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Articles
“The World Crisis” (8): The Battle of Jutland, 1916
Hillsdale Dialogues: The World Crisis
The Hillsdale Dialogues are weekly broadcasts of discussions between Hillsdale College President Larry P. Arnn and commentator Hugh Hewitt. They are engaged in an extended discussion of Churchill’s The World Crisis: his classic memoir of the First World War. Written contributions to the discussion, accompany the Dialogues. (Parenthetical references are to Jutland in The World Crisis vol. 3, part 1, 1916-1918, in the Rosetta Books e-book edition, 2013.)
Audio (World Crisis Dialogue 22): Battle of Jutland.
Churchill on Jutland
“The Queen Mary had towered up to heaven in a pillar of fire. The Lion was in flames. A tremendous salvo struck upon or about her following ship, the Princess Royal, which vanished in a cloud of spray and smoke….
“On this the Vice-Admiral said to his Flag Captain, ‘Chatfield, there seems to be something wrong with our ships today. Turn two points to port,’ i.e., two points nearer the enemy.” —WSC, “Jutland,” The World Crisis, Vol. III, Chapter V.
Beatty’s order is reminiscent of Admiral Lord Hawke‘s reply to the pilot of Royal George, his flagship, warning him of the rocks of Quiberon Bay in 1759: “Master pilot, you have done your duty, now lay me alongside the enemy.”
* * *
Churchill’s discussion of the battle of Jutland (31 May 1916) is in truth an account of naval leadership. Churchill was a statesman and leader; he knew the importance of grace when evaluating decisions made under pressure. Yet Churchill was also daring and imaginative, without patience for timidity. That attitude forces its way through his conscious restraint, emerging at the fore of his account.
Like a strategist and statesman, Churchill addressed the implications of Jutland before the telling. “If the German Fleet had been decisively defeated,” he wrote, it might have enabled “men and material required by the Admiralty for the Grand Fleet to be diverted for the support of the Army” (100-01). It might have led to British control of the Baltic, and checked the Russian Revolution. It might also have foiled German plans for a large-scale U-boat attack.
If the British suffered decisive defeat, however,
the trade and food-supply of the British islands would have been paralysed. Our armies on the Continent would have been cut from their base…. All the transportation of the Allies would have been jeopardized and hampered. The United States could not have intervened in the war. Starvation and invasion would have descended upon the British people. Ruin utter and final would have overwhelmed the Allied cause (101).
The U-boat menace
Churchill was right to emphasize the stakes of battle, since one of the most difficult decisions of Jutland was whether to fight it at all. The British already held naval superiority and need not engage unless they expected to win. The Admiralty and Fleet Commander, Sir John Jellicoe, knew their strength. But one variable gave them pause: the torpedo.
A stark image, Churchill wrote, hovered before the eyes of the Admiralty: “the spectacle of great vessels vanishing in a few moments as the result of an under-water explosion,” caused by a torpedo attack before they could come into firing range (103). Submarine torpedoes were a new weapon, and the Germans possessed superior U-boat forces. With no prior naval encounter to go by, the British could not measure the capability of enemy submarines.
Debates over how to counter the threat dominated the prewar years, and fear of U-boats led almost to paralysis. This fear saw Jellicoe complaining of his inferior forces even in 1917, when the combined American and British fleets overpowered the Germans four to one. There were limits, Churchill grumbled, “beyond which this outlook ceases to contribute to the gaining of victory in war” (105).
Gathering of forces
In May 1916 an intelligence report forced a decision. Admiral Reinhard Scheer, the new, aggressive commander-in-chief of Imperial Germany’s High Seas Fleet, was putting to sea. First Lord of the Admiralty Arthur Balfour sent Jellicoe’s fleet into North Sea to await them. Churchill described the two fleets as “the culminating manifestation of naval force in the history of the world” (111).
Though both sides had the latest naval technologies, the Royal Navy held a clear advantage. The combined shell weight of their 272 heavy guns more than doubled the weight of the Germans’ 200.
Britain had more of every class of ship and only twelve fewer torpedoes than the Germans. The credit for this advantage belonged to Balfour’s predecessor Churchill. He had spent his time as First Lord ruthlessly developing naval innovations, and had every right to be proud of his accomplishments.
Jellicoe made his first tactical error before the battle was joined. He sent Vice-Admiral David Beatty ahead of the main fleet with a substantial force. This maneuver opened a sixty-five mile gap between the British units. As Churchill explained: “If Beatty, arriving at his rendezvous, found the enemy there or thereabouts, Jellicoe would be out of tactical relation and too far off to force a battle” (112).
The “skirmish”
Beatty’s ships were just turning back from their mission when one signaled, “enemy in sight” (113). It was Admiral Franz Hipper’s battlecruiser scouting group. Beatty’s 5th Battle Squadron was wandering, confused or reluctant, several thousand yards away. Without hesitation, the rest of Beatty’s force turned to engage.
Later critics argued that Beatty ought first to have concentrated his force, but Churchill characteristically rejected such caution: “It is the duty of a Commander, wherever possible, to concentrate a superior force for battle. “Why should he wait to become stronger when by every test of paper and every memory of battle he was already strong enough?” (116).
Beatty’s choice was between fighting with a superior force, or needlessly waiting for a still larger one. Over a year earlier at Dogger Bank, the Germans had eluded him; he could not let it happen again.
So Beatty and Hipper engaged without hesitation. Neither side could bring the full force of their ships to bear, and Churchill describes this episode as a “skirmish,” separate from the crux of the battle. Still, there was something notable—the sudden explosion of HMS Queen Mary scarcely an hour into the encounter.
Churchill called this “the prodigy of modern war on sea” (118). Larger naval battles had been fought. But never before had a battlecruiser, seconds after being hit, exploded “into a pillar of smoke which rose 800 feet in the air, bearing with it for 200 feet such items as a fifty-foot steamboat” (118). Danger was nothing new, but instantaneous destructive capacity was. Only nine of her crew survived.
The main battle
The “skirmish” ended when Scheer learned of the encounter and raced to join Hipper. Beatty, realizing he would be outnumbered, turned to reunite with Jellicoe. As the two great fleets rolled toward each other, Jellicoe had to decide how to arrange his ships. For that, he needed precise information on the whereabouts of the Germans—and this he did not have.
Churchill considered it essential that any deployment be “founded upon the visual signal of a scout who is actually in sight of the enemy’s fleet” (133). Wireless reports were simply unreliable in comparison to visible signal flashes. Yet Jellicoe’s furthest scouts were up to sixty miles away, far out of sight of his flagship.
Jellicoe sent more ships to scout, but unlike the fast Carolines, designed for that purpose, they were incapable of outdistancing the main fleet. Thus, Jellicoe’s estimate of the German positions was mistaken by over six miles. They surprised him, and a commander should never allow himself to be surprised.
Jellicoe had planned to encounter the Germans far away, and before him. Instead, they appeared suddenly and on his right. Unprepared, he considered he had two options. He could let his right wing lead, even though they might encounter the enemy alone and be shot to pieces. If he led with his left wing, Churchill wrote, he would have to deploy “outside effective gun range; and his opening movement in the battle would be a retirement” (143).
An option not considered
Jellicoe chose the safer left wing deployment, although Churchill believed he could have deployed right “without misadventure” (145). Churchill supported Jellicoe’s decision, but faulted his tendency to centralize command:
Everything was centralized in the Flagship, and all initiative except in avoiding torpedo attack was denied to the leaders of squadrons and divisions. A ceaseless stream of signals from the Flagship was therefore required [to direct] the course and speed of every ship….But in the smoke, confusion and uncertainty of battle the process was far too elaborate (129).
Churchill conceived of a third option. Jellicoe “could have deployed on his centre and taken the lead himself” (145). Though complex, British seamen were capable of this, and it would have bought time and space without necessitating a withdrawal. “He would have led his Fleet,” Churchill wrote, “and they would have followed him” (146). In the heat of battle, the idea never occurred.
The fateful deployment
Jellicoe’s deployment at Jutland required Beatty’s squadron to pass before the entire British battle line to reach its place. This elicited such smoke and confusion that ships began to bottle up under German fire. Though not fatal, the melee did damage one ship and sink another. Worse, it allowed the Germans to catch Jellicoe in the very position he had worked so hard to avoid.
More significant than Jellicoe’s deployment, in Churchill’s view, was his deliberative process. Churchill believed that the Admiralty’s exhaustive deliberations before the encounter imposed such rigid limitations on Jellicoe’s thinking that they compromised his command ability.
Churchill also criticized Jellicoe’s conduct under torpedo fire. The Admiral focused on turning away and avoiding torpedoes, according to Admiralty doctrine. This, wrote Churchill, missed an opportunity “to divide the British Fleet… and so take the enemy between two fires” (152).
The Germans attacked the British seven times in this ninety-minute phase of Jutland. “Jellicoe turned his battleships away on each occasion; and contact with the enemy ceased. The German flotillas in the whole of this phase lost only a single boat, but they effectively secured the safe withdrawal of their Fleet from the jaws of death” (152-53). What might have been a decisive defeat became a draw.
Missed opportunities
Admiral Jellicoe committed his final error during the German withdrawal. His goal was to pursue them, forcing a final, decisive battle in the morning. This he could not do without determining their most likely route home and intercepting them. Of the four possible routes, Jellicoe neglected the position Churchill believed most likely. This would have given him a vantage point from which he could espy and pursue the Germans along two possible paths.
The route Jellicoe chose “was hardly the most reasonable assumption, and did not gather, but on the contrary excluded, the major favourable chances” (159-60). It meant that he could spot the Germans on only one path, and not a probable one at that.
Jellicoe received numerous indications and reports suggesting that the Germans were not, in fact, taking the route he expected. (Churchill in The World Crisis named the right one.) Confusion over the reliability of those reports lessened their influence.
But there was other, more authoritative evidence, Churchill concluded, that the Admiral had misjudged: “He was leaving so many favourable choices behind him as he sped to the south, and guarding against so few, that it is difficult to penetrate his mind” (162).
Still, Churchill remained magnanimous toward his Fleet Admiral: “Full weight,” he admitted, must “be assigned to the elements of doubt and contradiction which have been described” (162). Perhaps he was remembering what he wrote in his life of Marlborough—“in default of genius, nations have to make war as best they can and, since that quality is much rarer than the largest and purest diamonds, most wars are mainly tales of muddle.” *
* Winston S. Churchill, Marlborough: His Life and Times, 4 vols., first published 1933 (London: Sphere, 1967), II: 93.
Neither victory nor defeat
The Battle of Jutland ended in a draw. The Germans escaped before a decisive climax on either side. For this, Churchill blamed Jellicoe and the Admiralty’s inflexibility. Churchill tried to be fair, considering the great catastrophe that one over-reckless decision by Jellicoe might have wrought. Nevertheless, he saw excessive caution as equally dangerous.
Jellicoe’s action “was deliberately adopted by him after prolonged thought, and inflexibly adhered to” (171). Though the torpedo danger was “real and terrible,” Jellicoe should never have let it paralyze him (171). War is full of risk. The commander who cannot accept that will suffer—a wisdom Churchill grasped as few leaders do.
The author
Gwen Thompson is a junior economics major at Hillsdale College and a Winston Churchill fellow. She studies in the Center for Military History and Grand Strategy, which includes helping staff the Center’s events. She has been a Koch Fellow and is currently Vice President of the Delta Phi Alpha German honorary.
Ms. Thompson,
Congratulations on a well researched and well expressed essay on the Battle of Jutland. I have read military history and especially military naval history for over 50 years and have seen few essays as insightful and readable as yours.
Through the study of military history our present and future leaders of the free world can prepare to fight the next totalitarian foe who will always rise up to see what he can get away with.
If you have not already read it, William Shirer’s “Berlin Diary” gives an insightful account of Hitler’s rise in the 1930’s that has value in understanding Vladimir Putin.
I look forward to reading your future essays at this site.
Bill Hestir
LtCol USMC (Ret)
Seneca, SC