When the Narrative was used in 1922 during a number of lectures to twenty officers on the senior officers’ war course at the Royal Naval College Greenwich (one of which Harper attended), Kenneth Dewar was ‘severely’ heckled.25 Even Captain Ellerton’s successor, Rear Admiral W H Haggard, was very critical of the Dewars’ work: ‘The mental attitude of the writer [sic] was rather that of the counsel for the prosecution than of an impartial appraiser of the facts … an obvious bias animates his statements throughout … leading to satirical observations and a certain amount of misrepresentation’26
The Dewars even maintained that the staff of Iron Duke had forged or manipulated the signals logs. Jellicoe had produced an ink copy for review when the policy at the time was to write signals text in pencil.27 In fact, as was also normal at the time, a second, personal, copy had been made for him in ink. The report also pointed the finger at Evan-Thomas’s responsibility for the signals muddle and Jellicoe’s reaction was predictable: to defend staunchly the actions of his old friend (with whom he used to punt in his junior-officer days; the families were close). The report had not been shown to Evan-Thomas beforehand to get his reactions or at least his own version of events. Evan-Thomas did manage to see the then First Lord of the Admiralty, Leo Amery, in July 1923, but to no avail.
Evan-Thomas tried a second time to get a fair hearing at the Admiralty, but was cut off by Beatty before he could get started. Later the same day, Evan-Thomas suffered a stroke. He retired the following March, too ill even to attend a meeting with the King, who had been saddened by the way he had been treated. When he did finallysee the King in May 1925, the latter felt that he could not publicly support his old friend: the controversy had – in the King’s view – to end.
Such was the early furore around the report that by August 1922 even Beatty was questioning whether the Naval Staff Appreciation should be distributed as had been intended. He put the question to Roger Keyes and Ernie Chatfield. Their reaction was recorded in the 22 August minutes of their meeting:
While not approving the tone in which the book is written … nor [agreeing] in all respects with the criticisms of the tactics of the Commander-in-Chief, e.g. the criticism of the single line, we are in entire agreement with the main conclusions … both as regards the failure of Lord Jellicoe to seize the great opportunity before him on the afternoon of 31 May, and his failure to make any dispositions or give any instructions that would bring the enemy to action at dawn on 1 June.
It is not considered, however, that any sufficient cause exists at the moment to justify the issue to the Fleet of a book that would rend the Service to its foundation …28
It was the Dewars’ criticism of the single line and the embodying doctrine of centralised command, and not the criticism of his former commander-in-chief, that persuaded Beatty to call back copies. Having reached proof stage, workwas stopped by Beatty and later, in 1928, Admiral Charles Madden – married, like Jellicoe, to a daughter of Sir Charles Cayzer – ordered all copies of the report destroyed. Copies do exist, but are hard to come by.29 Roskill received one from Jellicoe’s secretary and Churchill referred to it in The World Crisis.* Beatty’s copy also survived and is signed by him.30
Ranft also said that Beatty had ordered the destruction of all the Harper charts. One copy, rolled up on a dusty shelf and thought to have been spare wallpaper, was recently found at my father’s house in the UK.31 It was another copy of the set of Harper maps which are in the British Library in the Jellicoe Papers. The British Library sets are marked up in pencil with the original track of Lion before Beatty altered it. The Jellicoe set is a completely clean copy.† Beatty was not persuaded to stop the work of revision, however, that Rear Admiral Haggard undertook on the Naval Staff Appreciation. That version appeared later in what Marder termed a ‘de-venomised’ form, as the aforementioned Narrative of the Battle of Jutland.
The official history: Corbett’s Naval Operations
It was known that Sir Julian Corbett, who had been given the task of writing the official history of the Navy in the Great War, was on friendly terms with Wemyss. His especially close friendship with Jellicoe, from whom he had received ample commentary and advice, rendered him untrustworthy in Beatty’s mind.32 Officially the history was sponsored by the Committee on Imperial Defence, but Wemyss had actually asked Corbett to write it, as he feared that Jellicoe’s own book would be too biased; it was not especially so.
Beatty was eventually able to harness this mistrust into a decision by the Board of the Admiralty to issue a disclaimer on the third volume of Corbett’s Official History of the Great War Naval Operations – the volume that dealt with Jutland and which was published in 1923 – stating that ‘The Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty have given the author access to official documents in the preparation of this work, but they are in no way responsible for its production or for the accuracy of its statements’. In the earlier 1923 edition there was an additional paragraph that was subsequently taken out of the revised 1940 edition. It was a pretty damning statement: ‘Their Lordships find that some of the principles advocated in the book, especially the tendency to minimise the importance of seeking battle and of forcing it to a conclusion, are directly in conflict with their views’.
Because he was also a civilian, Corbett was attacked by Navy professionals on the basis of not having had the experience at sea to give credibility to his commentary. Chatfield simply called his account of Jutland ‘an outrage’.33 Dewar wrote equally disparagingly. Talking of his own work and Corbett’s:
The real and essential difference between the two is that the Narrative confines itself to a statement of events whereas Corbett’s, while adopting its sequence and material, has woven into it a long sustained apologia for British tactics. He illuminated the battle in a historical glow of soft sunlight, providing a good narrative, based on the Staff Appreciation, set in a frame of general congratulation.34
That Corbett’s history of the battle should have been attacked by the Beatty faction for being too supportive of Jellicoe was quite expected, but it was strange that even so eminent a historian as Corbett was also hampered in what he was allowed to use as documentation. He was not, for example, permitted to quote any of the deciphered German signal traffic that had been passed on so late in the battle to Jellicoe, an act that made it look as if the Admiralty was protecting its own. As Roskill himself commented in a letter to The Times: ‘[Corbett] was prevented from placing a share, and perhaps the chief share, of the responsibility for the escape of the High Seas Fleet where it properly belonged’ – presumably with Admiralty operations.35
Only by 1940, eighteen years after Corbett’s death, had the revised Naval Operations volumes been completed, by Henry Newbolt: twenty-four years after the battle the series of errors in not passing on important Admiralty intelligence from Room 40 was actually noted.* And on this, of course, there was, too, an Admiralty disclaimer!
The Admiralty’s Narrative of the Battle of Jutland
The draft of the Dewars’ modified Narrative, as edited by Haggard, was sent to Jellicoe – still in New Zealand. Again Jellicoe, who lacked appropriate staff, set to work, personally going through the material in great detail. He replied to the Admiralty on 27 November.
Again, he asked that the Admiralty either agree with some of his requests for changes or at the very least publish his own comments along with the Narrative. For a full ten months – almost twice the time that Jellicoe himself had actually worked on the revisions – the Admiralty did not bother to reply. When it did, only a very few of his comments were accepted, but he was still asked to cable his acceptance of the latest version of the book. The approach was coercive.
Quite reasonably, Bacon made the following comment on the Narrative: ‘To the technical reader, versed in naval operations and terms, as well as in the sentiment of the Navy, a nasty flavour pervades the whole narrative’.36 Bacon presented some examples. First, ‘Hardly had the columns turned south than the sound of heavy firing in
dicated the close proximity of the enemy’s heavy ships and the Lion signalled (6.6) that the enemy’s battle-cruisers bore south-east… About 6.14 pm and almost simultaneously, a signal came in from the Lion reporting that [enemy battleships] had been “sighted bearing south-south-west”’.37 This gave the impression of a fast relay of information from Beatty to Jellicoe. The facts on the day were very different from Jellicoe’s ‘Where is the enemy?’ signal, abysmally absent from the description. Bacon could scarcely contain himself: ‘That is all. Nothing more. The whole episode is glossed over and the important facts are never mentioned.’38 In Bacon’s words, these reports ‘did no more than deepen the obscurity’.39
He continued with a second example: ‘A few minutes later the guns of the Calliope and the 4th Light Cruiser Squadron could be heard to the westward. Touch had evidently been regained, and at 6.21 pm the Commander-in-Chief altered course to west-south-west 2 points away from the enemy (Bacon’s italics).40 In fact, the sound of the guns was to Jellicoe’s west; hence his turn was actually towards the enemy and not away.
Bacon then talked of the night action: ‘Admiral Beatty was still in ignorance of the enemy’s course to the south-eastward, and imagined him to be the westward. The battle-cruisers had been too far ahead to observe the route of the High Seas Fleet as indicated by destroyer actions!41 Bacon highlighted in italics the last phrase as the destroyer actions, per se, did nothing more than indicate action. Since such an interpretation was not clear to the two admirals, Evan-Thomas and Burney, four miles nearer the fighting, he found it strange that Jellicoe should have arrived at another conclusion different from the admirals closest to the action.42
Jellicoe cabled back his disagreement on the major points, saying that he would send his full comments by mail and requested that the Admiralty hold back publication until they had been reviewed. Instead, in 1924, the Admiralty went ahead with the publication, using only Jellicoe’s cabled highlighted comments. These were relegated to Appendix G while the Admiralty’s comments – which Jellicoe had not even seen – dismissed his assessment at the outset. Much had been lifted from the earlier Appreciation and Jellicoe felt it like a slap in the face. He was also furious about the treatment meted out to Evan-Thomas. Blame for the heavy losses incurred in the run to the south was being squarely laid at his door.
The Jutland Scandal
In many ways, Admiral Reginald Bacon’s 1925 The Jutland Scandal exemplified the ‘Jellicoe school’ in defending what the admiral had done at the battle. The book appeared early in the New Year, but it was actually written to rebuff an article that Filson Young had written the previous year, and that appeared on 10 August 1924 in the Sunday Express. It was Alexander Filson Young who had been ‘embedded’ on Lion by Beatty and had written the glowing account of Beatty in With the Battle-cruisers in 1921. Filson Young had also written the Encyclopedia Britannica entries on Jutland and Beatty the following year.
Reinhard Scheer had been quoted in another, earlier, article on the battle. Scheer claimed that he had been badly quoted:
The account in the ‘Daily Express’ published without my foreknowledge, is a gross misrepresentation of a conversation that I had with an English correspondent in 1922. In the report the English correspondent does not completely express the explanations given by me, but in a not very gentlemanly manner he has not hesitated to deceive the English reader by the misleading title ‘How I escaped at Jutland’ and by a false date.43
The article made out that Scheer claimed that Jellicoe had lost the perfect opportunity to annihilate the High Seas Fleet. At the time, Jellicoe reacted angrily to the article which claimed that the Grand Fleet had been first to ‘turn away’.
Jellicoe did not support the deep divisions that these partisan attacks were creating within the service. Bacon’s book was, in the opinion of one author, ‘vitriolic’. Temple Patterson called it ‘belligerently partisan’.44 I can understand his frustration. Bacon’s text, like Filson Young’s, often became too sarcastic for such a serious subject. Beatty wrote in fury: ‘that bloody Bacon book annoys me, and has added to my despondency, and the difficulties I am having with the government are not so easily overcome, and I think they don’t pay so much attention to my advice as in the past’.45
Kenneth Dewar had let Beatty know that he had written about it in the Naval Review and had also mentioned the Staff Appreciation. Beatty told him to take out any reference to CB0938 as, of course, it was a restricted publication. It was not surprising: so much bad blood now existed between the factions.
Bacon’s points, however, are that Beatty failed in his primary mission, the reconnaissance role, and in his secondary role of meeting and defeating an enemy battle-cruiser challenge.46 Bacon asserts that Beatty neither managed nor concentrated his fleet but, rather, dispersed his strength, and then tried to put the blame on Evan-Thomas and not on the signals officer, Ralph Seymour. Bacon was relentlessly critical of the notion of Beatty’s giving the High Seas Fleet to Jellicoe on a platter; as we know, he had lost visual contact.
But in the end Bacon’s assessment of Jutland was not unrealistic: ‘No one wishes to pretend that Jutland was a glorious victory. It was not. No glorious victory was possible under the daylight conditions that prevailed on 31 May.’47 Bacon was, nevertheless, taken to court and found guilty of having infringed the 1911 copyright law as he had quoted so extensively from Filson Young’s articles, allowing the latter to claim that he was diminishing his (Filson Young’s) future revenues from this work.
Churchill’s The World Crisis
In 1927 Churchill weighed in on Beatty’s side with his two-chapter account of the battle in The World Crisis. It was no surprise that he would favour Beatty; the latter had worked closely with Churchill and through Churchill’s patronage had, again as we know, risen meteorically.* Churchill liked the proximity of a national icon such as Beatty. It put him in a good light. As Margot Asquith, wife of Herbert Asquith, quipped: ‘Winston wrote a book about himself, and called it The World Crisis’.48
Jellicoe, he wrote – to reiterate a well-known quotation we have encountered more than once – was the only man ‘who could lose the war in an afternoon’.49 The words, here, are worth a moment’s pause. Churchill did not say that he was the man who could win the war, but implied that his action could lead to a British defeat. If the Grand Fleet had been defeated, Britain’s trade lifeline would have been instantly severed and the nation’s economy crippled.
This was why, on the day, Jellicoe had to favour caution above all else. He saw the bigger picture and that the blockade of Germany had to be preserved. He was also aware of the status quo: that an out-and-out victory would not necessarily bring much more to the table. Some have argued that just such a decisive British victory at Jutland would have considerably shortened the war. This is conjecture. Yet most of Churchill’s attack on Jellicoe highlighted what he cited as his excessive caution and rigidity, and, Churchill added, obsessive fear of the mine and torpedo.
Churchill’s account is gravely inaccurate in places, especially about Scheers evening battle turn: ‘At 6.35 pm he … turned his whole fleet about… launching a flotilla to cover his retirement by torpedo attack … Jellicoe, threatened by the torpedo stream, turned away according to his long-resolved policy.’50 Jellicoe did not, in fact, turn away at this point: he closed with his adversary. The famous Jellicoe turn-away took place almost an hour later.
Churchill’s book soon provoked responses, one example being Winston Churchill: The World Crisis. A Criticism.51 Churchill’s book had acknowledged the huge burden on Jellicoe, but at the same time – with the full benefit of historical hindsight and the accumulated knowledge of the post-battle debate – roundly criticised his decision to deploy the fleet to port and the subsequent battleship engagements.
Churchill was also highly critical of Evan-Thomas and blamed him for the failure to turn south, despite the 14:32 signal not having been seen. He placed no blame on Beatty for not having used the time before
the ‘turn south-southeast’ signal to pull back the 5th Battle Squadron into the general battle-cruiser line. For Jellicoe, Churchill’s blaming of Evan-Thomas was inexcusable. ‘That they [the 5th Battle Squadron] were not 5,000 yards closer was due entirely to their slowness in grasping the situation was made with the first contact with the enemy.’52 Bacon’s assertion is that Beatty did not use the twelve minutes, between 14:20 and 14:32, from sighting the enemy fleet to close up his two fleets: the battle-cruisers and Evan-Thomas’s Queen Elizabeths.
Churchill’s account elicited silent criticism from Jellicoe; privately, as was his style. On the fly jacket of a family copy of The Criticism is a pencilled, handwritten note by Jellicoe: ‘No one should read Churchill’s book The World Crisis without reading also this volume which shows so clearly how grossly inaccurate are Churchill’s writings’.
An eminently more readable account of the battle was Langhorne Gibson’s and Vice Admiral Harper’s The Riddle of Jutland, published over a decade after Churchill’s. Then, nearly seventy years later, Robert Massie’s Castles of Steel, along with Nigel Steel’s and Peter Hart’s Jutland 1916: Death in the Grey Wastes, became classics. Both are lucid and involving, and full of gripping personal accounts.
Der Krieg zur See: the ‘official’ German point of view
The German official history, Der Krieg zur See 1914–1918, was written to legitimise the role of the Imperial Navy in the war: ‘Every volume should make the German people conscious of what deeds were performed on all seas by its navy and the men who created and led it and what it (the German people) has lost through the loss of its sea power’.53 It was a very political document indeed, and Tirpitz consulted closely with Captain Eberhard von Mantey, the head of the Marinearchiv, on each volume in the series. Edited by Otto Groos (who served at Jutland as a navigating officer), ‘the purpose of the series was to foster the rebirth of the navy and to propagate a narrative to that end’. Both Ingenohl and Müller objected to the pro-Tirpitz stance. Neither’s opinion was taken account of, and Eric Raeder, later to become head of Hitler’s navy, wrote the foreword to the series.
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