May 31, 2016: 100th anniversary of the start of the Battle of Jutland, the largest naval battle of WWI, and history’s only full-scale engagement between fleets of dreadnought battleships and battlecruisers (even though the battleship groups were only in sight of each other for a brief amount of time overall).
As our naval expert, Marc, who would you say won at Jutland? Germany because of the greater damage and loss of life inflicted? Or Britain because the German fleet retreated (and never ventured out again)?
Of course Britain only needed not to lose. The blockade was maintained and so some say Jutland was the battle that won the war.
I imagine that the allied armies would disagree with that, especially given the furious German onslaught early in 1918 and the series of victories subsequently, with the deployment of various advances in tactics and equipment, such as the tank and rolling artillery barrage.
It was definitely a British victory, for the reasons you mentioned. Strategy was all that mattered, not at the tactical level. The German fleet never sailed again and Britain never lost control of the seas.
@Private:
As our naval expert, Marc, who would you say won at Jutland? Germany because of the greater damage and loss of life inflicted? Or Britain because the German fleet retreated (and never ventured out again)?
Jutland was a tactical victory for the Germans because they sank more enemy ship tonnage than they themselves lost, and a strategic victory for the British because the High Seas Fleet never made another major attempt to break the Royal Navy’s control of the North Sea. I agree with Wittmann that the strategic importance of Jutland overrides its tactical significance – but I do think that the tactical element shouldn’t be brushed off lightly. Jutland was a hard blow to the prestige of the Royal Navy, and by extention to the “Britannia rules the waves” self-assurance that Britain had taken for granted since the time of Nelson. A case in point: the first official communique about the results of Jutland which the British government released to the British press was, to its great credit, a pretty accurate picture that correctly reflected the best information which the Admiralty had at the time. It was duly published, and the British press (and the British public) responded with howls of outrage at the notion that Britain’s ship and personnel losses had been significantly greater than those of Germany. Whitehall hasily issued a revised communique, in which all the German ships previously listed as “severely damaged” were reclassed as “sunk”, and all the Germans ships previously listed as “damaged” were reclassed as “severely damaged” or “probably sunk.” In this new estimate, the British score came out slightly ahead of German score. It was duly published, and this paper victory was greeted with relief by the British press (and the British public), who were reassured that Britain’s naval supremacy was once more secure.
Behind the scenes, however, nobody at the Admiralty was laughing. The reputation of Jellicoe, who commanded the Grand Fleet at Jutland, took a bit of a beating and he was ultimately “kicked upstairs” to a desk job. (His naval command was handed over to Beatty, who at Jutland had famously commented that “there seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today.”) Jutland had also revealed some major deficiencies in Britain’s pride and joy, its very expensive dreadnought battleships and battlecruisers. There were quality-control problems with the big gun shells, some of which had failed to detonate properly. The shell hoists lacked proper anti-flash shutters, a factor which contributed to the loss of some of the British battlecruisers. (Ironically, the Admiralty ended up overcompensating. The anti-flash shutters fitted in the WWII-era King George V class battleships were so elaborate that they tended to jam, a problem which hampered Prince of Wales while she was fighting Bismarck in 1941.) And the whole battlecruiser concept (“eggshells armed with hammers”) came close to being discredited; the construction of Hood, which in 1916 was in its early stages, was halted so that the design of the ship could be significantly revised, with a major increase in armour protection.
Jutland also made the embarrassing point – as the Bismarck operation did in WWII – that German capital ships appeared to be harder to sink than British capital ships, even when one is comparing battleships versus battleships as opposed to battleships versus battlecruisers. And there was actually a good reason for this. The capital ships of the High Seas Fleet were designed for short-duration, short-range excursions into the Baltic and the North Sea; as such they didn’t need to provide anything more than austere living facilities for their crews (who, in port, lived in barracks rather than aboard ship). Therefore, German designers could allocate more tonnage to armour. British ships, by contrast, were designed for long-range, long-duration operations (due to Britain’s dependence on maritime trade and due to its vast imperial holdings), so their designers had to allocate more tonnage to crew quarters and related facilities.
German designers also, in a general sense, made the most of the fact that Germany could never hope to outbuild Britain in terms of quantity; they opted instead for quality. For instance, the main guns of German capital ships often had longer barrels (in terms of caliber length) than British guns of the same caliber. This gave them a higher muzzle velocity. The disadvantage was that it increased their barrel wear (and thus decreased their service life), but the advantage was that it allowed them to deliver harder-hitting shells travelling on flatter trajectories. Because the force delivered by a shell equals its mass times the square of its velocity, the increase in velocity given by a longer barrel is in some circumstances a much better bargain than than the increase in mass given by a larger gun caliber.
In terms of the big picture, however, the fundamental outcome of Jutland was that the British blockade of the North Sea remained unaffected – and as far as the ultimate outcome of the war was concerned, that was what mattered.
Great rundown, and all conclusions spot-on… for a Reader’s Digest version of Jutland here you go:
Germany, Tactical Win, Strategic Loss
Sank/Killed more British Ships/Lives, but did nothing with the win.
May as well have had the entire German fleet sunk at Jutland for all the difference the tactical win made, because Germany never ventured out again, making the entire battle pointless for Germany and Britain maintained her command of the Sea, despite the tactical loss.
Thanks Marc and witt.
I watched an interesting documentary the other night that argued that the higher loss of British ships was caused by shortcuts taken to deliver shells to the gun turrets more quickly, with doors propped open, allowing exploding gun turrets to propel the explosion down into the weapons stores below.
A lesser suggestion was that Beatty’s gung-ho bellicosity and poor communications (i.e. relying on signal flags in poor visibility across miles of ocean) resulted in his force being outgunned for much of the battle.
Any thoughts on those points?
Cheers
PP
@Private:
I watched an interesting documentary the other night that argued that the higher loss of British ships was caused by shortcuts taken to deliver shells to the gun turrets more quickly, with doors propped open, allowing exploding gun turrets to propel the explosion down into the weapons stores below.
A lesser suggestion was that Beatty’s gung-ho bellicosity and poor communications (i.e. relying on signal flags in poor visibility across miles of ocean) resulted in his force being outgunned for much of the battle.
Any thoughts on those points?
The part you mentioned about shell delivery in the turrets is what I was talking about when I mentioned the lack of proper anti-flash shutters. Such shutters slow down the delivery of shells, but they offer protection against one of the biggest dangers that big-gun ships face: having an enemy shell burst inside a main gun turret at the same moment when an unprotected (meaning non-shuttered) shell hoist is open, thus allowing the flash of the exploding shell to travel all the way down into the powder magazines, whose detonation can blow a battleship apart. Proper anti-flash shutters can limit the damage to the struck turret; its crew will be killed, but the ship will survive. The 1989 Turret 2 explosion on the USS Iowa is a sad but dramatic example: the turret crew was lost, but the anti-flash shutters saved the ship itself from being destroyed, which is exactly what they were designed to do.
I’m not familiar with the Beatty element you mentioned, so I can’t really comment on its specifics. However, the German and British battlecruiser forces at Jutland (the latter commanded by Beatty) were each trying to lure tne opposite force towards their main body of battleships (which they both did successfully), so I’m not sure it’s correct to say that Beatty was outgunned for most of the engagement.
Thanks again Marc.
Apparently Beatty lost contact with a significant part of his own force which could not see his signals, which resulted in his having fewer ships to hand when he met the German battlecruisers. He ignored the more modern communication means at his disposal.
But I am always wary of TV documentaries, which can be too keen to have something new or significant to say.
@Private:
Apparently Beatty lost contact with a significant part of his own force which could not see his signals, which resulted in his having fewer ships to hand when he met the German battlecruisers. He ignored the more modern communication means at his disposal.
I assume that the “more modern means of communication” mentioned by the documentary is a reference to wireless telegraphy, since Beatty’s ships seem to have used both blinker lights and flags for communication. W/T in WWI was a mixed blessing in combat, so Beatty may have had valid reservations about using it. Automatic devices allowing messages to be encrypted and decrypted instantaneously didn’t exist at the time of WWI (nor even in WWII, as far as I know; the Enigma machine was painfully slow), so in a fast-moving tactical situation in which information is very time-sensitive messages would have had to be sent in the clear, because encyphering by the sender and decyphering by the receiver is too time-consuming. And the problem with sending any kind of radio (or in this case radio-telegraphy) messages is that the enemy will be able to pick them up too. W/T sent in the clear therefore potentially informs the enemy of your position (through direction-finding) and intentions (by analysis of the content of the message). You could make life more complicated for the enemy by sending uncyphered messages whose content consists of coded instructions taken from code books (like, to invent an example, “Perform maneuver X-12 immediately”), but there’s always a risk that the other side’s intelligence services have acquired or reconstructed your codes.
At any rate, part of the problem which Beatty apparently had at Jutland was that his force included a squadron that normally operated with Jellicoe’s battleships rather than Beatty’s battlecruisers, and whose commander wasn’t informed that Beatty’s standing orders on what to do in such-and-such a situation weren’t the same as Jellicoe’s standing orders. As a result, that squadron seems at one point to have done something different than what Beatty was expecting it to do, which resulted in Beatty temporarily losing the concentration of ships which he had had up to that point.
Yes - wireless. There was no mention of communication security, nor of blinker lights.
Thanks Marc, for sharing your knowledge.
One hundred years ago today, William Leefe Robinson became the first person to shoot down a German airship over the UK. This success in the skies above London, which saw him awarded the Victoria Cross just 48 hours later, was due to a mixture of the 21-year-old’s own bravery, an improved defence strategy and a revolutionary flammable bullet designed to ignite the hydrogen gas used to fill the 620ft-long (190m) long balloon.
Great read, Marc. Thanks.
@wittmann:
Great read, Marc. Thanks.
The BBC has a good track record of picking up all sorts of interesting news stories related to the two World Wars, sometimes on quite obscure subjects, so they deserve a lot of credit for their interest in history.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-37302722
Today in history: the 100th anniversary of the tank’s first use in combat, at the Battle of the Somme. At the outbreak of World War One, practical battlefield machines were for most soldiers scarcely more than science fiction. A “Landships” committee was formed in early 1915, and tanks went from science fiction to steel fact in the space of six months. They were at the limits of technology. Engines were unreliable, armour was thin, tactics were guesswork. Communication was mostly by hand signal and pigeon. And that was before anyone started shooting. On 15 September 1916, the shooting would start.
Interesting BBC story about the 100th anniversary of the decoding of the Zimmerman Telegram, the intellgence coup that eventually brought the US into WWI. When the story broke, the German foreign minister, Arthur Zimmerman, was mobbed by some journalists who wanted him to comment on the allegations that Germany was trying to get Mexico to go to war against the US, in exchange for a German promise to help Mexico regain some if its “lost territories” (like Arizona). One pro-German journalist (as I recall, he even was on the payroll of the German secret service) asked Zimmerman a “question” that was actually a broad hint about how Zimmerman should handle the situation: “Surely your Excellency will deny these allegations, will he not?” If Zimmerman had taken the hint, he would have put the Americans and the British into an awkward position – and even more so if he had challenged them to disclose their sources, which was something that they couldn’t do without revealing that the German diplomatic code had been cracked. Instead, Zimmerman – who doesn’t sound like he was the sharpest knife in the kitchen drawer – lamely answered, “I can’t deny it. It’s true.”
Thanks mark. For this and all the other knowledge you share on these boards.
April 6th, 1917 - The United States declares war on the German Empire.
I think you guys would be interested in this -
The Great War, a YouTube WW1 documentary series.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUcyEsEjhPEDf69RRVhRh4A
They do a main episode every week, detailing events of that week 100 years ago.
So it’s still an ongoing series and will be til late 2018.
They also do side episodes on specific topics, at least once a week for that too.
The main episodes are in playlists for viewer convenience too, having each season for each year the war takes place in.
Here’s the playlist for 1914, which is where you ought to start off if you’re interested.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FgaL0xIazk&list=PLB2vhKMBjSxO1lsrC98VOyOzfW0Gn8Tga
Definitely a worthwhile watch if you are particularly interested in WW1 history, I personally find it a joy to look forward to the next episode every week. Keeping up with the war on a weekly basis.
I think you guys would be interested in this -
The Great War, a YouTube WW1 documentary series.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUcyEsEjhPEDf69RRVhRh4AThey do a main episode every week, detailing events of that week 100 years ago.
So it’s still an ongoing series and will be til late 2018.
They also do side episodes on specific topics, at least once a week for that too.The main episodes are in playlists for viewer convenience too, having each season for each year the war takes place in.
Here’s the playlist for 1914, which is where you ought to start off if you’re interested.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FgaL0xIazk&list=PLB2vhKMBjSxO1lsrC98VOyOzfW0Gn8Tga
Definitely a worthwhile watch if you are particularly interested in WW1 history, I personally find it a joy to look forward to the next episode every week. Keeping up with the war on a weekly basis.
I follow the The Great War series on YouTube. First class series. Can’t say enough good things about the show.
Today marks the 100th anniversary of the event that is commonly held to be the end of World War I: the armistice on the Western Front. Germany’s war effort was on the verge of collapse both militarily and domestically, and its allies had already signed separate armistice agreements during the preceding months. The signing took place early in the morning, the ceasefire went into effect at 11 AM.
Formally speaking, the notion that World War I ended with this armistice is incorrect. Hostilities had ended, but unlike the end of World War II, the armistice did not constitute a formal capitulation. So legally speaking, the war continued until the various parties involved had reached separate peace agreements, a process which took several years to complete – in the case of Germany, the Versailles treaty which was signed in 1919 and took effect on January 10, 1920. And the state of war with Turkey even continued until the 1923 treaty of Lausanne.
