h/t to Colonialista
For naval history fans: The Battle of Jutland – Clash of the Titans – Part 1
Best detailed online account I have seen of that battle.
Two more parts should linked from the first part. Total almost three hours. Pour yourself a glass of your favorite beverage and enjoy.
Jutland: my grandfather was there, but I’m not sure which ship he was on.
To narrow it down: In which navy did he serve?
‘With The Battle Cruisers’.
A journalist who was on HMS Lion at Dogger Bank.
The description of being on a ship being hit by heavy shells is interesting.
The Amazon comments on the book are worth reading .
And the Kindle book is only 74 cents.
https://www.amazon.com/Battle-Cruisers-Filson-Young-ebook/dp/B018MFSPMY
WWII of course, but ‘Killing The Bismark’ is a very good book as well.
Lots of background on the politics of it and a gritty description of the utter horror and slaughter that took place as HMS Rodney battered the Bismark into floating wreckage from point blank range.
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=killing+the+bismarck&i=digital-text&crid=2FHBNHK7Y5HNQ&sprefix=killing+the+bism%2Cdigital-text%2C198&ref=nb_sb_ss_fb_1_16
Just this morning I watched Drachinifel’s Jutland Clash of the Titans Part III, which is a handy summation of the battle. He says that in effect, Jutland was a “Battle In Two Parts” – the first part the Run to the South, starring Beatty and Hipper, and the second part the main fleet action, starring Jellicoe and Scheer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odoN2kjINwc
Part one was won convincingly by Hipper, as three RN battlecruisers blew-up and sank. The Germans had a hidden advantage, as in the preceding battle of the Dogger Bank they’d had one of their ships hit (by Beatty’s Lion) and very nearly blow up. They were prompt in addressing this, insisting on proper ammunition handling and flash protection throughout the High Seas Fleet. On the British side, Lion had been roughly handled during the earlier battle and required extensive repairs, but had not nearly blown up so the RN had not learned the ammunition lessons – and it was a common practice in the Grand Fleet to store shells and cordite charges in the back of the gun turrets, hoping for faster reloads. It was most likely these extra charges that resulted in Queen Mary’s loss, RN divers have been down to the wreck and Queen Mary still has extra shells and charges in the backs of its unexploded turrets.
Part two was convincingly won by Jellicoe – due to an extraordinarily astute deployment decision based-on very limited information, he deployed the Grand Fleet into line in such a way that the Grand Fleet subsequently crossed the High Seas Fleet’s T twice, allowing all of their guns to fire while the Germans could only fire their forward guns. An example of this; Beatty and his battlecruisers were there supposedly to keep Jellicoe informed of where German forces were, which he did only very spottily. Jellicoe made his decision on how to deploy from columns into line pretty well uninformed, and it took an Admiralty commission in the ‘Twenties, armed with all the logs and charts from both sides, eight hours to conclude that his decision had been correct, which was a disappointment for an Admiralty eager to pin the Grand Fleet’s failure to secure a smashing victory on Jellicoe. But then, a friend gives the following agenda for any Navy Conference:
1) Bold Statement.
2) Vehement Denial.
3) Angry Argument. And,
4) Physical Violence.
The High Seas Fleet faced annihilation, which they avoided only because the RN shells were no good – they were filled with picric acid which, while a potent explosive, is sensitive enough that the RN shells usually exploded when they hit (i.e., outside the German armour) instead of after a slight delay, which would’ve allowed them to penetrate the armour and explode inside among the machinery and ammunition that the armour was there to protect.
The Germans themselves were amazed that they’d not lost several more ships, and the RN shells became a laughing-stock throughout the High Seas Fleet. Ironically, Jellicoe himself had been pushing for more effective shells since before the war, as he rose through the ranks of the Grand Fleet; these had been studied, but the matter was set-aside after Jellicoe was promoted out of Third Sea Lord, and had only come back into prominence with his promotion into command of the Grand Fleet. The new shells, the “green boys” were filled with TNT, a much more stable explosive, and would be available to the fleet two years later – German shells were already filled with TNT.
All good points. Yes Germans were amazed they haven’t lost more ships but they came extremely close. One more hole in Seydlitz or a few miles further from the dock and she would be gone. Apart for Moltke all battlecruisers were battle dead. Neither Iron Dog nor VdT has any fight in them left. If a handful more shells exploded as designed, if the 5th battleship squadron got off few more salvos before having to run, if the Hood’s battlecruisers enjoyed the mist that let them sink Lutzow with immunity just for a short while longer the hull looses would be on par or in RN favor.
Here is another way to look loses:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damage_to_major_ships_at_the_Battle_of_Jutland
But the bottom line is:
Both sides lost a single modern battlecruiser.
RN lost two older largely obsolete battlecruisers.
HS lost an antique battleship
RN lost three antique armored cruisers
HS lost four modern light cruisers
With exception of Queen Mary and Lutzow major ship loses involved old or still relatively young but rapidly made obsolete by arms race ships.
One of Scheer’s lessons-learned from the battle was, “Pre-dreadnoughts will henceforth serve only secondary roles, and will not sail with the High Seas Fleet again.” The pre-dreadnoughts had only sailed with the fleet because they were Scheer’s former command, and the current admiral commanding begged to be taken along. And Drachinifel’s bottom line is, the High Seas Fleet went home with the Grand Fleet on their tail, and didn’t come out again. For that reason alone, there can be no real doubt that it was an English victory.
There’s another malign little twist in there – Jellicoe might have been waiting for Scheer the next morning at Horn’s Reef, but for a bit of Royal Navy Officers’ snootiness. Both sides devoted a lot of time and effort to reading the other sides’ mail – on the RN side, this was helped-along by two interludes. Several German u-boats were caught inshore during WW1 and sunk in shallow water – and in the dead of night, in extreme secrecy, the RN was putting helmet divers down on their wrecks and salvaging their code books. As well, SMS Magdeburg ran aground in the eastern Baltic in August 1914 and the hulk was boarded by the Russians; the comm officers had been unable to put their code books into a boiler firebox or over the side, and the Russians captured three copies and passed one to the English. The Germans – for whatever reason – did not re-issue the codes, and the RN could read German codes for the rest of the war.
The RN codebreaking establishment was in Room 40 in Whitehall; but the officers manning the ops room, whether for reasons of just general snootiness or because they considered codebreaking unsportsmanlike, looked down their noses at Room 40, and took every opportunity to inform them that their help would be asked-for when it was wanted and not before, thank you very much. So Room 40 got used to not being asked, and did not volunteer information that hadn’t been requested – including Scheer’s signal requesting zeppelin reconnaissance over Horn’s Reef for the morning after the battle. Had jellicoe received that signal, he’d’ve known the High Seas Fleet’s intended route back to Heligoland and could have maneuvered to block it.
Not the only casualty of the famed RN snootiness, I fear. USN Admiral Ernest King had served a liaison tour in the UK between the wars, wherein he frequently went to sea in RN ships. He was not an Anglophobe when he went over, but he was a virulent Anglophobe when he came back – I’ve always been deeply curious as to what pi$$ed him off. In any event, King was famously prickly, and was in charge of the USN during WW2 when the D-Day invasion was being planned; and he did his utmost to keep USN assets out of the invasion, declaring he’d rather they be used in the Pacific against the Japanese. The D-Day planners had to go up to Churchill and across to Roosevelt to override King, without which D-Day would not have been possible.
Ernest King’s incompetence and skill at passing the buck was in evidence elsewhere, at the court martial of the skipper of the USS Indianapolis:
“In the end, McVay was charged with two counts: suffering his vessel to be hazarded by failing to zigzag, and failure to order abandon ship in a timely manner. His counsel, reportedly hand-picked by (Admiral Ernest) King, had never argued a case in court before.
The court claimed that McVay was not being charged for any deficiency that led to the sinking of his ship. They made a strong case that the “Indianapolis was hazarded before she was ever detected by I-58, and would have been hazarded if she had never been detected by I-58.” In essence, McVay could have been found guilty in a court– martial even if his ship had not been sunk. This is a meaningless legal distinction, however, since absent the sinking, there would have been no way for anyone to know that the vessel had been hazarded.
Hence, despite the fact that McVay was convicted only on the first count—for suffering his vessel to be hazarded by not zigzagging—there is no way to escape the fact that Captain McVay was court-martialed for having his ship sunk.”
https://news.usni.org/2014/07/30/legacy-uss-indianapolis
The treatment of McVay and his subsequent tortured life is a very depressing story. He eventually killed himself. Shot himself in the head. He was found holding a pistol in one hand a toy sailor figure given to him by his dad in the other.
Likewise the treatment of USN Admiral Husband Kimmel, who was removed from command of the Pacific fleet after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Well I mean c’mon, you gotta’ have somebody to blame it on, right? And it’s never OUR fault, so it’s gotta’ be somebody else, right? This despite Ernest King in the 1936 fleet problem, and Harry Yarnell in the 1932 fleet problem, both of whom demonstrated that Pearl Harbor was vulnerable to air attack and both of whom were ignored until proven right on the day.
But all navies (and just about everybody else) do that. The two Arleigh Burkes involved in the collisions in East Asia make an ugly example, especially when one stumbles across the unending appeals for better maintenance, training and equipment that were continually made by their Captains and the Admiral in charge of that fleet, all of which were ignored – and all three of whom were relieved of command after the fact.
The saddest I think would be Rear Admiral Christopher Cradock, in command of the RN on the West Indies / North America station in early WW1. An earlier event, the pursuit of SMS’s Goeben and Breslau (which makes grisly reading as it would help to precipitate Turkey’s joining WW1 on the German side, the collapse of Russia and the rise of the Soviet Union) had resulted in Admiral Troubridge being court-martialled for failing to bring the two German ships to battle, even though he was clearly outgunned and his orders were to avoid action with superior forces. Cradock was a friend of Troubridge, and he vowed that he, his ships and his men would not be unfairly humiliated like that in the eyes of the nation. So when Graf von Spee’s German East Asia Squadron entered his area on their way home from Asia, he charged into battle with them even though hopelessly overmatched – which he was despite his numerous futile efforts to point-out to the Admiralty the inevitability of encountering the East Asia Squadron in his area of responsibility, the danger his force was in and his urgent need for reinforcements.
The Battle of Coronel was entirely one-sided and Cradock went down with his ships. That the RN rushed superior forces to the South Atlantic and wiped-out the East Asia Squadron afterwards, ignores the facts that Cradock was right and an earlier reinforcement would have saved his force from annihilation in the first place. Chile was a haven for German emigrants, and a parade of celebration was thrown for von Spee and his ships after the battle; as a centerpiece of it, von Spee was presented a large bouquet of flowers by a little girl amidst the assembled Chilean dignitaries. Von Spee was under no illusion that the British wouldn’t respond overwhelmingly to their humiliation at Coronel, and he’s said to have glumly remarked, “Better save them for my funeral.”
“Pre-dreadnoughts will henceforth serve only secondary roles, and will not sail with the High Seas Fleet again.”
Yep, neither them nor armoured cruisers would. Gone were the days of Admiral Togo and armoured cruisers following pre dreadnoughts in the battle.
Bear in mind that pre-WW1, cruisers were a lot faster than battleships and were attached to the fleet for scouting and chasing-down stragglers and damaged enemies. This was an effect of the switch from coal-fired Scotch boilers and reciprocating engines to oil-fired small-water-tube boilers and turbines, but how little engine power most of Jellicoe’s battleships had at Jutland is fascinating. The Queen Elizabeths were the exception, and indeed were roundly criticized at the time as Britain had lots of coal but was dependant on imports for their oil; they were the first pointer to the fast battleship.
Yes but armored cruisers formed a battle line alongside battleships in two largest pre dreadnought engagements at Santiago de Cuba and at Tsushima. At Tsushima two Japanese armoured cruisers Kasuga and Nisshin followed four battleships in battle line of Togo’s main force. That happened because of loses on Russian mines of two battleships earlier. Nisshin received quite a pounding from Russian guns and was the second heaviest damaged Japanese ship in that battle. On board of Nisshin an unknown at the time ensign lost two fingers, had he lost three he would have been discharged, but a loss of two fingers only allowed him to stay in service, his name was Isoroku Yamamoto.
The battleship lost at Jutland was the pre-dreadnought Pommern, lost with all hands after a torpedo set-off one of its magazines. Pommern and the pre-dreadnought Sqn were referred-to by the rest of the German marine as the “five minutes”, as that was how long they were expected to last against a modern dreadnought.
But the RN did the same thing. The three cruisers Aboukir, Cressy and Hogue were obsolete armoured cruisers manned mostly with reservists, that were sent out on North Sea patrol. They weren’t really a match for anything, particularly any brace of modern cruisers that the Germans were likely to send out patrolling the North Sea, and shouldn’t have been given the task; the rest of the RN called them the “live-bait squadron”. They were torpedoed by U-9, commanded by Otto Weddigen, and all three sank within the hour with a total of ~1,450 casualties.
Weddigen would appear in the history books once again when, commanding the more modern U-29, he would find himself in position to possibly torpedo HMS Neptune; he launched a torpedo that missed, and U-29 broke the surface directly ahead of HMS Dreadnought and was spotted. HMS Dreadnought rammed and sank U-29 with all hands – the only known case where a battleship sank a submarine in this manner.
After sinking HMS Aboukir, HMS Hogue, and HMS Cressy in one action, U-9 went on to sink a fourth armoured cruiser HMS Hawke mere three weeks later. Truly a spectacular success for a single boat.
As for the 7th cruiser squadron aka named “life bait squadron”, their presence was needed on station, once new cruisers were available they were replaced but until then something was better than nothing.
Most famous quote imo. Admiral Beatty: “There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today”
Bottom line, the German High Seas Fleet, despite successes with RN battlecruisers, failed in objective of a blue water navy.
“As Richard Hough declared in The Great War at Sea, 1914-1918, “Germany could play with figures for as long as she wished, but British control of the world’s sea lanes was unimpaired, the blockade of the enemy as tight as ever.”
https://www.vqronline.org/essay/continuing-argument-over-jutland
History has lost it’s appeal now that I realize that everything I have absorbed dies with me and imparting it to someone else is a fucking waste of time.
Yes I learnt a lot of new stuff abut the battle, and not just the Maori Majik shorts.