Castles of Steel (134 page)

On returning home from New Zealand, Jellicoe was awarded an earldom, five years after Beatty’s. Eight years had passed since Jutland but the controversy continued. Retired vice admiral Sir Reginald Bacon, a protégé of Fisher, the first captain of
Dreadnought,
and a staunch Jellicoe admirer, wrote a book titled
The Jutland Scandal.
Harper, whose official narrative had been scuttled by Beatty, was a rear admiral and now also retired; he brought out his own unofficial book,
The Truth About Jutland.
Between them, Bacon and Harper pilloried Beatty’s performance: “A British force was worsted by a squadron half its strength . . . because our admiral in command was inexperienced and showed no tactical ability” (Bacon). “A want of tactical competence on the part of Lord Beatty led to the 5th Battle Squadron not being engaged during the . . . [early part] of the action at Jutland. Admiral Evan-Thomas has been ungenerously and unjustly blamed for this in the Admiralty
Narrative
” (Bacon). “Beatty now made a decision which was to cost us dearly. . . . He made the fatal and elementary mistake of dividing his forces. . . . It is incomprehensible why such a position was selected for this powerful force [the 5th Battle Squadron]” (Harper). “Then, full of ardor, without making cer-tain that the 5th Battle Squadron had received the signal to alter course . . . [Beatty] raced away at high speed. . . . This was the action of an impulsive fighter but not that of an experienced admiral” (Bacon). “It is unpalatable—extremely unpalatable—but nevertheless an indisputable fact that in the first phase of the battle, a British squadron greatly superior in numbers and gun power, not only failed to defeat a weaker enemy who made no effort to avoid action, but in the space of fifty minutes suffered what can only be described as a partial defeat” (Harper).

Later, Harper, still angry, had more to say, this time about his experience with Beatty and the writing of the original official narrative:

Lord Beatty’s political power was such that he was able to sway the First Lord and the Prime Minister to countenance the publication of deliberate misstatements. . . . By insertions or omissions, attempts were made to disguise the fact that . . . Admiral Beatty had seriously neglected the first duty allotted to him, that of giving his Commander-in-Chief frequent and precise information of the position of the enemy; that he failed to inflict damage on a greatly inferior enemy owing to incorrect dispositions of his ships and faulty signaling; and that the shooting of his battle cruisers was far below the standard expected of the Royal Navy. . . . The mischief done, not only to Lord Jellicoe, but to the Navy . . . is incalculable. Admiral Jellicoe was belittled and criticised while his onetime subordinate was lauded by a crowd of unscrupulous scribblers. With no damage to his own reputation, Lord Beatty was in a position to stop this campaign of calumny by the utterance of one word. . . . He did not utter that word.

Not until many years later, deep in retirement, did Jellicoe make a public comment. At a naval seminar, he reported that the principal difficulty affecting his handling of the fleet in the battle was

the absence of even approximately correct information from the battle cruiser fleet and its attendant light cruisers regarding the position, formation and strength of the High Seas Fleet. . . . Had Sir David Beatty reported the position of the German battle cruisers at 5.40 p.m. when he once more caught sight of them and re-engaged, the difficulties of the Commander-in-Chief would have been greatly lessened, but he made no report of any kind between 4.45 and 6.06, the latter report being in reply to urgent enquiries made by the Commander-in-Chief. . . . [Beatty] should have made it his principal duty to keep his Commander-in-Chief informed of the enemy’s position. The Commander-in-Chief’s battle orders laid the strongest emphasis on this duty.

The most accomplished writer involved in the Jutland Controversy was Winston Churchill. His account is interesting, not just because his description of the battle, published in the third volume of
The World Crisis,
which appeared in 1927, was written in Churchill’s unique descriptive style, but because, in a strikingly un-Churchillian manner, he waffled. He had appointed both Jellicoe and Beatty to their posts and knew both intimately. As a former cavalry officer who had participated in a charge at Omdurman, he admired Beatty’s headlong audacity; as a former First Lord, he understood Jellicoe’s care for his immense strategic responsibilities. In the Jutland chapter of
The World Crisis,
he tried to have it both ways.

Churchill began in a way that could only have pleased Admiral Jellicoe, a thorough appreciation of “the consequences to Britain and her allies which would immediately have followed from a decisive British defeat. The trade and food supply of the British islands would have been paralyzed. Our armies on the continent would have been cut off from their base by superior naval force. . . . Starvation and invasion would have descended upon the British people. Ruin, utter and final, would have overwhelmed the Allied cause. . . . There would certainly be no excuse for a commander to take risks of this character with the British fleet at a time when the situation on sea was entirely favorable to us. . . . Command of the sea . . . that priceless sovereignty, was ours already. . . . We were under no compulsion to fight a naval battle.” In this context, the former First Lord continued, “the standpoint of the Commander-in-Chief of the British Grand Fleet was unique. His responsibilities were on a different scale from all others. It might fall to him as to no other man—Sovereign, Statesman, Admiral or General—to issue orders which in the space of two or three hours might nakedly decide who won the war. The destruction of the British battle fleet was final.” Then came Churchill’s famous declaration that “Jellicoe was the only man on either side who could lose the war in an afternoon.”

Having made the case for Jellicoe and caution, Churchill suddenly vaulted on the other side of the aisle: “The dominant school of naval thought and policy are severe critics of Sir John Jellicoe. . . . The attempt to centralise in a single hand the whole conduct in action of so vast a fleet failed. . . . Praiseworthy caution had induced a defensive habit of mind . . . which hampered the Grand Fleet.” And thus, “the Royal Navy must find in other personalities and other episodes the golden links which carried forward through the Great War the audacious and conquering tradition of the past. . . . It is to Beatty . . . Keyes . . . Tyrwhitt . . . that the eyes of rising generations will turn.”

Jellicoe, in other words, had preserved British naval supremacy and by so doing had won the war. Next time, however, it must be done differently.

[Churchill’s verdict provoked a tangential battle over the former First Lord’s qualifications to write about command at sea. His liveliest critic, Vice Admiral Bacon, pictured “Mr. Churchill as he sits in an armchair in his well-lighted and commodious library, with all the many charts of Jutland showing the positions of the fleets spread out before him. . . . Here with pencil, compasses, protractor and eraser, he satisfies himself as to what Admiral Churchill would have done had he commanded the British fleet eleven years earlier.”]

Churchill’s appraisal of Jellicoe at Jutland came eleven years after the battle; it was not that of the officers and men of the Grand Fleet in 1916. In November of that year, when Lloyd George’s new Cabinet decided that the gravity of the renewed U-boat menace required replacement of Sir Henry Jackson as First Sea Lord, Jellicoe was summoned from Scotland to take this post, and command of the Grand Fleet was handed to Beatty. On the day the news reached Scapa Flow, a midshipman larking on the quarterdeck of the battleship
King George V
realized that the ship’s captain was looking at him. “He beckoned me over,” said the young man, “and I doubled across and came to attention and said, ‘Yes, Sir?’ I looked at him and there were tears rolling down his cheeks. He said, ‘Arthur, you may as well tell the gun room that Sir John Jellicoe has been superseded.’ ” This reaction was general: thousands of men in the fleet who knew him only by sight nevertheless thought of him not only as their Commander-in-Chief but also as a friend, a modest, honest, and decent man. When Jellicoe left
Iron Duke,
the crew cheered and wept and “stayed on deck watching his [departing] barge until she was lost to sight.”

It is often said that after Jutland the German fleet never came out again, but, in fact, it did so three times. The first and most ambitious of these sorties, one in which another great battle almost occurred, came on August 18, 1916, eleven weeks after Jutland. Scheer had not yet been able to persuade the German government to break its promise to the United States on unrestricted submarine warfare; as the U-boats were not to be released, he decided to try once more with the battle fleet. This time, with
Lützow
sunk and
Seydlitz
and
Derfflinger
undergoing protracted repairs, Hipper had only two battle cruisers,
Moltke
and
Von der Tann,
available. To strengthen the Scouting Group, Scheer gave Hipper three dreadnought battleships,
Grosser Kurfürst, Markgraf,
and the newly commissioned 15-inch-gun
Bayern,
the mightiest warship yet built in Germany. The High Seas Fleet battleship force was back at full strength; including
König Albert,
which had missed Jutland, there now were fifteen dreadnought battleships at sea, not counting the three with Hipper. One lesson had been learned: Mauve’s six predreadnoughts were left behind.

Scheer’s plan was a revival of his original Sunderland operation. At dawn, Hipper would bombard the Yorkshire coastal town while Scheer and the battle fleet followed twenty miles behind. If Beatty came rushing south, his battle cruisers first would pass over two lines of waiting U-boats; then, those not torpedoed would fall into the arms of the High Seas Fleet. This time, Scheer insisted on the absolute necessity of extensive airship reconnaissance to be certain that he did not again find himself surprised by the full might of the Grand Fleet. Twenty-six U-boats and ten zeppelins were assigned these tasks, and Hipper and Scheer sailed from the Jade at 9:00 p.m. on August 18.

As usual, Room 40 alerted the Admiralty and again, the Grand Fleet sailed five hours before the High Seas Fleet. Jellicoe, who was resting at his father-in-law’s house near Dundee, was picked up by the light cruiser
Royalist,
standing by for that purpose, and rushed to board
Iron Duke
at sea. The Commander-in-Chief had twenty-nine dreadnoughts, including the five
Queen Elizabeth
s, and Beatty brought six battle cruisers. This time, the Harwich Force of five light cruisers and twenty destroyers was sent to sea and ordered to join the Commander-in-Chief. The British preponderance was overwhelming.

On both sides, submarines drew first blood. At 5:05 a.m., the British submarine
E-23
torpedoed the battleship
Westfalen;
Scheer sent her home and with the rest of the fleet maintained course. At 6:00 a.m.,
U-52
hit the light cruiser
Nottingham,
screening Beatty’s battle cruisers, first with two torpedoes, then with a third. Because no torpedo tracks were seen, Goodenough,
Nottingham
’s squadron commodore, reported to Jellicoe that he was uncertain whether the ship had encountered mines or torpedoes. All Jellicoe’s fears of underwater weapons were aroused; worried that the Grand Fleet might be entering into a new, uncharted German minefield, he reversed course for two hours. When Goodenough signaled assurance that
Nottingham
had been sunk by torpedoes, Jellicoe again reversed course and headed south. He had lost four hours, but remained in a position to intercept the High Seas Fleet. Then, shortly after noon, a German mistake saved the German fleet.

The zeppelins had been aloft through the morning, but their reports to Scheer had been confusing. The airships’ clearest look at the water’s surface came at a moment when the Grand Fleet was steaming north, away from the “minefield” and away from Scheer; they did not see or report Jellicoe’s subsequent turn back to the south. Then, at 12:35 p.m., when Hipper was eighty-two miles from Whitby on the Yorkshire coast, the zeppelin
L-13
reported a new force of thirty ships including five battleships approaching the German main body from the south, seventy miles away. This was a misidentification: the five “battleships” were the five light cruisers belonging to the Harwich Force. Scheer jumped to the conclusion that this was an isolated British battle squadron, the sort of prey he had been seeking in all his North Sea operations. Immediately, he abandoned the bombardment of Sunderland and turned southeast at high speed, toward Tyrwhitt and away from Jellicoe. The Grand Fleet, meanwhile, was closing fast, with a long afternoon of clear visibility ahead. When the fleet was at action stations, the Commander-in-Chief signaled: “High Seas Fleet may be sighted at any moment. I look forward with entire confidence in the result.” It was not to be. A thunderstorm about this time caused
L-13
to lose contact, but Scheer heard from a scouting U-boat that the Grand Fleet was approaching, sixty-five miles to the north. The Victor of the Skagerrak had no desire to repeat his “victory”; at 2:35 p.m., he abruptly turned southeast for home. An hour and a half later, Jellicoe, bitterly disappointed, also gave up and turned north for Scapa Flow. Along the way, the light cruiser
Falmouth
was struck by two torpedoes fired by
U-66.
Taken in tow, she suffered two more torpedo hits from another submarine and went to the bottom.

Two British light cruisers had been sunk and one German dreadnought damaged and this time Scheer made no claim to victory. He was displeased with his air reconnaissance. Only three of the ten airships aloft had sighted the British fleet; they had sent seven reports, four of which were wrong. In general, Scheer observed wryly, “Scouting by airships is somewhat negative in character, since the fleet is only informed by them that the main hostile fleet is
not
within their field of vision, whereas the important thing is to know where it actually is.”