The British Navy in Battle

by Arthur Joseph Hungerford Pollen

The tactics of Admiral Scheer were a development and an extension of those of Von Hipper on January 24 of the previous year. If his task was to break off action as soon as possible and to keep out of action until darkness made fleet fighting impossible, means must be found of thwarting or neutralizing the attack of the British Fleet while it lasted, of evading that attack at the earliest moment, and of preventing its resumption. He could only neutralize the attack in so far as he could thwart the fire-control and aiming of the enemy by the constant or intermittent concealment of his ships by smoke. He could only evade attack by preventing the overwhelming force against him being brought within striking distance. Recall for a moment the lessons of the Dogger Bank. In his retreat Von Hipper had put his flotillas to a double task. For the first two hours of that engagement he had checked the speed of his battle cruisers to cover Bluecher. When the British Fleet had so gained on him that its artillery became effective, he realized that the case of Bluecher was hopeless and that, unless prompt measures were taken, the case of the battle cruiser would be little better. Bluecher was, therefore, abandoned to her fate and Derfflinger, Seydlitz, and Moltke concealed by smoke. Simultaneously, or almost simultaneously, a veritable shoal of torpedoes was launched across the path on which Lion and her consorts were advancing. The smoke baffled the gun-layers, the changed course forced on the battle-cruisers baffled the fire-control. The Germans gained immunity from gunfire and, in the pause, changed course and got a new start in the race for home. Then the first of a succession of rendezvous for submarines placed on the pre-arranged line of the German retreat, repeated this tactic of diversion just before Lion was disabled. The intervention—an hour later—of a second protecting picket of submarines was decisive, for, on realizing their presence, the officer who had succeeded Sir David in command broke off pursuit. It was on these tactics on a greatly extended scale and developed no doubt by assiduous study and repeated rehearsal, that Scheer now had to rely.

The circumstances of the moment were exceptionally favourable for their employment. The conditions of atmosphere that made long-range gunnery difficult, made the establishment of smoke screens to render it more difficult still, exceptionally easy. The wind had dropped, the air was heavy and vaporous, the ships were running from one bank of light fog into another. It was a day on which smoke would stay where it was made, clinging to the surface of the sea, mingling with and permeating the water-laden atmosphere. Further, these were just the conditions in which, were a torpedo attack delivered at a fleet by the fast destroyer flotillas, the threat would have an element of surprise that would be lacking in clear vision. Such menaces, then, should they have any deterrent effect on the enemy’s closing, would be likely to have a maximum effect. The respite from gunfire, the delay in the re-formation of the fleet for pursuit, each could be the longest possible.

Two considerations must have caused Scheer the gravest possible anxiety. In the first place, smoke screens would not protect the van of his fleet. What if the British used their speed to concentrate ships there and crush it? Secondly, as destroyer attacks could only be delivered from a point in advance of the course of the squadrons it was hoped to injure or divert, the method on which he relied, first for breaking off from, and then evading, action could not be used until he had the British Fleet on his quarter or astern. Now at six o’clock the British Fleet was dead ahead of him. Its fleet’s speed must have been three, and may have been four, knots greater than his own. He had four powerful ships, six or seven knots faster still, on his port bow at a range of only 14,000 yards, supported by a 25-knot squadron only three knots slower and of enormous gun power. How was he to turn a line of twenty-one ships to get the whole of this force behind him, without some portion of it being overwhelmed in the process? For to turn in succession would be to leave first the centre and the rear, and then the rear entirely unsupported as the leading ships escaped. As we have seen in a previous chapter, until the enemy’s artillery was neutralized, it was out of the question to do anything but to turn on a flat arc, so that so long as it was necessary or possible, all the ships should act in mutual support. The crux of the situation was this: The Grand Fleet was but twelve miles off, a distance that could be shortened to easy gun range in ten or twelve minutes. What if the whole of this force were in a quarter of an hour brought parallel to, and well ahead of, his own? To engage it defensively by gun power would be useless for the odds were hopeless. To turn the head of the line sharply would be to purchase a precarious safety for the van by the certain immolation of the centre and the rear. Scheer must have seen that, were things to develop along this line, he would have no choice but to turn his whole fleet together, a dangerous and desperate manœuvre, but permissible because the time would have come for a sauve qui peut.

But while these considerations may have caused him some anxiety, there were other elements to reassure him. Years before the war, the Germans had discovered and grasped what seemed the fundamental strategic idea that had shaped British naval strategy. It was that the rôle of our main sea forces in war was to be primarily defensive. Our fleet was to consist of units individually more powerful than those of competing navies. As to numbers, we were aiming at possessing these on an equality with the two next largest Powers combined. It was a policy that permitted of an overwhelming concentration against the most powerful of our competitors, the Germans, while still maintaining substantial forces the world over. It was a presumption of this policy that the use of the sea would in war be ceded to us by our enemies, and would remain virtually undisturbed until our main forces were not only attacked but defeated. Numbers and individual power made an attack by inferior forces seem the most remote of all contingencies, and defeat impossible.

From this theory the Germans derived a corollary. It was that, as the British ideal was concerned not primarily with victory, but in avoiding defeat, we should probably not face great risks to destroy an enemy—and obviously no enemy could be destroyed without great risks—but rather would be chiefly preoccupied with averting the destruction, not only of our whole fleet, but even of such a proportion of it as would deprive us of that pre-eminence in numbers on which we seemed chiefly to rely. Hence, in the preamble of the last Navy Bill which the Government got the Reichstag to accept before the war, it was plainly stated that the naval policy of the German Higher Command did not aim at possessing a fleet capable of defeating the strongest fleet in the world, but would be satisfied with a force that the strongest fleet could not defeat, except at a cost that would bring it so low that its world supremacy would be gone. The underlying military conception was that the group then controlling the British Navy would not fight, and the underlying political conception that, should this group be replaced by leaders of a more aggressive complexion, the price we should pay for a sea victory would be a combination of the world’s other sea forces against us, they being prompted to this by their long-felt jealousy of Great Britain’s navalism.

In May, 1916, the bottom had fallen out of the political argument. There was no naval Power that was the least jealous of Great Britain. The submarine campaign had disgusted all with Germany’s sea ethics, and the whole world would have rejoiced had sea victory, which was necessary before the submarine could be finally defeated, been won. But on the military argument the Germans were on surer ground. They had certain substantial reasons for believing that they had not misread the psychology of our Higher Naval Command. Indeed, if Jutland left them or the world in any doubt about the matter, their interpretation was to receive the most striking of all confirmations by a statesman who had not only been First Lord of the Admiralty, but had personally selected the Commander-in-Chief on this eventful day, and had no doubt been a party to, if he had not inspired, the strategy which the Grand Fleet was to observe. Mr. Churchill left the world in no uncertainty at all that, in his opinion—which, presumably, was that not only of the Boards over which he had presided, but of those from whom it had been inherited—the British Fleet, without a victorious battle, enjoyed all the advantages that the most crushing of victories could give us, and that it was for the Germans and not for us to attempt any alteration in the position at sea. Beyond this, however, Scheer not only had it in his favour that the British Commander-in-Chief might, under such inspiration, hesitate about the risks inseparable from seeking a rapid decision at short range; he seemed to have a definite and official confirmation of a further theory, viz., that to avoid a certain form of risk was almost an axiom of official British doctrine. Von Hipper’s escape at the Dogger Bank, unexplained it is true in Sir David Beatty’s despatch, had been complacently attributed by the British Admiralty to the unexpected presence of enemy submarines. The immediate abandonment of the field in the presence of this form of attack, so far from being made the subject of Admiralty disapproval, seems to have been endorsed by the continuous employment of the officer responsible. Scheer could then look forward to his torpedo attack not only as holding a menace over the British Fleet that might endanger its numerical superiority. It seemed to be a menace specifically accepted as one not in any circumstances to be encountered.

Still, for all that, there was uncertainty in the matter. The sport of bull-fighting owes its continuance solely to the fact that the instincts of each brute playmate in that cruel game are exactly identical with those of every other. However busy any bull may be with a tossed and disembowelled horse, it is a matter of mathematical certainty that a red cloak dangled before his eyes will divert him from goring the rider. The animal’s reactions to each well-known pin-prick or provocation are inevitable. The safety of every toreador, piccador, and matador depends not on their power of meeting the unexpected, but upon the rapidity, deftness, and agility with which they can first time the movements which long experience has taught them to expect, and then execute the counter-stroke or evasion which an old-established art has prescribed. Scheer, it seems to me, showed something more than rashness in relying on a German analysis of our naval mentality, and upon a single instance—and endorsement—of that mentality in action, as if it established a rule of conduct as irrevocable as instinct. But, then, it must be understood, he had no choice.

Sir David Beatty’s Tactics

At six the Grand Fleet was five miles to the north, approximately twelve miles from the enemy. It could not come into action in less than a quarter of an hour. The speed of Lion, Tiger, Princess Royal, and New Zealand was twenty-seven knots, at least eight, possibly nine or even ten knots faster than that of the enemy. The head of the enemy’s line bore southeast from the flagship. Scheer, already aware of Sir John Jellicoe’s approach, was beginning his eastward turn. Beatty realized that at full speed he could head the German Fleet, so that by the time the Grand Fleet’s deployment was complete, he would be in a commanding position on the bow of the enemy’s van. It would probably not be possible for Evan-Thomas to gain this position, too. But there was no reason why he should. Assuming Sir David’s purpose to be the realization of the most elementary of tactical axioms, viz. to strike as nearly as possible simultaneously with all the forces in the field, Evan-Thomas would be just as useful at one end of the line as the other. The twenty-four ships of the Grand Fleet, led by the battle cruisers and with the four Queen Elizabeths as a rear squadron, would outflank the enemy at both ends of his line.