The Great War IV: Jutland

Leaving the mud of the trenches for the moment, I am now going to consider the Battle of Jutland.

Jutland was by far the biggest naval action of the Great War and is one of the most famous encounters in the history of the Royal Navy. It was therefore surprising to find that my Oxford Illustrated History of Britain devotes but one sentence to it. It is customarily disparaging about the British, telling us that the navy was Britain's expected area of superiority, yet the battle was 'an ill-conducted engagement' and was, for the British, 'at best a draw'.

That sentence does not even mention the usual revisionist view of the battle, which has it that Jutland was a tactical victory for the Germans but a strategic victory for the British. The Germans are said to have won tactically because they sank more ships, but that they were dissuaded from trying it again and therefore Britain won strategically.

My own view, however, is different again. I believe the battle was both a tactical and strategic victory for Britain. It is too simplistic to say that the battle was a tactical loss due to the fact that the British lost more ships and more lives. Many of the surviving German vessels had suffered terribly. More hits were scored by British ships on German vessels than vice versa. At every stage after the initial engagement (known as the 'Run to the South') the Royal Navy had the better of the gunnery exchanges between capital ships. Britain also had much more resources to replace both men and ships than the Germans did at the time.

Much more to the point, however, is this: it was the Germans who fled the battlefield to avoid annihilation. They did not do so to lure the British into a trap - although that is what the British commander, Jellicoe, feared - nor did they do so as part of a pre-existing plan. They did so because they realised they were facing a superior enemy and if the fight continued the outcome was a certain German defeat. If you run away, you can't claim a tactical victory.

I think that public perception and many subsequent historians were content to score an own goal and call the engagement a defeat because they had been led to expect a second Trafalgar. When they didn't get it, they assumed that the Germans had won.

I am pleased to be able to report that Dreadnought largely shares my view of the battle as set out above. But leave our views aside, as being those of revisionist British writers more than 90 years after the event. Instead, let us consider three contemporary reactions.

First, there was the British disappointment at the absence of a decisive victory. But Jellicoe had achieved his overriding objective: maintaining the balance of power in Britain's favour, and hence the continued blockade of the German points. The Grand Fleet was back on patrol as per normal the day after the battle. Admittedly Jellicoe's caution led to Beatty's promotion to commander of the fleet and Jellicoe being shuffled into a desk job as Sea Lord, but Jellicoe had achieved what he wanted: Britain continued to control the seas. As Dreadnought puts it:

The famous quote by Churchill about Jellicoe was that he was the only man who could lose the war in an afternoon. Well he hadn’t lost it by nightfall of the 31 May 1916.

Second, there was a neutral verdict by the New York Times of the day (America not then having joined the war): it stated that the German fleet had assaulted its jailor, but it was still in jail.

Third, and in my view most instructive, was the German reaction. The High Seas fleet took much longer than their British counterparts to repair the damage to their surviving warships. Most crucially of all, however, the German admirals reviewed the action and concluded that they would not win an engagement with the British fleet. They never again tried to press for a substantial fight with British surface vessels, even as Germany slid towards an inevitable defeat on the Western Front. Instead they decided that thereafter they would have to take the option of unrestricted submarine warfare. That led to America's entry into the war and therefore the balance of power in terms of resources being tipped decisively in favour of the allies (the Germans had known this, but hoped to secure victory through submarine war before the Americans had time to muster an effective contribution).

The bottom line is this: if the Germans had thought that the British had handled the engagement poorly and that they (the Germans) had at the very worst a draw from the encounter, would that have been the strategy they pursued thereafter?