Tyneside Irish. The “first hundred thousand” had included many of the pre-war unemployed. Subsequent hundred thousands—there were to be five altogether—were formed of genuine volunteers including, by January 1915, 10,000 skilled engineers, and over 100,000 each from the coal mining and the building trades. From this magnificent human resource, Kitchener was able eventually to form six “New” or “Kitchener” Armies, each five divisions strong, to join the army’s eleven regular divisions and the twenty-eight infantry divisions of the part-time, voluntary Territorial Force. By the spring of 1916, Britain had seventy divisions under arms, a tenfold expansion since peace, and of those twenty-four were New Army divisions on or waiting to go to the Western Front.28
It was this enormous increment in the striking power of the Anglo-French concentration in France and Belgium that allowed the French and British to promise their allies at Chantilly a continuation of their joint offensive efforts in 1916. It would, Joffre agreed on 29 December with General Sir Douglas Haig, the new commander of the BEF, take the form of a combined offensive in the centre of the Western Front. Joffre argued initially for mounting a series of preliminary assaults, in continuation of his policy of attrition. Haig, who feared that forces would be frittered away in such operations, counter-proposed an attack by the British in Flanders, to be matched by a French offensive further south, as had been tried in 1915. As a compromise, Joffre secured his agreement to a drive along the line of the River Somme, to which the British were to extend their line. As the movement would allow the French units north o
f the Somme to rejoin the main concentration of Joffre’s armies to the south, the two armies would then share a clear-cut boundary which, Joffre argued, should be the axis of their great offensive in the coming year. Haig, who doubted the military logic of an operation that seemed likely at best to dent the huge salient left by the failed German advance on Paris in 1914, demurred but, in the interests of Anglo-French harmony, eventually concurred.
Plans made without allowance for the intentions of the enemy are liable to miscarry. So it was to prove in 1916. While Joffre and Haig were making their dispositions for the Somme, the Italians preparing to persist in the struggle for the heights above the Isonzo and the Russians contemplating retaliation for the loss of Poland, Conrad von Hötzendorf was laying the basis for an Austrian “punishment expedition” against the hated Italians from the unexpected direction of the Trentino, while Falkenhayn, who had wrongly concluded that the Russians had been beaten into submission by the series of victories beginning with Tannenberg and culminating in Gorlice-Tarnow, was devising a vast punishment expedition of his own against the French at Verdun.
Falkenhayn outlined his reasoning in a letter written to the Kaiser on Christmas Day 1915. Germany’s object, he insisted, must be to dishearten Britain on whose industrial and maritime power the Alliance rested. He therefore argued for a resumption of the unrestricted U-boat campaign. At the same time—he perhaps and rightly surmised that his call for a U-boat offensive would be refused—Britain’s continental partners should be destroyed. Italy was too unimportant to deserve a major effort against her. Russia, on the other hand, tied up German troops which could be better used elsewhere, without presenting the opportunity to strike against her a success decisive to the outcome of the war. His assessment was that, “Even if we cannot perhaps expect a revolution in the grand style, we are entitled to believe that Russia’s internal troubles will compel her to give in within a relatively short period. In this connection it may be granted she will not revive her military reputation meanwhile.” What made even a weakened Russia too difficult to knock out of the war was the lack of a strategic objective: the capture of St. Petersburg would have merely symbolic results; an advance on Moscow led towards the vast emptiness of the interior; while the Ukraine, though a prize of great value, was inaccessible except through Romania, whose neutrality Germany would be ill-advised to violate. Dismissing involvement in the Egyptian, Mesopotamian and Salonika fronts as irrelevancies, and accepting the British portion of the Western Front as too strong to attack, he therefore concluded that, since an offensive somewhere was necessary, because “Germany and her allies could not hold out indefinitely,” it must be made against France. “The strain on France,” he wrote, “has reached breaking point—though it is certainly borne with the most remarkable devotion. If we succeed in opening the eyes of her people to the fact that in a military sense they have nothing more to hope for, that breaking point would be reached and England’s best sword knocked out of her hand.” The operational solution to his analysis was for a limited offensive at a vital point that would “compel the French to throw in every man they have. If they do so the forces of France will bleed to death.”29