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. And 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 would 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 the 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 power 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 manœuvre 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 of 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 rôle 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 submarine 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 must 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.
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 manœuvre. 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 to 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 relied 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 manœuvres 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.