Abstract
It is hardly astonishing that the centenary of the Battle of Jutland was a good opportunity to examine once again this most important naval battle of World War I. After two years of increasingly fierce fighting on land, the sea also became the site of a huge battle. On 31 May 1916, 250 modern British and German battleships clashed in the northern North Sea. Admirals and officers from both sides as well as historians have dealt with this event ever since. Against this background, one might expect that is very difficult to offer new insights. To make it short, John Brooks, whose book on Dreadnought Gunnery and the Battle of Jutland: The Question of Fire-Control (London, 2005) had already broken new ground, does fulfil all expectations in spite of a view, which, due to the sources it is based on, is closer to the British than the German ships. Nevertheless, wherever possible, he also draws on those sources which have been translated into English since the 1920s.
Despite this bias, of which John Brooks is fully aware, he gives a very interesting account of the Anglo-German naval race before 1914, the development and the importance of technologies, the orders for battle, and the preliminaries and the different phases of the battle until the return of the fleets to their respective home ports. Before he comes to a very balanced conclusion, he deals with ‘technology and tactics’ in a well-written chapter. Numerous figures and tables give additional and immensely valuable information on tactical aspects unknown to many readers, such as turning pendants or the strengths of the German and British battle fleets, as well as signals, effects of hits by heavy shell, or ships with casualties. All in all, the reader is thus able to make up his own mind of this battle many contemporaries had hoped for and which, to their great astonishment, did not have the result for neither side everyone had expected since the beginning of the war: victory in a Nelsonic sense.
What makes this new account so interesting? First it is the description of both fleets on the eve of war not only from a purely political or strictly military perspective. Rather, the author allows deep and well explained insights into the advantages and disadvantages of each class of ships. He thus convincingly prepares the ground to explain why Jellicoe eventually lost more ships than Scheer. It is striking to see the pessimism with which British commanders, both Jellicoe and Beatty, went into the war and which Brooks describes vividly and convincingly in his first chapters. Although they did, of course, exaggerate somewhat the inadequacies of their ships and numbers in order to get a greater share of naval resources, there can be no doubt that their ‘pervasive pessimism in their communications and their willingness to believe the worst (…) suggests that they were prey to genuine and potentially demoralising fears’ (p. 35).
Similarly interesting is the chapter on ‘Orders for Battle.’ Here, the author describes in great detail the key expectations and concerns which shaped the development of both the British and the German tactics during the battle. Thus he can explain that Jellicoe, who hoped that the High Seas Fleet would fight in single-line ahead, operated very cautiously for fear of mines and torpedo-attacks and submarines, whereas Beatty left no doubt ‘that he intended to take the offensive whenever there was a good prospect of annihilating his opponents’ (p. 116). German battle tactics, which had fallen into British hands at the beginning of the war and were known to Jellicoe and his commanders, the author unfortunately deals with only rather briefly. Most important in this respect is, however, that Scheer, like Jellicoe, insisted on a ‘single battle line, on keeping together in the (probable) event of facing a numerically superior enemy, and on maintaining central control of the fleet in action’ (p. 129).
Whereas the author in his first chapters, by and large, relies on well-known sources and interpretations, which he, though, often re-examines with interesting results, his account of the battle itself tries to go back to the original sources – the despatches submitted by flag officers and by the commanding officers of major ships, flotillas, and even destroyers. As he rightly claims, ‘their great value lies in their immediacy and authenticity (p. xv)’. Many historians have shied from doing this, not least because it is really tiring to read them and to put them into the right context of a battle with all its turns, its confusion, and its unexpected developments and results.
In Chapters 4–9, Brooks accordingly gives a very detailed description of what happened after the clash of the two fleets. He carefully and convincingly analyses the events at sea during the different stages of the battle. Most impressive are his descriptions of the attacks of the destroyers on both sides as well as of the night actions and the decisions of both commanders-in-chief in the early morning hours. Limited space does not permit to go into further detail here.
Most important are the two remaining chapters on ‘technology and tactics’ as well as on the ‘unpalatable result’, as Jellicoe phrased the outcome of the battle in a secret despatch written only two weeks later. Very meticulously John Brooks re-examines all aspects of the fighting: ammunition and protection, ships, signals, gunnery and fire control, and finally torpedoes and tactics. Thus the reader gets a very good impression of the quality of the ships of both fleets from a technological point of view. It is striking to see how well the German ships performed against a superior enemy, whose ships partly and astonishingly suffered from serious deficiencies.
The last chapter deals with the men who were in charge of these ships; Hipper and Scheer on the German side, Jellicoe and Beatty on the British. John Brooks carefully and fairly assesses and judges their respective performances. Of course, all of them deserve some kind of criticism, because they were, like Hipper, after initial successes ‘less determined, responding to rather than controlling events’ (p. 517), or ‘acted coolly and promptly to extricate his forces’ (p. 520) like Scheer who ‘enjoyed a measure of good fortune’, but who also made misjudgements and serious mistakes in the course of the battle. Jellicoe, the scapegoat for many in Britain, who had expected a great victory, also receives a fair judgement despite the mistakes he certainly made during the battle. ‘Yet’, Brooks convincingly argues, ‘in view of the resolve that Jellicoe had shown during the gun actions, it seems fair to conclude that, if he did not during the night live up to the Nelsonic ideal, it was due to the subconscious effects of an overmastering fatigue and a profound anxiety about underwater threats’ (p. 533). Moreover, despite the criticism of his leadership, it is right to argue that Jellicoe achieved victory, though in a different sense: Apart from the fact that the Royal Navy had never been trained to fight a fleeing enemy, Jellicoe had achieved what he had been expected to do: the enemy’s withdrawal from the battlefield. Hardly astonishing, compared with this positive judgement of Jellicoe’s leadership qualities, Beatty, in return, receives a rather harsh, though, as it seems against the background of his behaviour during the battlecruiser action, fair judgement: ‘The conclusion is unavoidable; he did not live up to his own image – there was little that was truly heroic in Beatty’s leadership at Jutland’ (p. 543).
To sum up, John Brooks’s book is one of the best written on this battle. Of course, we do not learn anything about the situation on board during the battle, the horror of fighting and dying as well as the myth of Jutland both in Britain and in Germany. However, the author should not be blamed for this, for his topic was different – he wanted to give a true account of a great battle – no more, but also no less. He has achieved this aim marvellously. Congratulations.