The range of a modern torpedo, the range at which it may occasionally be effective, is not far short of 12,000 yards, about seven land miles. This, when the visibility is low, is about the extreme effective range for heavy guns. The guns can shoot much farther, twice as far, when the gunners or the fire directors up aloft can see; but gunnery without proper light is a highly wasteful and ineffective business. At the range—usually about 12,000 yards, though sometimes coming down to 9,000 yards—to which the German torpedo attacks forced Jellicoe and Beatty to keep out, only some four or five enemy ships in the van could be seen at once; more of the rear squadron could be seen, though never more than eight or twelve. Our marks were usually not the hulls of the enemy’s ships but the elusive flashes of his guns. Scheer used his torpedo craft in exactly the same way as a skilful land General—in the old days of open fighting—used his cavalry during a retreat. He used them to cover by repeated charges, sometimes of single flotillas, at other times of heavily massed squadrons, the retirement of his main forces.

If, therefore, we combine the factor of low visibility and the approach of sunset, with the other factor of the long range of the modern torpedo, we begin to understand why Jellicoe and Beatty were not able to close in upon their enemy and wipe him off the seas. From the English point of view the third phase—that critical third phase to which the first and second phases had led up and which, under favourable circumstances, would have ended with the destruction of the German Fleet—found us in the position of a “following” or “chasing” fleet. But from the German point of view the same phase found their fleet in the position of “attackers.” I have shown how these points of view can be reconciled, for while the main German Fleet was intent upon getting away and our main fleet was intent upon following it up and engaging it, the German battle cruisers, supported by swarms of torpedo craft, were fighting a spirited rearguard action and attacking us continually. The visibility was poor and mist troubled both sides. But the escape of the Germans was not wholly due to the difficulty of seeing them distinctly. If we could have closed in we should have seen his ships all right; we did not close in because the persistence and boldness of his torpedo attacks prevented us.

The third phase, which lasted from 6.17 p.m. until 8.20 p.m., was fought generally at about 12,000 yards, though now and then the range came down to 9,000 yards. The Germans, fending us off with torpedo onslaughts, did their utmost to open out the ranges and used smoke screens to lessen what visibility the atmosphere permitted. Their gun-fire was so poor and ineffective that Jellicoe’s Main Fleet was barely scratched and three men only were wounded. But we cannot escape from the conclusion that Scheer’s rearguard tactics were successful, he did fend Jellicoe off and kept him from closing, and he did withdraw the bulk of his fleet from the jaws which during two hours were seeking to close upon it. He made two heavy destroyer attacks, during one of which the battleship Marlborough was hit but was able to get back to dock under her own steam. The third phase of the Jutland Battle was exactly like a contest between two boxers—one heavy and the other light—being fought in an open field without ropes. The little man, continually side-stepping and retreating, kept the big man off; the big man could not close for fear of a sudden jab in his vital parts, and there were no corners to the ring into which the evasive light weight could be driven.

If one applies this key to the English and German descriptions of the third phase in the Jutland Battle one becomes able to reconcile them, and becomes able to understand why the immensely relieved Germans claim their skilful escape as a gift from Heaven. They do not in their dispatches claim to have defeated Jellicoe, except in the restricted sense of having foiled his purpose of compassing their destruction. They got out of the battle very cheaply, whatever may have been their actual losses. This they realise as plainly as we do. Relief shines out of every line of their official story and is compressed, without reserve, into its concluding sentence. “Whoever had the fortune to take part in the battle will joyfully recognise with a thankful heart that the protection of the Most High was with us. It is an old historical truth that fortune favours the brave.”

I am afraid that I can do little to elucidate the fourth phase of the Battle of the Giants—the night scrimmage (one cannot call it a battle) during which our destroyers were seeking out the enemy ships in the darkness and plugging holes into them at every opportunity. And that dawn upon June 1st, of which so much was hoped and from which nothing was realised? Who can describe that? Nothing that I can write would approach in sublimity the German dispatch. Consider what the situation was. Jellicoe and Beatty had worked far down the Jutland coast and had partially edged their way between Scheer and the German bases. Their destroyers had sought out the German ships, found them and loosed mouldies at them, lost them again and found them again; finally had lost them altogether. At dawn the visibility was even lower than during the previous evening—only three to four miles—our destroyers were out of sight and touch and did not rejoin till 9 o’clock. No enemy was in sight, and after cruising about until 11 o’clock Jellicoe was forced to the conclusion that Scheer had got away round his far-stretching horns and was even then threading the mine fields which protected his ports of refuge. There was no more to be done, and the English squadrons, robbed of the prey upon which they had set their clutches, steamed off towards their northern fastnesses. There the fleet fuelled and replenished with ammunition, and 9.30 a.m. on June 2nd was reported ready for action. The German description of that dawn is a masterpiece in the art of verbal camouflage: “As the sun rose upon the morning of the historic First of June in the eastern sky, each one of us expected that the awakening sun would illumine the British line advancing to renew the battle. This expectation was not realized. The sea all round, so far as the eye could see, was empty. One of our airships which had been sent up reported, later in the morning, having seen twelve ships of a line-of-battle squadron coming from the southern part of the North Sea holding a northerly course at great speed. To the great regret of all it was then too late for our fleet to intercept and attack them.” The British Fleet, which the writer regretted not to see upon the dawn of a long day in late spring, was of more than twice the strength of his own. It would have had sixteen hours of daylight within which to devour him; yet he regretted its absence! The Germans must be a very simple people, abysmally ignorant of the sea if this sort of guff stimulates their vanity.

In war the moral is far greater than the material, the psychological than the mechanical. One cannot begin to understand the simplest of actions unless one knows something of the spirit of the men who fight them. In sea battles, more than in contests upon land, events revolve round the personalities of the leaders and results depend upon the skill with which these leaders have gauged the problem set them, and dispose their forces to meet those varying phases which lead up to a conclusion. It is borne in upon us by hard experience that the southern part of the North Sea is not big enough and not deep enough to afford space for a first-class naval battle to be fought out to the finish. The enemy is too near his home bases, he can break off an action and get away before being overwhelmed. Yet even in the southern North Sea there is room in which to dispose great naval forces and in which to manœuvre them. Fleets are not tucked up by space as are modern armies. Jutland was a battle of encounter and manœuvre, not of heavy destructive fighting. There was a dainty deftness about the first two phases which is eminently pleasing to our national sea pride, and however we may growl at the tactical incompleteness of the battle we cannot but admit that, taken as a whole, it was as strategically decisive an action as has ever been fought by the English Navy throughout its long history. It re-established the old doctrine, which the course of the Sea War has tended to thrust out of sight, that Command of the Sea rests as completely as it always has done in the past upon the big fighting ships of the main battle line. Upon them everything else depends; the operations of destroyers and light cruisers, of patrols and even of submarines. For upon big ships depends the security of home bases. Surface ships alone can occupy the wide spaces of the sea and can hold securely the ports in one’s own country and the ports which are ravished from an enemy. Submarines are essentially raiders, their office is the obstruction of sea communications, but submarines are useless, even for their special work of obstruction, unless they can retire, refit, and replenish stores at bases made secure by the existence in effective being of a strong force of big fighting ships. Had Jutland been as great a tactical success as it was a strategical success, had it ended with the wiping out of the German High Seas Fleet, then, as I have already stated, the U-⁠boat menace would have been scotched by the destruction of the protecting screen behind which the U-⁠boats are built, refitted, and replenished. No small part of the German relief at the issue of Jutland is due to their realisation of this naval truth. They express that realisation in a sentence which contains the whole doctrine of the efficacy of the big ship as the final determinant in naval warfare. Admiral Scheer in his dispatch declared that the Battle of May 31st, 1916, “confirmed the old truth that the large fighting ship, the ship which combines the maximum of strength in attack and defence, rules the seas.” They do not claim that the English superiority in strength—which they place at “roughly two to one”—was sensibly reduced by our losses in the battle, nor that the large English fighting ships—admittedly larger, more numerous, and more powerfully gunned than their own—ceased after Jutland to rule the seas. The German claim, critically considered, is simply that in the circumstances it was a very lucky escape for the German ships. And so indeed it was. It left them with the means of securing their bases from which could be carried on the U-⁠boat warfare against our mercantile communications at sea.

When the day arrives for the veil which at present enshrouds naval operations to be lifted, and details can be discussed freely and frankly, a whole literature will grow up around the Battle of the Giants. Strategically, I repeat—even at the risk of becoming tedious—it was a great success, both in its inception and in its practical results. Tactically its success was not complete. The Falkland Islands and Coronel actions were by comparison simple affairs of which all essential details are known. Jutland, from six o’clock in the evening of May 31st until dawn upon June 1st, when the opposing fleets had completely lost touch, the one with the other, is a puzzling confusing business which will take years of discussion and of elucidation wholly to resolve—if ever it be fully resolved. If any one be permitted to describe the three actions in a few words apiece one would say that Coronel was both strategically and tactically a brilliant success for the Germans. Von Spee concentrated his squadron outside the range of our observation, placed himself in a position of overwhelming tactical advantage, and won a shattering victory. At the Falkland Islands action we did to von Spee exactly what he had done to us at Coronel. This time it was the English concentration which was effected outside the German observation, and it was the German squadron which was wiped out when the tactical clash came. The first two phases of Jutland were, in spite of our serious losses in ships, notable tactical successes; they ended with Beatty round the head of the German Fleet and Jellicoe deployed in masterly fashion between Beatty and Evan-⁠Thomas. Then we get the exasperating third phase, in which the honours of skilful evasion rest with the Germans, and the fourth or night phase, during which confusion became worse confounded until all touch was lost. And yet, in spite of the tactical failure of the third and fourth phases, the battle as a whole was so great a success that it left us with an unchallengeable command of the sea—a more complete command than even after Trafalgar. The Germans learned that they could not fight us in the open with the smallest hope of success. One of the direct fruits of Jutland was the intensified U-⁠boat warfare against merchant shipping. The Germans had learned in the early part of the war that they could not wear down our battleship strength by under-water attacks; they learned at Jutland that they could not place their battleships in line against ours and hope to survive; nothing was left to them except to prey upon our lines of sea communication. And being a people in whose eyes everything is fair in war—their national industry—they proceeded to make the utmost of the form of attack which remained to them. Viewed, therefore, in its influence upon the progress of the war, the Battle of Jutland was among the most momentous in our long sea history.

I have discussed the Battle of the Giants so often, and so remorselessly, with many officers who were present and many others who though not present were in a position to know much which is hidden from onlookers, that I fear lest I may have worn out their beautiful patience. There are two outstanding figures, Beatty and Jellicoe, about whose personalities all discussion of Jutland must revolve. They are men of very different types. Beatty is essentially a fighter; Jellicoe is essentially a student. In power of intellect and in knowledge of his profession Jellicoe is a dozen planes above Beatty. And yet when it comes to fighting, in small things and in great, Beatty has an instinct for the right stroke at the right moment, which in war is beyond price. Whether in peace or in war, Jellicoe would always be conspicuous among contemporaries; Beatty, unless war has given him the stage upon which to develop his flair for battle, would not have stood out. He got early chances, in the Soudan and in China; he seized them both and rushed up the ladder of promotion. He was promoted so quickly that he outstripped his technical education. As a naval strategist and tactician Jellicoe is the first man in his profession; Beatty is by professional training neither a strategist nor a tactician—he was a commander at twenty-seven and a captain at twenty-nine—but give him a fighting problem to be solved out in the open with the guns firing, and he will solve it by sheer instinctive genius. In the Battle of Jutland both Beatty and Jellicoe played their parts with consummate skill; Beatty was in the limelight all through, while Jellicoe was off the stage during the first two acts. Yet Jellicoe’s part was incomparably the more difficult, for upon him, though absent, the whole issue of the battle depended. His deployment by judgment and instinct—sight was withheld from him by the weather—was perfect in its timing and precision. He should have been crowned with the bays of a complete Victor, but the Fates were unkind. He was robbed of his prey when it was almost within his jaws. Do not be so blind and foolish as to depreciate the splendid skill and services of Lord Jellicoe.