Introduction

AFTER JUTLAND EXAMINES THE NAVAL CONFLICT in northern European waters for the last two-and-a-half years of the Great War. The principal subject of this book, as in Before Jutland, is the Royal Navy, but the analysis extends to the Imperial German Navy and the Imperial Russian Navy, as well as to the United States Navy after April 1917. Furthermore, although its operations on France’s northern coasts were on a much smaller scale than its allies or its protagonists, attention is given to the ships of the French Navy that operated alongside the Dover Patrol.

This book’s precursor, Before Jutland, assessed the responses in 1914–15 to the challenges created by new technologies; it sought to explain how the protagonists coped with the mass of unexpected problems they encountered, resulting in forms of naval warfare unlike anything ever before experienced. After Jutland takes up the story when two years of war and a succession of major engagements as well as a multitude of small-scale encounters had created a body of hard-won experience in each navy, while many of the new technologies had achieved a level of capability unthinkable before 1914. Although the present volume strives to work within an understanding of the external factors at play, most notably the evolution of national strategies as nations sought to bring the conflict to a successful conclusion, its focus is not so much naval high command as naval operations. Space does not permit a narrative of every encounter but using select examples, I have tried to provide a more complete understanding of what happened at sea in the years between the Battle of Jutland and the passage of the German High Sea Fleet to internment on 21 November 1918. The naval conflict in this period involved much more sustained effort and attrition than the popular image of Grand Fleet battleships idle in Scapa Flow and High Sea Fleet squadrons moribund in their anchorages allows.

This book does not describe every aspect of the war against the U-boats; that subject has been addressed by other authorities. Rather, although it examines the challenges of detecting and attacking U-boats (because these problems bear upon so many aspects of naval operations in the First World War) its principal concern with the campaign is how U-boat suppression affected the main fleets. Arguably, the subject of After Jutland is the war behind the U-boat war and the war behind the Allied blockade of the Central Powers. The main fleets of each nation protected their own campaigns of economic warfare while also seeking to achieve decisive effects against their opposition. In this they failed, although in failing they created an apparent stalemate that both permitted and intensified the U-boat campaign and the Allied blockade. Both sides could provide the cover of their main fleets necessary for these endeavors, but they found it impossible to undermine the protection provided to the elements that were doing so much damage to them elsewhere. It was a situation in which there was not one predominant naval power but a dispersion of fleets in being, which by their very existence limited the options of their enemies but could not prevent their opponents from conducting what can best be termed the “war of supply.”

After Jutland tries to elucidate why, despite extraordinary advances in material and techniques since 1914, operations apparently succeeded in nothing more substantial than maintaining the status quo. Our principal questions are these: first, whether the navies of this study achieved all that they might have between 1916 and 1918, given both the capabilities and the limitations of the ships and weapons they had to hand; and second, if the navies did not succeed, why was this so?

After Jutland is more forthright in many of its judgments than its predecessor, Before Jutland. This is first the result of critical demand from readers; some felt that more could have been said about the subject. But I may also be more confident in my analysis and alert to the lessons of naval warfare that should reasonably have been learned by 1916, even if the personnel of 1914 can be excused their ignorance. Nevertheless, I have tried to preserve a measure of charity, based on my own experience and mistakes at sea. The words of one of the most attractive personalities of the war, who died when his flagship Invincible exploded on 31 May 1916, were quoted in the concluding paragraph of Before Jutland and they remain relevant. When observing the failures of another officer at sea, Rear Admiral the Honorable H. L. A. Hood observed, “There but for the grace of God goes Horace Hood.”1 While researching, analyzing, and describing events at sea between 1916 and 1918 and coming to understand just what the seagoing personnel of every navy went through, your author often had cause to think, “There but for the grace of God go I …”