CHAPTER 34

Jutland: Aftermath

On Thursday afternoon, June 1, twenty-four hours before Jellicoe and the Grand Fleet returned to Scapa Flow, the High Seas Fleet reached Wilhelmshaven, and Scheer, finishing his champagne, assembled his admirals and asked for their reports. The evidence presented was impressive: they had confronted the might of the Grand Fleet; they had watched British dreadnought battle cruisers and large armored cruisers blow up before their eyes, and they had discovered their own big ships to be powerfully resistant to fatal damage from heavy-caliber British shells. Scheer telegraphed the Naval Staff in Berlin; by early evening, an official communiqué was published. The battle was announced as a German victory. Famous British ships—the battleship Warspite, the battle cruisers Queen Mary and Indefatigable—had been sunk (Invincible had been mistaken for Warspite). Two British armored cruisers, two light cruisers, and thirteen destroyers were described as destroyed. German losses were said to be the old battleship Pommern and the light cruiser Wiesbaden; Frauenlob and several destroyers had “not yet returned to base.” Nothing was said about Lützow, Rostock, and Elbing. The victory was called the Skagerrakschlacht, the Battle of the Skagerrak, and Scheer became the Victor of the Skagerrak. The Austrian naval attaché reported to Vienna that the German fleet was “intoxicated with its victory.”

The German communiqué went immediately to the news agencies of Europe and America and then to the newspapers of the world. In Germany, the presses roared with special editions. Crowds gathered at newspaper offices and around kiosks to read electrifying headlines: “Great Victory at Sea,” “Many English Battleships Destroyed and Damaged.” Above the entrance of Tageszeitung, a huge placard read, “Trafalgar Is Wiped Out.” Flags appeared on Unter den Linden, then all over Berlin, then in every city and town in Germany. Schoolchildren were given a holiday. In subsequent editions, the papers spoke, not just of victory, but of “annihilation.” Illustrations showed British dreadnoughts blowing up and floating upside down. Stories brimmed with contempt for the British navy; one paper described “the arrogant presumption of the British rats who have left their safe hiding places only to be trapped by German efficiency, heroism and determination.” Friday, June 2, was declared a national holiday and Sunday became a day of national mourning when the dead from the fleet were buried in the naval cemetery at Wilhelmshaven. On Monday morning, the kaiser arrived in Wilhelmshaven to visit the fleet. William, described by Marder as “almost hysterical in his theatrical display of emotion,” boarded the flagship, embraced Scheer, and kissed him on both cheeks. To the crew assembled on the quay beside the battleship, he shouted, “The journey I have made today means very much to me. The English were beaten. The spell of Trafalgar has been broken. You have started a new chapter in world history. I stand before you as your Highest Commander to thank you with all my heart.” William then boarded other ships, kissing the captains and distributing Iron Crosses. Scheer and Hipper both were handed Germany’s highest military decoration, the Ordre pour le Mérite. Scheer was promoted to admiral and Hipper to vice admiral. King Ludwig III of Bavaria then elevated Hipper, a Bavarian by birth, to the kingdom’s nobility, making him Franz von Hipper. Scheer, offered a “von” by the kaiser, refused and remained simply Reinhard Scheer.

It did not take long for this public “cock-crowing,” as Weizsäcker called it, to subside. The truth about the loss of Lützow leaked out and traveled through the country by word of mouth. On June 7, the German Naval Staff was forced to reveal its additional losses and a month later, on July 4, Scheer sent the kaiser his confidential report on the battle. The High Seas Fleet would be ready for sea by mid-August, he wrote, and he hoped to inflict serious damage on the enemy. “Nevertheless,” he continued, “even the most successful outcome of a fleet action in this war will not force England to make peace.” Citing “the disadvantages of our military-geographical position and the enemy’s great material superiority,” Scheer told the emperor that “a victorious end to the war within a reasonable time can only be achieved through the defeat of British economic life—that is, by using the U-boats against British trade.”

During the morning and afternoon of Thursday, June 1, the British Admiralty waited for news from Jellicoe. London had been monitoring wireless messages between Jellicoe, Beatty, and other commanders, referring to losses, strayed ships, and their search of the battlefield; from these, it was clear that the German fleet had returned to port and that Jellicoe held command of the field. By nightfall, the Admiralty also knew that the Grand Fleet would be arriving back in its harbors the following morning. By then Jellicoe would surely report; meanwhile, the Admiralty was prepared to wait. There seemed no immediate harm in this; because of strict censorship in Britain, no one beyond a small official circle knew that the Grand Fleet had been in action.

That same Thursday evening, Reuters in Amsterdam picked up the official communiqué from Berlin and cabled it to their London bureau. The bureau sent the text to the Admiralty for the required censorship review prior to release to the British press. At the Admiralty, however, the claims in the communiqué appeared so damaging that there could be no question of revealing them to the public unless confirmed by Jellicoe. Now impatient for news, the Admiralty signaled Iron Duke at 9:40 p.m., summarizing the German communiqué and stressing the need for “prompt contradiction.” Jellicoe did not reply. The Commander-in-Chief, passing a second night with little sleep, was preoccupied with the problems of rounding up, safeguarding, and shepherding his fleet, especially his damaged ships, back to harbor. Warspite and Marlborough, limping home, had been attacked by submarines. Black Prince, Warrior, and several destroyers were missing; many other destroyers were dangerously low on fuel. Further, until he had received reports from his own admirals and commodores, Jellicoe really did not know enough about what had happened during the battle to make a report. And on this day of all others, concern about an Admiralty press release was at the bottom of his list of priorities.

For these reasons, when daylight came on Friday, June 2, the Admiralty still had not heard from Jellicoe. By 8:00 a.m., ominous rumors were spreading across Britain. Some originated in Rosyth dockyard, which was preparing to receive a number of damaged ships. The arrival of other ships and the despatch of more than 6,000 uncensored messages from men coming ashore to tell loved ones they were safe spread the news that a battle had been fought. Further concealment was impossible; at 11:00 a.m., with the news from Berlin spreading around the world, the Admiralty decided to let the German communiqué be published in Britain.

To the British public, unaware even that a sea battle had taken place, it came as a bombshell. Within an hour, London newsboys were on the streets shouting, “Great naval disaster! Five British battleships lost!” Flags were lowered to half staff, stock exchanges closed, theaters darkened. Overseas, on breakfast tables in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, the headlines read, “Britain Defeated at Sea!” “British Losses Great!” “British Fleet Almost Annihilated!” Still, the Admiralty issued no communiqué. Why not? Surely there must be another side to the story. Or had there been a spectacular defeat? Beginning that day, a tide of suspicion flooded up that would not subside for many years.

Meanwhile, at 10:35 that morning, as Iron Duke was entering Scapa Flow, Jellicoe signaled his first report to the Admiralty. A brief, sober summary of British losses, giving only the most conservative estimates of damage to the enemy, it seemed, taken at face value, almost to confirm the German communiqué. With the newspapers clamoring for an official statement, Balfour, Jackson, and Oliver sat down at the Admiralty during the afternoon to produce a document, which they released to the press at 7:00 p.m.:

On the afternoon of Wednesday, May 31, a naval engagement took place off the coast of Jutland. The British ships on which the brunt of the fighting fell were the Battle Cruiser Fleet and some cruisers and light cruisers supported by four fast battleships. Among these the losses were heavy. . . . The battle cruisers Queen Mary, Indefatigable, and Invincible and the cruisers Defence and Black Prince were sunk. The Warrior was disabled . . . and had to be abandoned. . . . No British battleships were sunk. . . . The enemy’s losses are serious. At least one battle cruiser was destroyed, one battleship was reported sunk by our destroyers during a night action; two light cruisers were disabled and probably sunk.

Balfour was the primary author of this document. The First Lord, a former prime minister, a philosopher, and a man little interested in public favor, had chosen candor: “I desired to let the people know the best and worst that I knew,” he said. The communiqué, therefore, was a simple, honest recital of British losses. There was no mention of Scheer’s double turnaway or of his desperate nocturnal lunge to escape. There was no explanation of the significance of British sea control after the battle.

The Admiralty’s brief statement reached the public in Saturday morning newspapers on June 3. To most British readers, schooled to believe that whenever the Royal Navy encountered an enemy, the foreigners must in-evitably go to the bottom, it gave a shocking impression of mishap, even disaster. The press, inherently suspicious of official pronouncements, was convinced that something was being hidden. If Jutland had been a British victory, why not say so? If it was not a British victory—and the Admiralty steadfastly refused to claim it as such—then it must have been a British defeat. Newspaper editorials struck an attitude of suspicious mourning. “The result could not be viewed with satisfaction,” said the Daily Telegraph. “Defeat in the Jutland engagement must be admitted,” agreed the Daily News. Newspapers in hand, Jacky Fisher, now at the Board of Invention and Research, paced up and down his office, repeating, “They’ve failed me, they’ve failed me! I have spent thirty years of my life preparing for this day and they’ve failed me!”

By Saturday afternoon, Jellicoe had read the British communiqué and had signaled a vigorous protest, saying that it magnified his losses, minimized Scheer’s, and gave a misleading picture of the battle. The Admiralty then issued a second communiqué redistributing the balance of lost ships, but still not saying which side had won the battle. To strengthen the Admiralty’s case, Balfour asked Winston Churchill, his predecessor and friend, famous for his gifted pen, to come in, examine the confidential reports of the battle, and publish his own opinion. Churchill came and was handed all dispatches from the fleet commanders. His commentary, appearing on Sunday morning, placed the battle in a larger context. He brought out the crucial fact that the High Seas Fleet had escaped destruction only by flight. He stressed that sea control depended on dreadnought battleships and that British supremacy in this respect was unimpaired. Britain had lost a first-line battle cruiser, Queen Mary, but the Germans had lost Lützow, an equivalent vessel. Invincible and Indefatigable were second-line vessels; their loss was regrettable, but far from crippling. Overall, the Royal Navy’s margin of superiority continued undiminished. Churchill’s essay calmed the public, but further enraged the press. Why had the Admiralty given secret information to a politician, but not to them? London journalists now were convinced that the original German communiqué had been substantially correct and that the Admiralty, in dribbling out the story, was concealing the truth.

Accordingly, a third Admiralty communiqué, appearing in the Monday morning newspapers, gave a higher estimate of German losses: two battleships, two battle cruisers, four light cruisers, and at least nine destroyers. Jellicoe, it declared, “having driven the enemy into port, returned to the main scene of action and scoured the sea in search of disabled vessels.” Then, bending over backward to please, the Admiralty announced that it was lifting censorship on all official dispatches from the sea commanders concerning the battle. Learning this, Jellicoe vehemently protested that many of the details in these reports, if released to the public, would give valuable information to the enemy. Immediately on Jellicoe’s telegram reaching London, censorship was reimposed—and journalistic suspicions flared higher. The Admiralty was partially vindicated the following day when the German Naval Staff admitted the loss of Lützow and Rostock; and by the end of the week, public opinion began to shift. Now there was talk of a “substantial victory”; there were reminders of the continuing blockade; there was a description of the High Seas Fleet sealed up in Wilhelmshaven while the victorious British fleet was “sweeping across the North Sea in its unchallenged supremacy.” The Naval and Military Record announced that “the Navy’s prestige stands higher today than at any period for a hundred years.” The Globe asked: “Will the shouting, flag-wagging [German] people get any more of the copper, rubber and cotton their government so sorely needs? Not by a pound. Will meat and butter be cheaper in Berlin? Not by a pfennig. There is one test and only one of victory. Who held the field of battle at the end of the fight?” Arthur Balfour laconically noted, “It is not customary for a victor to run away.” And a New York City newspaper told its readers: “The German fleet has assaulted its jailor, but it is still in jail.”

The British public was just recovering from the Jutland “defeat” when newspaper headlines on Tuesday, June 6—six days after the battle—sent them reeling again. Field Marshal Lord Kitchener, the nation’s military idol and the secretary of state for war, had drowned at sea aboard a British cruiser only a few miles from Scapa Flow.

The tragedy that stunned the nation came almost as a release for the hero. Kitchener, aging, tired, and fractious after twenty-two months of war, had found himself in an anomalous position: his reputation with the British public remained as high as ever, but within the Cabinet it had shrunk to a point where he was treated with almost contemptuous indifference. Lloyd George said privately that Kitchener “talked twaddle” and constantly urged Asquith to remove him from the War Office. The visible cause was the army’s failure at Gallipoli; as failure at the Dardanelles had toppled Churchill and Fisher, so now failure at Gallipoli had left Kitchener tottering. Underneath lay concerns over Kitchener’s remote, sometimes inexplicable behavior. One night over dinner, Balfour explained this view to his niece, who was to become his biographer:

“K. knows nothing,” the First Lord said. “He does nothing right.”

“He is a stupid man?” the niece asked.

“That’s it; he is,” Balfour replied. “He is not a great organizer, he is not a great administrator, nor a great soldier. And what is more, he knows it. He is not vain. He is only great when he has little things to accomplish.”

“And yet,” the niece said, “I feel as if he were rather a great man.”

“You are not wrong. He is in a way. But our language has no word for the subtleties I would like to express about K. I must call his greatness personality. He has that in the highest sense.”

Kitchener knew what his colleagues were saying, but, as he told a friend, “Rightly or wrongly—probably wrongly—the people believe in me. It is not, therefore, me the politicians are afraid of, but of what the people would say if I were to go.” Early in May, an invitation from Tsar Nicholas II to visit the Russian army and confer with the Russian government on questions of military cooperation provided an excuse, as welcome to Kitchener as to his detractors, for him to leave England for three weeks. On June 4, he said good-bye to the prime minister and the king and left London from King’s Cross Station for northern Scotland. From Thurso, a destroyer carried him across the Pentland Firth to Iron Duke in Scapa Flow. His visit was secret, but as he came up the flagship’s ladder, the crew recognized the familiar figure and began to clap. Already, an unseasonable northeasterly storm had the flagship bucking at its mooring cables, and while Kitchener had lunch with Jellicoe, the weather grew worse; one officer would call it “the dirtiest night we had seen in Scapa.” The Commander-in-Chief recommended that his guest postpone sailing for twenty-four hours, but the field marshal insisted that he had “a timetable and not a day to lose.” Jellicoe thereupon personally changed his visitor’s course out of Scapa Flow; the armored cruiser Hampshire, instead of taking the usual route to the east through Pentland Firth, was to take the less-used western route around the Orkneys. His intention was to give Kitchener, whose sea legs were rubbery, more comfort by putting him in the lee of the islands during the first hours of his voyage.

Just after 4:00 p.m., the towering field marshal reached out across Iron Duke’s spray-swept deck and clasped the hand of the small admiral. At 5:00 p.m., Hampshire and two escorting destroyers sailed for Archangel, turning west out of the Flow and keeping close to the sheer black cliffs of the Orkney coast. The cruiser’s captain, fearing submarines, called for 18 knots, but the storm had moved from the northeast around to the northwest and the three ships, burying their noses in enormous green waves rolling in from the Atlantic, were unable to make this speed. By 6:30 p.m., the seas were so high that the destroyers had to be sent home. At 7:40 p.m., about a mile and a half off Marwick Head, Hampshire struck a mine, one of twenty-two laid on the night of May 27–28 by U-75 in hopes of harming the Grand Fleet when it came out in response to Scheer’s planned thrust into the Skagerrak. The cruiser heeled over and within fifteen minutes went to the bottom. No boats could be lowered in the heavy seas; and of the more than 650 men on board, only twelve survived on small float rafts to reach the base of the Orkney cliffs. Kitchener was not among them. He was last seen immediately after the explosion wearing his heavy greatcoat and heading for the bridge. *62

The news reached London on the morning of June 6 and was on the street by noon. Kitchener—the blue-eyed, scarlet-faced soldier with the rampant mustache; the omnipotent war lord beckoning (“Your Country Needs You!”) from recruiting posters—was gone, drowned in the care of the navy. Jellicoe, struggling to deal with the repercussions of Jutland, sank into despondency. “I feel in a measure responsible as I ordered her movements,” he wrote to Jackson. “My luck is dead out for the present, I am afraid.”

Beyond communiqués and headlines, who won the Battle of Jutland? Scheer and the Germans claimed victory by comparing the number of ships sunk and of seamen killed and wounded. Here, indeed, they had the advantage: Britain had lost fourteen ships (three battle cruisers, three armored cruisers, and eight destroyers), while the German navy had lost eleven (one battle cruiser, one predreadnought battleship, four light cruisers, and five destroyers). British casualties were much heavier: 6,768 men were killed or wounded, while the Imperial Navy lost 3,058. But significant footnotes must be appended to these figures. British personnel losses were higher because five large British ships suddenly blew up, each explosion destroying almost 1,000 men. Only one big German ship, Pommern, blew up in this manner; by contrast, the crippled battle cruiser Lützow sank only after her crew of more than 1,000 had been safely taken off. Further, there was the matter of proportional loss. The British had lost three battle cruisers and Germany only one, but two months after the battle Britain had seven battle cruisers ready for sea and Germany only two. The newest and best battleships of the High Seas Fleet had been heavily damaged and took weeks to repair. But of the twenty-four dreadnoughts of the British battle fleet, only one, Marlborough, had been sent to dry dock; of the other twenty-three, only one, Colossus, had been hit by two heavy German shells. The battle fleet’s casualties were two men from Marlborough killed and the arm lost by a leading seaman on Colossus. Nor, aside from the loss of the men on board, did the Admiralty mourn every one of its lost ships. The armored cruisers, especially, were not missed. Slow and vulnerable, as Fisher had predicted, able neither to fight nor to run, after Jutland the remaining ships of this species were scrapped.

Besides, Jellicoe quickly made good his losses When Warspite went into dock at Rosyth, Queen Elizabeth came out. When Malaya went into the floating dock at Invergordon, Emperor of India came out. Barham was gone for a while, under repair at Devonport, but the dreadnought battleship Royal Sovereign, held back at Scapa Flow from Jutland, now was ready, and her sisters Resolution and Ramillies soon would join the fleet. Dreadnought herself, sent to join the Channel Fleet, could be brought back north. Among the battle cruisers, Princess Royal and Tiger went into the dockyard, but Australia came out. Repulse and Renown were completed in August and September. Across the North Sea, Scheer enjoyed no such quick replacement of his losses. His best three dreadnoughts, König, Grosser Kurfürst, and Markgraf, remained in dry dock for weeks; two of his four surviving battle cruisers, Derfflinger and Seydlitz, were not ready for sea until December, six months later. German light cruiser strength had been cut to six against Britain’s thirty. In sum, when ships available were added up on both sides, Britain’s superiority was as overwhelming as ever.

What caused the disparity in ship losses at Jutland? After the war, the official German naval history declared that during the battle “the superiority of German gunnery is clearly evident.” Hipper’s battle cruisers did shoot well in the opening stages when visibility was much in their favor, but they became less accurate once they came under fire from the 15-inch guns of the 5th Battle Squadron. The gunnery of Beatty’s six battle cruisers was never more than mediocre, but when Jellicoe’s battle squadrons came into action, a few minutes of their massive cannonade was sufficient to make Scheer turn and run. Even so, given a rough balance in gunnery efficiency, why did the British fleet suffer losses so much heavier? Why was it unable to sink Seydlitz despite twenty-two hits with heavy-caliber shells? Or Lützow with twenty-four? How was it that Derfflinger got home, having been struck twenty-two times? In short, why were German ships nearly unsinkable? And, on the other side, why did three British battle cruisers blow up?

From the beginning, Alfred von Tirpitz, who believed that “the supreme quality of a ship is that it should remain afloat,” had set out to build ships that would be unsinkable. Tirpitz had been willing to accept smaller-caliber guns for his battle cruisers and battleships in order to allow more weight for armor; accordingly, Derfflinger, a battle cruiser, was as well protected as Iron Duke, a battleship, and better protected than Tiger, a contemporary battle cruiser. Tirpitz’s approach was in direct contrast to Jacky Fisher’s philosophy that dreadnoughts of all types must be built to “Hit first!” and “Hit hard!” Fisher’s battle cruisers were built to overtake and destroy an enemy at long range with heavy guns. If, to achieve superior speed and striking power within a fixed tonnage, armor in British ships had to be sacrificed, so be it. And so it was: Queen Mary, of 27,000 tons, devoted 3,900 tons to armor, whereas Seydlitz, weighing 25,000 tons, carried 5,200 tons of armor. And, at Jutland, Queen Mary blew up while Seydlitz came home.

But heavier armor was only one reason damaged German warships survived at Jutland. German armor was penetrated during the battle; the vessels remained afloat because designers and builders had subdivided their hulls into an extraordinary number of small watertight compartments. Seawater entering one compartment was contained and prevented from spreading to others. Bayern, a new German dreadnought battleship about to join the fleet, had six engine rooms and six boiler rooms, whereas Royal Sovereign, a new British battleship, had three of each. The price of this honeycomb of small, watertight compartments was paid in cramped living quarters for the crew; officers were packed in four or six to a cabin, and the men lived like tinned sardines. But the ships, even when battered into wreckage, remained afloat.

Not all—or even most—of the blame for British losses at Jutland should be placed on thinner armor. There is no evidence that Indefatigable, Queen Mary, and Invincible blew up because German 11-inch or 12-inch shells penetrated their armored hulls and burst inside their magazines. Rather, the almost certain cause of these cataclysmic explosions was that the turret systems of British battle cruisers lacked adequate flashtight arrangements and that, in each of these ships, a shell bursting inside the upper turret had ignited powder waiting to be loaded into the guns, sending a bolt of flame flashing unimpeded down the sixty-foot hoist into the powder magazines. Assuming this to be true, blame lay not with the design of British ships but with the deliberate decision by captains and gunnery officers to discard the flashproof scuttles originally built into British dreadnoughts. The Royal Navy made a cult of gunnery. To win peacetime gunnery competitions, gun crews were encouraged to fire as rapidly as possible. Quick loading and firing required a constant supply of ammunition at the breech of the gun, and thus a continuous flow of powder bags moving out of the magazines and up the hoists to the guns. Safety became secondary; gunnery officers began leaving magazine doors and scuttles open to facilitate movement; eventually, in some ships, these cumbersome barriers were removed. But for this weakness none of the three battle cruisers might have been lost.

If, before Jutland, the British Admiralty did not realize the importance of protecting magazines from powder flash, the Germans did. Both German and British turrets were penetrated by enemy shells during the battle; indeed, nine turrets on Hipper’s battle cruisers were pierced by British shells. Some of these turrets burned out as a result, but there were no magazine explosions.

The Germans had profited from grim experience. At the Dogger Bank, sixteen months before Jutland, a 13.5-inch British shell had penetrated Seydlitz’s after turret. Powder in the turret caught fire, flashed below, and killed everyone in the two after turret systems, sending flames 200 feet above the ship. Only quick flooding of the magazines saved the ship. The Germans learned from this lesson and German warships were provided with antiflash protection for the hatches between handling room and magazines. Thus, at Jutland, powder exploded and fires wiped out turret crews on Derfflinger and other ships, but the flames did not penetrate to the magazines and the ships did not blow up. Belatedly, the British understood and caught up. The navy rapidly installed flashtight scuttles, which operated like revolving doors, in magazine bulkheads and turret systems throughout the fleet.

Seeking other reasons why German dreadnoughts would not go to the bottom, the British navy discovered one that was as unexpected as it was embarrassing: the ineffectiveness of its own armor-piercing shells. These heavy projectiles were designed to penetrate, but all too often at Jutland they broke up on initial impact with armor rather than piercing it and exploding inside a ship’s vitals. Bad fuses were to blame: they triggered the shell into bursting prematurely, on first hitting enemy armor. The Royal Navy knew nothing about this flaw until German gossip reached it by way of a neutral naval officer two months after Jutland. In August 1916, Beatty gave a lunch party aboard Lion anchored at Rosyth. One of the guests was a Swedish naval officer who until recently had been attached to the Swedish embassy in Berlin. In conversation, he told Ernle Chatfield that German naval officers considered British shells “laughable”; heavy shells had not penetrated their armor but had “broken to pieces” on it. Chatfield, “hardly able to restrain myself till the guests had gone,” hurried to tell Beatty. The Admiralty ordered the design of a new armor-piercing shell with a thicker head and a better fuse, which would reliably carry the bursting charges through ten and twelve inches of armor plate and then burst fifteen to twenty feet beyond. These shells, called the “green boys” for the color of their paint, doubled the power of the Grand Fleet’s heavy guns, but they did not arrive in numbers until April 1918, seven months before the end of the war. None of the 12,000 eventually produced was fired at an enemy ship.

Suppose that Jellicoe had won the annihilating victory the nation and the navy expected. What might this have led to? The extreme assertion—that if the German fleet had been destroyed at Jutland, the war would have ended then and there—ignores, among numerous other considerations, the fact that the annihilating British victory at Trafalgar did not prevent France and Napoleon from continuing to make war for another ten years. As a practical matter, an absolute victory at Jutland in 1916 would have released thousands of British soldiers held in England by fear of a German invasion or a small-scale landing. Elimination of the High Seas Fleet might conceivably have opened the way into the Baltic, as it was the German battle fleet that barred the Kattegat to British surface ships. A British Baltic expedition probably would have suffered heavy losses to mines and submarines, but an open supply route to the hard-pressed Russians might have affected the events leading to the 1917 revolution. In addition, a British fleet in the Baltic would have tightened the blockade of Germany by preventing iron ore and other war materials from crossing from Sweden. In the North Sea and the Atlantic, annihilation of the High Seas Fleet would have deprived the U-boats of their main support; Scheer himself admitted that without the surface fleet to shield Germany’s ports and coastline, the U-boats might have been mined into their own harbors.

Reversing the question, what did failure to eliminate the German surface fleet cost Great Britain and the Royal Navy? It meant that the Grand Fleet had to continue to be maintained in enormous strength, absorbing thousands of trained seamen and dozens of destroyers that otherwise could have been released to fight submarines. Without the need to build more warships, the shipyards of the Clyde and the Tyne would have been free to produce the merchant shipping essential to replace the heavy toll being extracted by U-boats. And so on, as in all of history’s ifs. But the High Seas Fleet escaped.

In the months and years after Jutland, a curious thing happened in Britain. Because of the blurred nature of the British victory, a bitter, divisive argument arose as to which British admiral, Beatty or Jellicoe, was responsible. The Jutland Controversy, as it came to be called, began immediately after the battle, when some London journalists trumpeted that Beatty had practically won the battle before Jellicoe came up and lost it. The fact is that if any British admiral had been “defeated” at Jutland it was Beatty, who led ten capital ships into action against Hipper’s five and suffered the loss of two with heavy damage to others. But for the press, Beatty could not become a scapegoat. Beatty was “Our David,” the dashing, victorious admiral, the hero of the Bight and of the Dogger Bank, always willing, even eager, to welcome journalists on board his flagship. If Beatty’s forces had suffered the heaviest British losses, then Beatty must have been an underdog, facing tremendous odds. He had brilliantly delivered Scheer’s vessels into the jaws of the Grand Fleet only to see the opportunity to annihilate them thrown away. Beatty had achieved a historic victory, he was the man of the hour, another Nelson. Once this legend was established, the culprit was easy to find: the overcautious, defensive-minded Commander-in-Chief, famous for his antipathy toward journalists and dislike of their visits to the fleet at Scapa Flow.

For the men in the fleet, the result of the battle had been a terrible disappointment. The enemy had appeared before their guns, they were in a position to annihilate—and then, the Germans had disappeared. Still, the faith of the fleet in the Commander-in-Chief remained unshaken. Captain William Fisher of the dreadnought St. Vincent wrote to Jellicoe the day after the battle, “May I go outside strict service custom and say that every officer and man in St. Vincent believes in you before any one.” William Goodenough, commodore of Beatty’s light cruisers, wrote, “God bless you, Sir. I have never felt so bound to you in affection and respect than at this moment.” Many retired admirals, including the mutual antagonists Fisher and Beresford, sent congratulations. “Your deployment into battle was Nelsonic and inspired,” Fisher wrote, “and in consequence you saved Beatty from destruction and in one hour—given vision—you would have ensured Trafalgar.” From the Admiralty, Balfour consoled him: “You were robbed by physical conditions of a victory which, with a little good fortune, would have been complete and crushing and I feel deeply for your disappointment. But . . . you have gained a victory which is of the utmost value to the Allied cause.” Jellicoe himself, having eaten only half a loaf, refused to be cheered up. To the First Lord, he offered to submit to an investigation: “I hope that if my actions were not considered correct, you will have no hesitation in having them enquired into,” adding, “I often feel that the job is more than people over fifty-five can tackle for very long.” On his way south to visit the Admiralty, he stopped at Rosyth and came on board Lion where, according to Beatty, Jellicoe put his head in his hands and confessed, “I missed one of the greatest opportunities a man ever had.”

Beatty’s behavior toward Jellicoe after the battle operated on two levels. On the surface, he was supportive and condoling. “First, I want to offer you my deepest sympathy in being baulked of your great victory which I felt was assured when you hove in sight,” he wrote on June 9. “I can well understand your feelings and that of the Battle Fleet, to be so near and miss is worse than anything. The cussed weather defeats us every time. . . . Your sweep southward was splendid and I made certain we should have them at daylight. I cannot believe now that they got in the northeast of you. . . . It was perhaps unfortunate that those who sighted the enemy to the northward did not make reports. . . . I do hope you will come here in Iron Duke soon, it would do us from top to bottom great honour to know that we have earned your approbation. . . . We are part of the Grand Fleet and would like to see our Commander-in-Chief. . . . Please come and see us and tell us that we retain your confidence.”

Beneath the surface, however, Beatty was seething. Convinced that, through excessive caution, Jellicoe had robbed him of the victory he thought he had won, he raged about his superior. Dannreuther of the Invincible saw Beatty at Rosyth after the battle: “I spent an hour or more alone with him in his cabin on board the Lion, while he walked up and down talking about the action in a very excited manner and criticising in strong terms the action of the Commander-in-Chief in not supporting him. I was a young commander at the time and still regard that hour as the most painful in my life.” Six months later, when Beatty succeeded Jellicoe as Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Fleet, his feelings had not subsided. A farewell letter to Walter Cowan, captain of Princess Royal, contained a nasty innuendo: “As you well know, my heart will always be with the battle cruisers who can get up some speed, but I’ll take good care that when they are next in it up to the neck that our Battle Fleet shall be in it too.”

Some of Jellicoe’s Grand Fleet supporters responded in kind. A lieutenant complained to his diary of the “arrogant, slipshod” battle cruisers. Rear Admiral Alexander Duff of the 4th Battle Squadron wrote: “There is no doubt that before May 31, the Battle Cruiser Force were swollen headed and truculent and their own idea was to annihilate the High Seas Fleet . . . with just sufficient support of battleships, all to be under the command of Beatty. The game was to be kept in their hands, we were not even to be spectators. With this end in view, Beatty persuaded the C-in-C to give him the 5th Battle Squadron. Then came May 31 when the German battle cruisers severely mauled ours and Beatty did not make use of the 5th Battle Squadron as support; in fact, he left them to their own devices.”

Eventually, Beatty’s feelings percolated high enough to deny Jellicoe immediate promotion to Admiral of the Fleet, the usual reward for a successful admiral. *63 This was due in part to a letter from retired Admiral of the Fleet Sir Hedworth Meux, a Beatty admirer, to the king’s private secretary: “If Jellicoe had grasped the opportunity which Providence, assisted by Beatty, placed in his way and destroyed the German fleet, he ought to have been made an Earl. But instead . . . practically the whole of the fighting was done by the battle cruisers, and our battle fleet only fired a very few rounds. . . . Jellicoe has done splendid work as an organizer and driller of the fleet, but as yet I am sorry to say he has shown no sign of being a Nelson.”

As Meux’s letter indicates, naval officers began mustering in opposing Jellicoe and Beatty camps soon after the battle. The Jutland Controversy simmered during the remaining two years of the war; then, in peacetime, open hostilities broke out at the Admiralty, in the press, and in dueling books. This animosity reached a level of rancor, accusation, and epithet that no British naval officer ever directed at Admiral Scheer or Hipper.

Over the years, only one of the four senior admirals at Jutland, two German and two British, entirely escaped criticism. Franz von Hipper, the veteran of the Scarborough Raid and the Dogger Bank, led his battle cruisers at Jutland with confidence and skill and managed to triumph over Beatty’s superior force. His ships stood up not only to the British battle cruisers but also to the 15-inch guns of battleships—although he later said, “It was nothing but the poor quality of their bursting charges that saved us from disaster.” During the Run to the South, Hipper sank two British battle cruisers and led an unsuspecting Beatty to the High Seas Fleet, as well. Hipper should not be blamed for obeying Scheer’s command to pursue Beatty to the north, thereby thrusting the High Seas Fleet into the arms of the Grand Fleet. The training and élan of the German battle cruiser squadron, for which Hipper was responsible, proved themselves when his battered, crippled ships, lacking their admiral, charged the enemy in order to save Scheer’s battleships. Hipper made no mistakes at Jutland and was the only one of the four senior admirals present to come away with his reputation enhanced.

Reinhard Scheer was a bold, experienced tactician, famous for his quick decisions, who had the misfortune to command the smaller fleet at Jutland. The High Seas Fleet was made up of superbly built ships with efficient officers and crews having superior training in areas such as night fighting; if the numbers of ships on each side had been equal, the outcome might easily have been different. Scheer’s tactics, based on recognition that the strength of his fleet was inferior, were to blend the use of the weapons systems carried by his dreadnoughts and destroyers. The battleships would fight a gunnery duel if they encountered a weaker enemy, but Scheer himself was a torpedo specialist and believed that the torpedo could be as decisive as the gun. If his dreadnoughts encountered an enemy as strong, or stronger, they would rapidly withdraw under cover of smoke screens and massed destroyer torpedo attacks. At Jutland, Scheer’s tactics and skills were sorely tested. Twice he came by accident under the guns of the British battle fleet, and on each occasion he was so completely surprised that he found the Grand Fleet crossing his T. Scheer’s first turnaround escape was brilliantly executed, but his second—when he turned back toward the Grand Fleet from which he had escaped only thirty minutes before—detracts from his reputation. It was clumsily executed; but, as before, he was hugely assisted by luck and the weather. Scheer had never wanted to fight this particular battle and, from the moment he discovered that he was confronting the entire Grand Fleet, his preoccupation was to get away, if necessary sacrificing his battle cruisers and destroyers. The High Seas Fleet fought bravely and well, but in the end, Reinhard Scheer succeeded not in winning a victory but in escaping annihilation. *64

David Beatty was an impetuous, bulldog type of fighter, courageous and impatient for action. His preferred tactic was to charge the enemy, and he expected his captains to follow without having to be told. With men who had long been with him and understood his ways—his battle cruiser captains and the commodores of the light cruiser squadrons attached to the battle cruiser force—this simple system worked well. Unfortunately, he did not explain his tactics to men new to his command, especially the two rear admirals, Moore and Evan-Thomas, who played critical roles in his two most famous battles, the Dogger Bank and Jutland. Beatty’s failure to acquaint Moore with his style of leadership led to Hipper’s escape at the Dogger Bank; because of a similar failure to brief Evan-Thomas, he engaged Hipper at Jutland without the initial support of the powerful 5th Battle Squadron. In other areas, too, Beatty’s leadership was flawed. Leaving initiative to subordinates was one thing; ignoring slipshod performance was another. Mistake after mistake was made by his signals staff, led by the hapless Ralph Seymour. And Beatty’s effort at Jutland was marred by his continuing failure to improve the poor gunnery of his battle cruisers.

In the immediate aftermath of the battle, Beatty won huge popular praise and was proclaimed another Nelson, but the facts scarcely justify these laurels. Beatty had six battle cruisers and four of the most powerful battleships in the world, as well as fourteen light cruisers and twenty-seven destroyers; Hipper had five battle cruisers, five light cruisers, and twenty-two destroyers. Yet in spite of this preponderance, Beatty lost two battle cruisers and Hipper lost none. Scheer may not have defeated Jellicoe, as claimed by the German communiqué, but there is no doubt that Hipper defeated Beatty.

Beatty began badly at Jutland by failing to concentrate before he attacked. At 10:10 a.m., Beatty ordered the four Queen Elizabeths of the 5th Battle Squadron to take station five miles northwest of Lion. Had the battleships been closer, or had they had been stationed on a bearing where an enemy was most likely to appear (southeast, for example), Hipper’s battle cruisers would have been subjected to overwhelming fire from the beginning. Once the enemy was discovered, Beatty, determined not to let Hipper get away as he had at the Dogger Bank, turned the battle cruisers at high speed to the southeast, signaling the battleships five miles away to follow. But the signal was given by flag hoist, which could not be distinguished from Barham, and it was not repeated by searchlight or wireless. Minutes went by before Evan-Thomas realized that the battle cruisers had altered course and turned to follow. By then, his four giant battleships were ten miles astern.

In the artillery duel that followed, British battle cruiser gunfire inflicted little damage on German ships. Hipper later compared this shooting unfavorably to that of the 5th Battle Squadron and other British battleships while Lützow’s gunnery officer stated, “Neither Lion nor Princess Royal hit us once between 4.02 and 5.23 p.m.; their total hits were three in ninety-five minutes.” There was also the usual confusion in fire distribution between Beatty’s ships, leaving Derfflinger to shoot untroubled. The same mistake had been made at the Dogger Bank. Potentially, Beatty’s most harmful error at Jutland was his failure to keep Jellicoe informed as to the position of the enemy battle fleet. Jellicoe had counted on Beatty to provide this vital information, but during the Run to the North, Beatty lost touch with the High Seas Fleet. As a result, he could not tell the Commander-in-Chief what Jellicoe desperately needed to know before deciding in which direction to deploy. Only at the last minute, and largely by instinct, did Jellicoe choose correctly.

The battle cruiser losses at Jutland were not Beatty’s fault—ship designers, naval constructors, captains, and gunnery officers bore this responsibility. And, despite these losses and his own errors, Beatty made an important contribution to the British victory: he led Scheer and the German battle fleet to Jellicoe. This significantly mitigates Beatty’s numerous errors and his defeat by Hipper. But it certainly does not make David Beatty the hero of Jutland.

John Jellicoe, who defeated Scheer and the German fleet at Jutland, was the most unassuming of the four principal admirals who fought the battle. A quiet, methodical man, he was a consummate professional whose success in the navy had been based on discipline, foresight, loyalty, self-confidence, and imperturbable calm at moments of crisis. In his long career afloat and ashore, he had gathered immense technical knowledge, and he commanded the fleet with a soberly realistic understanding of the material strengths and weaknesses of his ships and guns. His organizational abilities had reached a peak in the months at Scapa Flow where he had rigorously drilled the Grand Fleet in tactics and gunnery. His intended tactics were to deploy and exercise his huge margin of superior firepower by staging a massive artillery duel with the enemy fleet; at the same time, he insisted on showing suitable deference to the enemy’s possible use of underwater weapons. Jellicoe’s principal weakness as a commander was his inflexibility. He was a perfectionist. Everything was centralized in the flagship; he had difficulty delegating and often became immersed in detail. Wishing to leave nothing to chance, he had drawn up the Grand Fleet Battle Orders, seventy pages of detailed instructions, intended to control the fleet under every imaginable circumstance. The contrast between this style of command and Beatty’s freewheeling “Follow me” was enormous.

Jellicoe had waited twenty-two months for this moment. Although during the battle, he was never fully aware of the strength or composition of the German fleet, he managed twice to cross Scheer’s T, to pound the High Seas Fleet and drive it into retreat. His deployment to port, the complex, massive movement of twenty-four battleships from six columns into a single line, which enabled him to cross Scheer’s T, was brilliantly conceived and executed. Jellicoe’s critics maintain that by deploying away from the enemy, he surrendered 4,000 yards at a time when every yard and minute counted, but the greater weight of professional opinion supports his decision. This includes the official German naval history, which declared that had Jellicoe deployed to starboard rather than port, “he would have led his ships into a position which would have been only too welcome for the German fleet.” Half a century later, Admiral of the Fleet Lord Cunningham, Britain’s naval hero of the Second World War, wrote, “I hope I would have been given enough sense to make the same deployment as John Jellicoe did.”

Critics also blamed Jellicoe for not plunging forward, Beatty style, in pursuit of Scheer after the first German turnaway. But this was exactly the situation Jellicoe had foreseen in October 1914, when he warned the Admiralty that, because of the danger of mines or torpedoes, he would not pursue a retreating enemy. Again, he was severely belabored for turning away from the German destroyer torpedo attack covering Scheer’s second turnaway. But this tactic was standard in all navies and Hipper, Beatty, Hood, Evan-Thomas, and Sturdee all used it at Jutland. Beatty had employed it at the Dogger Bank, too, when he turned away from a supposed periscope.

The weather and the clock, as well as Hipper and Scheer, were Jellicoe’s enemies. Had the battle begun three hours earlier, had the visibility been that of the Falkland Islands battle, had there been the same ample sea room given Sturdee against Spee, the outcome at Jutland would have been different. Again, a decisive result might have been possible at daybreak on June 1 had the Commander-in-Chief been better served, first by the Admiralty, which failed to pass on German signals, then by those British captains who saw German battleships passing behind them. Nothing could have saved the High Seas Fleet had Jellicoe stood between it and Horns Reef with eighteen hours of daylight ahead.

Criticism of Jellicoe for not being another Nelson and hurling himself at the enemy is unfair. Tactics are governed by strategy and Jellicoe’s strategic purpose was to retain command of the sea. The destruction of the High Seas Fleet was a secondary object—highly desirable but not essential. In the words of the historian Cyril Falls, “He fought to make a German victory impossible rather than to make a British victory certain.” Ultimately, Jellicoe achieved both.

It was Beatty, simply being Beatty, who was mostly responsible for the Jutland Controversy. Immediately after the battle, he began what became a sustained effort to impose his own version of events on the public mind and the official record. His first move, made when the guns were scarcely cold, was to lobby to have his confidential report to Jellicoe and the Admiralty released and published. Announcing to Jellicoe that “I am not particularly sensitive to criticism,” he went on to complain that the handling of his reports after the Dogger Bank had made him look like “a rotter of the worst description,” and that, since Jutland, “I have already been the subject of a considerable amount of adverse criticism and I am looking to the publication of the despatch to knock it out. It is hard enough to lose my fine ships and gallant pals, but to be told I am a hare-brained maniac is not quite my idea of British fairness and justice. So I ask you to have my story published.” Jellicoe did his best to accommodate his thin-skinned subordinate by releasing portions of Beatty’s report to the press. Nevertheless, in private the Commander-in-Chief observed to the First Sea Lord, “I do not understand his attitude in regard to the despatch. It is surely not his business to edit or to have anything to do with the plans which it is proposed to publish. The telegram sent me yesterday in which he asks to see the new plan before publication astonished me. . . . My view would have been for the Admiralty to have told him that the plan was none of his business.”

After the war, on April 3, 1919, both Jellicoe and Beatty were promoted to Admiral of the Fleet, but the subsequent distribution of national gratitude was inequitable. Beatty was elevated to an earldom and awarded a grant of £100,000 for his services; Jellicoe was given the lesser title of viscount and £50,000. In the meantime, on January 23, 1919, Admiral Rosslyn Wester Wemyss, who succeeded Jellicoe as First Sea Lord, assigned Captain J.E.T. Harper, an Admiralty navigation specialist, to write a straightforward official account of the Battle of Jutland, “based solely on documentary evidence and free from commentary or criticism.” Harper’s first draft, an unvarnished, matter-of-fact narrative, came back from the printers in October 1919, a few weeks before Wemyss retired as First Sea Lord. The proofs were approved by the Board of Admiralty and a copy was placed on the desk of the incoming First Sea Lord, Admiral of the Fleet Earl Beatty. Arriving on Novem-ber 1 in the office he was to hold for the next eight years, Beatty read Harper’s draft and found it deficient in praise for the role of the battle cruisers and their admiral at Jutland. It was a simple matter for Beatty to summon Harper and order him to make deletions, additions, and alterations; it was less simple to get Harper to comply. Told to throw out or “reinterpret” the mass of navigational, gunnery, and signals data he had gathered, simply on Beatty’s word that these data were wrong, Harper, whose name was to be on the finished narrative, refused to do so without a written order from the First Sea Lord. The order did not come, but Harper understood the First Sea Lord’s intentions; they had been made explicit when Ralph Seymour, who had followed his chief to the Admiralty, told Harper that “we do not wish to advertise the fact that the battle fleet was in action more than we can help.” Beatty pushed hard. In one editorial clash, the embattled Harper refused to delete the statement that the battleship Hercules had been straddled and deluged with water as she deployed into the line of battle. Beatty, who had not wished the record to show that the Grand Fleet had actually been under shell fire, petulantly surrendered the point by saying, “Well, I suppose there is no harm in the public knowing that someone in the battle fleet got wet, as that is about all they had to do with Jutland.” As the months went by, three former First Sea Lords—Jellicoe, Wemyss, and Sir Francis Bridgeman—asked that Harper’s official narrative be published. It was not. Eventually Harper gave up and went off to command a battleship, and his version of the official narrative passed into limbo.

The first anti-Jellicoe book, The Navy in Battle, was published in November 1918, two weeks after the end of the war. Its author possessed varied credentials. Arthur Hungerford Pollen, one of ten children of a well-known Catholic artist, graduated from Oxford, began and soon gave up a career in law, ran unsuccessfully for Parliament, then supported himself writing articles on art, music, literature, and drama. A talented inventor, he attempted from 1900 to 1913 to persuade the Admiralty to adopt his naval fire-control system. One of those at the Admiralty who eventually said no was John Jellicoe. During the war, Pollen became a naval journalist and an admirer of Beatty; the frontispiece of his book is a heroic color portrait of the battle cruiser admiral. In line with this predisposition, Pollen’s account of Jutland portrayed Beatty steering a timid and dull-minded Commander-in-Chief through the battle. The Grand Fleet’s deployment, according to Pollen, was devised by Beatty:

It is to be supposed that Sir David Beatty kept Admiral Jellicoe informed from time to time of the position, speed, and course of the enemy. . . . [Jellicoe’s] plan of deployment . . . could not have been based upon his own judgement . . . but must have been dictated, either by some general principle of tactics applied to the information as to the enemy’s position, speed and course as given by the Vice Admiral [Beatty], or it must have been part of a plan suggested by the Vice Admiral.

Pollen was soundly thrashed by Jellicoe adherents. Harper described him as “inadequately equipped” to write on the subject and as having written a book that “teems with inaccuracies.” A. T. Patterson, the editor of The Jellicoe Papers, described Pollen’s book as “full of errors, some of them ridiculous.” John Winton, Jellicoe’s latest biographer, dismissed Pollen’s work as “almost unreadable.”

The following year, 1919, an all-out, ad hominem attack on Jellicoe appeared in The Battle of Jutland by Carlyon Bellairs. The author, a member of Parliament and a Beatty idolator, described Jellicoe as “a man of tearful yesterdays and fearful tomorrows.” Among his chapter titles were “The Grand Fleet Nibbles but Does Not Bite,” “I Came, I Saw, I Turned Away,” and “Eleven Destroyers Dismiss Twenty-four Battleships.” The Times called Bellairs’s book “outrageous and intolerable”; Harper wrote: “It is, apparently, equitable, in the author’s opinion, to ignore accuracy if such action is necessary to glorify Beatty at the expense of Jellicoe.”

Meanwhile inside Beatty’s inner circle, an unpleasant subplot was developing. The roly-poly Ralph Seymour had served for eight years as signals officer, courtier, jester, and worshiper. “I am the luckiest person on earth to be with David Beatty,” he wrote in 1915. “ ‘Flags’ is my Food Dictator and is very arbitrary,” Beatty wrote to his wife about a diet imposed by Seymour. For some reason, perhaps because reports of the ineptitude of battle cruiser signaling were spreading, Beatty turned on Seymour, telling people that Flags had “lost three battles for me.” Unfortunately, Seymour chose this moment to apply to marry Ethel Beatty’s American niece Gwendolyn Field. Ethel, hearing this, “rose in all Hell’s fury to break the engagement.” Gwendolyn was bundled away and Seymour became persona non grata to the Beattys. Unable to handle these blows from his former benefactors, he had a nervous breakdown and was institutionalized for almost a year. On Octo-ber 7, 1922, at the age of thirty-six, Flags threw himself over a cliff at Brighton.

Once the public controversy began, both Jellicoe and Beatty were silent in public, writing no articles or letters to newspapers, giving no interviews, and refusing to authorize others to write on their behalfs. From 1920 to 1924, Jellicoe was far from England, serving as governor-general of New Zealand. Meanwhile, Beatty, still First Sea Lord, had a new official Admiralty narrative in preparation. “The Admiralty,” a friend wrote to Jellicoe, “are bent on proving that Jutland was fought by Lion and the battle cruisers somewhat impeded by the presence of some battleships in a moderately remote vicinity.” A preface approved by Beatty was even more extreme: “On learning of the approach of the British main fleet, the Germans avoided further action and returned to base.” In July 1923, a draft of this document was sent to Jellicoe in New Zealand for comment. He was incensed. “The carelessness and inaccuracies of this document are extraordinary and the charts and diagrams are even worse,” Jellicoe wrote to a friend. “It is . . . of course a Battle Cruiser Fleet account, looked at through BCF eyes.” Soon after, Jellicoe wrote to another friend: “If you had seen it when it first came to me you would have said that it was the work of a lunatic.” Jellicoe’s twenty-page response pointed out what he considered inaccuracies, mostly having to do with wrong information affecting the reputations of some of his officers, especially Evan-Thomas, who was accused of missing the first part of Beatty’s battle with Hipper through his own incompetence. Jellicoe threatened to resign his post in New Zealand and come home to fight if the Admiralty published the new narrative without his corrections. Some but not all of his comments were included and in August 1924, a few months before he returned home, the narrative was published. It is an extraordinary document, notable for its omissions, its inaccuracies, and its unprecedented rudeness toward Jellicoe, a former Commander-in-Chief and First Sea Lord. There was no criticism of the Admiralty for its failure to tell Jellicoe that the High Seas Fleet was at sea or, subsequently, that Scheer was returning to base by Horns Reef. There was no criticism of Beatty. Jellicoe’s attempt to correct errors was printed as an appendix, where it was “refuted” by Admiralty-produced footnotes written in a tone of long-suffering annoyance.

On returning home from New Zealand, Jellicoe was awarded an earldom, five years after Beatty’s. Eight years had passed since Jutland but the controversy continued. Retired vice admiral Sir Reginald Bacon, a protégé of Fisher, the first captain of Dreadnought, and a staunch Jellicoe admirer, wrote a book titled The Jutland Scandal. Harper, whose official narrative had been scuttled by Beatty, was a rear admiral and now also retired; he brought out his own unofficial book, The Truth About Jutland. Between them, Bacon and Harper pilloried Beatty’s performance: “A British force was worsted by a squadron half its strength . . . because our admiral in command was inexperienced and showed no tactical ability” (Bacon). “A want of tactical competence on the part of Lord Beatty led to the 5th Battle Squadron not being engaged during the . . . [early part] of the action at Jutland. Admiral Evan-Thomas has been ungenerously and unjustly blamed for this in the Admiralty Narrative” (Bacon). “Beatty now made a decision which was to cost us dearly. . . . He made the fatal and elementary mistake of dividing his forces. . . . It is incomprehensible why such a position was selected for this powerful force [the 5th Battle Squadron]” (Harper). “Then, full of ardor, without making cer-tain that the 5th Battle Squadron had received the signal to alter course . . . [Beatty] raced away at high speed. . . . This was the action of an impulsive fighter but not that of an experienced admiral” (Bacon). “It is unpalatable—extremely unpalatable—but nevertheless an indisputable fact that in the first phase of the battle, a British squadron greatly superior in numbers and gun power, not only failed to defeat a weaker enemy who made no effort to avoid action, but in the space of fifty minutes suffered what can only be described as a partial defeat” (Harper).

Later, Harper, still angry, had more to say, this time about his experience with Beatty and the writing of the original official narrative:

Lord Beatty’s political power was such that he was able to sway the First Lord and the Prime Minister to countenance the publication of deliberate misstatements. . . . By insertions or omissions, attempts were made to disguise the fact that . . . Admiral Beatty had seriously neglected the first duty allotted to him, that of giving his Commander-in-Chief frequent and precise information of the position of the enemy; that he failed to inflict damage on a greatly inferior enemy owing to incorrect dispositions of his ships and faulty signaling; and that the shooting of his battle cruisers was far below the standard expected of the Royal Navy. . . . The mischief done, not only to Lord Jellicoe, but to the Navy . . . is incalculable. Admiral Jellicoe was belittled and criticised while his onetime subordinate was lauded by a crowd of unscrupulous scribblers. With no damage to his own reputation, Lord Beatty was in a position to stop this campaign of calumny by the utterance of one word. . . . He did not utter that word.

Not until many years later, deep in retirement, did Jellicoe make a public comment. At a naval seminar, he reported that the principal difficulty affecting his handling of the fleet in the battle was

the absence of even approximately correct information from the battle cruiser fleet and its attendant light cruisers regarding the position, formation and strength of the High Seas Fleet. . . . Had Sir David Beatty reported the position of the German battle cruisers at 5.40 p.m. when he once more caught sight of them and re-engaged, the difficulties of the Commander-in-Chief would have been greatly lessened, but he made no report of any kind between 4.45 and 6.06, the latter report being in reply to urgent enquiries made by the Commander-in-Chief. . . . [Beatty] should have made it his principal duty to keep his Commander-in-Chief informed of the enemy’s position. The Commander-in-Chief’s battle orders laid the strongest emphasis on this duty.

The most accomplished writer involved in the Jutland Controversy was Winston Churchill. His account is interesting, not just because his description of the battle, published in the third volume of The World Crisis, which appeared in 1927, was written in Churchill’s unique descriptive style, but because, in a strikingly un-Churchillian manner, he waffled. He had appointed both Jellicoe and Beatty to their posts and knew both intimately. As a former cavalry officer who had participated in a charge at Omdurman, he admired Beatty’s headlong audacity; as a former First Lord, he understood Jellicoe’s care for his immense strategic responsibilities. In the Jutland chapter of The World Crisis, he tried to have it both ways.

Churchill began in a way that could only have pleased Admiral Jellicoe, a thorough appreciation of “the consequences to Britain and her allies which would immediately have followed from a decisive British defeat. The trade and food supply of the British islands would have been paralyzed. Our armies on the continent would have been cut off from their base by superior naval force. . . . Starvation and invasion would have descended upon the British people. Ruin, utter and final, would have overwhelmed the Allied cause. . . . There would certainly be no excuse for a commander to take risks of this character with the British fleet at a time when the situation on sea was entirely favorable to us. . . . Command of the sea . . . that priceless sovereignty, was ours already. . . . We were under no compulsion to fight a naval battle.” In this context, the former First Lord continued, “the standpoint of the Commander-in-Chief of the British Grand Fleet was unique. His responsibilities were on a different scale from all others. It might fall to him as to no other man—Sovereign, Statesman, Admiral or General—to issue orders which in the space of two or three hours might nakedly decide who won the war. The destruction of the British battle fleet was final.” Then came Churchill’s famous declaration that “Jellicoe was the only man on either side who could lose the war in an afternoon.”

Having made the case for Jellicoe and caution, Churchill suddenly vaulted on the other side of the aisle: “The dominant school of naval thought and policy are severe critics of Sir John Jellicoe. . . . The attempt to centralise in a single hand the whole conduct in action of so vast a fleet failed. . . . Praiseworthy caution had induced a defensive habit of mind . . . which hampered the Grand Fleet.” And thus, “the Royal Navy must find in other personalities and other episodes the golden links which carried forward through the Great War the audacious and conquering tradition of the past. . . . It is to Beatty . . . Keyes . . . Tyrwhitt . . . that the eyes of rising generations will turn.”

Jellicoe, in other words, had preserved British naval supremacy and by so doing had won the war. Next time, however, it must be done differently. *65

Churchill’s appraisal of Jellicoe at Jutland came eleven years after the battle; it was not that of the officers and men of the Grand Fleet in 1916. In November of that year, when Lloyd George’s new Cabinet decided that the gravity of the renewed U-boat menace required replacement of Sir Henry Jackson as First Sea Lord, Jellicoe was summoned from Scotland to take this post, and command of the Grand Fleet was handed to Beatty. On the day the news reached Scapa Flow, a midshipman larking on the quarterdeck of the battleship King George V realized that the ship’s captain was looking at him. “He beckoned me over,” said the young man, “and I doubled across and came to attention and said, ‘Yes, Sir?’ I looked at him and there were tears rolling down his cheeks. He said, ‘Arthur, you may as well tell the gun room that Sir John Jellicoe has been superseded.’ ” This reaction was general: thousands of men in the fleet who knew him only by sight nevertheless thought of him not only as their Commander-in-Chief but also as a friend, a modest, honest, and decent man. When Jellicoe left Iron Duke, the crew cheered and wept and “stayed on deck watching his [departing] barge until she was lost to sight.”

It is often said that after Jutland the German fleet never came out again, but, in fact, it did so three times. The first and most ambitious of these sorties, one in which another great battle almost occurred, came on August 18, 1916, eleven weeks after Jutland. Scheer had not yet been able to persuade the German government to break its promise to the United States on unrestricted submarine warfare; as the U-boats were not to be released, he decided to try once more with the battle fleet. This time, with Lützow sunk and Seydlitz and Derfflinger undergoing protracted repairs, Hipper had only two battle cruisers, Moltke and Von der Tann, available. To strengthen the Scouting Group, Scheer gave Hipper three dreadnought battleships, Grosser Kurfürst, Markgraf, and the newly commissioned 15-inch-gun Bayern, the mightiest warship yet built in Germany. The High Seas Fleet battleship force was back at full strength; including König Albert, which had missed Jutland, there now were fifteen dreadnought battleships at sea, not counting the three with Hipper. One lesson had been learned: Mauve’s six predreadnoughts were left behind.

Scheer’s plan was a revival of his original Sunderland operation. At dawn, Hipper would bombard the Yorkshire coastal town while Scheer and the battle fleet followed twenty miles behind. If Beatty came rushing south, his battle cruisers first would pass over two lines of waiting U-boats; then, those not torpedoed would fall into the arms of the High Seas Fleet. This time, Scheer insisted on the absolute necessity of extensive airship reconnaissance to be certain that he did not again find himself surprised by the full might of the Grand Fleet. Twenty-six U-boats and ten zeppelins were assigned these tasks, and Hipper and Scheer sailed from the Jade at 9:00 p.m. on August 18.

As usual, Room 40 alerted the Admiralty and again, the Grand Fleet sailed five hours before the High Seas Fleet. Jellicoe, who was resting at his father-in-law’s house near Dundee, was picked up by the light cruiser Royalist, standing by for that purpose, and rushed to board Iron Duke at sea. The Commander-in-Chief had twenty-nine dreadnoughts, including the five Queen Elizabeths, and Beatty brought six battle cruisers. This time, the Harwich Force of five light cruisers and twenty destroyers was sent to sea and ordered to join the Commander-in-Chief. The British preponderance was overwhelming.

On both sides, submarines drew first blood. At 5:05 a.m., the British submarine E-23 torpedoed the battleship Westfalen; Scheer sent her home and with the rest of the fleet maintained course. At 6:00 a.m., U-52 hit the light cruiser Nottingham, screening Beatty’s battle cruisers, first with two torpedoes, then with a third. Because no torpedo tracks were seen, Goodenough, Nottingham’s squadron commodore, reported to Jellicoe that he was uncertain whether the ship had encountered mines or torpedoes. All Jellicoe’s fears of underwater weapons were aroused; worried that the Grand Fleet might be entering into a new, uncharted German minefield, he reversed course for two hours. When Goodenough signaled assurance that Nottingham had been sunk by torpedoes, Jellicoe again reversed course and headed south. He had lost four hours, but remained in a position to intercept the High Seas Fleet. Then, shortly after noon, a German mistake saved the German fleet.

The zeppelins had been aloft through the morning, but their reports to Scheer had been confusing. The airships’ clearest look at the water’s surface came at a moment when the Grand Fleet was steaming north, away from the “minefield” and away from Scheer; they did not see or report Jellicoe’s subsequent turn back to the south. Then, at 12:35 p.m., when Hipper was eighty-two miles from Whitby on the Yorkshire coast, the zeppelin L-13 reported a new force of thirty ships including five battleships approaching the German main body from the south, seventy miles away. This was a misidentification: the five “battleships” were the five light cruisers belonging to the Harwich Force. Scheer jumped to the conclusion that this was an isolated British battle squadron, the sort of prey he had been seeking in all his North Sea operations. Immediately, he abandoned the bombardment of Sunderland and turned southeast at high speed, toward Tyrwhitt and away from Jellicoe. The Grand Fleet, meanwhile, was closing fast, with a long afternoon of clear visibility ahead. When the fleet was at action stations, the Commander-in-Chief signaled: “High Seas Fleet may be sighted at any moment. I look forward with entire confidence in the result.” It was not to be. A thunderstorm about this time caused L-13 to lose contact, but Scheer heard from a scouting U-boat that the Grand Fleet was approaching, sixty-five miles to the north. The Victor of the Skagerrak had no desire to repeat his “victory”; at 2:35 p.m., he abruptly turned southeast for home. An hour and a half later, Jellicoe, bitterly disappointed, also gave up and turned north for Scapa Flow. Along the way, the light cruiser Falmouth was struck by two torpedoes fired by U-66. Taken in tow, she suffered two more torpedo hits from another submarine and went to the bottom.

Two British light cruisers had been sunk and one German dreadnought damaged and this time Scheer made no claim to victory. He was displeased with his air reconnaissance. Only three of the ten airships aloft had sighted the British fleet; they had sent seven reports, four of which were wrong. In general, Scheer observed wryly, “Scouting by airships is somewhat negative in character, since the fleet is only informed by them that the main hostile fleet is not within their field of vision, whereas the important thing is to know where it actually is.”

After this day in August 1916, the British Admiralty and Commander-in-Chief agreed that only in exceptional circumstances—a threat of invasion or an attack on the Thames or the Straits of Dover—should the British battle fleet be deployed south of the latitude of Horns Reef. When Room 40 warned on October 18 that Scheer intended another sortie, the Grand Fleet was ordered to raise steam but was held at anchor. And when a British submarine patrolling the Heligoland Bight fired a torpedo into the light cruiser München soon after the High Seas Fleet left the Jade, Scheer, fearing a trap, returned to harbor. Thereafter, the German admiral and Naval Staff decided that the chance of catching a part of the Grand Fleet alone at sea was too small to justify risking a major battle, and the dreadnoughts of the High Seas Fleet were kept in port. There they lay, rusting and crewed by mutineers, when the war ended on November 11, 1918.