What Really Happened: Notes on the Battle of Jutland

I

THOSE who seek the truth about any important military event of the World War find themselves confronted by a mass of contradictory evidence. Either side of the case may be presented in detail so circumstantial as to carry conviction — until the other side is read. This applies to almost every major combat that took place, from the outbreak of hostilities to the Armistice, but it is with regard to the campaign afloat that the facts are most elusive. Here the element of national bias comes into play with least restraint, and the reason is clear. Great Britain, as

unchallenged sovereign of the seas for a hundred years, is naturally concerned to prove that her ancient genius for maritime warfare remains unimpaired. Nor is she swayed by motives of vanity alone. The nimbus of naval invincibility has been to her an asset of priceless value ever since Trafalgar. To the prestige she enjoyed as the dominant sea Power she owed in very large measure her marvelous development during the nineteenth century. Primacy at sea confers advantages far greater than those which accrue from armed supremacy on land. Germany, from 1871 onward, was the leading military Power of the world, yet she had to wait nearly thirty years for recognition as a world Power, as distinct from a State of merely Continental importance.

’He that commands the sea commands the world itself’ is still a truism, as Germany found to her cost. At a period when her army stood unrivaled in strength and efficiency, her political influence did not extend beyond the confines of Central Europe. As late as the mid-nineties, Germans resident in the Far East were complaining to their Government of the low esteem in which the German flag was held by the Asiatic peoples. The same naïve faith in direct action which governed German policy throughout the World War had impelled the Kaiser in 1900 to give to Graf von Waldersee, commanding the allied expedition to Peking, his oft-quoted orders, the purport of which was so to deal with his adversaries that no Chinese should thereafter look at a German without blenching. These were the instructions in which that unfortunate reference to Attila and his Huns occurred. When the first German Navy Bill of 1898 was drafted, the precursor of more ambitious measures of naval expansion which helped to make the World War inevitable, stress was laid on the importance of forming powerful squadrons to show the flag abroad. By 1914 a considerable proport ion of Germany’s naval strength was to be found in foreign waters, and had not the war ensued the outlying squadrons of the Reich would soon have rivaled in majesty those of Great Britain herself. German battle-cruiser squadrons were to have been assigned to the Mediterranean and the China stations as soon as new ships became available. We see, therefore, that the German navy was designed to be the instrument of an imperialistic policy, which aimed at the acquisition of new colonies, the conquest of foreign markets, and the enhancement of German prestige overseas. In this respect it did not differ fundamentally from the British navy. The latter, it is true, existed to defend an empire which its power had brought into being, while the German navy, on the other hand, had first to create an overseas empire to defend.

It does not come within the scope of this paper to inquire whether the motives which guided Germany’s prewar naval policy continue to animate her present rulers. But it is permissible to remark that a very pronounced effort has been and is still being made to defend the reputation of the old Kaiserliche Flotte. In countless books and pamphlets the heroic deeds of the navy are recorded for the edification of the rising generation. Barely eight years have elapsed since the High Sea Fleet surrendered for internment at Scapa Flow. Yet to-day there is a strong and growing movement in Germany for the building of a new fleet. In the last six years a sum of nearly $300,000,000 has been devoted to this end. Extraordinary efforts are being made to fan the smouldering fires of naval ambition which the events of October and November 1918 seemed to have extinguished forever.

Thanks to skillful propaganda, the part which the old navy played in bringing about the great collapse has been glossed over. The naval mutiny which precipitated the revolution is ascribed to the machinations of a handful of professional sedition-mongers, and in defiance of notorious fact it is represented that the bulk of the personnel remained staunch. The excesses committed by the mutinous seamen in Berlin and other inland cities are either ignored altogether or lightly dismissed as the work of a few irresponsible youths. As for the palpable failure of the navy to perform its mission of defending Germany’s trade and colonies and keeping the sea routes open, this is attributed to the supineness of the war politicians, among whom the late Herr von Bethmann-Hollweg is singled out for special opprobrium.

That this intensive campaign of vindication has not been without effect is shown by the generous response with which the appeal for a new fleet has been met by the German people. Naval appropriations for the current year, amounting to nearly $55,000,000, were voted by the Reichstag in the course of an afternoon’s sitting. The Battle of Jutland has always been the trump card in the hands of the navy propagandists, and they have played it with remarkable skill. The annual celebration of what is acclaimed as a great victory assumed this year a nation-wide significance. For the tenth anniversary of Jutland, May 31, patriotic demonstrations were organized in every large town, the newspapers devoted many pages to reminiscences of the great national Ruhmestag, and the official naval organ of the Ministry of Defense published a special ‘victory number.’ The purpose of all this inspired jubilation seems obvious. It is intended to convince the German people that their future still lies on the water, that they possess in even greater measure than their British cousins the qualities which make for maritime ascendency, and that with a powerful fleet once more in being they may look forward to regaining all, and more than all, that was lost through defeat.

Since Jutland has thus become a symbol of high hope and promise, it is not surprising to find the soberest German historians betraying a tendency to magnify the achievements of their navy in that battle. Honesty compels the admission that a similar want of objectivity is perceptible in British versions of the action, the motive for this treatment of the subject being, as we have seen, one of considered policy rather than vainglory. Neutral versions of the Jutland campaign, based on data from both sides, have also been published, and serve as a useful check upon the more detailed if less impartial narratives prepared under official auspices in England and Germany. Thanks to all this literature we are now able to form a reasonably clear conception of the drama as a whole. Yet many of its details remain obscure, and some of these are important.

We have, for example, no definite knowledge of the plan of strategy which the fateful cruise of the High Sea Fleet on May 31, 1916, was to have initiated. The German official history merely states that a raid on enemy shipping in the Skagerrack was intended, with the ulterior purpose of destroying such isolated British forces as might be encountered in those waters. While this statement is probably accurate so far as it goes, there are grounds for suspecting the raid in question to have been only the prelude to a more ambitious undertaking. Since Admiral Scheer had assumed command of the fleet in the previous February, he had persistently urged the expediency of taking more vigorous action at sea. His views carried weight at headquarters, where he was known as a bold and resolute leader, and withal as a consummate tactician. These attributes were certainly revealed in his handling of the fleet at Jutland.

Scheer was at one with his mentor, Admiral von Tirpitz, in dissenting from the view held by the Kaiser’s entourage that a pitched battle with the British Grand Fleet was too hazardous to be accepted. He believed the fighting power of that force to be overrated, and had made up his mind to put the matter to the crucial test. With the Tirpitz school it was an article of faith that the German fleet made up for what it lacked in numerical strength by the unique quality of its material, and above all by its admirable system of tactical training. Previous naval actions of the war were considered to have justified this confidence. Had the Skagerrack adventure gone according to plan, Scheer would certainly not have rested on his laurels. He was determined to carry out the operation which unsuitable weather conditions had caused him to postpone — namely, the bombardment of Sunderland, coupled with the laying of a submarine snare across the track of the British fleet. It is clear from his own testimony that he foresaw the contingency of having to fight the Grand Fleet, and did not shrink from it. With Tirpitz and other senior officers of the navy, he was convinced that Germany’s salvation depended on a decisive victory at sea, and his writings leave no doubt that he took over command with the fixed idea of achieving such a victory.

In that case the suppression by German writers of the purpose underlying the Skagerrack cruise becomes intelligible. This cruise led to the Battle of Jutland, and though the engagement may have been inconclusive from the tactical point of view, it was decisive enough in the strategical sense. Only once thereafter did the High Sea Fleet show itself outside the defenses of the Heligoland Bight, and its movements on that occasion (August 18-19, 1916) were anything but indicative of a desire for battle. What, then, is the inference to be drawn from these facts? Surely this: that the Jutland encounter, notwithstanding the fine performance of the German fleet, disillusioned Scheer and his colleagues as to the possibility of ending the war at a blow by disabling the Grand Fleet, which constituted the main prop of the Allied cause.

This conclusion is fortified by a wealth of evidence. The testimony of Captain Persius, a reputable German historian, has never been challenged. ‘On the day following the battle,’he writes, ‘it was clear to all persons of intelligence that this fight would and must be the only one to take place. Those in authority often and openly admitted this.’ Again, there is the acknowledged fact that work on the new battleships then under construction in Germany was discontinued soon after the battle, from which time forward the national shipbuilding resources were devoted almost entirely to the production of submarines. This circumstance, taken in conjunction with the inactivity of the High Sea Fleet after the half-hearted sortie in August, and the subsequent declaration of unrestricted U-boat warfare, points unmistakably to the adoption of a new naval policy in which offensive action by the main fleet had no place. On these grounds British historians have a strong case for claiming the Battle of Jutland as a strategical success of the first importance.

II

As for the battle itself, it is now possible with the aid of diagrams, time-tables, and other data to follow the movements of the contending fleets with some precision. It is not until we approach the incidents of the mighty drama that we find ourselves groping in a fog. Of the two distinct stages into which the action was divided, it is with the first that we are chiefly concerned. The British Battle Cruiser Fleet, consisting of six battle cruisers and four battleships, under the command of Admiral Beatty, met and engaged Admiral Hipper’s First Scouting Group of five battle cruisers. Upon sighting the foe, Beatty proceeded to close as rapidly as possible. His four battleships, being somewhat slower, were several miles astern, and he did not wait for them. Had he done so he would have had a numerical superiority of two to one, and his artillery would have been reënforced by thirty-two 15-inch guns, the heaviest and most accurate naval weapons in existence at that time. As it was, these splendid ships (Queen Elizabeth class) were left far behind, and though eventually they did come into action at extreme range, the distance at first was too great for effective shooting. Beatty’s reasons for going into the fight without his battleships have never been disclosed. Probably, however, he feared that if he waited for these ships the Germans would take advantage of the respite to make their escape. His decision to strike while the opportunity occurred is applauded by the majority of naval critics.

Both sides opened fire simultaneously at a range of 16,500 yards. As the two lines were converging at full speed, the distance between them diminished rapidly. The British battle cruisers had been expressly designed for long-range fighting, in accordance with the ideas of Lord Fisher. They had less armor protection than the German ships of their class, but their guns, besides being heavier, had a higher angle of elevation (20 degrees), and could therefore outshoot the lighter German weapons, which had an extreme elevation of 16 degrees. Nor was this all. As the collective speed of the British squadron was at least one knot above that of the German force, it lay in Beatty’s power to choose and maintain his own battle range. Had he elected to fight at 19,000 yards, the Germans would have had to endure a cannonade to which they could not reply. True, the number of hits scored at this immense distance must have been small, but the very fact of being subjected to punishment without the possibility of retaliation would have had a depressing effect on the German crews.

Beatty, however, did not choose to fight at extreme range. Relying, apparently, on the superior weight of his gunfire, he closed to within 14,000 yards. This gave the German gunners a chance of which they made the most. They fired with the utmost rapidity and with an accuracy to which Lord Jellicoe has paid full tribute. Fifteen minutes after the first shot had been discharged the Indefatigable, at the tail of the British line, was hit by two successive salvos and blew up with a tremendous explosion. Her destroyer was the Von der Tann, a smaller ship armed only with 11-inch guns. A few minutes earlier Beatty’s own flagship, Lion, had narrowly escaped the same fate. A shell detonating in one of her turrets touched off some powder cartridges, the flash from which must have penetrated to the magazines had not the dying turret officer given with his last breath the order to close the communicating doors. Disaster next overtook the Queen Mary, a larger and more powerful vessel than the Indefatigable. She, too, was hit by several full salvos, and blew up with practically all hands. Two of Beatty’s six battle cruisers had now been lost, while his opponents had received only superficial damage.

The German sailors who had seen these two great enemy battle cruisers explode, as they put it, ‘like powder casks,’ while their own ships had scarcely been touched, may well have deemed themselves invincible. As for the British, if the sudden blotting out of two of their finest ships had disconcerted them they gave no sign of it. While yet a pall of smoke hid the grave of the Queen Mary, and débris was still descending in showers, her consorts raced past the spot with undiminished speed, their guns firing as steadily as before. It was a triumph of morale and discipline, but it should not blind us to the sinister aspect of the tragedy. Why should these great ships, upon whose construction the highest technical skill had been lavished, succumb to punishment far less severe than they had been designed to withstand? This is a question to which the British histories supply no answer. It is, apparently, thought undesirable for national reasons to dwell upon the subject. The destruction of the Indefatigable and the Queen Mary, followed by that of a third and similar ship, the Invincible, in identical circumstance, is merely ascribed to ‘lucky hits.’

There is, however, no real reason for shirking an inquiry into the facts. On the contrary, the national interest would benefit by their free ventilation. A modern battleship is valuable national property. It represents a cash investment of anything up to $40,000,000; it is at once the floating home and the fortress of more t han a thousand trained officers and men, whose fate is bound up with that of their ship; and upon the efficiency of this great vessel the destiny of the nat ion may one day depend. That naval warfare had become far more deadly since the introduction of high explosives was realized long before Jutland. But few can have foreseen the appalling destructiveness of this new agency against ships inadequately prepared for its assault. That the Germans had a clearer perception than the British of the material elements of naval attack and defense is revealed by the careful attention they paid to such problems before the war. Where the British spent a pound on practical experiments, the Germans spent ten. No German battleship was laid down until the salient features of her design had been experimentally tried out. When torpedo and mine developments brought into prominence the problem of protecting ships from underwater attack, the Germans did not rest until they had evolved a thoroughly efficient method of defense. Then they proceeded to test it by building, at vast expense, a fullsized target representing part of the underwater section of a battleship. This was attacked under every conceivable circumstance, and the experience so derived was incorporated in new ships. The result was that the subsurface protection of German battleships was definitely superior to that of their British contemporaries.

It was the British custom to design ships with an eye to existing dock accommodation. In other words, new ships were built to fit old docks, in consequence of which their dimensions, and particularly their breadth, had to be circumscribed, so that less room was available for protective devices below the waterline. The Germans, on the other hand, gave their ships the measurements imposed by considerations of safety, and then built new docks to take the new ships. There is no doubt that consciousness of the vulnerability of his ships to torpedo attack influenced Admiral Jellicoe’s movements on the day of Jutland. He knew, or feared, that whereas his own dreadnoughts were liable to be disabled by a single torpedo, it would probably take several such blows to cripple one of the enemy’s vessels. In the event, however, torpedoes did not cause much damage at Jutland. The big gun proved infinitely more formidable. Of the six large British ships that were lost, the Indefatigable, Queen Mary, Invincible, and Defense all exploded suddenly, before their waterline armor had been pierced; the Black Prince was set ablaze by a torrent of shell at pointblank range, and blew up in a few minutes; the Warrior was so badly knocked about that she became waterlogged and had to be abandoned, though not until hours after the fight. Clearly, therefore, the defective point in these ships lay somewhere in the vicinity of their magazines, and not in their system of waterline protection.

It is now possible to throw new light on the circumstances attending their destruction. The first instance of a ship exploding occurred quite early in the war, when the British cruiser Good Hope, flagship of Admiral Cradock, blew up during the action off Coronel. Unfortunately there were no survivors to describe what had happened, but the explosion itself was observed from another British vessel present. Its true inwardness does not appear to have been appreciated at the time, either in Britain or in Germany. But an incident that occurred three months later was destined to prove of incalculable benefit to Germany. In the Dogger Bank action of January 24, 1915, the German battle cruiser Seydlitz received a hit which set fire to some cartridges in the after turret. The flames spread to the next turret, both positions were completely burned out, and 150 men perished in the holocaust. But for the presence of mind of an officer, who promptly flooded the after magazines, the ship would certainly have gone up in one tremendous explosion, just as the Queen Mary and other British vessels did at Jutland.

When the Seydlitz returned to port a board of experts was appointed to probe the matter. In the after compartments of the ship, which were converted for the nonce into a wellequipped laboratory, numerous tests were made to determine the best method of protecting the powder charges from ignition in the event of a flash reaching the magazine. The measures ultimately taken remain to this day a German secret, but of their absolute efficacy there can be no question. In the Jutland action at least three German ships received hits precisely similar to those which proved fatal to the British battle cruisers. The Derfflinger, Lützow, and Seydlitz each had two turrets disabled by powder fires, but in every case the powder burned without exploding. In the British ships such fires almost invariably developed into explosions, causing the complete destruction of the vessel concerned. But for that single hit on the Seydlitz eighteen months before, it is not merely possible but extremely probable that the three German ships mentioned would each have disappeared in an eruption of flame and smoke.

III

It was the misfortune of the British that they did not have access to the vital knowledge which their rivals turned to such good account. Not until after Jutland were similar preventive measures adopted for British men-of-war. Special valves were then fitted to the ammunition hoists to prevent flashes from penetrating to the magazines, the powder charges were kept in asbestos bags until they reached the guns, and the routine of fire drill was modified.

But while due allowance must be made for the German advantage in this respect, it does not of itself explain the disparity in the losses suffered by the contending fleets. So pronounced was the British superiority in weight of gunfire that, had the shooting been equally good on both sides, nothing could have saved the greater part of the High Sea Fleet from annihilation. The Grand Fleet mounted a total of 344 heavy guns. Two hundred of these were of 15-inch and 13.5-inch calibre, firing shells of 1920 and 1250 pounds respectively. The remaining 144 guns were 12-inch, discharging 850-pound shells. The Germans had 244 guns all told, the heaviest being a 12-inch piece that fired a shell less than half the weight of the British 15-inch projectile. Forty per cent of the German guns were of 11-inch calibre only, and half of these again were of an old-fashioned model. In aggregate weight of broadside fire the Grand Fleet’s preponderance was at least two to one.

But mere weight is of no avail unless the marksmanship is good. In view of the data now accessible it is impossible to resist the conclusion that German shooting in the first stage of the battle was superior to the British. Whether this superiority was due to better optical instruments, which play an indispensable part in longrange practice, to better guns, powder, and shells, to more advanced principles of training, or to a combination of all these factors, can only be surmised. What we do know is that the German guns registered many more hits than the British, and that almost every hit they made was devastating. Salvo firing was the rule in both fleets, but the methods were different. The British endeavored to enlarge the danger zone by ‘spreading’ the projectiles of each salvo, so that when four shots were discharged together they fell at a considerable distance from each other. This, of course, increases the chances of hitting, but only by single shells. Now the Germans made a point of ‘bunching’ their salvos; the dispersion of the projectiles was very small, and if the aim was true all four would land on the target with one tremendous impact. This is what happened when the British battle cruisers were hit.

We owe practically all our knowledge of the gunnery results at Jutland to German historians, this being a phase of the action on which the British versions are decidedly vague. Captain Punt, of the Berlin Admiralty, states that during the battle-cruiser engagement the British received thirty-six hits and the Germans only ten. Moreover, two of the British ships were sunk, while on the German side not a single gun was put out of action. Captain Paschcn, who was gunnery officer of the Lützow in the battle, has this to say: ‘The British have always maintained that our fire was invariably rapid and accurate in the beginning, but that it soon fell off and became wild, while their own shooting, though slow in finding the range, remained steady and precise throughout. Nevertheless, neither the Lion nor the Princess Royal made a single hit on us between 6.20 and 7.23 P.M., and scored only three hits altogether in ninety minutes. Within the same period both ships, by their own admission, received a total of twelve hits.’

The German shells, in spite of their comparatively light weight, proved infinitely more destructive than the heavier British projectiles. The German type of shell, like every other item of equipment in the German fleet, was the outcome of prolonged research and experiment. A full account of the process has since been published in the German technical press. Steel of an exceptional hardness and toughness formed the body of the shell. It was loaded with a high-explosive aromatic compound, which had first to be ‘ phlegmatized ’ to resist the shock of impact against armor, though without impairing the violence of its disruption when, after penetrating the enemy’s armor, the shell was exploded by a delay-action tuse. ‘The severity of the problem involved in the production of this type of shell, writes Commander Kinzel, of the German service, ‘may be gauged by the fact that at the date of the Jutland battle the British had not succeeded in solving it. In spite of exhaustive experiments they had been compelled to load their armor-piercing shells almost exclusively with black powder, which although less sensitive was far less efficient than the high-explosive compounds.'

It is notorious that the British shells were defective in penetration and disruptive power. Admiral Jellicoe has written frankly on this subject; nor have his criticisms ever been refuted by Admiralty apologists. The topic, though primarily one of technical interest, has a wider significance. The lesson it teaches is that success in naval warfare, as in other spheres of human activity, depends in large measure on attention to detail. The British navy had the biggest ships and the heaviest guns, but its controllers appear to have lacked the infinite capacity for taking pains which was so marked a feature of the whole German naval organization. ‘The want of success at Jutland,’ writes Admiral Sir Cecil Lambert, who was a member of the British Admiralty when Jutland was fought, ‘was due mainly to the fact that ship for ship, gun for gun, engine for engine, there was a higher standard of efficiency in the German fleet than any which the British could claim. The great asset on which the British admiral could rely was the incomparable personnel of his ships; otherwise it was indeed a melancholy experience to find at the outbreak of war that all the public money which had been expended by Parliament on the assurance that they were getting the best that money and science could provide had produced such meagre results.'

Students of the Jutland campaign still find their researches handicapped on the one hand by departmental reticence and on the other by an element of personal controversy which has even found its way into the official histories. In England we have a ‘Beatty school’ and a ‘Jellicoe school.’ The former party, which is most active in presenting its case, represents the engagement as a triumph for the Battle Cruiser Fleet,led by Admiral Beatty. It argues that had Admiral Jellicoe, commanding the main battle fleet, displayed more resolution and given his subordinate closer support, the High Sea Fleet must have been annihilated. Against this it is contended by the partisans of Jellicoe that the fight was rendered indecisive by the faulty leadership and poor gunnery of Beatty’s force. The latter, they point out, had already suffered an undeniable reverse before Jellicoe came on the scene, two of its best ships having been sunk and others damaged, without the infliction of any corresponding loss on the enemy.

Such controversial issues need not be pursued here, but it may be of interest to glance at the record of enemy losses appended to Jellicoe’s original dispatch, in regard to which there has been much disputation. Among the ‘certain losses’ claimed were two dreadnoughts, one pre-dreadnought, and one battle cruiser. The British public, dissatisfied with the inconclusive result of the battle, consoled itself for two and a half years with the reflection that the Germans had, in any case, suffered losses far heavier than those they acknowledged. But even this consolation vanished when, in due course, the High Sea Fleet surrendered for internment, and ships which had long figured in the British list as being at the bottom of the sea were observed to be steaming past with the rest. The only German vessels sunk at Jutland were one battle cruiser, one pre-dreadnought battleship, four light cruisers, and five destroyers — a less imposing list than the official British estimate.

That the table of enemy losses had been compiled in all good faith no one can doubt. In the stress and turmoil of a great sea battle, with hundreds of craft moving at high speed and vision obscured by smoke, spray, and mist, it is almost impossible to establish the fate of individual vessels. The keenest eye may well be deceived. Cruisers may be mistaken for battleships, shell bursts for magazine explosions, and the splash of a salvo for the death throes of a dreadnought. Allowance should be made for such optical illusions, which have been a feature of all naval battles in modern times. But since Admiral Jellicoe has been publicly charged with the responsibility for an apocryphal record of enemy losses, it is worth while to look into this matter. A brief search reveals the interesting fact that a still longer list of ‘German losses’ was put forward by Admiral Beatty himself. Here is an extract from the dispatch he addressed to the Commandcr-in-Chief twelve days after the battle: ‘A review of all the reports which I have received leads me to form the following estimate of the enemy’s losses during the course of the operations described in this report: Sunk, three battle cruisers, two battleships (König or Kaiser class), one Pommern class, two light cruisers, three destroyers.’ It would seem, therefore, that the overstatement of German dreadnought losses for which Jellicoe has always been blamed originated in the misleading reports from the Battle Cruiser Fleet, commanded by his subordinate.

The full story of Jutland has yet to be told. Of many incidents, apparently trivial in themselves but full of instruction to those versed in the technique of the subject, the published accounts are vague and conflicting. Doubtless the archives of Whitehall and the Wilhelmstrasse contain very precise intelligence on all these points, and at some future date, when the advancement of naval science has rendered all existing tactical methods obsolete, and when personal reputations have no longer to be considered, the whole truth may be revealed. But it will not be in our time.