Cape £25 pp865
At 6.15pm on May 31, 1916, Admiral Sir John Jellicoe took what was arguably the most important single command decision of the first world war. He signalled the British Grand Fleet to deploy from six columns, then proceeding south-east, into a single line running east-west. This manoeuvre was dubbed "crossing the T". Jellicoe's ships would become the letter's top, horizontal bar, the approaching German High Seas Fleet its downward stroke. All the guns of the British dreadnoughts, broadside on to the enemy, could be brought to bear, while the Germans would be able to engage only their foremost. It was a moment for which the Royal Navy collectively had been waiting for almost two years — and its more fervid imaginations for much longer.
The manoeuvre took 20 minutes to complete, and involved much more than the reorientation of 24 battleships. The Grand Fleet had mustered 150 vessels when it had put to sea that morning, and its attendant destroyers and light cruisers had to weave their way through what could have become the most monstrous traffic jam, without collision. Once Jellicoe had issued his order, it was irreversible. If he gave it too soon, his own T might be crossed. If he left it too late, British ships would be caught still masking each other's arcs of fire. His guns could range 20,000 yards, further than a man could see, even when conditions in the North Sea were good. Mist ensured that they were not. He therefore had to take his decision blind. Moreover, his immediate subordinate, Sir David Beatty, the jaunty darling of the fleet, although successfully using his battle-cruisers to lure the High Seas Fleet towards Jellicoe, had failed to send a single signal reporting the enemy's position, course and speed between 4.45pm and 6.06pm. Jellicoe finally received precise information from Beatty at 6.14pm, one minute before he gave his own order.
It was the right one. At 6.26pm the T was crossed. It was the climactic moment of the dreadnought era — indeed of naval warfare in the age of the iron-clad and then steel battleship. It outstripped the battle of Tsushima in 1905, when the Japanese had sent the Russian Baltic fleet to the bottom, and nothing like it occurred in the second world war. The capital ships of the battles of the Coral Sea and of Midway would be aircraft carriers. Jutland is also the denouement to this huge book by Robert Massie, Castles of Steel, and indeed its equally extensive predecessor, Dreadnought, which took the story of the Anglo-German naval antagonism up to the outbreak of the first world war.
But what followed was an anticlimax. It lasted at most 20 minutes. Within 10 minutes of the T being crossed, Reinhard Scheer, the German commander, had ordered his ships to turn about. Although mauled, not a single German capital ship was sunk, while Invincible, the British battle cruiser, blew up and split in two, with the loss of all bar six of its 1,031 hands. It was the third British battle cruiser to go to the bottom that day. The Germans disappeared into the mist. But shortly after 7pm they reappeared: this phase of the battle also lasted at most 20 minutes, and for many of its participating ships much less.
Jellicoe's order was so pregnant because it linked tactical possibilities with strategic responsibility. Douglas Haig, commanding the British Expeditionary Force in France and Flanders, never took a decision that simultaneously combined so many levels of the war's conduct. Moreover, most of his instructions were reversible, or at least capable of adaptation. He had more than one bite at the cherry — some would say too many. Jellicoe never had another. Although he got it as right as he could have done, many felt that he had failed. As Massie makes clear, Beatty in particular used his own time, first as the commander of the Grand Fleet and then, after the war, as first sea lord, to denigrate Jellicoe. The basis for much of the vilification was not Jellicoe's order to deploy at the beginning of the fleet action, but his decision to turn away at the conclusion
of the second phase, when Scheer threw in his torpedo-boats to cover his second withdrawal. The Nelson tradition argued that the Royal Navy should close with its enemy. In going about, Jellicoe enabled Scheer to break contact and escape, this time for good.
The decision was a tactical one, and Massie is clear that it was right. Many German torpedoes had run out before they reached the British line and, of the 21 that did not, not one struck. As Massie points out, the differential speed between the torpedo and the vessel trying to escape it was 50 knots if the vessel was advancing, but only 10 if it was retiring. Jellicoe's second instantaneous decision gave his helmsmen more time to react.
The immediate debate as to who won the battle of Jutland was also tactical, shaped by ship losses and casualties. In both cases, the British came out on the wrong side of the equation. For them, the fighting revealed the design faults of their battle-cruisers. Massie is much less critical of their gunnery and fire-control systems than some recent commentators. He stresses the number of hits inflicted on the Germans in every phase of the action: what stands out, therefore, in his account is the relative unsinkability of the German dreadnought. Its combination of armour and water-tight compartments enabled it to take and survive a battering far worse than that sustained by the British battleships.
The pay-off was strategic. The Germans retired to their bases to lick their wounds; the British, on the other hand, were ready to fight again. Jellicoe did not have to win the battle of Jutland, but he could not afford to lose it. British ships still lay athwart the Germans' exits to the world's maritime trade routes, so sustaining the blockade. This — together with its corollary, the defeat of the U-boat — was, in Massie's view, what enabled Britain and its allies to win the first world war. But like most others before him, Massie does not do much to argue his case. The blockade is dismissed in 25 pages, and the war after Jutland — two years in which the Germans turned from the dreadnought to the submarine — is little more than a pendant to what has gone before.
In storytelling terms that is entirely understandable. The naval battles of the first world war make for gripping narrative history, the personalities were forthright and the scale of events did not swamp the role and influence of the individual. Massie does not fumble the opportunity. His command of the war's wider context can be shaky. So, too, is his geography, particularly of the approaches to the Firth of Forth. Some important recent scholarship has passed him by, and those who know the field will learn little that is new. But they, like the general reader, will count these as foibles rather than fundamental flaws. Massie indulges his love of detail, description and extensive quotation, but he has the knack of doing so without forfeiting pace, clarity or direction.
Available at the Sunday Times Books First price of £20 plus £2.25 p&p on 0870 165 8585 and www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirstbuy
Read on... websites:
www.firstworldwar.com/battles/jutland.htm
Brisk page on Jutland, with excellent links to official reactions from both sides
