Castles of Steel (133 page)

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 Harper 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:

It is to be supposed that Sir David Beatty kept Admiral Jellicoe informed from time to time of the position, speed, and course of the enemy. . . . [Jellicoe’s] plan of deployment . . . could not have been based upon his own judgement . . . but must have been dictated, either by some general principle of tactics applied to the information as to the enemy’s position, speed and course as given by the Vice Admiral [Beatty], or it must have been part of a plan suggested by the Vice Admiral.

Pollen was soundly thrashed by Jellicoe adherents. Harper described him as “inadequately equipped” to write on the subject and as having written a book that “teems with inaccuracies.” A. T. Patterson, the editor of
The Jellicoe Papers,
described Pollen’s book as “full of errors, some of them ridiculous.” John Winton, Jellicoe’s latest biographer, dismissed Pollen’s work as “almost unreadable.”

The following year, 1919, an all-out, ad hominem attack on Jellicoe appeared in
The Battle of Jutland
by Carlyon Bellairs. The author, a member of Parliament and a Beatty idolator, described Jellicoe as “a man of tearful yesterdays and fearful tomorrows.” Among his chapter titles were “The Grand Fleet Nibbles but Does Not Bite,” “I Came, I Saw, I Turned Away,” and “Eleven Destroyers Dismiss Twenty-four Battleships.”
The Times
called Bellairs’s book “outrageous and intolerable”; Harper wrote: “It is, apparently, equitable, in the author’s opinion, to ignore accuracy if such action is necessary to glorify Beatty at the expense of Jellicoe.”

Meanwhile inside Beatty’s inner circle, an unpleasant subplot was developing. The roly-poly Ralph Seymour had served for eight years as signals officer, courtier, jester, and worshiper. “I am the luckiest person on earth to be with David Beatty,” he wrote in 1915. “ ‘Flags’ is my Food Dictator and is very arbitrary,” Beatty wrote to his wife about a diet imposed by Seymour. For some reason, perhaps because reports of the ineptitude of battle cruiser signaling were spreading, Beatty turned on Seymour, telling people that Flags had “lost three battles for me.” Unfortunately, Seymour chose this moment to apply to marry Ethel Beatty’s American niece Gwendolyn Field. Ethel, hearing this, “rose in all Hell’s fury to break the engagement.” Gwendolyn was bundled away and Seymour became persona non grata to the Beattys. Unable to handle these blows from his former benefactors, he had a nervous breakdown and was institutionalized for almost a year. On Octo-ber 7, 1922, at the age of thirty-six, Flags threw himself over a cliff at Brighton.

Once the public controversy began, both Jellicoe and Beatty were silent in public, writing no articles or letters to newspapers, giving no interviews, and refusing to authorize others to write on their behalfs. From 1920 to 1924, Jellicoe was far from England, serving as governor-general of New Zealand. Meanwhile, Beatty, still First Sea Lord, had a new official Admiralty narrative in preparation. “The Admiralty,” a friend wrote to Jellicoe, “are bent on proving that Jutland was fought by
Lion
and the battle cruisers somewhat impeded by the presence of some battleships in a moderately remote vicinity.” A preface approved by Beatty was even more extreme: “On learning of the approach of the British main fleet, the Germans avoided further action and returned to base.” In July 1923, a draft of this document was sent to Jellicoe in New Zealand for comment. He was incensed. “The carelessness and inaccuracies of this document are extraordinary and the charts and diagrams are even worse,” Jellicoe wrote to a friend. “It is . . . of course a Battle Cruiser Fleet account, looked at through BCF eyes.” Soon after, Jellicoe wrote to another friend: “If you had seen it when it first came to me you would have said that it was the work of a lunatic.” Jellicoe’s twenty-page response pointed out what he considered inaccuracies, mostly having to do with wrong information affecting the reputations of some of his officers, especially Evan-Thomas, who was accused of missing the first part of Beatty’s battle with Hipper through his own incompetence. Jellicoe threatened to resign his post in New Zealand and come home to fight if the Admiralty published the new narrative without his corrections. Some but not all of his comments were included and in August 1924, a few months before he returned home, the narrative was published. It is an extraordinary document, notable for its omissions, its inaccuracies, and its unprecedented rudeness toward Jellicoe, a former Commander-in-Chief and First Sea Lord. There was no criticism of the Admiralty for its failure to tell Jellicoe that the High Seas Fleet was at sea or, subsequently, that Scheer was returning to base by Horns Reef. There was no criticism of Beatty. Jellicoe’s attempt to correct errors was printed as an appendix, where it was “refuted” by Admiralty-produced footnotes written in a tone of long-suffering annoyance.