British coincidence range-finders proved difficult even in ideal conditions. German Zeiss stereoscopic range-finders were found to be more accurate for initial range-finding, but the Barr and Stroud split screen, if provided with a hard, well-defined edge, worked well, causing less strain. It was said that while German initial ranging was excellent, its accuracy did tend to fall off over time.
The German ‘ladder’ approach to firing required salvos being rapidly fired from successive turrets, while the shells from the previous turret were still in flight at ranges separated by around 400yds (370m). They were then able rapidly to ‘ladder’ up or down, depending on ‘spotting’ the shell fall. ‘Laddering’ up was obviously easier to read and it was probably significant here that the initial fire of the British battle-cruisers fell very long. The British often relied more on speed than careful calculation, and even if Jellicoe himself was not of the ‘speed school’, Beatty was.* Jellicoe is still much criticised for his seemingly exaggerated respect for the new weapons of the day – torpedoes and mines – but he was dealing with mostly untried technologies. He clearly stated that he would not pursue an enemy that executed a turn-away, especially at night, as he was concerned at being led over mines dropped by the retreating force. As it turned out, the effect of mines in the battle was negligible. Nevertheless, the threat led to the later introduction of the paravane (a type of towed underwater kite which cut the cables of anchored mines), affording a fleet steaming into a minefield some protection.
The torpedo was a different matter. Scheer and Hipper were torpedo specialists. Jellicoe and Beatty were both concerned to keep any engagement outside of torpedo range, at roughly 14,000yds (12,800m). This makes it a little ironic that the British scored more torpedo hits and escaped with battleship torpedo damage only to Marlborough. The British hits on Seydlitz could have been exploited had she been re-engaged in the night action. Additionally, German torpedo activity at night was significantly less than what had been feared by Jellicoe.†
Torpedo Hits at Jutland (*sunk)
German
British
Battleships
Pommern*
Marlborough
Battle-cruisers
Seydlitz
Light cruisers
Wiesbaden
Frauenlob*
Destroyers
Shark*
Porpoise
Torpedo boats
V.29*
V.35
Source: Brown, ‘Torpedoes at Jutland’.
During the turn-away, the number of near-misses was high. The likelihood of serious damage to the battle fleet had Jellicoe not turned away was almost certain. But even with the turn-away, had the Germans increased the number of torpedoes within the fan, the results, it has been suggested, might also have been very different. Both sides tended to conserve torpedoes rather than use quantity when the opportunity presented itself. As an example of what might have been achieved, six months after Jutland, at the Horns Reef, the British submarine J.1. scored four hits in a four-torpedo spread. The fact that German torpedoes did not inflict heavier damage should not lead one to conclude that the threat itself was non-existent or, indeed, question the wisdom of the turn-away manoeuvre practised by almost every navy at the time. It is sometimes not the actual success of a weapon in use, but rather the effect of the threat that shows its potential.
The importance of flash protection was quickly understood by the Germans after the loss of Blücher and Seydlitz’s near-fatal turret fire at Dogger Bank. The British did not have quite the same experience from which to learn and after Jutland, Beatty remained quiet on the subject. He owed much to his gunnery officer, Warrant Officer Gunner Alexander Grant, who had been brought up in the practices of the Grand Fleet, and who limited the open stacking of cordite and imposed tighter procedure when he joined Lion. Grant was not popular for his actions but it might have been some of his efforts (as well, of course, Major Harvey’s) that saved Lion. Jellicoe had always been worried that the system of anti-flash doors would be compromised by the emphasis on gunnery speed. In the event, the concerns he expressed in late 1915, telling Beatty that he felt it [gunnery speed] was ‘being carried to excess’, were completely justified.
After the disappointment of Dogger Bank, Beatty concluded that the ideal gunnery range for battle-cruiser action would be 12,000–14,000yds (11,000–12,800m): this would be at the extremes of torpedo effectiveness and out of range of German secondary armament. He also concluded that the problem was too few hits, but he concentrated on speed of fire rather than on accuracy. Within a year of Dogger Bank, the safety granted by the ‘flash-tight interlocks from the ammunition hoists that carried the cordite charges from the magazine, safe in the bowels of the ship, to the exposed gun mountings’ was removed on all the ships of the Battle Cruiser Fleet.9 Ironically, the only exception was Lion, where Alexander Grant had ordered them to be replaced, in direct opposition to both Chatfield’s and Beatty’s preference. Chatfield remarked: ‘whoever gets the biggest volume of fire short or hitting will gain the ascendancy and keep it as the other person can’t see to reply’.10 Maybe this is why the gunnery results of the battle-cruiser practice shoots were not good. In the spring 1916 exercises, for example, ‘the Tigers [was] so bad her captain was censured’.11
On 2 June 1916, after the battle-cruiser bloodletting of Jutland, Beatty quietly ordered the flash-tight interlocks to be restored.* The Grand Fleet had notfound a solution to, in Andrew Lambert’s wonderfully visual description, ‘a fleet steaming off the bottom of the page! ‘They [the Germans] were meant to steam along in parallel courses and obligingly be sunk. They didn’t do that. Why on earth should they?’12
The debate on dogma: the Grand Fleet Battle Orders
The British fleet that fought at Jutland was steeped in traditions and etiquette that had been built over centuries, while the ships and weapons technologies they were to fight in and fight with had completely changed in twenty short years. With war, direct experience was garnered, and this knowledge from battle then applied. Apart from Tsushima, a decade previously, since Trafalgar there had been no fleet action experience from which to develop any new tactics. All commentary was supposition, a purely hypothetical guessing game. Jutland was the first opportunity for both the Germans and British to test their thinking. Jellicoe’s approach to tactics has to be looked at within a fast-changing environment. It could not have been more different from our own age, where the Western powers have been almost continuously engaged in military or naval actions somewhere around the globe.
The launch of HMS Dreadnought instantly rendered all other battleships obsolete, including much of the existing British fleet. Fisher’s battle-cruiser concept was supposed to have a similar impact but ended up costing his country’s Navy dearly. In the space of thirty years accurate naval gunnery had increased from ranges of 1,600–2,000yds (1,460-1,830m) to the Queen Elizabeth class that could hurl a shell weighing almost a ton over a distance of 24,400yds (22,300m): just under fourteen miles.13 Torpedoes, which had a range of over 1,000yds just before the start of the twentieth century, were, at Jutland, able to cover 17,000yds (15,500m) in twenty-eight minutes: a speed of 600yds a minute.14 Mines had become more sophisticated. They now started to incorporate variable depth settings, multiple launch platforms, and later even a magnetic fusing type.
In other complementary areas, systems had not kept pace, notably in communications. Flags, a system that was developed at the time of Nelson, was still the primary method of sending orders up and down a battle line. Visual contact and good visibility were fundamental to their efficacy. WT, still in its infancy, was discouraged before any fleet engagement for fear of giving the enemy one’s position and even, because of the nature and strength of signal, an indication of one’s force strength.
British fleet doctrine on how to engage with the Germans was first codified by Jellicoe in what were known as the Grand Fleet Battle Orders, usually referred to by their initials, the GFBOs.
These were detailed instructions to commanders as to what actions were appropriate or mandated under the widest possible range of circumstances, most of which – unfortunately, but by necessity – had been tested out only in manoeuvres and not in battle conditions. To say that the orders did not leave much to individual initiative is an understatement.
Later rewritten when Beatty commanded the Grand Fleet, the GFBOs were a constantly changing body of tactical thinking. Consequently, quoting the GFBOs in general as a single source of validating support for Jellicoe or Beatty is often a very misleading exercise but – with the caveat that I am not a naval man – I will try to highlight some of the issues on which the two admirals were at variance.
The GFBO print-run was around 250 copies. This suggests that circulation reached captain level. However, there were issues, often important and significant ones, not dealt with in the main body of orders that were handled in memoranda marked ‘Most Secret’, personally delivered by Jellicoe to his admirals and commodores: a group of fourteen people. Jellicoe’s starting point was the overall strategy that he needed to pursue. His primary objective was not defeat of the High Seas Fleet; it was retention of the command of the seas. Marder spoke of the annihilation of the enemy as a ‘nice to have’, not a primary, objective.
It is not, in my opinion, wise to risk unduly the heavy ships of the Grand Fleet in an attempt to hasten the end of the High Seas Fleet, particularly if the risks come, not from the High Seas Fleet itselfbut from such attributes as mines and submarines. There is no doubt that, provided there is a chance of destroying some of the enemy’s heavy ships, it is right and proper to run risks with our own heavy ships, but unless the chances are reasonably great, I do not think that such risks should be run, seeing that any real disaster to our heavy ships lays the country open to invasion.15
It is this kind of thinking that Arthur Marder points to when he talks about the ‘subordination of the offensive spirit to defensive precautions, especially against the torpedo’.16 Jellicoe’s outlook had been derived from an almost purely technical perspective, but it was fought over in the most emotional manner. The clear risk for Jellicoe was not so much the High Seas Fleet as the torpedo and mine. This fear supported a long-range plan of battle because the torpedo’s danger and the assumed German superiority in this weapon made Jellicoe extremely conscious of the downside potential for any error on his part. In ‘subordination of the offensive spirit’, Marder cited the adherence to the ‘single line, parallel course, and long range of the plan of battle; and centralised command’. All of these Jellicoe, and the Admiralty, believed in.
A summing-up by an adversary says it well:
The greatness of personality of a Jellicoe perhaps rests in the fact that he did not yield to fighting impulse, but evinced a statesmanlike mind … To him it was more important to keep his country’s fleet intact at all costs for the main strategic task – remote blockade of the German Bight. A total victory over the High Seas Fleet might well have hastened the defeat of Germany … but the risk inherent in such an attempt was not justified when the blockade, slowly but with deadly certainty, achieved the same end.17
The single line was the only known deployment of battleships that allowed him to concentrate fire in some manoeuvres, for example, that of crossing the enemy’s ‘T’. With decentralised command, he felt that the very power of the Grand Fleet would be dissipated by too much independent action and that it might leave isolated squadrons open to effective enemy counter-attack. Maintaining the controlled fighting effectiveness of his fleet under battle conditions would be difficult; without effective communications and signalling, near impossible. Signalling and communications were not great strengths with either the battle-cruisers or the battle fleet.
The pressure on Jellicoe on the day was enormous and was well-summed up in Churchill’s oft-quoted phrase, that he was the only man who ‘could lose the war in an afternoon, but not – I stress – ‘the only man who could win the war in an afternoon’.18 In today’s armed services, individual initiative and delegated authority are accepted practice. But you cannot use today’s standards with yesterday’s context. P Wayne Hughes wrote in 1986:
It does not do simply to dismiss Jellicoe as lacking the Nelsonian will to win. The analyses that reach this conclusion also compare his fleet’s quality and gunnery unfavourably with the German fleet’s; some authors go so far as to say Scheer had a chance to win. One cannot have it both ways. Either Jellicoe retained sole power to destroy, provided he exercised no imprudence, or his caution was justified because he in fact might have lost, in which case the consequences were incalculable.19
Looking at the main body of the GFBOs that were in place on the eve of Jutland,20 major doctrinal issues of difference between Jellicoe and Beatty existed.
Independence of action: Jellicoe held onto the previous position that the commander-in-chief‘controls’ before and on deployment except in cases of low visibility,21 but he stressed that after deployment – with ships at speed, and with smoke and gunfire – that ‘the vice-admirals commanding squadrons have discretionary power to manoeuvre their squadrons independently while conforming generally with the movements of the Commander-in-Chief and complying with his known intentions’. In spirit this was also Beatty’s position. Nevertheless, the dreadnought fleet would move ‘as a whole’ to avoid ‘isolation of ships’22 although independent action would be called for in case of destroyer or submarine attacks, mines, sudden, unsignalled moves by the commander-in-chief or moves by the enemy, such as closing with a portion of the British line.
Signalling: ‘Signalling may be indistinguishable or they may take too long to get through a large fleet. This does not mean that they will not be made, but the movement signal may be commenced before the executive is given. It is hoped that difficulties in signalling will be largely overcome by the use of wireless telegraphy.’23
Reconnaissance and signalling: ‘Ships having to make a report of sightings or of the movements of the enemy must pass the message to the admiral as well as to their own senior officers’.24 Jellicoe went on to stress that positions should be reported based on the ‘Commander-in-Chief’s reference position.
Opening range: In these instructions Jellicoe was clear. ‘I attach great importance to making full use of the fire of our heavier guns in the early stages at long range.’25 This idea was much influenced by Jellicoe wishing to maintain as much range as he could from possible attack by torpedo, a weapon in whose use he felt the Germans probably had the upper hand. He was – wrongly, as it turned out – under the impression that the Germans had developed a new torpedo that did not leave a stream of telltale surface bubbles. With that in mind he did not wish to close ‘much inside 14,000 yards’26 and felt that opening ranges should be between 10,000–15,000yds (9,100–13,700m) in ‘weather of good visibility’.* This was very similar to Beatty’s preference for action between 12,000 and 14,000yds (11,000–15,300m).
Speed of fire: Jellicoe’s focus was that ‘at all ranges, the early development of accurate rapid fire is the object’27 or not firing ‘too soon’.28 This was very similar to Fisher’s position: ‘It is not numbers, it is solely “gunnery efficiency” that will win the fight… no excess of numbers, however inordinate, [will be] of any use whatever if the guns don’t hit the target!’29
Use of destroyers: Jellicoe firmly believed that the role of attacking enemy ships was secondary to their role of defending the Grand Fleet’s capital ships. Beatty had always been in favour of the opposite: ‘I am a firm believer in getting our TBD attack with the torpedo in first, which would place them admirably for frustrating a counter-attack of enemy craft. … I believe that if the enemy torpedo craft attack first, ours would never get into a position in sufficient time to enable them to frustrate it.’30
An enemy turn-away: Jellicoe held to his previous point of view that this manoeuvre’s purpose would be for ‘drawing our fleet over mines or submarines’.31 Following a withdrawing enemy without a decisive
speed advantage merely put the Grand Fleet at risk for an extended period.
Destroyer-launched torpedo attack: Beatty’s views on the destroyer were very different from Jellicoe’s. Beatty was of the older May-Callaghan school, whose doctrinal ranks Jellicoe deserted in 1912. ‘Admiral Sims relates that it was generally reported that Beatty had memorably ordered all torpedo flags, an emblem displayed to warn ships to change course if torpedoes were seen, to be destroyed.’32
Beatty’s strong belief in a more proactive, aggressive role for the destroyer was incorporated into his own GFBOs:
The best counter to the German torpedo tactics [torpedo attacks on the British battle line by destroyers and light cruisers] … is for our destroyers to attack the enemy’s battle fleet with torpedoes first, and therefore our flotillas are to commence their attacks as soon as the heavy ships are engaged. They should not attack earlier as they will be driven off by the gun fire of the enemy battleships and light cruisers, and the attack will be ineffective.33
Jellicoe’s GFBOs have been used by some historians to attack their author and cited as an example of his over-attention to detail. By Jutland, Jellicoe’s GFBOs consisted of around fifty-two foolscap pages of main text, with additional pages for very detailed deployments.
Months after Jutland, when Beatty had become commander-in-chief, he reduced the GFBOs again – some said theatrically. On 12 March 1917 he issued a two-page memorandum that he called the Grand Fleet Battle Instructions or GFBIs. While the eventual instructions were of similar length to Jellicoe’s GFBOs, the main difference was not in length but in flavour. The orders and instructions reflect the very different characters of the two admirals.*
Jutland_The Unfinished Battle Page 48
