Photo 15.1 SMS Derfflinger at the internment Sea Power Centre, Australia
Reflections
AFTER JUTLAND’S CENTRAL QUESTIONS ARE TWO: first, whether the navies achieved all they might have achieved between 1916 and 1918, given the capabilities and the limitations of the ships and weapons they had to hand; and second, if they did not succeed, why was this so?
The strategic failure which Britain’s entry into the war on the side of the Entente meant for the very concept of the High Sea Fleet is beyond the scope of this book, but once the war had started, how effectively did Germany employ the navy it had created? The answer is not well. The German navy had missed its best opportunities in 1914–15 when the relative strengths of the forces in the North Sea were at their closest, but its fundamental error was initiation of the unrestricted submarine campaigns. Given the tactical advantages that submarines enjoyed in 1914–18, prize warfare alone could and did put a great deal of pressure on the Allies. The U-boats could certainly have been employed to attack Allied shipping, but it was never in Germany’s interest to anger the United States or to create conditions that allowed Britain and France to justify tightening the blockade as reprisal for alleged German atrocities.
With or without an unrestricted submarine campaign, the surface forces should have been very much more active. The handful of disguised raiders showed what might have been achieved on the world’s oceans to tie down Allied resources, all without much risk of alienating the Americans. More active use of the scouting groups and flotillas, properly supported by the battle fleet, would have made life very difficult for the British and French. This was particularly true during the crisis of the U-boat campaign in early 1917 when the Allies’ situation at sea could have been made much more complicated and even more threatening than it seemed at the time.
But there must be doubt as to the German navy’s ability to do much more than it did, at least over extended periods. This question must wait on research designed to clarify the exact nature of the navy’s access to resources within Germany as the conflict progressed. The financial crisis of 1912 determined that the German army would have priority, while the navy entered the Great War with a budget already tightly restricted. The navy was a service under strain; its efforts to expand and its scale of operations—the U-boats excepted—appear extraordinarily restricted by comparison with the British rate of effort. We are left with the impression that the High Sea Fleet was always limited in fuel and material; it was certainly limited in personnel. The steady transfer of officers and men to the U-boat force and the minesweepers represented a drain of human capital from the main fleet that could not easily be replaced. By 1917, difficulties were mounting, and they manifested themselves most clearly in the engineering problems that dogged big and small ships alike. To what extent this was more the result of material shortages arising from an increasingly effective blockade or shortfalls in expert manpower in ships and dockyards remains unclear. Nevertheless, British and American observers were surprised by the poor condition of many of the major German units when they were interned; and the sad state of a substantial number of the U-boats at that time has already been noted. Warships deteriorate very rapidly when they are not looked after, but the implication is that things had not been well long before the mutinies of the previous month. The High Sea Fleet might have been hard pressed to be more active, even if its commanders had wanted to, and might have deteriorated even more rapidly had it tried to go to sea much more often.
The customary criticism of the British is that the Admiralty took an unconsciable amount of time to accept that convoy was the proper response to the U-boat campaign against merchant shipping. The truth is convoy was only one of the necessary responses, some of which the Admiralty did make, while dealing with many others turned out to require what we would now term as “whole of government” solutions. Further, had the Germans responded differently—and if the war had continued they would inevitably have done so—convoys would have been at the center of a series of battles that might have played out very differently to such encounters in the war of 1939–45. Some of the tools required to defeat mass submarine attacks did not yet exist. Late adoption of convoy was thus a critical, perhaps even egregious, failure, but convoy was not quite as simple a solution as it seems in hindsight.
The key missed opportunity for the Royal Navy may have been mine warfare. Deficiencies in British mine design, particularly when compared with those of the Russians and the Germans, were clear as early as the end of 1914. The defensive and offensive utility of mines in the emerging operational environment was also apparent from the very start of the conflict. This was acknowledged long before by Lord Fisher, although he shares a measure of blame for the situation in 1914. It should not have taken until well into 1917 for mass production of the relatively efficient H2 mine to start. Here, criticism of the Admiralty staff and their supervision of the navy’s technical organization (in this case, the torpedo and mine warfare establishment, HMS Vernon) over the period 1915 to 1916 is justified. Too much time was taken to acknowledge the problems that British mines experienced and even more was consumed fiddling over alternative and unnecessary solutions.
As a form of attrition warfare, both geography and resources favored the British in mining. The Royal Navy could have started an extensive effort to mine the Heligoland Bight and the Kattegat at least twelve months earlier than it did, if an efficient model had been available at the right time. The evidence of 1917 and 1918 reveals that this would have achieved several things. First, it would have created growing stresses on the High Sea Fleet’s minesweeping capabilities and on the main force itself through the need to protect the sweepers from attack; second, the transit of U-boats to their operational areas would have been made much more hazardous—as would the dispatch of any surface forces to attack the British coast. The combination of these demands may also have created more opportunities for British surface units to raid the Heligoland Bight and the Kattegat with a good chance of finding worthwhile targets. In short, if an effective mine had been produced earlier and the British had deployed it properly, the High Sea Fleet could have been worn down much more quickly than it was.
Another area the British might have pursued more aggressively is naval aviation, but the alternative scenario is less clear. The problems of operating aircraft from ships at sea were not only complicated, they kept changing as the aircraft evolved. The achievement of the Grand Fleet in moving as far and as fast as it did in 1917–18 to develop fixed-wing aviation may have been undervalued. The problem of recovery certainly persisted until means were found to recover wheeled planes on board Argus (after her completion, it should be noted), but the numbers and types of shipborne fighters and reconnaissance aircraft that the Grand Fleet carried in 1918 represented a formidable capability. If the Admiralty had given the Grand Fleet’s proposals more priority in early 1917, a strike by torpedo aircraft on the High Sea Fleet in its anchorages would have been possible in 1918. But it is difficult to see how the required system-of-systems (torpedoes, aircraft, ships, launch and recovery techniques, marshaling in the air techniques, and at-sea operating experience) could have been brought into being and implemented on the necessary scale to be decisive in such a time frame. There is an analogy with the tank and its employment in the land war and the tension between the desire to employ it more or less piecemeal or wait until sufficient numbers were available to achieve a decisive victory. Argus could well have launched Cuckoo torpedo bombers to raid the High Sea Fleet anchorages in the summer of 1918, but it would have deployed no more than twenty aircraft. Admiral Beatty had much grander ambitions, it is true, but the aircraft that could do this job were no longer disposable in the manner of single-seat light fighters. They could not ditch after each sortie and be easily replaced.
Lack of strategic coordination between the British and the Russians has been another subject of criticism. To be fair, attempting to coordinate major operations in both the Baltic and the North Sea was probably always too much to ask. Here, the “Baltic Project” and the potential vulnerability of the Kattegat have tended to receive the most attention, but any British attempt to force their way into the Baltic would inevitably have involved an amphibious operation on a grand scale, with the necessary involvement of large numbers of troops, confrontation with the German army on what was effectively home ground, and some very difficult decisions about the neutrality of Denmark, Sweden, and even Norway. After the Dardanelles, such a venture was unthinkable. But even if the Baltic passages are left out of consideration, much more could have been done to think how difficult life could be made for the Germans in the Kattegat if they were constantly being forced to deal with threats at sea in both the east and the west. Diversions and deceptions around the Kattegat could have played an important part in putting on pressure.
Here, the Russian failure paralleled the British. Even if its defensive fixation on the Gulf of Finland had some validity, the Baltic Fleet always had the resources—and as time went on, added to them—to wage a much more active campaign against German freedom of movement in the western and southern Baltic than it did. Mines, submarines (even with the environmental challenges), and surface forces could have done much to prevent the movement of shipping between Sweden and Germany, and German sea communications between Germany and Courland. Apart from restricting the flow of vital materials, particularly iron ore, this would have forced the Germans to make much greater naval efforts in the Baltic than proved to be the case. It is astonishing in retrospect just how weak the German naval forces in theater usually were; still, it was a gamble that repeatedly paid off in their favor, though it was not inevitable that this should have been so. One consideration for the British about the benefits of a more active Russian policy in the Baltic, allied to their own greater efforts in the Heligoland Bight and the Kattegat, is that the outpost of the Flanders Command would have quickly been targeted as a source of reinforcements for areas more critical to German survival.
Deficiencies in operations and tactics in all three navies are best examined from the British experience, though the conclusions are almost as certainly equally applicable to the other services. The causes of failure are related—largely the absence of support organizations to provide training, analyze battle experience, and develop doctrine and tactics to meet the new challenges. Far too much in the Royal Navy fell victim to a laissez-faire attitude. Inexperienced personnel were thrown into the sea war with their new ships and equipment untested and themselves untrained. Because there was no proper analytical organization, the problems of night fighting (among other things) festered and failures were repeated when they could have been avoided. Too much was expected of local operational commanders, given the span of their responsibilities and the tiny staffs they employed. At the end of the war, Tyrwhitt of the Harwich Force had only three operational staff officers, one engineer, and three administrative officers to manage his command. While he probably did not want it any other way, this was a seagoing battle staff, not an organization to do the detailed planning required for the multitude of complex initiatives that the Harwich Force attempted over the years. Bacon and Keyes at Dover were no better off, with staff sufficient to operate an around-the-clock operations room, but not to simultaneously plan ventures on the scale of the Zeebrugge and Ostend raids. The truth is that the Harwich Force, Dover Patrol, and other commands endured a hand-to-mouth existence in their planning and conduct of operations, and this was reflected in the results. That the Grand Fleet was eventually better organized was a combination of its greater scale and the relative inactivity of its major units. Even so, the main fleet labored throughout the entire conflict to create the full range of systems needed to support the training of all its components, conduct analysis, and identify the necessary lessons from exercises and operations. Many of the Royal Navy’s problems that have long been ascribed to the Admiralty may have been as much the result of the inadequate organization of the operational commands as deficiencies in Whitehall.
The Royal Navy understood something of all these problems and it learned the lessons. The British sometimes made the mistake of overstaffing in later years, but the World War II period demonstrated that they had learned the difference between plans and operations. Establishment of the Tactical School in the 1920s was another answer. Notably—although it was only founded in 1942, more than two years after the start of the war—the Western Approaches Tactical Unit provided the type of doctrinal and tactical support to the antisubmarine forces of the Battle of the Atlantic that the night fighters of Dover and the Harwich Force so desperately needed. The need to train the mass of small ships and newly mobilized personnel was known in 1939. Early ideas for an Anglo-French training center were overtaken by the fall of France, but by the middle of 1940 there was an organization at Tobermory in Scotland that trained the crews of more than a thousand corvettes and frigates by the end of the war. That center was duplicated elsewhere in the United Kingdom and emulated around the world. The officers and sailors manning the destroyers, sloops, and patrol craft of the Great War would have envied their successors the experience of such training, however arduous, and the confidence it created in their equipment, their fellow crew members, and themselves.
While accepting the validity of these criticisms, we should also fully acknowledge the efforts in all navies to exploit emergent technology and the imagination and individual bravery that operating the new systems so often required. The anticlimactic end of the war at sea has largely disguised the progress made in so many areas of naval technology and operations since 1914. The U-boats and Allied submarines coming into service in 1918 were much closer in capability to the new construction units of 1939 than they were to their predecessors of 1914. This was certainly also the case for the surface fleets, and it was arguably true (in part) for aviation. It was not simply a matter of the technological progress of the war—although this had been at a breakneck pace—but also of operational advances in the employment of that technology. What is clear is that the operations of the Royal Navy in 1918 in particular were a remarkable advance on 1914, even if some of the concepts involved had been under consideration well before the outbreak of war. They foreshadowed the task forces of the next global conflict. The “Grand Fleet of Battles,” which had been emerging before the Great War, had been replaced by fighting groups that had the same ideas of combined arms and mutual support but operated on a smaller scale that made the necessary coordination practicable. Largely oil-powered formations consisting of cruisers and destroyers, and supported by more workable single squadrons of fast capital ships rather than a ponderous battle line, all fitted out with as much aviation capability as they could carry or tow, ranged across the North Sea at high speeds. Things had moved very far from the Grand Fleet’s seven-knot progress through the same theater in August 1914. A modern observer can mourn lost opportunities in the Great War at sea, but it is only fair to recognize just how much was achieved as well.
