Abstract
At this remove, a full century after the Battle of Jutland itself, the history of this contentious, not to say tendentious and sometimes mendacious, work is arguably of greater historical interest than the account of the engagement contained within it. Even those with only a superficial knowledge of the battle are doubtless aware that prior to it the British public had been led to expect a decisive victory of Nelsonian proportions, and when it failed to materialize – indeed, it could be argued that the Royal Navy suffered a modest tactical defeat in that it lost more ships and men than its German counterpart – there was much pressure both within the service and outside it to determine what ‘went wrong’ on 31 May and 1 June 1916. Therein lay Jutland: The Naval Staff Appreciation’s genesis.
Shortly after the war First Sea Lord Sir Rosslyn Wemyss instructed the Admiralty’s Director of Navigation, Captain John E. T. Harper, with a committee of assistants, to write an official account of what had occurred during the battle, based on the Admiralty’s own records: ‘[n]o comment or criticism was to be included and no oral evidence was to be accepted’ (Harper, quoted on p. xx). Harper did so, and his Official Record (sometimes referred to as the Harper Report) was on the verge of being published when David, Earl Beatty became First Sea Lord in November 1919. Beatty, with whom Harper’s narrative was shared as a courtesy, did not like it. It appeared to him to cast aspersions on the performance of the Battle Cruiser Fleet (BCF), which he had commanded at Jutland, and by extension upon himself. He therefore demanded that changes be made to it that would reflect less critically on his actions. Most obviously, he disputed Harper’s finding that, probably owing to inattention in the heat of battle, the BCF had turned a complete circle shortly after 7:00 p.m.: ‘[d]espite incontrovertible evidence that the turn did take place, Beatty insisted that his ships had followed a kind of ‘S-shaped’ track, sixteen points (180°) to starboard, followed by a sixteen-point turn to port. Worse still, it is clear that Beatty made a flimsy attempt to forge proof for his claim…’ (p. xxi). Even worse, if possible, when Harper refused to alter his text without written instructions, Beatty showed no compunction about compounding his egregious (and patently transparent) falsification and promptly issued the requisite orders, which were only rescinded following the intervention of First Lord Walter Long. ‘Nonetheless’, as this volume’s editor, William Schleihauf, remarks, ‘further alterations were called for [by Beatty], some of which were contrary to the findings supported by the data from the battle cruiser and gunnery records’ (ibid.).
The Grand Fleet’s commander-in-chief at Jutland, John, Viscount Jellicoe, a far more honourable man than Beatty, maintained that neither he nor Beatty should be permitted to see Harper’s Record prior to publication, but Long requested that he review the text as emended at Beatty’s insistence. Jellicoe, on the eve of taking up the Governor-Generalship of New Zealand, ‘was not pleased, and was prepared to delay his departure … unless matters were resolved to his satisfaction’ (ibid). Long attempted to placate Jellicoe by promising him that Harper’s text would not be altered without his (Jellicoe’s) approval, but this effort to square the circle foundered on Beatty’s refusal to countenance publication of the Record without the changes he demanded. As a consequence, and owing also to the intervention of Longmans, Green and Co., which was publishing the Committee of Imperial Defence’s official history of British naval operations and wanted no competition from the Admiralty’s account, Harper’s narrative was shelved until 1927, when it finally appeared in bowdlerized form, with some of Beatty’s emendations and minus the diagrams that had accompanied the original text, owing to parliamentary pressure.
While this unseemly struggle was playing out, either Beatty or his partisans at the Board of Admiralty, in particular Assistant Chief of Naval Staff Sir Ernle Chatfield (Beatty’s Flag Captain at Jutland) and Deputy Chief of Naval Staff Sir Osmond Brock (commander of the First Battlecruiser Squadron at Jutland) decided to commission their own version of the battle. On 15 November 1920 Brock instructed Alfred C. Dewar and his brother Kenneth G. B. Dewar ‘to write a full appreciation of the Battle of Jutland’ which, unlike Harper’s, was to contain ‘a full analysis’ not only of ‘the movements of the British Fleet … from the time of leaving harbour on 30th May until its return on 2nd June’, but also ‘any operation [sic] orders issued prior to the battle…’ (quoted in ibid., p. xxii).
Although Schleihauf does not state as much in his introduction, the fact that the copy of Brock’s letter from which he quotes is found in Beatty’s papers leads obviously to the inference that the Dewars were selected at least in part for their partisanship (unlike Harper, neither was a navigational specialist and nor did either have any other noteworthy professional qualifications for the task), and a 29 November 1920 clipping from the Evening News reporting ‘that a naval officer had been brought in to write a ‘Staff Appreciation’ in place of the Harper report’, also found in Beatty’s papers, strongly reinforces that inference (ibid). Stephen W. Roskill, Beatty’s biographer, states that the Dewar brothers were selected ‘probably on Beatty’s initiative and certainly with his knowledge’, and Andrew Gordon quotes an uncited source in The Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command (1996) that they ‘set to work on the Staff Appreciation ‘‘on the lines desired”’ although whether the last three words refer to the terms of reference as stated in Brock’s letter or to the unstated instruction that their account was to conform to ‘the lines desired’ by Beatty, Brock, and Chatfield is not clear (Roskill, Admiral of the Fleet Earl Beatty: The Last Naval Hero [1981], p. 332; Gordon, The Rules of the Game, p. 545). What is clear is that the Dewars were regarded in the service as intellectuals, a judgment to which they themselves adhered. They were among the officer corps’ ‘Young Turks’, according to Roskill (Roskill, Beatty, p. 332). Gordon less charitably likens them to the Shining Path, the Peruvian Maoist guerrilla organization (Gordon, The Rules of the Game, p. 545).
The original draft the Dewar brothers produced was so critical of Jellicoe that even Beatty and Chatfield demanded changes, but the subsequent ‘toned down’ version was still, in Chatfield’s words, ‘written in a somewhat severe style … which might be considered undesirable’ (quoted in Roskill, p. 333). More tellingly, in an August 1922 memorandum to Beatty (eight months after the Dewars completed their work and six after 100 proof copies were printed), Chatfield and Roger Keyes, although both staunch Beatty partisans, warned against issuing the Staff Appreciation to the navy, despite its having been commissioned for instructional purposes. ‘It is not considered’, they wrote, ‘that any sufficient cause exists at the moment to justify the issue to the Fleet of a book that would rend the service to its foundations’ (p. xxiv). Indeed, the Staff Appreciation was deemed so toxic that Chatfield and Keyes not only recommended that all of the proof copies be recalled, but that all but a few of them be destroyed, the survivors to be kept under lock and key by the First Sea Lord, and ‘[t]hat steps be taken to see that the printers break up the type and do not retain any copies’ (quoted in Bryan Ranft (ed.), The Beatty Papers, vol. 2, p. 456). Even this drastic step was insufficient for Beatty’s successor as First Sea Lord, Sir Charles Madden (who happened also to be John Jellicoe’s brother-in-law), who in 1930 ordered that the handful of extant copies be returned to the Admiralty and pulped (p. xxiv). Not everyone obeyed: Beatty refused to return his copy, telling Keyes that Madden’s order was ‘a crime against Contemporary History’ and that he would ‘be court-martialled before he would give his up’ (quoted in ibid. p. xxxiv–xxv, n. 31). Keyes likewise retained his, as did Jellicoe and Frank Spickernell, Beatty’s secretary.
Yet despite its occult status, the Staff Appreciation came to exercise a profoundly malignant influence on the historiography of Jutland, in part because an expurgated version appeared under the Admiralty imprimatur in 1924, and in part because Winston Churchill based his account of the battle in The World Crisis upon it. The former, published as Narrative of the Battle of Jutland, was supposedly ‘de-venomized’, but Jellicoe himself found it so full of errors of fact and judgment that his critique was ‘nearly as voluminous as … [the Narrative] itself. The carelessness and inaccuracies of this document are extraordinary and the charts and diagrams are even worse … The … [Narrative] is of course a BCF account, looked at through BCF eyes’ (quoted in Gordon, The Rules of the Game, p. 547). So was Churchill’s account of the battle, the ‘tone and … treatment of evidence’ of which were, according to Gordon, ‘unremittingly Beatty-ite…’ (ibid., p. 554).
It scarcely needs stating, therefore, that the Staff Appreciation is a most untrustworthy account of Jutland. Even Schleihauf warns that it ‘must not be treated as an authoritative source’. Indeed, he bluntly adds that ‘[i]t certainly isn’t suitable as a first introduction to the battle’ (p. xxx)! It is, to put it plainly, bad history or even worse: special pleading masquerading as history. The Dewars cherry-picked the evidence to suit their preconceptions and their analysis was so partisan than Captain Vernon Haggard, head of the Admiralty’s Training and Staff Duties Division when the proof copies of the Staff Appreciation were delivered, wrote to Beatty and Keyes that the authors’ ‘mental attitude … was rather that of a counsel for the prosecution than of an impartial appraiser of facts, and obvious bias animates … [their] statements throughout the book…’ (p. xxiv).
Harper, whose Official Record was, as Andrew Gordon remarks, ‘by no yardstick, other than BCF mythology … a scurrilous document’, termed the Staff Appreciation ‘an account which for inaccuracy and bias it would be difficult to surpass. The conduct of every Flag Officer at Jutland especially that of the Commander-in-Chief, was severely criticised, with the notable exception of Admiral Beatty who was lauded on every occasion’ (Gordon, p. 559; Harper quoted in A. Temple Patterson, The Jellicoe Papers, vol. 2, p. 482). So far from deserving that praise, Harper further charged that the Staff Appreciation glossed over or outright failed to mention that ‘Beatty … 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 disposition of his ships and faulty signalling; and that the shooting of his Battle Cruisers was far below the standard expected, at that time, in the Royal Navy’ (quoted in ibid., pp. 462–63). Sir Julian Corbett, who was supplied with a copy of the Staff Appreciation, was hardly less critical. He wrote to Jellicoe in July 1922 that he ‘read it with increasing wonder till at last I felt it my duty to convey privately to the Admiralty that such a grotesque account of the battle certainly ought not to go out as their considered verdict … the more I studied the battle the more grotesque did the Dewar account appear. … To call it a ‘Staff Account’ is nothing but a bad joke…’ (quoted in ibid., pp. 414–15).
So why publish it, especially in light of the passage of time since the battle, and even since the ‘Jutland Controversy’ in which it played such a prominent role? Both Schleihauf and Steve McLaughlin, who took over the project at an advanced stage when, sadly, Schleihauf succumbed to cancer, maintain that in spite all of the factual errors and misrepresentations the Staff Appreciation contains ‘many valid criticisms’ and remains ‘an important historical document’ (p. xii). With the latter claim there can be no dispute, although, as suggested above, its importance pertains much more to the post-battle war of words – the Jutland Controversy – than to the battle itself.
Chief among the ‘valid criticisms’ are the Dewars’ condemnation of Jellicoe’s unwieldy Grand Fleet Battle Orders (GFBOs), his highly centralized command structure, his lack of a proper staff and concomitant penchant for micromanagement, his rigid adherence to the line-ahead tactical formation, and his cautiousness. Yet, as Schleihauf and McLaughlin emphasize in their judicious afterward, there were equally valid explanations or justifications for all of these ‘failings’ save perhaps the want of a naval staff and Jellicoe’s reluctance to delegate authority, and even these traits were understandable, as they admit, given their own ‘uncomfortable impression that, with some notable exceptions [Jellicoe above all], something was fundamentally wrong with the Royal Navy’s officer corps’ (p. 262).
This argument is not novel, for it was made as long ago as 1963 by Correlli Barnett: ‘[i]n view of the performance of Beatty’s and his own cruiser squadrons … limp, bewildered and ineffective … it is difficult to believe that Jellicoe was wrong to centralise his battle fleet and its tactics. The truth was that the Grand Fleet was only capable of rigid textbook maneuvers, and Jellicoe was coolheaded enough to realise it’ (Barnett, ‘Sailor with a Flawed Cutlass’, in The Swordbearers: Supreme Command in the First World War, p. 151). Since Barnett published those words others have probed more deeply for the causes of the officers corps’ overall mediocrity. Stephen Roskill blamed the shortcomings of officer education. Andrew Gordon’s more wide-ranging investigation in The Rules of the Game points to larger socio-cultural factors: upper-class Victorian attitudes – mentalités, if you will – which placed premiums on order, control, hierarchy, and unquestioning obedience and stifled imagination and initiative.
And lurking in the background, as both Barnett and Andrew Lambert have stressed, was the fact that the officer corps was drawn almost exclusively from the narrow stratum of the landed elites, often with greater regard for social standing than for brains or ability. As Sir John Fisher argued in 1906, ‘…there are [in Britain] not more than 1,500,000 people in all from whom the officers of the navy can be taken – and of these, half, or more than half, are women and children. The remainder of the population is 41,500,000, and of these no single one can ever hope to become an officer in the navy! Surely we are drawing our Nelsons from too narrow a class’ (quoted in Barnett, p. 181). And the Dewars, like the men whose actions they critiqued so savagely, also came from that narrow class.
Yet for all of its often grotesque flaws – Corbett’s judgment in this regard, as in many others, cannot be bettered – the Staff Appreciation certainly deserved to see the light of day, and Schleihauf and McLaughlin, principally the former, have done an exemplary job of editing and annotating it. In composing the editorial material they have trawled the archival record exhaustively, drawing from the papers of all the principal participants, in particular Beatty, and many others as well. A substantial introduction provides the historical context of the Staff Appreciation’s commissioning, composition, and fate, and an equally substantial afterward cross-examines the most prominent of the Dewars’ charges.
Moreover, Schleihauf and McLaughlin engage the text in a running commentary via both footnotes and endnotes. As an example, a lengthy endnote follows the chapter on Jellicoe’s decision to deploy the Grand Fleet on the port column, a chapter which Schleihauf and McLaughlin rightly condemn as ‘one of the most biased sections of the appreciation; it ignores its advantages while emphasising its disadvantages. In doing so, moreover, it employs a good deal of ex post facto knowledge that was unavailable to Jellicoe at the time’ (p. 114). The editors then point out that the advantages gained – crossing the enemy’s T, blocking its retreat, and securing the best light – were not ‘the result of lucky accident’. Rather, Jellicoe deliberately sought to, and did, achieve them. They also point out that the deployment exposed the German High Seas Fleet ‘to the fire of the maximum number of British ships, for … [it] was charging head-on into what was essentially an envelopment…’ (p. 115). Finally, Schleihauf and McLaughlin cite several authorities, among them Corbett, Roskill, Arthur Marder, and even Herbert Richmond, whose overall judgment on Jellicoe was deeply and implacably negative, who regard the deployment as ‘by far the best manoeuvre possible’ (Roskill) or ‘little short of miraculous’ (Marder) (p. 116).
To these qualities of Schleihauf’s and McLauglin’s edition of the Staff Appreciation can be added others. The book is handsomely produced and well copyedited, the fifty-three diagrams – the work of John Jordan – are outstanding, and at a list price of £19.99 it constitutes excellent value for money. Now, if only someone would emulate Schleihauf’s labour of love and do the same for the un-doctored typescript of Harper’s Official Record, which rests in the British Library….