He “was the only man on either side who could lose the war in an afternoon.”2
“God himself cannot forgive the hanger-back.”3
“Get your bravery over young, before you command the British Fleet.”4
The Battle of Jutland, fought 100 years ago on 31 May, can mess with one’s head. For whom was it a victory and for whom a defeat, and by what criteria? What were its consequences and what its lessons? Before Jutland, Germany’s High Seas Fleet was blockaded within the North Sea by the domineering presence, over the horizon, of the Royal Navy’s Grand Fleet. After Jutland, the same state of affairs prevailed. But 6,000 Britons had died, as opposed to 2,500 Germans, and a British battle-fleet of 28 dreadnought battleships had failed to destroy a German one of 16. The aura and reputation of Nelson’s navy was diminished. The British public was confused; the Royal Navy officer corps was angry and feeling vaguely betrayed.
There were (in retrospect) obvious technical and architectural reasons for the disparity in casualties—for the shocking fact that most British deaths were caused by British explosives, with enemy projectiles acting merely as detonators. And niche work continues on the technologies of the Grand Fleet. But, although the two fields cannot really be disconnected, the subject of this discussion is the manner in which the British C-in-C, Admiral Jellicoe, trained and led his fleet: the purpose and skill with which he wielded the weapon in his charge.
The Royal Navy’s understood place in the naval firmament at the start of the World War I calls for superlatives. It bears resemblance to that of the U.S. Navy today. Britain’s sea force had emerged supreme from the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, and in the ensuing long, calm lee of Trafalgar, nobody stepped forward to challenge the fleet whose size and reputation were enough to deter great-power competition at sea. Meanwhile, the U.K.’s leading role in the Industrial Revolution multiplied the country’s wealth, reaffirmed its maritime dominance, and brought a cascade of technical and organizational changes to the Royal Navy. By the time Admiral Sir John Fisher was forcing through the “dreadnought revolution” in the early years of the 20th century, “the size of ships, the materials of their construction, the nature of their weapons, the means of their propulsion and even the colour of their paint had all changed beyond recognition.”5 Yet, if one could have asked of the Royal Navy of 1914, “Who do you think you are?”—every military service has its conceits—one would have found that it was still the navy of Horatio Nelson: the fleet whose presumed birthright was victory and whose enemies anticipated defeat.
“No pressure, then!” one might have joked to Jellicoe as his flag, the Cross of Saint George, climbed HMS Iron Duke’s masthead in August 1914. But the pressure was immense, and he was pulled in two directions. While Nelson was tugging at his gold-laced sleeve, he was acutely aware that he had accepted responsibility for Britain’s entire inventory of modern battle-line units, a weight borne by no admiral since Lord Howard at the time of the Armada in 1588. Even Nelson knew that, had he somehow lost his Mediterranean Squadron at Trafalgar, there were two other forces in home waters, the North Sea Fleet and the Channel Fleet, able and eager to stop a French invasion; indeed, “those far distant storm-beaten ships upon which the Grand Army never looked” were more directly Lord Keith’s and Sir William Cornwallis’ than they were Nelson’s.
Furthermore, by virtue of Jellicoe’s battle-fleet, Britain “already enjoyed most of the fruits of a victorious fleet action without actually having to fight one: the superior power of her fleet-in-being (in the Admiralty’s words) ‘pervades all the waters of the world’.”6 It lay menacingly in the path of the High Seas Fleet’s contributing anything of strategic value to Germany’s war effort, underwrote the U.K.’s global security, shielded the country from invasion, and allowed the Allies’ multinational warfighting logistics to function as required.
Sir John’s Dilemma
A few days after Jutland the Austrian naval attaché in Berlin reported: “They do not deny that they were extraordinarily fortunate, and that if the action had been prosecuted with energy on the British side, and if the ‘Nelson touch’ had been in evidence, things might have gone very badly for Germany.”7 But would Nelson’s ready acceptance that “Something must be left to chance; nothing is sure in a sea fight above all” have long survived his appointment as C-in-C Grand Fleet in 1914? He bequeathed to his successors little guidance on how a superior fleet, with much more to lose than to gain, should approach a fleet action, and we cannot be sure how Nelson might have led his fleet had he found himself in Jellicoe’s shoes.
Jellicoe was loath to leave anything to chance. It was entirely logical for him to be fastidious about the circumstances within which he would contemplate a battle that he did not, strictly speaking, need to fight. But this was Nelson’s navy, “the dread and envy of them all,” the core of British identity, and to remain merely a fleet-in-being was unthinkable—the more so with the army suffering relentless losses on the Western Front.8 As a gunnery specialist, Jellicoe was the master of the 240 heavy guns at his command in the battle-fleet. He had all the data at his fingertips. In more recent times he would have been a devotee of operational analysis (OA). In good visibility, with opponents at medium range and on parallel courses, he knew that the Grand Fleet must win a straight artillery-slugging contest. And his job in battle would be to allow the OA to prevail. In less favorable conditions, chance might play an erratic, spoiling, treacherous role.
In particular, he knew that his German opposite number in 1916, Vice Admiral Reinhard Scheer, was a torpedo specialist, and so Jellicoe’s sleepless nights were visited by an array of underwater weapons, decoys, and ambushes. His eagerness for battle was therefore hedged about with provisos designed to control the conditions under which an encounter would take place. He worried, and great worriers are rarely great warriors. Were he to wreck the battle-fleet in some risky, vainglorious lunge for victory, the country would rightly never forgive him; and he feared adventurism among his subordinates (few of whom were, in truth, adventurous). Through detailed battle orders and the processes of signaling, he sought to keep his 100-piece orchestra under the tight discipline of his conductor’s baton.
But there were those who foresaw that central control would prove unsustainable under battle conditions and believed that the fleet must, as it were, play jazz instead. Jazz demands a higher level of musicianship, for each player must understand exactly how his instrument can best contribute to the commander’s objectives and then take responsibility for his own interventions. Nelson played it at the Battle of Cape St. Vincent when, without orders, he turned HMS Captain out of the line to cut off a Spanish escape. To the jealousy of some of his other COs, Admiral Sir John Jervis applauded his action and gave him the squadron that entered the Mediterranean and in due course found Napoleon’s fleet in Aboukir Bay in the Nile Delta. There Captain Thomas Foley of the Goliath gave another jazz master-class. Leading Nelson’s battle-line into the French anchorage, he discerned that the enemy’s ships-of-the-line, up-light against the sunset, were riding to only one anchor, which meant there must be deep water “swinging room” on their landward side. So he led the British fleet around the end of the anchored line, to assault the French on their unprepared side.
In the early 1890s the C-in-C Mediterranean, Vice Admiral Sir George Tryon, judged his squadron of 11 ironclad battleships and cruisers to be too unwieldy to be centrally controlled in the smoke and confusion of battle, so he trained them to maneuver with few, or even no, signals. He called it their “secondary education”—a step beyond the primary skills of “goose-step” shiphandling at which the Victorian fleets excelled. Tryon’s premature death in 1893 was a grievous loss to the service. (A young Commander Jellicoe worked closely with his counter-reforming successor.)
Jellicoe’s subordinate in 1914–16, Vice-Admiral Sir David Beatty, nurtured jazzmanship in his semi-detached advanced force, the Battle-Cruiser Fleet. Jellicoe would probably have tried to block Beatty’s appointment, had Beatty not been already in-post (and sheltered by Winston Churchill) when he took over the Grand Fleet. In 1913, with the indulgence of Jellicoe’s predecessor, Beatty had started infusing his senior subordinates with what he called “cruiser” principles.9 These entailed reflex-responding to certain situations—taking their orders from the enemy—unless told otherwise. The key was situation-awareness and the responsibility for intelligent action that comes with it. Beatty lacked rigor as a trainer, and his attention to detail left something to be desired. He possessed a touch of laziness and relied on subordinates to do his doctrinal brain-work for him. But in time he brought his 50-ship fleet of battlecruisers, light cruisers, and destroyers up to a level of secondary skill where it could function reasonably well without prescriptive signaling (and the signals he did make were sometimes unhelpful). The doctrinal difference was brought into focus at Jutland, when he made no concessions to a “visiting” squadron from the Battle Fleet, which was supposed to be operating with him.
‘Saturated in Discipline’
Some of the opportunities of Jutland were missed because the outlying squadrons and flotillas of the Battle Fleet feared that initiative on their part might upset some master plan of Jellicoe’s. But the C-in-C did not know clearly what was going on around him and, when used, wireless telegraphy signals were, as often as not, jammed by the enemy or drowned out by weight of traffic or even just held up by office congestion. Writing of Jutland, Churchill stated what Vice Admiral Tryon had foreseen in 1891: “The attempt to centralise in a single hand the whole conduct in action of so vast a fleet failed.”10 It should not have been necessary to discover this at the cost of a half-cock battle.
Jellicoe’s succession as C-in-C Grand Fleet by Sir David Beatty at the end of 1916 brought changes whose reception had been prepared by the disappointment of Jutland. Beatty sensibly took his time, but within a year he had ousted Jellicoe’s voluminous Grand Fleet Battle Orders in favor of a few pages of “Grand Fleet Battle Instructions” that drew heavily from battlecruiser doctrine. The Grand Fleet was taking tentative steps toward playing jazz. There is another way of thinking about it: In civil aviation there is the concept of a “cross-cockpit gradient” (sometimes rendered as “cross-cockpit authority gradient”). Where the gradient is steep, the copilot is reluctant to intervene when he thinks the senior pilot may be doing something wrong; and, allegedly, those airlines are the safest which foster the shallowest gradients.
If we apply the idea to the Grand Fleet, Jellicoe, with his worrying, his central control and detailed orders, and his reliance on signaling processes, steepened the cross-fleet gradient to the point where his subordinate flag officers and flotilla captains felt unauthorized to reflex-respond to tactical opportunities in the big-picture uncertainties of battle. When Rear Admiral Arthur Leveson was urged by his flag lieutenant to turn his division of four battleships to follow the disappearing High Seas Fleet into the dusk—“Sir, if you leave the line now and turn towards, your name will be as famous as Nelson’s” —he hesitated and then replied: “We must follow the next ahead.”11 He was wrong, a wrongness that almost redefined what he was being paid for, but the blame rests equally with his C-in-C. Nelson’s mentor, Sir John Jervis, had said that “the great talent is to take prompt advantage of disorder in the enemy fleet, whether caused by shifts of wind, or accidents, or his deficiency in practical seamanship.” Jellicoe was no Jervis. Fisher thought him “saturated in discipline;” and (to borrow a marvelous line from, I think, George Bernard Shaw) he “was too military a man to be truly martial.”12
It is impossible to know how far, if at all, we should be grateful to Jellicoe for not taking risks with the essential foundation of Allied belligerency, sustenance, and survival: for refusing to be led astray by “the burden of Trafalgar.”13 His was a safe pair of hands, although too safe for the temper of many Royal Navy officers in 1916. In appraising Jellicoe’s Grand Fleet leadership, Churchill wrote from his head: “The ponderous, poignant responsibilities borne successfully, if not triumphantly, by Sir John Jellicoe during two years of faithful command, constitute unanswerable claims to the lasting respect of the nation.” Then his heart took over: “But the Royal Navy must find in other personalities and other episodes the golden links . . . to the audacious and conquering traditions of the past.”14
The eight or nine Grand Fleet veterans I was able to meet in the 1990s were still divided in their support of the two successive Cs-in-C and scornful of the wrong one. They were teenagers in 1916 (if such things then existed) with the least “height of eye” and shortest range of vision. But, applying the “horses for courses” test, Jellicoe and Beatty cannot both be the right man to command the Grand Fleet: The criteria might have evolved somewhat during the war, but there is a sense of zero-sum game about supporting one over the other. Jellicoe was adored by his Grand Fleet followers and he was a thoroughly decent, modest man. Beatty had a range of human foibles—arrogance, bullying, promiscuity, even sometimes dishonesty—that might be absent from a list of “officer-like qualities.” But his transformational hunger to get to grips with the enemy and not let go is beyond question. In reducing the cross-fleet gradient, he was ensuring that, were the two fleets to meet again, an indecisive outcome was unlikely to occur again.
Jellicoe Right at Last?
Well, they did meet again, in November 1918. But the Germans came to be interned, not to give battle. Beatty was desperately disappointed. Unlike Jellicoe, Jervis, or Nelson, Beatty’s high-command abilities were never actually put to the test of a fleet action. Can the High Seas Fleet’s self-destruction in the chilly waters of Scapa Flow in June 1919 be counted a deferred result of Jellicoe’s command-in-chief? Possibly.
Only World War II ended the divisions within the service, but by then Beatty had won the doctrinal argument. His philosophical DNA may be discerned in the 1939 Fighting Instructions, which were signed off by two of Jellicoe’s former battle-fleet captains. By then the Royal Navy was, once more, facing the prospect of numerical inferiority, which made clear that they would have to maneuver to upset the hostile OA, rather than work with it. It was a return to historically and mythically familiar ground. Jellicoe never enjoyed that certainty of purpose.
Even if we agree that Jellicoe’s belief, that a fleet produced by science must be managed in combat by strictly scientific methods, proved wrong for 1916, we might still ask whether it has come of age now, a century on. Most prophecies will come true if you can wait long enough.
An adjacent question is whether any of this is of interest to today’s dread and envy of them all: the U.S. Navy, which resides in another long, calm lee: that of the Pacific victories of 1942–45. It represents today’s globally supreme status-quo power and thus has potentially more to lose than to gain from a new shaking of the maritime kaleidoscope. It would seem unlikely that all the issues surrounding the use of the Grand Fleet 100 years ago were peculiar to the British of that era.
1. Attributed to Jellicoe in Arthur Marder, From the Dreadnought to Scapa Flow, Vol. III: Jutland and After, May to December 1916 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1966), 237n.
2. Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis, 1911–18, Vol. III: 1916–1918 (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1927), 112.
3. Admiral Sir William James, The Eyes of the Navy: A Biographical Study of Admiral Sir Reginald Hall (London: Methuen, 1955), 202.
4. Attributed to Admiral Sir Howard Kelly.
5. Andrew Gordon, The Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command (London: John Murray, 1996), 348.
6. Ibid., 23.
7. Cited in Gordon, Rules of the Game, 314.
8. “The dread and envy of them all” is a line from “Rule, Britannia!”
9. Battle-Cruiser Squadron memorandum of 15 April 1913, quoted in Gordon, Rules of the Game, 382.
10. Churchill, World Crisis, 169.
11. Gordon, Rules of the Game, 471.
12. Gordon, Rules of the Game, 565.
13. A phrase coined by Jan S. Breemer; see Breemer, “The Burden of Trafalgar: Decisive Battle and Naval Strategic Expectations on the Eve of World War I,” Journal of Strategic Studies, vol. 17, no. 1, 33–62.
14. Churchill, World Crisis, 169–70.