CHAPTER XIX The Battle of Jutland

I. NORTH SEA STRATEGIES

The battle off Jutland Bank, which took place on May 31, 1916, was the first and, at the time of writing, has been the only meeting between the main naval forces of Great Britain and Germany. It was from the first inevitable that we should have to wait long for a sea fight. It was inevitable, because the probability of a smaller force being not only decisively defeated, but altogether destroyed in a sea fight, is far greater than in a land battle, and the consciousness of this naturally makes it chary of the risk. Sea war in this respect preserves the characteristic of ancient land fighting, for—as is luminously explained in Commandant Colin’s incomparable “Transformations of War”—it was a common characteristic of the older campaigns that the main armies would remain almost in touch with each other month after month before the battle took place. He sums up his generalization thus:

“From the highest antiquity,” he says, “till the time of Frederick II, operations present the same character; not only Fabius or Turenne, but also C?sar, Condé, and Frederick, lead their armies in the same way. Far from the enemy they force the pace, but as soon as they draw near they move hither and thither in every direction, take days, weeks, months in deciding to accept or to force battle. Whether the armies are made up of hoplites or268 legionaries, or pikemen or musketeers, they move as one whole and deploy very slowly. They cannot hurl themselves upon the enemy as soon as they perceive him, because while they are making ready for battle he disappears in another direction.

“In order to change this state of affairs we must somehow or another be able to put into the fight big divisions, each deploying on its own account, leaving gaps and irregularities along the front.

“This, as we have seen, is what happened in the eighteenth century.

“Up to the time of Frederick II, armies remained indivisible during operations; they are like mathematical points on the huge theatres of operations in Central Europe. It is not possible to grasp, to squeeze, or even to push back on some obstacle, an enemy who refuses battle, and retires laterally as well as backwards. There is no end to the pursuit. It is the war of C?sar, as it was that of Condé, Turenne, Montecuculi, Villars, Eugène, Maurice de Saxe, and Frederick. It is the sort of war that all more or less regular armies have made from the remotest antiquity down to the middle of the eighteenth century.

“Battle only takes place by mutual consent, when both adversaries, as at Rocroi, are equally sure of victory, and throw themselves at one another in open country as if for a duel; or when one of them, as at Laufeld, cannot retreat without abandoning the struggle; or when one is surprised, as at Rossbach.

“And certainly to-day, as heretofore, a general may refuse battle; but he cannot prolong his retreat for long—it is the only means that he has for escaping the grip of the enemy—if the depth of the theatre of operations is269 limited. On the other hand, an enemy formerly could retire laterally, and disappear for months by perpetually running to and fro, always taking cover behind every obstacle in order to avoid attack.”

But at sea a fleet has to-day precisely the same power of avoiding action that an army had in former days. It cannot disappear for months by “running to and fro,” but it can disappear for years by burying itself in inaccessible harbours. It can, in other words, take itself out of the theatre of war altogether while yet retaining liberty at any moment to re-enter it. How, in view of these potentialities, did the rival fleets dispose their forces?

On April 25, 1916, some German cruisers made an attack on Lowestoft, similar in character but far less considerable in result to those made in the autumn of 1914, on the same small town, on Scarborough, Whitby, and the Hartlepools. As in 1914, there was considerable perturbation on the East Coast, and the Admiralty, urged to take steps for the protection of the seaboard towns, made a somewhat startling announcement. While this was going forward in England, the German Admiralty put out an inspired commentary on the raid, which dwelt with great exultation over the picture of “the Island Empire, once so proud, now quivering with rage at its own impotence.” These two documents, the First Lord’s and the German apology, led to a good deal of discussion, which I dealt with at the time in terms that I quote textually, as showing the general conception of naval strategy underlying the dispositions of the British Fleet.

“The directly military employment of the British Fleet has during the last week been made the subject of discussion. Mr. Balfour has written a strange letter to the Mayors of the East Coast towns, which foreshadows270 important developments; an inspired German apology for the recent raid on Yarmouth and Lowestoft has been published, and both have aroused comment. Mr. Balfour’s letter was inspired by a desire to reassure the battered victims of the German bombardment. He realized that the usual commonplace that these visits had little military value no longer met the case, and proceeded to threaten the Germans with new and more effective methods of meeting them, should these murderous experiments be repeated. The new measures were to take two forms. The towns themselves would be locally defended by monitors and submarines, and, without disturbing naval preponderance elsewhere, new units would be brought farther south, so that the interception of raiders would be made more easy. But for one consideration the publication of such a statement as this would be inexplicable. If the effective destruction of German raiders really had been prepared, the last thing the Admiralty would be expected to do would be to acquaint the enemy with the disconcerting character of its future reception. Count Reventlow indeed explains the publication by the fact that no such preparations have indeed been made. But the thing is susceptible of a more probable explanation.

“When Mr. Churchill, in the high tide of his optimism, addressed the House of Commons at the beginning of last year—he had the Falkland Islands and the Dogger Bank battles, the obliteration of the German ocean cruising force, the extinction of the enemy merchant marine, the security of English communications to his credit—he explained the accumulated phenomena of our sea triumph by the splendid perfection of his pre-war preparedness. The submarine campaign, the failure of the Dardanelles,271 the revelation of the defenceless state of the northeastern harbours, these things have somewhat modified the picture that the ex-First Lord drew. And, not least of our disillusions, we have all come to realize that in our neglect of the airship we have allowed the enemy to develop, for his sole benefit, a method of naval scouting that is entirely denied to us. That the British Admiralty and the British Fleet perfectly realize this disadvantage is the meaning of Mr. Balfour’s letter. He would not have told the enemy of our new North Sea arrangements had he not known that he could not be kept in ignorance of them for longer than a week or two, once they were made. The letter is, in fact, an admission that our sea power has to a great extent lost what was at one time its supreme prerogative, the capacity of strategical surprise.

“But this does not materially alter the dynamics of the North Sea position, although it greatly affects tactics. The German official apologist will have it, however, that another factor has altered these dynamics. Admiral Jellicoe, he says, may be secure enough with his vast fleet in his ‘great bay in the Orkneys,’ and, between that and the Norwegian coast, hold a perfectly effective blockade line, but all British calculations of North Sea strategy have been upset by the establishment of new enemy naval bases at Zeebrügge, Ostend, and Antwerp. He speaks glibly, as if the co-operation of the forces based on the Bight with those in the stolen Belgian ports had altered the position fundamentally. This, of course, is the veriest rubbish. So far no captured Belgian port has been made the base for anything more important than submarines that can cross the North Sea under water, and for the few destroyers that have made a dash through in the darkness. Such balderdash as this, and that the German battle-272cruisers did not take to flight, but simply ‘returned to their bases’ without waiting for the advent of ‘superior forces,’ imposes on nobody. It remains, of course, perfectly manifest that our surface control of the North Sea is as absolute as the character of modern weapons and the present understanding of their use make possible.

“The principles behind our North Sea Strategy are simple. One hundred years ago, had our main naval enemy been based on Cuxhaven and Kiel, we should have held him there by as close a blockade as the number of ships at our disposal, the weather conditions, and the seamanship of our captains made possible. The development of the steam-driven ship modified the theory of close blockade and, even without the torpedo, would have made, with the speed now attainable, an exact continuation of the old practice impossible. The under-water torpedo has simply emphasized and added to difficulties that would, without it, have been insuperable. But it has undoubtedly extended the range at which the blockading force must hold itself in readiness. To reproduce, then, in modern conditions the effect brought about by close blockade in our previous wars, it is necessary to have a naval base at a suitable distance from the enemy’s base. It must be one that is proof against under-water or surface torpedo vessel attack, and it must be so constituted that the force that normally maintains itself there is capable of prompt and rapid sortie, and of pouncing upon any enemy fleet that attempts to break out of the harbour in which it is intended to confine it.

“The great bay in the Orkneys’ may, for all I know to the contrary, supply at the present moment the Grand Fleet’s main base for such blockade as we enforce. But there are a great many other ports, inlets, and estuaries273 on the East Coast of Scotland and England which are hardly likely to be entirely neglected. Not all, nor many, of these would be suitable for fleet units of the greatest size and speed, but some undoubtedly are suitable, and all those that are could be made to satisfy the conditions of complete protection against secret attack. Assuming the main battle fleet to be at an extremely northerly point, any more southerly base which is kept either by battle cruisers, light cruisers, or submarines may be regarded as an advance base, if for no other reason than that it is so many miles nearer to the German base. The Orkneys are 200 miles farther from Lowestoft than Lowestoft is from Heligoland. An Orkney concentration while making the escape of the Germans to the northward impossible, would leave them comparatively free to harry the East Coast of England. If, approaching during the night, they could arrive off that coast before the northern forces had news of their leaving their harbours, they would have many hours’ start in the race home. It is not, then, a close blockade that was maintained. This freedom had to be left the enemy—because no risk could be taken in the main theatre. It is assumed on the one side and admitted on the other, that Germany could gain nothing and would risk everything by attempting to pass down the Channel. The Channel is closed to the German Fleet precisely as the Sound is closed to the British. It is not that it is physically impossible for either fleet to get through, but that to force a passage would involve an operation employing almost every kind of craft. Minefields would have to be cleared, and battleships would have to be in attendance to protect the mine-sweepers. The battleships in turn would have to be protected from submarine attack, and as the operation of securing274 either channel would take some time, there would be a virtual certainty of the force employed being attacked in the greatest possible strength. In narrow waters the fleet trying to force a passage would be compelled to engage in the most disadvantageous possible circumstances. The Channel is closed, then, for the Germans, as the Sound is closed to the British, not by the under-water defences, but by the fact that to clear these would involve an action in which the attacking party would be at too great a disadvantage. The concentration, then, in the north of a force adequate to deal with the whole German Fleet—again I have to say in the light of the way in which the use of modern weapons is understood—remains our fundamental strategical principle.”

I then went on to reply to the critics who had said that the use of monitors for coast defence was the most disturbing feature of a very unwise series of departures from true policy, and then passed on to what seemed to me the more serious criticism, as follows:

“The attack on this part of Mr. Balfour’s policy is vastly more damaging. For it asserts that the policy of defensive offence, Great Britain’s traditional sea strategy, has now been reversed. The East Coast towns may expect comparative immunity, but only because the strategic use of our forces has been altered. It is a modification imposed upon the Admiralty by the action of the enemy. Its weakness lies in the ‘substitution of squadrons in fixed positions for periodical sweeps in force through the length and breadth of the North Sea.’ Were this indeed the meaning of Mr. Balfour’s letter and the intention of his policy, nothing more deplorable could be imagined.

“But what ground is there for thinking that this is Mr. Balfour’s meaning? He says nothing of the kind. He275 makes it quite clear that a new arrangement is made possible by additional units of the first importance now being ready to use. The old provision of adequate naval preponderance at the right point has not been disturbed. It is merely proposed to establish new and advanced bases from which the new available squadrons can strike. It stands to reason that the nearer this base is to the shortest line between Heligoland and the East Coast, the greater the chance of the force within it being able to fall upon Germany’s cruising or raiding units if they venture within the radius of its action. To establish a new or more southerly base, then, is a development of, and not a departure from, our previous strategy—it shortens the radius of German freedom. If there is nothing to show that the old distribution is changed, certainly there is no suggestion that the squadron destined for the new base will be ‘fixed’ there. If squadrons now based on the north are there only to pounce upon the emerging German ships, why should squadrons based farther south not be employed for a similar purpose?”

The foregoing will make it clear that the general idea of British strategy was to maintain, to the extreme north of these islands, an overwhelming force of capital ships. It was adopted because it economized strength and secured the main object—viz. the paralysis of our enemy, outside certain narrow limits.

The southern half of the North Sea—say, roughly from Peterhead to the Skagerack, 400 miles; from the Skagerack to Heligoland, 250; from Heligoland to Lowestoft, 300; and from Lowestoft to Peterhead, 350 miles—was left as a kind of no man’s land. If the Germans chose to cruise about in this area, they took the chance of being cut off and engaged by the British forces, whose policy it was276 to leave their bases from time to time for what Sir John Jellicoe in the Jutland despatch describes as “periodic sweeps through the North Sea.” But the German Fleet being supplied with Zeppelins, could, in weather in which Zeppelins could scout, get information so far afield as to be able to choose the times for their own cruises in the North Sea, and so make the procedure a perfectly safe one, so long as chance encounters with submarines and straying into British mine-fields could be avoided. Thus for the old policy of close blockade was substituted a new one, that of leaving the enemy a large field in which he might be tempted to man?uvre; and it had this value, that should he yield to the temptation, an opportunity must sooner or later be afforded to the British Fleet of cutting him off and bringing him to action. Meantime he was cut off from any large adventure far afield. He would have to fight for freedom. It gave, so to speak, the Germans the chance of playing a new sort of “Tom Tiddler’s ground.” The point to bear in mind is, that it left the Germans precisely the same freedom to seek or avoid action as the armies of antiquity possessed. Thus no naval battle could be expected unless—as Colin says—the weaker wished to fight, or was cornered or surprised.

Now, against surprise, the German Fleet was seemingly protected by Zeppelins. It could hardly be cornered unless, in weather in which aerial scouting was impossible, it was tempted to some great adventure—such as the despatch of a raiding force to invade—which would enable a fast British division to get between this force and its base. So that the chance of a fleet action really turned upon the Germans being willing to fight one. And they could not be expected to be anxious for this. “A war,” says Colin, “is always slow in which we know that the277 battle will be decisive, and it is so important as to be only accepted voluntarily.”

The state of relative strength in May, 1916, was not such as to afford the Germans the slightest hope of a decisive victory if it brought the whole British Fleet to action. Nor was the naval situation such that there was any stroke that Germany could execute if it could hold the command of some sea passage for twenty-four hours or so. There was nothing it could expect to achieve if, by defeating or at any rate standing off one section of the British Fleet, it could enjoy a brief local ascendancy.

The argument, indeed, was all the other way. The professed main naval policy of Germany, viz., the blockade of England by submarine, though for the moment in abeyance, was being held in reserve until the military and political situation made the stake worth the candle. Now, deliberately to risk the High Seas Fleet in an action on the grand scale, when the chances of decisive victory were remote and the probability of annihilation extremely high, was to jeopardize not the fleet alone but also the blockade. For, with the High Seas Fleet once out of the way, the one stroke against the submarine which could alone be perfectly effective, viz., the close under-water blockade by mines, immediately outside the German harbours, would at once become feasible. So far, then, as military considerations went, the arguments against seeking action were far stronger than those in its favour.

But in war it is not always reasons which are purely military that operate; and as this war got into its second year there were many forces, each of which contributed something towards driving the German Navy into action. First, and in all probability by far the most powerful, would be the impatience of a large body of brave and skilful278 seamen—in control of an enormous sea force—with the r?le of idleness and impotence that had been imposed upon them. The German apologist, when uttering his p?ans of triumph over the bombardments of Lowestoft, said, on May 7:

“It must not be assumed that this adventure was a mere question of bombarding some fortified coast places. It would also be a mistake to think that it was only an expression of the spirit of enterprise in our young Navy. The spirit is indeed just as fresh as ever, and is simply thirsting for deeds, and when one sees or talks to officers and men one reads on their lips the desire ‘If only we could get out.’ The sitting still during the spring and winter may also play their part in this. Only a well-considered leadership knows when it will use this thirst for action, and employ it in undertakings which keep the great whole in view. Our Navy, thank God, does not need to pursue prestige policy; the services which it has already rendered us are too considerable and too important for that.”

There is no occasion to quarrel with a word in this passage. The German admirals and captains in command of twenty-three or twenty-four of the most powerful ships in the world must certainly have been straining at the leash. This, then, would be a predisposing cause to a battle of some kind being voluntarily sought by the weaker force.

And in May, 1916, there were other causes as well. The German Higher Command, while ignorant perhaps of the exact points at which the Allies would attack, must have been very perfectly aware that attacks of the most formidable character, and on all fronts, were impending. It also knew that the resources of the Central Empires were to this extent relatively exhausted, that all the Allied279 attacks, when they came, must result in a series of successes, not of course immediately decisive, but such as no counter-attacks could balance or neutralize. Austria and Germany, in short, would be shown to be on the defensive. They would have to yield ground. It may not have seemed a situation bound to lead to military defeat. For the superiority of the Allies—at least so it may have appeared to the German command—in men and ammunition and moral, would have to be overwhelming to bring this about.

But the Higher Command had made the mistake of carrying the civil population with them in the declaration and prosecution of the war, first by the promise and then by the assertion of overwhelming victory. But the victory that was claimed did not materialize in the way that is normal to great victories. There was no submission of the enemy, and no sign of a wish for an honourable peace. What was worse, the defeated enemy had shown an almost unlimited capacity to starve and hamper their conquerors. It was bad enough that they should not acknowledge themselves beaten. It was worse that the flail of hunger should fall on those who should be fattening on the fruits of victory. What would the state of mind of the German people be if, on the top of all this, the conquered Allies were to evince a capacity for winning a few battles themselves? It was manifestly a position in which, at any cost, the moral of the German people should be braced for a new trial. Given a fleet impatient to get out and a higher command anxious for news of a victory, these are surely elements enough to explain the events that led to the action of May 31.

But the most powerful motive of all was this: Not only was German moral badly in need of refreshment, it was280 especially that Germany’s belief in her naval power needed to be confirmed. For, in the last week in April, the Emperor and his counsellors had been compelled to submit to a peremptory ultimatum despatched by President Wilson with the endorsement of both houses of Congress behind him. Towards the end of the winter 1915–16 the German people had been led to expect a decisive stroke against England by the new U-boats which the Tirpitz building programme of the previous year was reputed to be producing in large and punctual numbers. The Grand Admiral himself, amid the vociferous applause of the Jingoes and Junkers, announced that the campaign would begin on a certain day in March. The story how more cautious counsels prevailed, how the Grand Admiral was dismissed, how an agitation was thereupon organized throughout Germany, and how, finally, the campaign was begun, though its author was out of office, are well known. The point is that the sinking of the passenger ship Sussex led America to define the position and to inflict a public humiliation, not only on the German Government but on the German Navy. On the top of all the other predisposing causes, then, here was a special reason why the sea forces of the Fatherland should vindicate their existence by some signal act of daring.

We must then, I think, in considering the Battle of Jutland, start with the assumption that the German Fleet came out in obedience both to policy and to its own desire. But we should be wrong if we supposed that they came out with any hopes of achieving final and decisive victory. It has never been a characteristic of German military thought to build on the possibilities of an inferior force defeating its superior.

On the other hand, it was very confident that it could281 not be decisively beaten. Being an inferior force, the German Navy has been driven to giving the utmost consideration to all the methods of fighting that can add to the defensive in battle. It was not slow to realize, as we have seen, the enormous advantage that the dirigible airship offered in scouting, and from the first it has devoted itself with special energy and care to the practice and development of the defensive tactics which the long-range torpedo made possible. Nor is this all. For though the Germany Navy was the last of all the great navies to cultivate long-range gunnery, it very quickly appreciated the fact that its efficiency depended upon the visibility of the target, that it should be launched at periods when the rate of change was constant. It consequently made it a first step in its war preparations to supply itself with the finest optical instruments regardless of cost, so as to get the range and the rate with utmost accuracy and rapidity and to master all the means by which the enemy’s gunfire could be made nugatory both by devices that would hide its own ships from his view, and by imposing sudden man?uvres by torpedo attack. We have already seen, in the story of the Dogger Bank engagement, how the pursuing British battle-cruisers were hampered in their chase and indeed deflected from their course by submarines skilfully stationed for attack, and by the employment in action of destroyer flotillas. And, again, how when Bluecher was disabled, and two out of three battle-cruisers were on fire and their batteries useless, they were shielded in their final flight by the destroyers interposing themselves on the British line of fire and then raising huge volumes of smoke impenetrable to the eye.

Lastly, as German writers since the battle have never ceased to remind us, the German Fleet had never been282 built with the idea of its being able to fight and defeat the British Fleet, but with the idea of creating a force so formidable that the British Fleet would not face the risk to itself that would be involved in its destruction. That there was some justification for such a belief will become apparent when we consider the statements of various British naval authorities made after the action was over. I draw attention to it here because it was undoubtedly reliance on some hesitation of this kind that gave the Germans such confidence in the methods of evasion which they adopted when the two fleets met.

In asking ourselves why the Germans came out we must bear this extremely significant truth in mind. They believed that they could almost certainly avoid contact with the Grand Fleet, but they also believed that if contact were made, what with torpedo attacks and smoke screens, they could hold off their enemies long enough to make evasion possible. To the Germans, then, it was very far from being an irrational risk to come into the North Sea to look for the enemy, with a view to fight on the principle of limited liability.