Jutland_The Unfinished Battle

by Nicholas Jellicoe

  * A ‘dry-dock repair day’ is defined as the total of all the days for each individual ship that went into repair. With the information I had at hand I was not able to calculate the dry-dock repair man-days. This would have been a more instructive comparative measure.

  * Initially, Jellicoe agreed with his predecessor Sir George Callaghan’s position on the need for independent divisional action. By 1916 he strongly opposed such independence, presumably after seeing the lack of initiative within the Grand Fleet.

  * It may be no coincidence that the fastest-firing ships in the BCF were Invincible and Queen Mary. On both ships, stacking additional cordite outside of the protected magazines ready to feed to the guns faster was standard practice.

  † ‘The irony is that the German destroyer flotillas, the element of the High Seas Fleet that Jellicoe most feared and that had loomed so large in his night dispositions, played no part in the nighttime battle. Ten German destroyers actually left the battlefield early and returned to Kiel around the northern tip of Denmark. Through the rest of the night, the remaining German destroyers searched in vain for the British battle fleet.’ (Massie, p649).

  * On 2 June 1916, following Jutland, Beatty, in Lambert’s words ‘tacitly admitted his responsibility for the three battle-cruiser losses … symbolically ordering that the flash-tight interlocks be restored’ (Lambert, p360).

  * Confusingly, however, Jellicoe later talks about 18,000yds as being the probable distance and in any case these rules applied ‘unless the enemy does so earlier’. This is within the same GFBOs.

  * Comments like Sir Julian Thompson’s that the GFBOs were ‘voluminous’ are rather misleading. It was not the length but the over-obsession with detail and the lack of a visible over-arching strategy that present any reader problems. Beatty’s GFBIs are much more to the point, but of roughly equal length. Incidentally, the first GFBOs published by Jellicoe in August 1914 were also three pages (see the introduction in Brad Golding’s work). Do depth and detail come with experience? (see Bachrach, Jutland Letters).

  14

  The Controversy: An Unfinished Battle

  It may be deemed a refusal of battle … might possibly result in failure to bring the enemy to action as soon as is expected and hoped. Such a result would be absolutely repugnant to all the feelings of all British naval officers and men, but with new and untried methods of warfare new tactics must be devised to meet them. I feel that such tactics, if not understood, maybring odium upon me, but so long as I have the confidence of their Lordships, I intend to pursue, what is in my considered opinion, the proper course to defeat and annihilate the enemy’s battle fleet.

  Jellicoe to the Secretary of the Admiralty, Iron Duke, 20 October 1914

  Most historians of the battle have felt that controversy was inevitable. In the Beatty papers, Bryan Ranft quoted William Scott Chalmers:

  After the war, with the inevitable post-mortem, the controversy reached its height, because the bird’s-eye view depicted on diagrams could not always be identified with the situation as seen by those in command when they made their decisions. Owing to low visibility, no two commanders got the same view of the action, and although 250 ships took part, there were never more than three or four enemy capital ships in sight at the same time from any point on the British line.1

  Geoffrey Bennett, himself a naval officer before turning historian, mentioned that there was a strong, simmering distaste for Beatty among a lot of senior officers. Many of them had been passed over during Beatty’s meteoric rise on Churchill’s coat-tails. At forty-four he was commander-in-chief of the Royal Navy. But his flamboyance courted dislike. There was his selfpermission to have two three-button rows on his uniform, the only man in the Navy to do so. There was also the occasion when he was seen on the deck of Queen Elizabeth talking to his King – whom he regarded as his friend, too – with his hands in his pockets. ‘Soon the press, which had already built up Beatty’s panache into a heroic image against which Jellicoe’s quiet personality counted for little, was distorting Jutland into a victory for the Battle-Cruiser Fleet, and ascribing Scheer’s escape to Jellicoe’s failure to handle his Grand Fleet with comparable skill.’2

  Another ex-Navy historian, Captain Stephen Roskill, wrote:

  Many perfectly genuine uncertainties existed regarding the movements of ships and what combatants saw. Or thought they saw. By modern standards the plotting of ships’ movements were then archaic … and on 31 May 1916 weather conditions were such that few, if any, opportunities existed for navigating officers to establish observed positions from celestial bodies … Thus when it came to drawing maps of the various phases of the battle, historians have inevitably to rely on the deck and signal logs of ships and on the diaries kept on their bridges or at their plots.3

  Roskill also said that officers would naturally try to intervene to give what they felt was a truer picture of the battle.

  The debate was drawn out. Positions hardened and bitterness at the sense of not having achieved a recognised victory over the Germans made things turn into increasingly personal and partisan attacks, as the lines formed between politicians, officers and men of the Battle Cruiser and Grand Fleets, press and historians. Soon it was as if the Navy was as divided as it had been in the days of the Beresford-Fisher era. The controversial extension of life to the Jutland story started with the ill-fated Harper record, with the vitriol heating up with the Dewar brothers’ Naval Staff Appreciation and its later, re-edited public version, the Narrative of the Battle of Jutland (see below). In between, the forays of the likes of Jellicoe’s biographer Bacon, of Filson Young and even Churchill in The World Crisis added oxygen to the fire. Others, such as Sir Julian Corbett, and later Arthur Marder and Correlli Barnett, tended to quieten the debate.

  Roskill, Bennett and now also the equally respected naval historian, Dr Andrew Gordon (Rules of the Game), all reopened the wounds of the Jutland debate.

  Before the Harper Record

  The official dispatches of the battle were released in 1919. Their initial appearance, in July 1916, bore, as Le Mesurier noted, ‘signs of careful editing for public consumption’.4 That would seem all too obvious. Yates rightly complains that they were very badly presented: ‘a stupefying mass of undigested documents, dispatches and ships reports’.5 Indeed, in his opinion, it was ‘an exercise in official obfuscation. They are difficult to read and to use. All of Jellicoe’s comments and insights on superior German ship design, ordnance, communications and searchlights were taken out: they could have been useful to the Germans.

  In 1919 Jellicoe published The Grand Fleet, described by Keith Yates as ‘long-winded, dull and self-effacing’,6 an assessment with which I, sadly, rather agree. It is a shame that Cassell, Jellicoe’s publisher, did not persuade him to take on a ghost-writer. The next year, 1920, saw one of the first accounts for the Beatty school, The Battle of Jutland: The Sowing and the Reaping, by Carlyon Bellairs. A chapter heading in the book – along with the one quoted earlier – said it all: ‘I came, I saw, I turned away’.*

  The Harper Record

  The First Sea Lord, Rosslyn Wemyss, wanted an official report on the battle completed, to try to assemble the known facts. He was persuaded that he needed to do this when he learnt that Jellicoe had been preparing a history of the Grand Fleet through the war. He worried that this would be partisan and therefore start considerable debate. He was wrong about Jellicoe’s approach, but he decided to set up his own marshalling of the facts.

  On 23 January 1919 New Zealand-born Captain (as he then was) John Harper was appointed to ‘prepare a record, with plans, showing in chronological order what actually occurred in the battle’.7 Harper had four junior officers working with him as research assistants. He had no experience of command at sea – which would plague him later – but having been Director of Navigation at the Admiralty, he chose to start with the track charts to establish the known positions of the wrecks. He decided to locate that of Invincible, which he then verified with
divers. The idea was to create a base of documentary information for the Admiralty without any added commentary or interpretation.

  The report was presented to Wemyss and had reached proof stage, but sat on his desk while he was on holiday. His deputy chief of staff, Admiral Brock, who had commanded the 1st Battle Cruiser Squadron at Jutland, read the piece and announced that he was delaying a decision: ‘As Lord Beatty is assuming office as First Sea Lord in a few days it must wait for his approval’.8 This was the first intimation of Beatty’s battle-cruiser influence in the Admiralty. There were wider changes. It was as if – in Temple Patterson’s quoting of a comment made at the time – ‘the battle-cruiser people took over the Admiralty’.9

  It was immediately clear that Harper had actually exceeded his brief and, in one critical account of the battle-cruiser action, had added commentary that was purely personal interpretation. He talked of what he supposed were some of the things that could have caused higher British damage, such as indifferent armour protection, or – a particular nettle to Beatty’s sensitivities – the very high standard of the German battle-cruisers’ gunnery. At the same time, even if he overextended himself, he tried where possible to strike the balance and, in talking about the battleship duel, said that the British had ‘something of an advantage in the way of light’.10

  Beatty claimed that the wording in Harper’s report ‘implies that the Commander-in-Chief was badly served and that many errors were being made which prevented him from receiving [information] such as he could have reasonably expected’.11 Beatty also commented on the section of the record referring to ‘Reports on the progress of the Action, saying that they ‘might as well be omitted as they come in the category of criticisms which serve no useful purpose’.12

  Harper told Beatty that he refused to make any changes; he would only make them if he received written orders to do so from the 1SL. Beatty wanted to add his own reports, and those of Scheer and Jellicoe, as well as all the signals from the battle. The Admiralty position, however, was that too much detail would give a sense of defeat, not overwhelming victory.†

  Brock commented that it lacked ‘the note and tone of victory, and [read] rather as a record of disasters and misfortunes’.13 Chatfield felt the same. But they could not have it both ways: a neutral report of the ‘chronological order of what actually occurred in the battle’ and one that would strike a ‘tone of victory’. There was evidently a belief within the Admiralty that it was preferable not to explain the greater losses of the British fleet, even though the battle was felt to have been a strategic victory. Jellicoe’s astonishment at this is expressed in a letter written to Beatty in response to his criticisms: ‘the publication should take place without any alteration by the Board, myself or by any other person’.14

  Harper was understandably becoming testy – he was increasingly caught in the middle of powerful forces. He demanded that he be able to put a comment of his own in the introduction, saying that this was only a record that did not wholly accord with the facts.15 Jellicoe became aware of the duel between Beatty and Harper; he broke his own rule and asked to see the report for himself.

  Sir Walter Long, First Lord of the Admiralty, met Harper, asking him what was holding up the report’s publication. Harper told him about his issues with Beatty. Long was in strong disagreement with Beatty’s interference – direct or indirect – and told the latter his position. Shortly thereafter, Beatty withdrew his objections and publication was scheduled for 14 May1919, even though there were still differences from the original, and alterations.

  When Jellicoe saw the original and the amended reports, he was incensed. He wrote to Walter Long with his complaint and threatened not to take up his new position as governor general of New Zealand unless his comments were taken on board. The impression given by Beatty’s interference with the report was that the Grand Fleet arrived so late that it had no impact on the battle.

  The situation was very difficult. Irreconcilable positions were being taken by Jellicoe and Beatty. Harper, trapped in the middle, offered to resign. This was refused. He then said that he would like to add a statement to the report, saying that he was not responsible for materials that were not aligned with the documentary evidence that he knew was shortly to be published as the Jutland Dispatches. This was also refused. However, with the latter’s publication in December 1920, questions started to be raised in Parliament as to why the Harper Record had not yet seen the light of day. Harper himself had come to the conclusion that Beatty was now merely trying to delay publication.

  Finally, Walter Long, who had not been aware of Beatty’s efforts to change Harper’s conclusions, found a way out by saying that Julian Corbett’s official history would soon appear and that there was no longer need for a separate report. Harper was asked to hand over all his documents to Corbett.

  The outcome was ironic. Beatty had at one point asked Corbett to write an introduction to the report that would talk about gunnery at Jutland and in particular about the poor quality of ordnance. This could throw the focus off the poor quality of gunnery at the start of the run to the south.16 Corbett refused, saying that he was already commissioned to write the official history.

  Harper finally placed copies of his report in safekeeping with the Royal United Services Institution, fearing its suppression and destruction.17 One copy is today in the British Library. One remained in the possession of Jellicoe’s family. Included inside is the famous sketch of the disputed 360-degree turn by Lion that Beatty had so vehemently denied. Even though the words, ‘Published by HMSO, 1920’, appear on the front, the full report was never actually published and has never, as the author would have intended, seen the light of day outside its life in the British Library archives.18

  By the mid 1920s Harper was thoroughly disgruntled at the treatment that his report had received and decided to produce his own account, The Truth about Jutland, published with considerable commercial success in 1927. His attack here on Beatty was full of vitriol. Though Harper could no longer be said to be writing without bias, some of his points were valid: ‘It is an indisputable fact that, in the first phase of this battle, a British squadron, greatly superior in numbers and gun-power, not only failed to defeat a weaker enemy who made no effort to avoid action, but, in the space of 50 minutes, suffered what can only be described as a partial defeat’.19 It is no surprise that a rebuttal was published under the title, The Truth about Harper. I have never seen a copy.

  While Harper was made a rear admiral in 1924, his position was highly vulnerable and Beatty certainly did not want him around. In 1926 Harper was advised that he would take command of a dockyard, but this was withdrawn a year later at the request of Chatfield in February 1927, when he was retired from the service, though he had by then been promoted to vice admiral. Even after he had left because of ill-health, his report came back to haunt Beatty: between 1919 and 1927 the delayed publication of the Harper Record ‘was raised on at least twenty-two occasions in Parliament’.20

  The threat of dividing the service: the Naval Staff Appreciation

  Beatty took things into his own hands and ordered the compiling of yet another report on the battle. The Director of Training and Staff Duties, Captain Ellerton, asked Captain Alfred Dewar in November 1920 to start work on a staff appreciation of the battle using some of Harper’s own findings, one that would clearly be a battle-cruiser point of view.

  In November 1920 Alfred and his brother, Captain Kenneth Dewar,* set to work. Kenneth Dewar had crossed paths with Jellicoe before, when he had worked at the operations and then at the plans divisions of the Admiralty. Temple Patterson maintained that the ‘conservatively minded’ Jellicoe took exception to Kenneth Dewar, ‘the iconoclast with a chip on his shoulder’.21 Jellicoe regarded the older brother, Alfred, as ‘a retired Lieutenant of but little sea experience’ and Kenneth ‘a recently promoted Captain [who] had never as yet commanded a ship at sea’.22 There seemed no love lost. ‘Jellicoe’, Dewar wrote, ‘instinctively mistrust
ed mental independence in his subordinates’.23 After two years they published what was to be the most contentious criticism of Jellicoe in the Naval Staff Appreciation (officially titled ‘CB0938’ – that is, a confidential Admiralty book not intended for general distribution).

  On 27 September 1920 Jellicoe, accompanied by his wife, four daughters and his young son George, stepped onto New Zealand soil to take up the post of governor general. At the same time, he received a copy of the completed Appreciation from Walter Long. At the very moment when he should have been fully focused on his new colonial role, Jellicoe instead commenced a lengthy correspondence pointing out inaccuracies and misleading conclusions.

  Jellicoe eventually summarised his concerns to the Admiralty in a letter in November 1922, saying that if he could not have his own thoughts incorporated into the Appreciation, he would at least like his comments published alongside. He waited quite a while before being replied to with a series of amendments to the original text. He was not satisfied and requested the Admiralty hold up publication while he sent back his comments. The Admiralty refused and published a redacted version of the report, now being called the Admiralty Narrative of the Battle of Jutland, in 1924.

  The conclusions and the writing of the original Staff Appreciation were widely criticised. Julian Corbett, who was on first-name terms with Jellicoe, wrote that the ‘facts were … very loose’; he read it (he said) ‘with increasing wonder till at last I felt it my duty to convey to the Admiralty that such a grotesque account of the battle certainly ought not to go out as their considered verdict’. In a letter to Jellicoe he lambasted the Staff Appreciation, saying that ‘To call it a “Staff Account” is nothing but a bad joke’24 Ernle Chatfield and Roger Keyes – Keyes was later known as the father of combined operations – wrote to Beatty saying that they felt publication would not be in the interests of the Navy, and that going ahead would only cause a public airing of the most vindictive quarrel.