In May of 1916, the stalemate in the North Sea between the British Grand Fleet under John Jellicoe, and the German High Seas Fleet under Reinhard Scheer came to an end. The British used German signals to learn of the fleet's sailing and sent Jellicoe out to trap him. The British battlecruisers under David Beatty first met Hipper's German battlecruisers, and chased them south until they met the main body of the High Seas Fleet, losing two of their number to magazine explosions in the process.

Jutland: The Run to the North

As the British turned north, the battle began to shift. The weather was getting worse, as it often does in the North Sea. Beatty finally signaled Jellicoe ‘Fleet action is imminent’, although he did not give details, and took five more hits from Hipper without hitting back before his ships pulled out of range. The German battle fleet divided its fire between the escaping HMS Southampton and the 5th BS, who also suffered under Hipper’s fire. Malaya, in the rear of the line, was particularly badly hit, taking a total of 7 shells from the German battleships. None were fatal, although a large cordite fire put the starboard 6” battery out of action, killed over 100 men, and came close to setting off the 6" magazines. Barham took four shells from Derfflinger and Warspite two from Seydlitz. The battle wasn't entirely one-sided, as Seydlitz was hit by a destroyer torpedo during the British turn north.

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Thursday is the 102nd anniversary of the Battle of Jutland, and I'm reposting my series on the battle from last year.

Last time, we looked at the strategic situation leading up to the battle. 1916 saw the British Grand Fleet, under John Jellicoe, and the German High Seas Fleet under Reinhard Scheer, facing off across the North Sea. The British outnumbered the Germans, and had managed to cut Germany off from seaborne trade.

Jutland: Preliminaries to battle

Scheer planned the operation that led to Jutland as a trap for the British, a battlecruiser raid on the north coast of England to draw the British out past submarines stationed off their bases,¹ with the main body of the High Seas Fleet waiting to pounce. Due to condenser problems and delays in repairs to the battlecruiser Seydlitz, the operation's planned start date of May 17th had to be pushed to the end of the month. The Germans had a force of zeppelins they used for reconnaissance, but high winds on May 28th prevented them from reaching their positions, and the plan was altered to a sweep into the Skagerrak, the area between Denmark and Norway. The British continued to trade with Norway, and this raid would have seriously disrupted that trade. The High Seas Fleet finally sailed shortly after midnight on May 31st.

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Jutland: Strategic Background

The Battle of Jutland,² the greatest clash of dreadnoughts in history, was fought in the North Sea on May 31st and June 1st, 1916. This was the titanic clash of the British and German fleets that both sides had been waiting for since the outbreak of war.

At the beginning of the war, both sides had known that the primary use of seapower would be to interdict the enemy’s trade. The British did this by declaring a blockade, and searching any ship that tried to enter the North Sea, while the Germans initially dispatched commerce raiders against the British. These were quickly hunted down, which led to the switch to submarines.

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I picked up a copy of the New Maginot Line expecting it to be bad. It's a 1986 book by journalist Jon Connell, a proponent of defense reform, the theory that there's a massive flaw in not only the existing procurement process, but also the concepts behind the weapons we buy. This is not a position I agree with, and I felt like seeing how its conclusions held up today. They did worse than I expected. Jon Connell did not understand military history or contemporary systems, and the intervening 3 decades have not been kind to his thesis. This seems like useful information when judging similar claims made today.

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In April of 1982, Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands, British possessions in the South Atlantic. There was a centuries-old sovereignty dispute, and the Argentine Junta chose to invade in an attempt to distract the populace from a stagnant economy. If Argentina expected Britain to roll over and give up the Falklands without a fight, they were sorely disappointed. In a meeting on March 31st, two days before the invasion, the Defense Secretary, John Nott, suggested that it would take five months to muster a task force, by which time winter would have set in, and the operation would be impossible. The First Sea Lord, Admiral Henry Leach, disagreed. He not only convinced Prime Minister Thatcher that it was possible to recapture the islands, but also promised that he could have a task force ready to go within a week.³

HMS Hermes

This was an incredible claim. Britain had only two carriers, the WWII-vintage HMS Hermes and the new HMS Invincible.⁴ They had recently returned from a major exercise, and Hermes was in week two of a six-week stint in the yards, while much of Invincible's crew was on leave. One of the two British LPDs,⁵ HMS Intrepid, was only weeks away from decommissioning, and her crew had already been dispersed throughout the fleet. All available personnel were immediately put to work, buttoning up Hermes and loading the ships due to go south.

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Warships are the most visible part of naval power, pictures of military might. However, they are not capable of operating alone. The ability of a navy to operate worldwide and at a high tempo is ultimately dependent on auxiliary ships, which keep the fleet supplied with oil, food, and all of the other paraphernalia required to run a warship.

Iowa refueling from USS Cahaba

The modern auxiliary ship is a surprisingly recent innovation, although it has precursors going back to the age of sail. The Royal Navy, blessed with a worldwide network of bases, had little need for a seagoing support train. The USN, beginning during the Spanish-American War, found itself in a very different situation. That war revealed the inadequacy of the USN's support system, as the Asiatic Squadron found itself dependent on British coal supplies, while the blockade of the Cuban port of Santiago was hampered by the need for coal, even after Guantanamo Bay was captured for use as a base. In the aftermath of the war, the US planned for two major threats: an assault into the Caribbean by a European power (most likely Germany) and an attack by Japan on the Philippines. In both cases, the US would have to fight at great distance from its bases. The most famous result was the long ranges of US warships, but even a battleship couldn't carry enough fuel to avoid the need for a forward base.

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One issue that’s come up a couple of times in the comments to Naval Gazing is Millennium Challenge 2002. MC02 was a major exercise designed to test operational concepts that the US military was developing, using a combination of computer simulations and live exercises. But today it’s known primarily for the allegations that the OPFOR commander, Paul Van Riper, managed to sink most of the US fleet using asymmetric tactics such as small boat scouts and motorcycle couriers to keep the US from intercepting his communications, followed by a massive salvo of cruise missiles. At this point, the exercise was reset, and he was ordered to stick to a script that would guarantee a US victory. The obvious takeaway is that the USN is incompetent and vulnerable to an enemy using the same tactics.

Missile-armed Fast Attack Craft

As you’d probably expect, I’m of the opinion that the conventional narrative is deeply flawed. Unfortunately, I can’t offer a verifiable narrative to counter it, as deeper research into this has left me confused, with at least three different narratives as to what happened, and no real way to sort out the truth among them.

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David Beatty's famous remark about the destruction of two of his ships by catastrophic magazine explosions during the Battle of Jutland sums up the traditional attitude towards one of the battle's most famous aspects. Of the 3,326 men aboard the battlecruisers Indefatigable, Queen Mary, and Invincible, only 17 survived. It's long been believed that the ships themselves were to blame, as they were built with only relatively light armor. Shells supposedly penetrated to the magazines and set them off.⁶ Recent research has revealed that this was not the case, and the ships were lost primarily due to defects in operation, not design.⁷

HMS Lion on the left steams past HMS Queen Mary as she explodes

The basic problem with the conventional theory is that no German shell penetrated deep enough into the surviving ships to have been able to set off a magazine if it had hit one. The magazines took up a minority of a battlecruiser's volume, so if such hits were common, then at least a few of the surviving ships should have seen shells reach their machinery. Instead, German shells were found to detonate with 16-24' of their first impact with the structure. At the 20° angle the shells were falling at at the time, this puts them no more than 8 feet below the upper deck upon detonation. The only case where shell fragments reached a magazine was a hit on Barham at 1758⁸ when fragments from a 12" shell penetrated the deck over the 6" magazine. Despite leaving a 12"x15" hole in the 1" deck, the fragments had no effect on the powder stored under it.

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In 1908 and 1909, the British believed that combat ranges were rising, and that they'd pushed the 12" gun as far as they could. The ships that took the 13.5" gun to sea were a radical departure from the previous generation of battleships in other ways, with the abolition of the wing turret and a significant jump in size.

Orion

The four Orion class battleships were the result of the famous 1909-1910 program, when the British became convinced that the Germans were planning a major building campaign to overtake them at sea.⁹ Instead of the normal three-ship programs of the era, four ships were bought initially, the two ships of the Colossus class, the battlecruiser Lion, and Orion. Later, under public pressure, another three units of the class were ordered, as well as the battlecruiser Princess Royal.

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Bean: I figured I'd start my time today by picking up where we left off last time. Does anyone have any more questions?

Johnathan Wallis: If we are worried about future confrontation with China, we may want to look at how costly we could make hostilities against us. I'm thinking short of hot war, here, more in the range up to a naval embargo. With the future of U.S. influence uncertain, are we preparing to be potentially isolated from them?

Bean: That's a good point, and a risk we should definitely investigate. I don't think it's one we should build our fleet around, though we can probably get an effective defense at relatively little cost. Added to a future agenda.

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