Great rundown, and all conclusions spot-on… for a Reader’s Digest version of Jutland here you go:
Germany, Tactical Win, Strategic Loss
Sank/Killed more British Ships/Lives, but did nothing with the win.
May as well have had the entire German fleet sunk at Jutland for all the difference the tactical win made, because Germany never ventured out again, making the entire battle pointless for Germany and Britain maintained her command of the Sea, despite the tactical loss.
Thanks Marc and witt.
I watched an interesting documentary the other night that argued that the higher loss of British ships was caused by shortcuts taken to deliver shells to the gun turrets more quickly, with doors propped open, allowing exploding gun turrets to propel the explosion down into the weapons stores below.
A lesser suggestion was that Beatty’s gung-ho bellicosity and poor communications (i.e. relying on signal flags in poor visibility across miles of ocean) resulted in his force being outgunned for much of the battle.
Any thoughts on those points?
Cheers
PP
@Private:
I watched an interesting documentary the other night that argued that the higher loss of British ships was caused by shortcuts taken to deliver shells to the gun turrets more quickly, with doors propped open, allowing exploding gun turrets to propel the explosion down into the weapons stores below.
A lesser suggestion was that Beatty’s gung-ho bellicosity and poor communications (i.e. relying on signal flags in poor visibility across miles of ocean) resulted in his force being outgunned for much of the battle.
Any thoughts on those points?
The part you mentioned about shell delivery in the turrets is what I was talking about when I mentioned the lack of proper anti-flash shutters. Such shutters slow down the delivery of shells, but they offer protection against one of the biggest dangers that big-gun ships face: having an enemy shell burst inside a main gun turret at the same moment when an unprotected (meaning non-shuttered) shell hoist is open, thus allowing the flash of the exploding shell to travel all the way down into the powder magazines, whose detonation can blow a battleship apart. Proper anti-flash shutters can limit the damage to the struck turret; its crew will be killed, but the ship will survive. The 1989 Turret 2 explosion on the USS Iowa is a sad but dramatic example: the turret crew was lost, but the anti-flash shutters saved the ship itself from being destroyed, which is exactly what they were designed to do.
I’m not familiar with the Beatty element you mentioned, so I can’t really comment on its specifics. However, the German and British battlecruiser forces at Jutland (the latter commanded by Beatty) were each trying to lure tne opposite force towards their main body of battleships (which they both did successfully), so I’m not sure it’s correct to say that Beatty was outgunned for most of the engagement.
Thanks again Marc.
Apparently Beatty lost contact with a significant part of his own force which could not see his signals, which resulted in his having fewer ships to hand when he met the German battlecruisers. He ignored the more modern communication means at his disposal.
But I am always wary of TV documentaries, which can be too keen to have something new or significant to say.
@Private:
Apparently Beatty lost contact with a significant part of his own force which could not see his signals, which resulted in his having fewer ships to hand when he met the German battlecruisers. He ignored the more modern communication means at his disposal.
I assume that the “more modern means of communication” mentioned by the documentary is a reference to wireless telegraphy, since Beatty’s ships seem to have used both blinker lights and flags for communication. W/T in WWI was a mixed blessing in combat, so Beatty may have had valid reservations about using it. Automatic devices allowing messages to be encrypted and decrypted instantaneously didn’t exist at the time of WWI (nor even in WWII, as far as I know; the Enigma machine was painfully slow), so in a fast-moving tactical situation in which information is very time-sensitive messages would have had to be sent in the clear, because encyphering by the sender and decyphering by the receiver is too time-consuming. And the problem with sending any kind of radio (or in this case radio-telegraphy) messages is that the enemy will be able to pick them up too. W/T sent in the clear therefore potentially informs the enemy of your position (through direction-finding) and intentions (by analysis of the content of the message). You could make life more complicated for the enemy by sending uncyphered messages whose content consists of coded instructions taken from code books (like, to invent an example, “Perform maneuver X-12 immediately”), but there’s always a risk that the other side’s intelligence services have acquired or reconstructed your codes.
At any rate, part of the problem which Beatty apparently had at Jutland was that his force included a squadron that normally operated with Jellicoe’s battleships rather than Beatty’s battlecruisers, and whose commander wasn’t informed that Beatty’s standing orders on what to do in such-and-such a situation weren’t the same as Jellicoe’s standing orders. As a result, that squadron seems at one point to have done something different than what Beatty was expecting it to do, which resulted in Beatty temporarily losing the concentration of ships which he had had up to that point.
Yes - wireless. There was no mention of communication security, nor of blinker lights.
Thanks Marc, for sharing your knowledge.
One hundred years ago today, William Leefe Robinson became the first person to shoot down a German airship over the UK. This success in the skies above London, which saw him awarded the Victoria Cross just 48 hours later, was due to a mixture of the 21-year-old’s own bravery, an improved defence strategy and a revolutionary flammable bullet designed to ignite the hydrogen gas used to fill the 620ft-long (190m) long balloon.
Great read, Marc. Thanks.
@wittmann:
Great read, Marc. Thanks.
The BBC has a good track record of picking up all sorts of interesting news stories related to the two World Wars, sometimes on quite obscure subjects, so they deserve a lot of credit for their interest in history.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-37302722
Today in history: the 100th anniversary of the tank’s first use in combat, at the Battle of the Somme. At the outbreak of World War One, practical battlefield machines were for most soldiers scarcely more than science fiction. A “Landships” committee was formed in early 1915, and tanks went from science fiction to steel fact in the space of six months. They were at the limits of technology. Engines were unreliable, armour was thin, tactics were guesswork. Communication was mostly by hand signal and pigeon. And that was before anyone started shooting. On 15 September 1916, the shooting would start.
Interesting BBC story about the 100th anniversary of the decoding of the Zimmerman Telegram, the intellgence coup that eventually brought the US into WWI. When the story broke, the German foreign minister, Arthur Zimmerman, was mobbed by some journalists who wanted him to comment on the allegations that Germany was trying to get Mexico to go to war against the US, in exchange for a German promise to help Mexico regain some if its “lost territories” (like Arizona). One pro-German journalist (as I recall, he even was on the payroll of the German secret service) asked Zimmerman a “question” that was actually a broad hint about how Zimmerman should handle the situation: “Surely your Excellency will deny these allegations, will he not?” If Zimmerman had taken the hint, he would have put the Americans and the British into an awkward position – and even more so if he had challenged them to disclose their sources, which was something that they couldn’t do without revealing that the German diplomatic code had been cracked. Instead, Zimmerman – who doesn’t sound like he was the sharpest knife in the kitchen drawer – lamely answered, “I can’t deny it. It’s true.”
Thanks mark. For this and all the other knowledge you share on these boards.
April 6th, 1917 - The United States declares war on the German Empire.
I think you guys would be interested in this -
The Great War, a YouTube WW1 documentary series.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUcyEsEjhPEDf69RRVhRh4A
They do a main episode every week, detailing events of that week 100 years ago.
So it’s still an ongoing series and will be til late 2018.
They also do side episodes on specific topics, at least once a week for that too.
The main episodes are in playlists for viewer convenience too, having each season for each year the war takes place in.
Here’s the playlist for 1914, which is where you ought to start off if you’re interested.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FgaL0xIazk&list=PLB2vhKMBjSxO1lsrC98VOyOzfW0Gn8Tga
Definitely a worthwhile watch if you are particularly interested in WW1 history, I personally find it a joy to look forward to the next episode every week. Keeping up with the war on a weekly basis.
I think you guys would be interested in this -
The Great War, a YouTube WW1 documentary series.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUcyEsEjhPEDf69RRVhRh4AThey do a main episode every week, detailing events of that week 100 years ago.
So it’s still an ongoing series and will be til late 2018.
They also do side episodes on specific topics, at least once a week for that too.The main episodes are in playlists for viewer convenience too, having each season for each year the war takes place in.
Here’s the playlist for 1914, which is where you ought to start off if you’re interested.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FgaL0xIazk&list=PLB2vhKMBjSxO1lsrC98VOyOzfW0Gn8Tga
Definitely a worthwhile watch if you are particularly interested in WW1 history, I personally find it a joy to look forward to the next episode every week. Keeping up with the war on a weekly basis.
I follow the The Great War series on YouTube. First class series. Can’t say enough good things about the show.
Today marks the 100th anniversary of the event that is commonly held to be the end of World War I: the armistice on the Western Front. Germany’s war effort was on the verge of collapse both militarily and domestically, and its allies had already signed separate armistice agreements during the preceding months. The signing took place early in the morning, the ceasefire went into effect at 11 AM.
Formally speaking, the notion that World War I ended with this armistice is incorrect. Hostilities had ended, but unlike the end of World War II, the armistice did not constitute a formal capitulation. So legally speaking, the war continued until the various parties involved had reached separate peace agreements, a process which took several years to complete – in the case of Germany, the Versailles treaty which was signed in 1919 and took effect on January 10, 1920. And the state of war with Turkey even continued until the 1923 treaty of Lausanne.
