Why Was Admiral John Jellicoe Dismissed As First Sea Lord?

Admiral Sir John Jellicoe (1869–1935)

Canadian Naval Historian Robert L. Davison provides some context on the embarrassing Christmas Eve 1917 firing of Admiral Sir John Jellicoe:

Indeed, in the crucial year of 1917 the Admiralty seemed paralysed in the face of unrestricted submarine warfare. . .The experience of the Great War was profoundly traumatic for the RN's executive officer corps. Before 1914, forces associated with the ongoing revolution in naval affairs had exerted considerable pressure on naval officers. Despite these forces that altered, and even challenged, the status of executive officers, self-confident assertions about the corps' fitness to command remained untested. That changed with the outbreak of war in 1914. Professional officers were faced with a conflict dramatically different from what had been expected. The war presented innumerable tasks that did not involve exercising command from the bridge of a man-of-war. For these demands, officers were not well prepared. The result was intense frustration, and the claims made by officers were exposed to searching criticism not merely from outside the profession but also from within.

The incapacity of the Admiralty machinery and the senior executive officers to deal with the reality of industrialized warfare caused a crisis of confidence that was not confined to parliament or public opinion but also extended into the [officer] corps itself.

The loss of confidence in the legitimacy of the [1917] Jellicoe regime resulted in a letter of dismissal from First Lord of the Admiralty Eric Geddes to the first sea lord on Christmas Eve 1917. Vice-Admiral Rosslyn Wemyss replaced Jellicoe as first sea lord. A temporary crisis among the remaining sea lords was averted, and they were persuaded to stay on. Jellicoe went on half pay and was not employed again.

Alarm in the Press

But why, specifically, was one of the world's most notable naval leaders chosen to "Walk the Plank"? I've gathered some ideas about this from the sources listed below. In the aggregate, though, they seem to describe a situation in which it was simply time for the good admiral to go.

1.  The most widely stated reason is his reluctance to support the convoy system, which was strongly supported by the Lloyd George government, a large number of proponents within the Royal Navy, and key admirals like the Commander in Chief of the Grand Fleet, David Beatty, and the U.S. Navy—as represented by its senior officer in Europe, Admiral William Sims.

Admiral Jellicoe's memoirs make patently clear his very traditional and limited understanding of what exactly “defeating the U-boats” meant. “Our object,” he wrote, …was to destroy submarines at a greater rate than the output of the German shipyards. This was the surest way of counteracting their activities. It was mainly for the purpose of attack on the submarines that I formed the Anti-Submarine Division of the Naval Staff." His thinking about defeating the U-boats was limited to a hunt-and-destroy strategy.

Eric Geddes and David Lloyd George

2.  The admiral had a strained and deteriorating relationship with both Prime Minister David Lloyd George and First Lord of the Admiralty Geddes. His distinguished reputation and the distractions of the 1917 land campaigns for his superiors possibly kept him in office too long. 

3.  Jellicoe's pessimistic and somewhat contagious frame of mind made it across the Atlantic and into history books when after his first meeting with Sims, the American cabled to Washington, “Briefly stated, I consider that at the present moment we are losing the war.”

4.  Neither a bureaucratic in-fighter nor a visionary

The British Admiralty of World War I was, to expand on Professor Davison's point above, and to use fellow naval historian Michael Simpson’s phrase, a “creaking giant” that was organizationally incapable of visualizing the U-boat problem. A report by the American novelist Winston Churchill (no relation to the prime minister) to President Wilson on the state of the Admiralty cited by Simpson was scathing on this score:

I have become convinced that the criticism of the British Admiralty to the effect that it has been living from day to day, that it has been making no plans ahead, is justified. The several Sea Lords are of the conservative school, and they have been so encumbered by administrative and bureaucratic duties that they have found insufficient time to decide upon a future strategy. The younger and more imaginative element of that service has not been given a chance to show its powers, nor has it been consulted in matters of strategy. . . . [T]he Admiralty is still suffering from the inertia of a tradition that clings to the belief that the British navy still controls the seas, and can be made to move but slowly in a new direction.

Sadly, the man whose strategic command at Jutland ensured surface dominance for the remainder of the war was the wrong man to take on the novel U-boat threat when it emerged.

Sources: "Jellicoe: Controversy and Dismissal", The Dreadnought Project; "The Royal Navy Executive Branch and the Experience of War", Robert L. Davison, The Northern Mariner, July 2005;  "U-boat Challenge—Convoy Solution", Jan S. Breemer, Over the Top, August 2017