CHAPTER XX The Battle of Jutland—(Continued)

II. THE URGENCY OF A DECISION

We can safely accept the German official statement, that their objective on May 31 was to cut off and chastise that portion of our advanced forces that had so often swept across to the Schleswig coast in the previous few months. The force they were looking for would naturally be the Battle Cruiser Fleet, for it had been this force that had always been nearest the German bases, even when the whole of both British fleets were engaged in sweeping. But it is not necessary to suppose that in every sweep both fleets took part. In coming out, then, the Germans would expect to meet the battle-cruisers, if anything, and they would count either upon the Grand Fleet not being in the field at all, or at any rate to be sufficiently far off to be of no immediate danger.

But how could the Germans expect to bring Sir David Beatty to action? The Battle Cruiser Fleet, before the Battle of Jutland, was exactly twice as numerous, and in gun power more than twice as strong, as the German fast division. In the Battle of Jutland it was reinforced by the Fifth Battle Squadron, ships to which Germany possessed no counterparts at all. Clearly, then, if Sir David Beatty’s force was to be brought to action and defeated it would be useless to rely upon Von Hipper alone. The whole German naval forces would be required. And284 according to enemy accounts sixteen modern battleships appeared on May 31. None of these had a greater speed than 21 knots, and, as they were said to be accompanied by six pre-Dreadnoughts, the speed of the whole fleet could not have exceeded 18 knots. The united German forces would, of course, have a fleet speed of the slowest squadron. How can an 18-knot squadron corner and chastise a 25-knot squadron—for 25 knots was an easy speed for the slowest of the Battle Cruiser Fleet?

It is clear, then, that Von Hipper’s fleet would not be able to get into action with Sir David Beatty’s fleet, unless the British Admiral chose to engage. Before the news of the battle was three days old, the suggestion had been many times made that the loss of Queen Mary, Indefatigable, and Invincible was to be explained by their having been employed in “rash and impetuous tactics,” and set to engage a superior force by the “over-confidence” of the Admiral responsible for their movements. And one critic went so far as to say that the opportunity for the German Commander-in-Chief to overwhelm an inferior British force with greatly superior numbers was exactly what the enemy was looking for. With the justice of this as a criticism of Sir David Beatty’s tactics I will deal later. But that Admiral Scheer fully expected that if Sir David Beatty found him he would engage him, we may take for granted. Just as he and his own officers and men were anxious for action, so must Sir David and his fleet be burning with a desire to get to grips. He banked, that is to say, on Sir David attacking. If he did, the German position and prospects were distinctly good. There would be twenty-one ships against nine or ten, and if the fast battleships were with the British Vice-Admiral, against fourteen or fifteen. The preponderance in force would285 certainly be on the German side. It should not be difficult to escape defeat. With luck, serious loss might be inflicted on the British before it was compelled to break off battle and retreat, especially if it sought close action. It might indeed be compelled to continue the battle, if some of its units were wounded, for the Vice-Admiral would certainly hesitate to desert them.

As to the danger of the situation being reversed—by the Grand Fleet turning up—in the first place, Zeppelins might save him from that. If they did not, he always had the card up his sleeve, that he could stand the British Fleet off by torpedoes, and shield himself by smoke from the very long-range gunnery which the torpedo attacks would make inevitable. So much for the German plan. Now how about the English plan?

It is a little difficult to say exactly what the British plan was, if by plan we mean a definite understanding existing between the Higher Command in London and the Commander-in-Chief at sea. For as to this no information whatever has been given to the public and we can only arrive at its tenor by the fact that the Admiralty after the event expressed itself completely satisfied with the Commander-in-Chief’s conduct after the fight—a matter to be gone into in greater detail later. For the moment the only indication we have of the general policy which has inspired Whitehall, is that given by Mr. Churchill in an article contributed to a popular magazine a few months after the action was fought. In this he laid down the following as the sea doctrine that should guide our naval conduct:

From the first day of the war, he said, the British Navy had exercised the full and unquestioned command of the sea. So long as it really remained unchallenged and unbeaten the superior fleet ruled all the open waters of the286 world. From the beginning it had enjoyed all the fruits of a complete victory. Had Germany never built a Dreadnought, or if all the German Dreadnoughts had been sunk, the control and authority of the British Navy could not have been more effective. There had been no Trafalgar, but the full consequences of a Trafalgar had been continuously operative. There was no reason why this condition of affairs should not continue indefinitely. Without a battle we had all that the most victorious of battles could give us. This was the true starting point of any reflections on the war by sea. We were content! As for Jutland, there was no need for the British to seek that battle at all. There was no strategic cause or compulsion operating to draw our battle fleet into Danish waters. If we chose to go there it was because of zeal and strength. A keen desire to engage the enemy impelled, and a cool calculation of ample margins of superiority justified, a movement not necessarily required by any practical need. The battle must, therefore, be regarded as an audacious attempt to bring the enemy to action, arising out of consciousness of overwhelming superiority!

A little consideration will, I think, convince us that Mr. Churchill was altogether wrong in supposing that a decisive action was not highly important to us at this time. For obviously the German Fleet came out to do something, and if my suggestion is right—that its mission was to raise German moral—we had first the obvious duty of preventing the German Fleet doing anything it wished to do, and next an insistent duty to depress German moral, at least as much as Admiral Scheer wished to raise it. Apart from any material or directly military results, a second Trafalgar, had it really broken the hearts of German civilians, might have been an element decisive of the power287 of the German people to endure the privations that the prolongation of war inflicts upon them. It might finally have broken down the whole structure of lying bluff that the Emperor’s government has maintained. This would have been a military object of the first value and importance. If the war is to end by the collapse, not of the German Army but of the German people, the value of such a victory and such a result can be measured by the number of days of war that it would have saved at a cost in men and treasure that it is hard to calculate.

But apart altogether from this, there were other considerations, some economic and some military, so immensely serious, as would certainly have justified Sir David Beatty in risking, not three, but all his battle-cruisers, if by so doing he could have insured the entire destruction of the German Fleet by Sir John Jellicoe’s forces. To realize this point we must carry our consideration of the naval strategy of the two sides in this war a little further. We have seen that our method of disposing of our forces in the North Sea gave the German Fleet a certain limited freedom of man?uvre in the irregular quadrilateral formed by Peterhead, the Skagerack, Heligoland, and Lowestoft. Outside of this area there was not, after December 8, 1914, a single German warship afloat that was not a fugitive or in hiding, nor has any surface ship ventured outside this area since. When the careers of Karlsruhe and Emden terminated, the period of systematic capture of our trading ships closed also. But Von Tirpitz was very far from being satisfied with the situation so created.

The Grand Admiral was wildly wrong in the kind of navy that he built for Germany, and hopelessly at sea in his forecast of the action England would take in the kind of288 war that Germany intended to provoke. But when the events of the first few months showed that the war would be a long one, it is not certain that he was not the first European in authority to realize to the full the r?le sea-power would play. In a long war, the merchant shipping of the world—and it was immaterial whether it was belligerent or neutral—would obviously be the one thing by which the Allies, by importations of raw material, and the manufactures of America, the British colonies, and Japan, could counterbalance the vastly superior organization of the Central Powers for working their industries and factories. Shipping was at once the source of supply of the whole Alliance and the military communications of the most formidable of them. The German submarines had had a small initial success against British warships. It was disappointing from the point of view of the attrition that Germany had hoped for. But it opened Von Tirpitz’s eyes to the immense possibilities of a submarine attack on trading ships. He saw, then, both the necessity of cutting the Allies off from the sea, and the means of cutting them off. The plan was an outrageous one from the point of view of morals. But Von Tirpitz’s conception of the importance of sea supplies to the Allies was perfectly correct, and in organizing an attack upon it he was striking straight at the heart of our power of carrying on the war.

This campaign had a very direct bearing upon our North Sea strategy, for at the date at which the Battle of Jutland was fought, about two and a half million tons of British, Allied, and neutral shipping had been sunk by submarine and mine. Had the war imposed no other attacks upon merchant shipping, the percentage lost would not have been very formidable. In the eighteen months that had elapsed since the first organized submarine289 attack on trade, it represented a rate of sinking of less than a million and three-quarter tons a year, a loss which the Allies and neutrals could easily have counteracted by more energetic building. But more than half of Great Britain’s ocean-going shipping had been commandeered for various war purposes and already in 1916 it had become obvious that the remaining stock of ships could not seriously be diminished without grave embarrassment, either to civil supply, to our financial position, to our military power abroad, or to all three. What was much more serious was this: It was a well-known fact that immediately after the German Government decided to blockade by submarine, a very large building programme was put in hand. The programme, as we have seen, had begun to materialize at the beginning of 1916, and it was Germany’s resources in new ships that was Tirpitz’s justification for risking a quarrel with America, so certain did the ruin of England seem, were ruthlessness of method combined with the employment of larger and larger numbers. The Higher Naval Command, then, in this country were fully aware of the extreme importance of being able to deal drastically with this menace, should it once more arise to threaten our sea communications. They also knew that it was certain to arise. And, again, they knew that the under-water threat could only be completely met by an under-water antidote. In the nature of things, as we have seen, there could be no complete reply to the submarine except by mines laid in continuous barrage outside the German harbours, and this in turn was a thing that could not be done unless the German Fleet were destroyed. Whatever reason there may have been in 1914 and 1915 for holding the Churchill doctrine that a victory was unnecessary, the brief submarine campaign of 1916 must290 have undeceived the blindest. For this campaign had not only shown that ruthlessness could double the rate of sinking, it had also shown that our stock counter-measures were ineffective to thwart it. It was, then, a matter of the very highest military importance to the cause of the Alliance that the German Fleet should be disposed of, so that the renewal of the German submarine campaign should be virtually impossible.

Had this indeed been the result, it is difficult to calculate the profound influence it must have had upon the course of the war, for within a year of the Battle of Jutland over five and a half million tons of shipping were destroyed and throughout that year a very high percentage of British shipbuilding capacity had necessarily to be devoted to purely military purposes.

The continued existence of the German Fleet made it impossible to curtail, made it indeed obligatory to increase and accelerate, the building of war ships of all sizes. The effect of this on the capacity to build merchant ships was felt immediately. In pre-war days the shipyards of Great Britain had turned out over a million and a quarter tons of merchant shipping and a quarter of a million tons of naval shipping. The same yards, had their industry been organized as a national activity, could under the pressure of war undoubtedly have produced two and a half million tons a year. The complete destruction of the German Fleet at Jutland, then, would have made the difference of nearly eight million tons of shipping before another year was out. What would this have meant in the saving of treasure, in man-power, in every other form of military strength to the Allies? But apart from these, there were further military objects of a very striking kind that might well have been within reach.

291 We have just seen, in discussing the North Sea strategy, that the kind of blockade we have maintained over the Germans was a long-range sort, leaving the German fleets an area of, say, 60,000 square miles in which to man?uvre. If there had been no fleet of German battleships something very like the old close blockade could have been maintained. It is well known that it is not mines and submarines that close the Channel and the Sound to the German and British fleets. It is the fact that the operation of clearing these things away must expose the force doing it to battleship action. The converse also holds true. If there were no German battleships the operation of confining the German cruisers, destroyers, as well as the German submarines, within waters of comparatively narrow limits, by mines, nets, &c., might not have been impossible. Certainly the opening of the battle would have been comparatively simple. There are many kinds of operations in which it would be folly to risk a battle-fleet so long as the enemy’s battle-fleet was in being. But with no hostile enemy fleet in existence a whole vista of new possibilities is opened up to naval and amphibious force. It is unnecessary to enumerate them.

We may take it, then, as axiomatic that, if any chance of bringing the German Fleet to action was offered, it was the first business of the British Navy, and on purely military grounds, no less than those of economic and moral advantage, to force it to decisive action, and that very heavy losses indeed would be justified by complete success.

But a further word must be added. If every admiral at every juncture is to regulate his action by nice calculation of policy and chance, is there not a risk that the balancing of pros and cons may be pushed so far as to292 confuse the main issue? It is not on these principles that, when it comes to fighting, brave men with an instinct for war do in fact act. It is almost true to say that the example of Hawke and Nelson, no less than those of the light cruiser and destroyer captains in the battle we are about to consider, prove that the best way of diminishing the risk of loss is to take the risk as boldly and as often as you get the chance. Something seems to be due to fighting for fighting’s sake. What was it that Nelson said about no captain could go far wrong who laid his ship alongside an enemy’s! or as Napoleon has it, “the glory and honour of arms should be the first consideration of a general who gives battle!”

In summing up the situation on May 31, the elements appear to be as follows: The German Government was in double need of a stroke to restore the moral of its people. A Russian revival was possible, the British army in France and Flanders was growing to formidable dimensions, the blow at Verdun had failed. The German Government, and particularly the Imperial Navy, had been humiliated by the surrender to America, so that everything pointed to a stroke at sea, if one could be planned that did not involve too great a risk. Admiral Scheer and his officers of the High Seas Fleet were full of eagerness to justify themselves to their force. They believed the British naval strategy to be such that it would be possible for them to inveigle the fast division of the British Fleet into an action with greatly superior numbers, when serious damage might be inflicted on them. They counted, and with confidence, on Sir David Beatty’s eagerness to fight, and they trusted to being able to defeat him before he could break off action or could be supported by forces with whom engagement would be hopeless. They relied293 upon their air scouts to save them from surprise, and had no intention of coming into contact with Sir John Jellicoe if it could possibly be avoided. At the same time, however, they recognized that the defensive tactics which smoke screens and the new torpedo made possible would not only prevent contact with superior numbers being disastrous, they believed here, too, either that the British would avoid the risk of torpedo disaster, or that the keenness of the British Fleet for action must expose them to very formidable losses by under-water attack, while their gun-fire could be rendered harmless by the obscuration of the target and the man?uvres the torpedo could force upon them. And in these conditions the evasion of an artillery fight at decisive range should present no difficulties. Finally, such risks as were involved were well worth the incalculable enhancement of German prestige that would follow if a not-too-untruthful claim could be made to a naval victory. The world that has a natural sympathy with the weaker force would be inclined to regard even the escape of the German Fleet as something very like a German success.

It was the manifest duty of the British Fleet first to thwart any German naval design, whatever it might be, and, secondly, to remove from the theatre of war the only formidable sea force that the enemy possessed. For to do this would make a close investment of his ports possible, would to a large extent cut down the possibility of his submarine successes by mining them into their harbours and channels instead of netting them out of ours, would open the Baltic to British naval enterprise, and would set the whole resources of the Clyde and the Tyne free to produce merchant shipping.