Jutland_The Unfinished Battle

by Nicholas Jellicoe

  Jellicoe was starting to pace. He had signalled Marlborough asking, ‘What can you see?’ (TOO 18:00) and the reply was only Lion leading the battle-cruisers. A minute later (TOO 18:01) he signalled Beatty, ‘Where is the enemy B.F?’. Beatty’s reply that the enemy battle fleet was ‘bearing S.S.W’ was received at 18:14 on Iron Duke: no other detail.

  To the officers on the bridge of the Iron Duke, Beatty was now clearly in sight, but ‘engaged with an enemy invisible to us’.20 At exactly the same moment, Southampton reported that she had now ‘lost sight of the enemy battle-fleet’, though a destroyer signalled an early visual contact: ‘Whole Hun battle-fleet coming up, steering N by E’, which was another superlatively uninformative report. Then five minutes later (TOO 18:06) came Beatty’s less than helpful reply: ‘Enemy battle-cruisers bearing south-south-west’. Jellicoe signalled again: ‘Where is the enemy battle fleet?’ Finally, at 18:14 Beatty’s earlier (18:01 TOO) message was received on Iron Duke. Beatty had regained at least some visual contact with the target that the Dewar brothers later described as having been ‘delivered’ into Jellicoe’s ‘lap’, but it was Barham who eventually gave Jellicoe the visual fix that he needed, when she signalled by flags at 18:10 that the ‘Enemy’s battle fleet S.S.E’.

  Bacon traced the battle-cruisers’ return to the north from 16:40 up to the point when Beatty led the Germans to Jellicoe’s battleships. It is clear that for much of the time from 16:40 to 18:01, Beatty had, in fact, lost touch with the German battle fleet, hence Beatty’s wording – ‘have sighted’ – in his reply to Jellicoe’s first request (TOO 18:01), which was only seen after Beatty’s other message regarding the German battle-cruisers had been received on Iron Duke. It was not until TOO 18:18 (a message not dispatched till 18:27) that Lion started to fill in some of the blanks: ‘Enemy battle-fleet in sight bearing south, the nearest ship is distant 7 miles’. Jellicoe’s battle fleet had already been engaged for a full ten minutes.

  It was small wonder that Bacon was contemptuous of the absurdly exaggerated wording, in an article by Alexander Bell Filson Young that was published in the Daily Express the following Sunday, 4 June: ‘With that risk throughout, he [Admiral Beatty] played throughout this marvellous fighting chase towards and from the south-east of Jutland, when he brought back the whole German High Seas Fleet and laid it, as a cat brings you a mouse, at Jellicoe’s feet.’ In The Jutland Scandal, in words dripping with sarcasm, Bacon wrote: ‘This is delightful! The cat ran away from the mouse and lost sight of it in twenty minutes and never saw it again. When asked where the mouse was the cat had to confess it didn’t know.’21

  Leading up to the deployment, this lack of precision was extraordinary. As Jellicoe would later describe his own frustrations to Beatty:

  My great difficulty … was due to the difference in reckoning between Lion, 2nd Lt CS [Light Cruiser Squadron] and Iron Duke. This caused me to find the enemy and you in a totally unexpected direction and made deployment very difficult, and as the first thing I saw was firing from right ahead to abaft the beam, it was important to guess the position of the enemy battle fleet. In fact, I did not know it till some time after deployment.22

  The deployment that Jellicoe had to decide upon could actually have been a number of distinct manoeuvres or one fluid one. He had to take the fleet from its boxed cruising formation, in which each division steamed in parallel to another, to one in which a battle line would allow as many guns as possible to bear on the enemy: a formation pretty well unchanged since Nelson’s time. Even without the pressure of an unseen enemy fleet bearing down, it was a complex procedure in good visibility, but what Jellicoe faced that day was a lack of information, low visibility brought about by heavy curtains of mist mixed with cordite and funnel smoke, and a very fast-changing picture as the forces raced to a final point of convergence. He had practised many variants of the manoeuvre – at least ten times in the first six weeks of the war. During his command of the Grand Fleet, his ideas had evolved. It was clear to Jellicoe that the principle upon which he would take the decision was one which would be arrived at, not in the brief intensity of battle, but after deep and reflective consideration.

  As commander-in-chief, Jellicoe did not want to remain either in the van or in the rear. He wanted to be in the centre. This was a practical matter and had been concluded as the best policy for a commander’s position following the 1909 fleet sea trials under Admiral Lord Charles Beresford’s direction. If Jellicoe were to maintain some manner of control over his fleet, issuing signals from the centre was faster than having them passed down an entire line, in either direction. He wanted to make sure that his opponent would not be able easily to run from the field of battle, as indeed had happened in December 1914 after the Scarborough raid and, again, in January 1915 after the Dogger Bank action. On both occasions the Germans had escaped south to Heligoland.* Whether or not they would be seeking an engagement (and this was a point itself on which thinking had evolved), the escape route south had to be blocked.

  If Jellicoe assumed that the main German battle fleet would be coming from a south or southeasterly direction, his options, broadly, were these. He could deploy to the east, towards the Skagerrak, to hold the foe off the coast, or he could deploy to the west to close faster. There were variations within this. He could even deploy on the centre, although this manoeuvre had neither been contemplated nor practised. He could also move his columns to a new formation in an equal-speed manoeuvre or he could do so in an unequal-speed one.

  In an equal-speed approach, each column of ships would turn 90 degrees in succession in the wake of the division leader, who would – eventually – follow the stern of the last ship of the neighbouring column on the wing on which the deployment would be made. Ships in cruising formation were normally 500yds (460m) apart (roughly two and a half cables’ length), measured stern to stern.*

  In an unequal-speed manoeuvre, divisions would change course 90 degrees (or 8 points) at declining speeds as one moved from the wing that would become the van and at ever-increasing distances, so that the end battle line was actually a staggered echelon formation, with each successive line slightly off-centre of the preceding division’s line of ships. The time taken for the deployment was significantly faster for an equal-speed method: four minutes against eleven to twenty for an unequal-speed deployment.23

  As gunnery ranges increased, the speed of deployment into a battle line meant the critical minutes of added broadside could be let loose on an enemy at ranges longer than the ones they could employ to hit back. British assumptions were that the Germans would want to fight a closer-ranged battle than them. Fisher’s intentions had always been to push for speed and range under the premise that the need was to ‘hit first, hit hard and keep on hitting’. Weather, therefore, had a decidedly important role to play. Not only would low visibility blunt British long-range gunnery superiority, but wind, current, sun intensity and direction would also play their parts too.

  The decision to deploy to port would be based on a number of factors. While it meant that action would not be joined so quickly, it put the Grand Fleet in an advantageous gunnery position, with the Germans silhouetted against the western horizon. Jellicoe had asked Dreyer’s opinion on this and he was unequivocal: ‘The most favourable direction was to the southward, and would draw westward as the sun sank’.24 With a westerly wind blowing, it would also mean that smoke from their guns would drift to the disengaged side of British ships. Scheers ships would be silhouetted against the western sun while Jellicoe’s would be hidden by the intervening haze and a dark, eastern backdrop. The smoke would drift ahead and to the front of the German guns.

  Jellicoe calculated that a deployment to starboard, while possibly bringing him closer to the enemy and therefore allowing him to open fire quicker, would, in all likelihood, have placed his fleet in much higher danger of having its own ‘T’ crossed.25 This has often been characterised as a deployment ‘away from the enemy’. It is a misleading phrase in the sense that it
immediately suggests that Jellicoe lacked the Nelsonian spirit of ‘closing with the enemy’.

  The port deployment would also put the fleet in a better blocking position if the Germans were trying to take the eastern route through the Skagerrak as the closest one. At Jutland, Jellicoe had considerably increased the broadside power of the battle line, raising it by around a quarter from just over 200,000lbs (91,000kg) to more than 270,000lbs (120,000kg). More importantly, while increasing the number of columns from five to six, he rebalanced the broadside weight from the starboard to the port. In 1914, the two outer starboard columns had over 51 per cent of the broadside weight – in 1916, the combined weight of the three starboard columns was less than 45 per cent.26

  Comparative Allocation of Broadside Weight at the Deployment: 1914 versus 1916

  August 1914

  May 1916

  Watched closely by his staff, Jellicoe mulled over the decision but quickly ordered Dreyer to ‘commence the deployment’. Two short blasts signalled the turn to port. Jellicoe’s signal to the fleet was originally given as ‘Hoist Equal Speed Pendant south-east’. The fleet’s signals officer, ARW Woods, questioned the order and asked, ‘Would you make it a point to port, sir, so they will know that it is on the port wing column?’ Jellicoe agreed: ‘Very well, hoist equal-speed pendant south-east-by-south’. The signal, which became famous, is now better known now as ‘Equal Speed Charlie London’.*

  Most commentators (not, obviously, Beatty or Churchill) thought the deployment a stroke of genius. Julian Corbett called it ‘the supreme moment in naval war’,27 Arthur Marder ‘the peak moment of the influence of sea power on history’.28 Andrew Gordon uses few superlatives, saying that the decision was as good as could have been expected, given the lack of time and information.29 For me, while it may be personally appealing to hear this, both Marder’s and Corbett’s comments seem too flamboyant. It was a carefully thought-out and calculated decision, but to describe this as a ‘supreme moment’ smacks of the kind of black-and-white position one would not expect from a non-partisan account, although one could conclude that within the space of a quarter of an hour, the two British admirals Jellicoe and Beatty had both displayed a certain brilliance: Jellicoe in his deployment and Beatty in bending the van and hiding the Grand Fleet’s approach from Hipper.

  The alternatives were scarce. Churchill, under the influence of his naval secretary, Kenneth Dewar, wrote that a deployment on the centre would have been the best manoeuvre. It also could have been an extremely dangerous one (Dewar eventually dropped his support of the idea) as it also would have put the commander-in-chief at the van of the battleship line, not a good position for equidistant flag signals to the line. Whichever way one looks at it, it was an extraordinarily significant decision, given the minimum amount of information Jellicoe had at the critical moment. His own comment summed it up nicely: ‘I wish someone would tell me who is firing and what they are firing at’.30

  The scene at the deployment was remarkable, one ship passing over another’s track as 144 captains steered their ships through the complex manoeuvre with a minimum of sea room between them.31 The water was a churning mass of bubbling brown, criss-crossed with fantails and propeller wash.

  The sea was white with fountains kicked up by German shells. There didn’t seem room for a ship to escape but lots of us were there and came out smiling though unfortunately we got a big splinter which damaged one of our big forced-draught fans putting one boiler room out of action and forcing us to reduce our speed for some time to 18 knots, so we had to trot along with the battleships.32

  It did not all go quite to plan. On St Vincent, Major Claude Wallace, permitted to sail with the ship at the last moment, reported that she slowed to 9 knots.33 Some ships even stopped dead in the water because the lanes just became so crowded. As the 2nd Light Cruiser Squadron joined at the rear, Southampton had to slow so much that in the end she turned 32 points and even then nearly collided with one of the Queen Elizabeth-class battleships (probably Malaya or Valiant).34 Warspite turned inside Valiant (at around 18:15) and Malaya, and was hit by a 12in shell from Kaiserin.

  Being small was not always to one’s advantage: Galatea actually passed right beside Agincourt, just as the latter opened fire, feeling the full impact of the guns’ pressure wave. And all this was happening when the exact position of the German fleet was still unknown: ‘The signal was actually hauled down at 18:15. We still had not sighted a German ship, but [the Germans] were obviously very close.’35

  Evan-Thomas assumed that Jellicoe would deploy to starboard and wanted to place his ships at the van. Instead, he decided that it was better to tuck in behind Agincourt, the last ship in the line behind Marlborough.† But even then there would be some real challenges to face.

  We in the 5th Battle Squadron took station in the rear of the 1st Battle Squadron. In doing so we must have been going too fast, for we ran up on to the last ship of the line and were actually overlapping each other, thus presenting an excellent target to the Huns, who were extremely quick in taking advantage of it… Amidst this perfect deluge of shells, the light cruisers and destroyers were twisting and turning, endeavouring to avoid each other and the big ships who were themselves manoeuvring violently. There were no collisions, and a few ships hit: a wonderful display of seamanship and clear-headedness.36

  With all ships crossing each other as units attempted to reform into a new battle line, the place aptly became known as ‘Windy Corner. It was hardly the ‘parade ground’ mentioned by Filson Young in his Daily Express criticism:

  … one can find no technical fault with Admiral Jellicoe’s deployment, which was strictly according to the rules. The only problem lay in the fact that at 18:15 in the evening, and in the midst of a battle, there is not always time to observe the rules of the parade ground. The opportunity was there but opportunity did not wait long enough for Admiral Jellicoe.37

  There was considerable confusion, particularly around the 12th Flotilla, which had been posted as an anti-submarine screen at the rear. The battle-cruisers came so close that Faulknor (the flotilla leader) had to stop engines and ‘several 12th Flotilla destroyers had to go astern to avoid a collision’.38 Seven miles away were the German battleships and battle-cruisers. From his post on Marlborough, Lieutenant Bowyer-Smith described the difficulty that the low visibility presented: ‘We tried to engage them [Lützow] but owing to the mist failed to get the guns off… We engaged her [König] immediately, opening fire without being able to get the range due to the mist, and hit her with our fourth and fifth salvos.’39

  Finally, the line of British ships started to stretch out like a long snake: King George V, Ajax, Centurion, Erin, Orion, Monarch, Conqueror and Thunderer. In the centre were Iron Duke, Royal Oak, Superb, Canada, Benbow, Bellerophon, Temeraire and Vanguard.40 At the rear were Colossus, Collingwood, Neptune, St Vincent, Marlborough, Revenge, Hercules and Agincourt.

  This deployment has been the focus of heated debate ever since. Even if the fleet had practised a deployment of this nature, the conditions would not have been anything close to those faced by Jellicoe’s massed formations on the actual day. Somewhere in Jellicoe’s mind might also have been a dark memory: his near-drowning in Libyan waters twenty years earlier in 1893 during Admiral Tryon’s attempt at a relatively simple two-ship manoeuvre that led to the catastrophic sinking of the Victoria.41 But I certainly do not think it produced what some have described as a lifelong dread of drowning. What Jellicoe was now attempting was a manoeuvre that required total precision under the very real threat of being caught mid-manoeuvre by the enemy.

  Churchill, as mentioned earlier, later criticised the deployment on either flank, suggesting that valuable time and distance were thrown away, and offered the alternative of a deployment on the centre, an idea that was not even covered by the GFBOs: as also pointed out, no such manoeuvre had been practised by the Grand Fleet. In the best of conditions – good visibility being key – the equal-speed manoeuvre would have been
complex, as many of the ships following their division leaders would have the tendency to cut corners; so speed changes were – as was the case on the day – inevitable.

  Gordon makes specific reference to the fact the deployment was probably developed by Sir Arthur Wilson, in the Channel Fleet, and frequently practised as early as 1903.42 He also noted that it was thought up when gunnery ranges were considerably shorter; by the time of the longer ranges of Jutland, it became necessary for the manoeuvre to be initiated before sighting the enemy, otherwise the manoeuvre would be completely carried out under fire. With an unseen enemy, the time must have seemed like an ‘eternity’. Jellicoe managed to maintain an extraordinary composure in what was – and here I do not feel it an exaggeration to describe it like this – one of the most decisive single moments of the war.

  The line was nearly caught by enemy fire in mid-manoeuvre, although the initial fire falling among the battleships were more likely ‘overs’: enemy fire that had passed ‘long’ over the battle-cruiser line and was falling on the line of battleships behind. Beatty later wanted the reference in the Harper record to ‘longs’ falling among the battle fleet taken out altogether, and was supposedly heard to remark sarcastically at a 14 July 1920 text review meeting with Harper: ‘Well, I suppose there is no harm in the public knowing that someone in the battle fleet got wet, as that is about all they [the battleships] had to do with Jutland’.43

  It was with comments like these that Beatty – probably unintentionally – stoked the fires of the post-Jutland controversy, playing up the role of the battle-cruisers, and dismissing the contribution and later important role of Jellicoe’s battle fleet. Its also raises a question: had it not been for bad visibility on the day, might the Grand Fleet have suffered a different and potentially much nastier fate? Similar to the battle-cruisers? Even the young Prince Albert, the future George VI, who was on Collingwood as a gunner, felt the potential for slight: ‘Bertie is very proud of being in action but he is sorry that his ship was not hit (although she was straddled by several salvos) as she has nothing to show that she has been in the fight’.44