Jutland_The Unfinished Battle

by Nicholas Jellicoe

  Lloyd George had told Geddes that he had six months to make up his mind if he agreed with getting rid of Jellicoe. Now Geddes agreed. He could not work with Jellicoe but, rather than act sooner while the press attacks were at their height, he had decided to wait, possibly to show that it was his decision and not pressure from the press that was forcing his hand. When Geddes decided to act, he did so by letter on 24 December 1917. Jellicoe was still at his office, having just met a group of officers from Iron Duke, who had presented him with a silver model of the ship containing a scroll with all their signatures on it.118 At around six,* as he was about to leave, a messenger arrived from Geddes:

  My dear Sir John Jellicoe

  After very careful consideration, I have come to the conclusion that a change is desirable in the post of the First Sea Lord. I have not, I can assure you, arrived at this view hastily or without personal regret and reluctance. I have consulted the Prime Minister and with his concurrence, I am asking to see the King to make this recommendation to him.119

  Jellicoe replied instantly saying that he would be glad to be relieved as soon as possible. The strain of the workload of the last few years, and particularly the amount of time that he was having to devote to Cabinet, had become very great. A letter from Lloyd George, awarding Jellicoe a title, arrived on Christmas morning. It was one sentence long: ‘Dear Sir, I have the honour to inform you that His Majesty has been pleased to approve of my recommendation that the dignity of a peerage of the United Kingdom be conferred upon you. Yours faithfully, D Lloyd George’.120 Later, the prime minister referred to the ‘courteous letter’ that he had written to Sir John Jellicoe.

  It was a curt manner in which to end such an illustrious career. ‘A strange curtain-line for the most brilliant officer of his time’ was how William Jameson put it.121 And well-timed: it avoided any effective outcry; Parliament had adjourned for the Christmas recess and there were no newspapers over the Christmas-Boxing Day holidays. And though the prime minister made out that this was not the case, the sacking had been carefully co-ordinated with Lloyd George to minimise political fallout. The line in the letter saying that he had wanted to get the prime minister’s ‘concurrence’ was transparent. Sir Auckland Geddes made it plain that he saw David Lloyd George as the puppeteer who pulled his brother’s strings, as the instrument through which he could rid himself of Jellicoe.122

  The reaction after Christmas was ferocious. Prince Louis of Battenberg was livid: ‘I cannot find the words to express my disgust and indignation’.123 Goodenough said: ‘Never a man stood higher in the estimation of his friends, his brother officers and every man and boy in the Service’.124 Asquith said what Lloyd George should have had the courtesy to have written: ‘No one knows better – perhaps no one as well as I do – what the State and the Allied cause owes you’.125 Messages from the fleet demanding his return poured in, but of course he could not go back.

  On 1 January the Sea Lords met (except Wemyss, Duff and Oliver),* saying they ‘had full confidence in Sir John Jellicoe’s ability and fitness to perform his responsible duties … (that) they were most gravely concerned and disturbed by this sudden removal of a most able and distinguished officer.’126 They threatened resignation en masse if they did not get a satisfactory explanation from Geddes on his reasons. That they would have resigned is highly doubtful; nevertheless, Jellicoe asked them to back down: ‘I advised Halsey that the Sea Lords should not resign as it would do no good and be bad for the country.’127 John Winton said that the point of resignation in protest was more a figure of speech than real intention.128 Added to that, it would never have been in Jellicoe’s character to publicly bandstand his obvious bitterness.†

  As always, Geddes was slippery. He claimed that others had been in favour of the dismissal, Carson in particular. Carson flatly denied it and said that when Geddes raised the issue in October of what he should do his reply was crystal clear: ‘Do? Why stand beside him and think no more about it’.129 Carson and Jellicoe had been close and, indeed, Sir Edward later made it clear to the Commons that Jellicoe had been targeted by Lloyd George for months.

  It was a sad affair, after a lifetime of service to his country and the Navy. No reason was given for the dismissal. Jellicoe had been Asquith’s choice for the position, not Lloyd George’s. But there is ample evidence to speculate as to the immediate causes.

  Marder believed it was Jellicoe’s refusal to approve of the dismissal of Bacon that was ‘the catalyst that prompted (his) dismissal’; Temple Patterson because of the accumulated strain of twenty-eight months of command at sea and eleven months at the Admiralty during Britain’s most dire time. Jellicoe himself thought that it was as a result of Lord Northcliffe’s press campaign carefully orchestrated with his close ally David Lloyd George.

  Jellicoe had always held the press at arm’s length (while Beatty, wisely, learnt how to use and befriend journalists). In The Submarine Peril he explained his reasons for not letting journalists onto Iron Duke: ‘it was not advisable to give full details of our methods’ to the press. Jellicoe, according to Thompson, had heard that Northcliffe had spoken with Carson in late February or March 1917 and ‘complained personally to Carson’ about the ‘ineptitude of the Navy’ after his Essex house had been hit by German destroyer fire.130 Carson experienced the typical Lloyd George over a breakfast meeting: ‘Sack the lot of them’, ‘why do you not get fresh men with sea experience?’131 Equally, Carson became deeply respected in the Navy for his determination not to let the politicians overrule them.132 He was very conscious that his role was one of defending naval officers from Lloyd George’s constant attacks, even reminding Jellicoe on one occasion when the latter had come to see him about resigning, that he was his boss, not Lloyd George, and that, as is the way in the Navy, he should ‘carry on.

  Admiral Rosslyn ‘Rosie’ Wemyss took over the post of First Sea Lord. In the words of his biographer, his wife, ‘Confidence and cheerfulness took the place of uncertainty and gloom at the Admiralty’, and that he had ‘not been seated many weeks in the First Sea Lord’s chair before I had the pleasure of knowing that the machine was running more smoothly and efficiently than before.’133 The King was conscious of Wemyss’s intellectual shortcomings, and even Wemyss himself made no bones about it, but at the same time the King was very confident of his friend’s suitability for the role that Jellicoe had vacated. He trusted Wemyss’s ability with people and his practical mind. Beatty worked closely with Wemyss from the start, taken by his easy way, but later came to disagree more fundamentally on policy. Most importantly on destroyers: ‘to counter the submarine menace defence only has been used. To me it appeared absolutely necessary that the tables be turned and we must hunt the enemy submarines instead of them hunting us’.134 His ideas for submarine hunting groups never came to fruition as ‘senior members of the Staff chose not to reduce the readiness of the Grand Fleet in the face of opposition from Beatty’.135 Others, like Madden, Jellicoe’s brother-in-law, were not so happy. He wrote that he was ‘full of fear for the future; the Grand Fleet is all right as Beatty is strong enough to refuse to throw it away on wild cat schemes, but the wider field of operations is not in such able hands.’136

  Andrew Gordon wrote that ‘Jellicoe had gone to the Admiralty partly to get to grips with the submarine menace. He failed.’137 I disagree. Through the creation of the Anti-Submarine Division he laid solid foundations for the future success of the submarine war. Sims’s letter said as much: ‘I am distressed to hear of your leaving the Admiralty when the effects of all your anti-submarine measures are showing such great success’.138

  In the same vein, Jameson put much in balance: ‘He may have been slow to decide (when there was no evidence to help him) that convoy would thwart the U-boat, and stubborn in concentrating on the so-called “offensive” methods. But it was he who had given “teeth” to the anti-submarine organization without which convoys could not have enjoyed their present success’.139 Even Lloyd George would write in his memoirs
that ‘the greatest allied triumph’ and the ‘real decision of the war’ was meeting and defeating the U-boat threat in 1917.140

  * The staple diet became ‘turnips and herb tea, potato bread, very little meat’ (Gibson and Harper, p322).

  † Scheer had written to the Kaiser shortly after the Battle of Jutland saying that ‘A victorious end to the war in the foreseeable future can only be achieved by wearing down the British economy, therefore by setting the U-boats against the British trade routes … I strongly advise your Majesty not to opt for any milder form of U-boat warfare … which would force us into humiliating loss of face if we could not act without total ruthlessness (mit voller Schärfe)’, quoted in Nicolas Wolz, From Imperial Splendour to Internment. The German Navy in the First World War (Seaforth, 2015).

  ‡ A German study before the war had been done by Korvettenkapitän Blum on what numbers of submarines would be needed to make an economic blockade of Britain successful. He reckoned 222, so the second unrestricted submarine campaign would be launched with half of what he calculated was necessary. Fregattenkapitän Hermann Bauer, who led the North Sea submarines at the start of the war, said that of the twenty-one submarines stationed there in 1914, only three or four could be maintained on patrol (Terraine, p9).

  * Jellicoe brought the bulk of his trusted officers from the Grand Fleet when he moved to the Admiralty. Duff had been 2IC of the 4th BS, Captain W W Fisher became the director of the Anti-Submarine Division itself, RA Hope became Jellicoe’s deputy, and RA Lionel Halsey, Third Sea Lord.

  * The Short Type 184, the type flown by Rutland before the battle of Jutland, became the RNAS’s principal aircraft and around 650 were built, but the endurance was only around two and a half hours compared to the H12’s six.

  * Jellicoe, The Submarine Peril, p111. The Möwe, built in 1914, was originally employed as a minelayer by the German navy. At the end of 1915 she was converted and began her life as an armed merchant ship under Swedish colours. Möwe’s operational success was impressive – and dangerous. When attacking, her Swedish colours would be lowered and the German Imperial flag hoisted before the main armament of four SK L/45 5.9in (15cm) guns were brought to bear. In addition, she was armed with two 50cm torpedo tubes and carried a very large number of mines (500). She was not fast – at best she could manage around 13 knots – but at that sort of speed she was able to cover 8,700 nautical miles. By war’s end her guns had sunk forty-five merchantmen.

  * Allan Macfarlane told me, in personal correspondence, that he could find no further detailed discussion of these statistics in the papers of Jellicoe, Duff, Lloyd George (in the Parliamentary Archives) and Carson, nor was there anything that he could find in the Admiralty records at The National Archives.

  * Beatty had been at the Longhope Conference (in the Orkneys) and made his strong support of convoy known, but in this context he was talking about the Scandinavian convoy, not the transatlantic. Dreyer quotes the findings, also saying that ‘The conference unanimously agreed that a system of convoy should be tried, but the representatives were unable to state whether the necessary vessels could be spared from their respective areas’ (Dreyer, Sea Heritage, p218).

  † Colvin writes that ‘He (Lloyd George) had worked – so he told his biographers – in complete harmony with Sir John Jellicoe and the other Sea Lords; he had understood the reason for their cautions and delays in the matter of convoy; they were due entirely, in his opinion, to practical difficulties which had to be overcome.’ (Colvin, Carson, p261). This does not sound like the public Lloyd George, but might have been his real view.

  * Sims held Jellicoe in high regard even where the anti-submarine war was concerned: ‘The whole scheme which has defeated the German submarine campaign was conceived by Admiral Jellicoe just before he was fired’ (see Altham, p149, also Temple Patterson, p169).

  * Massie, p743. Massie says that Geddes’ letter arrived marked ‘Personal and Strictly Private’. Gibson and Harper, rather theatrically, p327, have it a little later, at 9pm. ‘The strokes of Big Ben’s chimes floated through the still wintry night … eight … nine o’clock.’

  * Duff’s offer of resignation on 28 December was accepted by Geddes, even if the latter asked him to come back to the post when he realised how much experience was being lost. Carson also resigned, but later, on 22 January 1918.

  † Just the opposite. Jameson talks about him meeting the Bishop of London as he was strolling on the Embankment. ‘This is the first time, Bishop, I’ve been sacked in my life’ (Jameson, p204) was his rather self-effacing comment.

  12

  From Kiel to Scapa Flow

  German sorties after Jutland

  One of the myths that somehow gained traction in the post-Jutland years was that Germany’s High Seas Fleet never put to sea again after the battle. This is simply not true. Not counting the North Sea crossing to internment at Scapa Flow, the fleet, in fact, came out a further three times, even if its role was significantly different.

  Jutland had changed Scheer’s thinking fundamentally. He wrote to the Kaiser that ‘a victorious termination of the war can only be obtained by the employment of the submarine’.1 Two weeks later he added: ‘We have proved to the world that the British fleet is not invincible … Yet if, in our present situation, we are not ultimately to bleed to death materially, we must make unrestricted use of the submarine to paralyse England’s vital nerve.’2 Effectively, Scheer argued, ‘even the happiest outcome of a battle on the high seas will not force Britain to sue for peace in this war’. The Kaiser put his thoughts down in the margin. He only wrote one word: ‘Right’.3 Scheer’s major opposition came from Bethmann-Hollweg, who feared that the result of such a policy would be America’s entry into the war.

  While Derfflinger and Seydlitz were still in dry dock undergoing much-needed repairs, Großer Kurfürst, Markgraf and the new eight 15in-gunned Bayern were used to reinforce Hipper’s 1st Scouting Group. The slow-moving pre-dreadnoughts were taken out of the battle line but the dreadnought König Albert, which had been in dry dock during Jutland, was now available. Hipper’s idea was similar to the pre-Jutland planning. His force would bombard the town of Sunderland, pull Beatty out and across a waiting submarine line, while the High Seas Fleet would be lurking a safe distance away, hoping to achieve the same surprise that was the case in the middle of the battle-cruiser action at Jutland. Submarines would play a stronger role. Scheer increased their number from the seventeen he had deployed at Jutland to twenty-four.

  On 18 August 1916 an intercepted signal gave warning that the High Seas Fleet was preparing another sortie, and the Grand Fleet was at sea before the Germans sailed. Its margin was even more overwhelming this time: thirty-five dreadnoughts against nineteen. And this time Jellicoe and Beatty would also be supported by the Harwich Force of light cruisers and destroyers. Jellicoe joined the fleet late as he had been ill. The stress of the last two years of command had started to catch up with him. It would temporarily render him deaf. The light cruiser Royalist took him out to his command.

  The German fleet itself went back to sea on the night of 18 August 1916. Hipper’s five capital ships led Scheers fourteen dreadnoughts and supporting forces. Each side now was well-supported by airborne reconnaissance. Scheer had allocated eight Zeppelins – four to the north, four to the west – while the British used kite balloons. Towed behind a dreadnought, the balloons would give them a view from 1,000ft above the battlefield. Their first use gave the fleet’s reconnaissance capability an enormous forward stride.

  Goodenoughs scouts were also out ahead. Dublin first spotted activity but thought it to be a fishing-boat sail.* Very soon after, Nottingham was hit by two torpedo explosions and when Dublin came back to help, she was also attacked. At 06:25 yet another torpedo hit. This time Nottingham’s crew were taken off by two destroyers.4 Jellicoe was now even more worried that the Germans had perfected the weapon that he had so needlessly feared at Jutland. He ordered that the Grand Fleet should not be put at risk and,
consequently, not cross a line that roughly ran south of Scotland or east of Belgium, unless there was a real chance of catching the German battle fleet: he turned his fleet north, thinking it ‘prudent to avoid this locality … until it was ascertained that the damage was due to torpedoes’.5

  It was now becoming abundantly clear to Jellicoe that the submarine was coming into its own. In fact, he had laid a similar trap for his German counterparts, positioning five submarines along the access points to the Heligoland Bight. At 800yds (730m), the commander of E.23, Lieutenant Commander Turner, was able to launch and successfully hit the battleship Westfalen after an abortive first effort on a battle-cruiser and a second miss at Scheers main battleship line, but he only damaged her. Scheer ordered the wounded ship, along with five escorting destroyers, to return home to port. Turner was able, however, to surface and let Jellicoe know what he had seen.