Castles of Steel

  On the other hand, two other Royal Navy officers were quickly promoted. A week after the battle, Captain Thomas Jackson, Director of the Operations Division of the Admiralty, who had bungled Room 40’s interception of Friedrich der Grosse’s call sign and failed to tell Jellicoe that Scheer was at sea, was promoted to rear admiral. Later in the summer, Lieutenant Commander Ralph Seymour, Beatty’s signals officer, who had mishandled numerous critical signals at Jutland, received early promotion and was decorated with a DSO.]

  This was due in part to a letter from retired Admiral of the Fleet Sir Hedworth Meux, a Beatty admirer, to the king’s private secretary: “If Jellicoe had grasped the opportunity which Providence, assisted by Beatty, placed in his way and destroyed the German fleet, he ought to have been made an Earl. But instead . . . practically the whole of the fighting was done by the battle cruisers, and our battle fleet only fired a very few rounds. . . . Jellicoe has done splendid work as an organizer and driller of the fleet, but as yet I am sorry to say he has shown no sign of being a Nelson.”

  As Meux’s letter indicates, naval officers began mustering in opposing Jellicoe and Beatty camps soon after the battle. The Jutland Controversy simmered during the remaining two years of the war; then, in peacetime, open hostilities broke out at the Admiralty, in the press, and in dueling books. This animosity reached a level of rancor, accusation, and epithet that no British naval officer ever directed at Admiral Scheer or Hipper.

  Over the years, only one of the four senior admirals at Jutland, two German and two British, entirely escaped criticism. Franz von Hipper, the veteran of the Scarborough Raid and the Dogger Bank, led his battle cruisers at Jutland with confidence and skill and managed to triumph over Beatty’s superior force. His ships stood up not only to the British battle cruisers but also to the 15-inch guns of battleships—although he later said, “It was nothing but the poor quality of their bursting charges that saved us from disaster.” During the Run to the South, Hipper sank two British battle cruisers and led an unsuspecting Beatty to the High Seas Fleet, as well. Hipper should not be blamed for obeying Scheer’s command to pursue Beatty to the north, thereby thrusting the High Seas Fleet into the arms of the Grand Fleet. The training and élan of the German battle cruiser squadron, for which Hipper was responsible, proved themselves when his battered, crippled ships, lacking their admiral, charged the enemy in order to save Scheer’s battleships. Hipper made no mistakes at Jutland and was the only one of the four senior admirals present to come away with his reputation enhanced.

  Reinhard Scheer was a bold, experienced tactician, famous for his quick decisions, who had the misfortune to command the smaller fleet at Jutland. The High Seas Fleet was made up of superbly built ships with efficient officers and crews having superior training in areas such as night fighting; if the numbers of ships on each side had been equal, the outcome might easily have been different. Scheer’s tactics, based on recognition that the strength of his fleet was inferior, were to blend the use of the weapons systems carried by his dreadnoughts and destroyers. The battleships would fight a gunnery duel if they encountered a weaker enemy, but Scheer himself was a torpedo specialist and believed that the torpedo could be as decisive as the gun. If his dreadnoughts encountered an enemy as strong, or stronger, they would rapidly withdraw under cover of smoke screens and massed destroyer torpedo attacks. At Jutland, Scheer’s tactics and skills were sorely tested. Twice he came by accident under the guns of the British battle fleet, and on each occasion he was so completely surprised that he found the Grand Fleet crossing his T. Scheer’s first turnaround escape was brilliantly executed, but his second—when he turned back toward the Grand Fleet from which he had escaped only thirty minutes before—detracts from his reputation. It was clumsily executed; but, as before, he was hugely assisted by luck and the weather. Scheer had never wanted to fight this particular battle and, from the moment he discovered that he was confronting the entire Grand Fleet, his preoccupation was to get away, if necessary sacrificing his battle cruisers and destroyers. The High Seas Fleet fought bravely and well, but in the end, Reinhard Scheer succeeded not in winning a victory but in escaping annihilation.

  [After the war, Scheer’s Flag Lieutenant at Jutland, Ernst von Weizsäcker, offered an unflattering portrait of his chief during the battle: “Scheer had but the foggiest idea of what was happening during the action and . . . his movements were not in the least dictated by superior tactical considerations. On the contrary, he had only two definite ideas: to protect the Wiesbaden and, when that was no good, to disentangle himself and go home. Talking of the destroyer attack . . . the origin lay in Scheer saying, ‘The destroyers have not done anything yet—let them have a go.’ . . . Scheer’s success lay in his ability to make a decision, but he knew nothing of tactics, although he was against sitting in harbor and liked to get the fleet to sea when he could. . . . In other words, Scheer was much like any other admiral and by no means the tactical genius and superman that the present day historian tries to make out.”

  In 1936, when Weizsäcker said this, he was acting director of the Political Department of the Foreign Ministry of Nazi Germany.]

  David Beatty was an impetuous, bulldog type of fighter, courageous and impatient for action. His preferred tactic was to charge the enemy, and he expected his captains to follow without having to be told. With men who had long been with him and understood his ways—his battle cruiser captains and the commodores of the light cruiser squadrons attached to the battle cruiser force—this simple system worked well. Unfortunately, he did not explain his tactics to men new to his command, especially the two rear admirals, Moore and Evan-Thomas, who played critical roles in his two most famous battles, the Dogger Bank and Jutland. Beatty’s failure to acquaint Moore with his style of leadership led to Hipper’s escape at the Dogger Bank; because of a similar failure to brief Evan-Thomas, he engaged Hipper at Jutland without the initial support of the powerful 5th Battle Squadron. In other areas, too, Beatty’s leadership was flawed. Leaving initiative to subordinates was one thing; ignoring slipshod performance was another. Mistake after mistake was made by his signals staff, led by the hapless Ralph Seymour. And Beatty’s effort at Jutland was marred by his continuing failure to improve the poor gunnery of his battle cruisers.

  In the immediate aftermath of the battle, Beatty won huge popular praise and was proclaimed another Nelson, but the facts scarcely justify these laurels. Beatty had six battle cruisers and four of the most powerful battleships in the world, as well as fourteen light cruisers and twenty-seven destroyers; Hipper had five battle cruisers, five light cruisers, and twenty-two destroyers. Yet in spite of this preponderance, Beatty lost two battle cruisers and Hipper lost none. Scheer may not have defeated Jellicoe, as claimed by the German communiqué, but there is no doubt that Hipper defeated Beatty.

  Beatty began badly at Jutland by failing to concentrate before he attacked. At 10:10 a.m., Beatty ordered the four Queen Elizabeths of the 5th Battle Squadron to take station five miles northwest of Lion. Had the battleships been closer, or had they had been stationed on a bearing where an enemy was most likely to appear (southeast, for example), Hipper’s battle cruisers would have been subjected to overwhelming fire from the beginning. Once the enemy was discovered, Beatty, determined not to let Hipper get away as he had at the Dogger Bank, turned the battle cruisers at high speed to the southeast, signaling the battleships five miles away to follow. But the signal was given by flag hoist, which could not be distinguished from Barham, and it was not repeated by searchlight or wireless. Minutes went by before Evan-Thomas realized that the battle cruisers had altered course and turned to follow. By then, his four giant battleships were ten miles astern.

  In the artillery duel that followed, British battle cruiser gunfire inflicted little damage on German ships. Hipper later compared this shooting unfavorably to that of the 5th Battle Squadron and other British battleships while Lützow’s gunnery officer stated, “Neither Lion nor Princess Royal hit us once bet
ween 4.02 and 5.23 p.m.; their total hits were three in ninety-five minutes.” There was also the usual confusion in fire distribution between Beatty’s ships, leaving Derfflinger to shoot untroubled. The same mistake had been made at the Dogger Bank. Potentially, Beatty’s most harmful error at Jutland was his failure to keep Jellicoe informed as to the position of the enemy battle fleet. Jellicoe had counted on Beatty to provide this vital information, but during the Run to the North, Beatty lost touch with the High Seas Fleet. As a result, he could not tell the Commander-in-Chief what Jellicoe desperately needed to know before deciding in which direction to deploy. Only at the last minute, and largely by instinct, did Jellicoe choose correctly.

  The battle cruiser losses at Jutland were not Beatty’s fault—ship designers, naval constructors, captains, and gunnery officers bore this responsibility. And, despite these losses and his own errors, Beatty made an important contribution to the British victory: he led Scheer and the German battle fleet to Jellicoe. This significantly mitigates Beatty’s numerous errors and his defeat by Hipper. But it certainly does not make David Beatty the hero of Jutland.

  John Jellicoe, who defeated Scheer and the German fleet at Jutland, was the most unassuming of the four principal admirals who fought the battle. A quiet, methodical man, he was a consummate professional whose success in the navy had been based on discipline, foresight, loyalty, self-confidence, and imperturbable calm at moments of crisis. In his long career afloat and ashore, he had gathered immense technical knowledge, and he commanded the fleet with a soberly realistic understanding of the material strengths and weaknesses of his ships and guns. His organizational abilities had reached a peak in the months at Scapa Flow where he had rigorously drilled the Grand Fleet in tactics and gunnery. His intended tactics were to deploy and exercise his huge margin of superior firepower by staging a massive artillery duel with the enemy fleet; at the same time, he insisted on showing suitable deference to the enemy’s possible use of underwater weapons. Jellicoe’s principal weakness as a commander was his inflexibility. He was a perfectionist. Everything was centralized in the flagship; he had difficulty delegating and often became immersed in detail. Wishing to leave nothing to chance, he had drawn up the Grand Fleet Battle Orders, seventy pages of detailed instructions, intended to control the fleet under every imaginable circumstance. The contrast between this style of command and Beatty’s freewheeling “Follow me” was enormous.

  Jellicoe had waited twenty-two months for this moment. Although during the battle, he was never fully aware of the strength or composition of the German fleet, he managed twice to cross Scheer’s T, to pound the High Seas Fleet and drive it into retreat. His deployment to port, the complex, massive movement of twenty-four battleships from six columns into a single line, which enabled him to cross Scheer’s T, was brilliantly conceived and executed. Jellicoe’s critics maintain that by deploying away from the enemy, he surrendered 4,000 yards at a time when every yard and minute counted, but the greater weight of professional opinion supports his decision. This includes the official German naval history, which declared that had Jellicoe deployed to starboard rather than port, “he would have led his ships into a position which would have been only too welcome for the German fleet.” Half a century later, Admiral of the Fleet Lord Cunningham, Britain’s naval hero of the Second World War, wrote, “I hope I would have been given enough sense to make the same deployment as John Jellicoe did.”

  Critics also blamed Jellicoe for not plunging forward, Beatty style, in pursuit of Scheer after the first German turnaway. But this was exactly the situation Jellicoe had foreseen in October 1914, when he warned the Admiralty that, because of the danger of mines or torpedoes, he would not pursue a retreating enemy. Again, he was severely belabored for turning away from the German destroyer torpedo attack covering Scheer’s second turnaway. But this tactic was standard in all navies and Hipper, Beatty, Hood, Evan-Thomas, and Sturdee all used it at Jutland. Beatty had employed it at the Dogger Bank, too, when he turned away from a supposed periscope.

  The weather and the clock, as well as Hipper and Scheer, were Jellicoe’s enemies. Had the battle begun three hours earlier, had the visibility been that of the Falkland Islands battle, had there been the same ample sea room given Sturdee against Spee, the outcome at Jutland would have been different. Again, a decisive result might have been possible at daybreak on June 1 had the Commander-in-Chief been better served, first by the Admiralty, which failed to pass on German signals, then by those British captains who saw German battleships passing behind them. Nothing could have saved the High Seas Fleet had Jellicoe stood between it and Horns Reef with eighteen hours of daylight ahead.

  Criticism of Jellicoe for not being another Nelson and hurling himself at the enemy is unfair. Tactics are governed by strategy and Jellicoe’s strategic purpose was to retain command of the sea. The destruction of the High Seas Fleet was a secondary object—highly desirable but not essential. In the words of the historian Cyril Falls, “He fought to make a German victory impossible rather than to make a British victory certain.” Ultimately, Jellicoe achieved both.

  It was Beatty, simply being Beatty, who was mostly responsible for the Jutland Controversy. Immediately after the battle, he began what became a sustained effort to impose his own version of events on the public mind and the official record. His first move, made when the guns were scarcely cold, was to lobby to have his confidential report to Jellicoe and the Admiralty released and published. Announcing to Jellicoe that “I am not particularly sensitive to criticism,” he went on to complain that the handling of his reports after the Dogger Bank had made him look like “a rotter of the worst description,” and that, since Jutland, “I have already been the subject of a considerable amount of adverse criticism and I am looking to the publication of the despatch to knock it out. It is hard enough to lose my fine ships and gallant pals, but to be told I am a hare-brained maniac is not quite my idea of British fairness and justice. So I ask you to have my story published.” Jellicoe did his best to accommodate his thin-skinned subordinate by releasing portions of Beatty’s report to the press. Nevertheless, in private the Commander-in-Chief observed to the First Sea Lord, “I do not understand his attitude in regard to the despatch. It is surely not his business to edit or to have anything to do with the plans which it is proposed to publish. The telegram sent me yesterday in which he asks to see the new plan before publication astonished me. . . . My view would have been for the Admiralty to have told him that the plan was none of his business.”

  After the war, on April 3, 1919, both Jellicoe and Beatty were promoted to Admiral of the Fleet, but the subsequent distribution of national gratitude was inequitable. Beatty was elevated to an earldom and awarded a grant of £100,000 for his services; Jellicoe was given the lesser title of viscount and £50,000. In the meantime, on January 23, 1919, Admiral Rosslyn Wester Wemyss, who succeeded Jellicoe as First Sea Lord, assigned Captain J.E.T. Harper, an Admiralty navigation specialist, to write a straightforward official account of the Battle of Jutland, “based solely on documentary evidence and free from commentary or criticism.” Harper’s first draft, an unvarnished, matter-of-fact narrative, came back from the printers in October 1919, a few weeks before Wemyss retired as First Sea Lord. The proofs were approved by the Board of Admiralty and a copy was placed on the desk of the incoming First Sea Lord, Admiral of the Fleet Earl Beatty. Arriving on Novem-ber 1 in the office he was to hold for the next eight years, Beatty read Harper’s draft and found it deficient in praise for the role of the battle cruisers and their admiral at Jutland. It was a simple matter for Beatty to summon Harper and order him to make deletions, additions, and alterations; it was less simple to get Harper to comply. Told to throw out or “reinterpret” the mass of navigational, gunnery, and signals data he had gathered, simply on Beatty’s word that these data were wrong, Harper, whose name was to be on the finished narrative, refused to do so without a written order from the First Sea Lord. The order did not come, but Harpe
r understood the First Sea Lord’s intentions; they had been made explicit when Ralph Seymour, who had followed his chief to the Admiralty, told Harper that “we do not wish to advertise the fact that the battle fleet was in action more than we can help.” Beatty pushed hard. In one editorial clash, the embattled Harper refused to delete the statement that the battleship Hercules had been straddled and deluged with water as she deployed into the line of battle. Beatty, who had not wished the record to show that the Grand Fleet had actually been under shell fire, petulantly surrendered the point by saying, “Well, I suppose there is no harm in the public knowing that someone in the battle fleet got wet, as that is about all they had to do with Jutland.” As the months went by, three former First Sea Lords—Jellicoe, Wemyss, and Sir Francis Bridgeman—asked that Harper’s official narrative be published. It was not. Eventually Harper gave up and went off to command a battleship, and his version of the official narrative passed into limbo.

  The first anti-Jellicoe book, The Navy in Battle, was published in November 1918, two weeks after the end of the war. Its author possessed varied credentials. Arthur Hungerford Pollen, one of ten children of a well-known Catholic artist, graduated from Oxford, began and soon gave up a career in law, ran unsuccessfully for Parliament, then supported himself writing articles on art, music, literature, and drama. A talented inventor, he attempted from 1900 to 1913 to persuade the Admiralty to adopt his naval fire-control system. One of those at the Admiralty who eventually said no was John Jellicoe. During the war, Pollen became a naval journalist and an admirer of Beatty; the frontispiece of his book is a heroic color portrait of the battle cruiser admiral. In line with this predisposition, Pollen’s account of Jutland portrayed Beatty steering a timid and dull-minded Commander-in-Chief through the battle. The Grand Fleet’s deployment, according to Pollen, was devised by Beatty: