@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.
