Jutland: The Unfinished Battle by Nicholas Jellicoe

British Destroyer HMS Onslow on the Attack during the Jutland Night Actions (Click on Image to Enlarge)

By Nicholas Jellicoe

Naval Institute Press, 2018 Reprint

Reviewed by Holger Herwig

Excerpted from "Jutland: Acrimony to Resolution," Naval War College Review, Autumn 2016.

It now has been [over] one hundred years since the battle of Jutland. Beatty and Jellicoe both rest in the crypt of Saint Paul’s Cathedral in London. Armies of naval historians have dissected every aspect of the battle, and have come up with intriguing names such as “Flawed Victory,” “Distant Victory,” “Jutland Scandal,” “The Riddle of Jutland,” “The Truth about Jutland,” “The Jutland Epic,” “The Blindfold Game,” “The Rules of the Game,” “The Smoke Screen of Jutland,” “Sins of Omission and Commission,” and “Our Bloody Ships or Our Bloody System,” among countless others.

Thankfully, we now have a superb analysis, Jutland: The Unfinished Battle (2016), from Nicholas Jellicoe—the admiral’s grandson. This source at first  light might seem to be prejudiced, but that is not the case. Obviously aware of the possible suspicion of bias because of his last name, Nicholas Jellicoe has gone out of his way to offer both the general reader and the naval expert a balanced,measured, and yet nuanced account of the greatest sea battle of World War I. He weighs and measures. He offers conflicting accounts and interpretations.

He evaluates sources. He compares British and German eyewitness and official accounts and statistics. He judiciously examines the accounts by John Harper, Reginald Bacon, and the Admiralty discussed above. And then he offers his own best opinion. Along the way, he provides the layman with text boxes and sidebars to explain the complex naval systems in place at Jutland, and he further includes countless diagrams to explain ship locations and movements.

Nicholas Jellicoe apportions praise and criticism in equal amounts. Tactically, Jutland was a German victory and a “bad blow” for both the Royal Navy and  the nation. Hipper’s leadership of the German battle cruisers had been “brilliant,” Scheer’s two “battle turns away” and his ultimate escape “remarkable.” German signals and communications had been “exemplary,” those of the British “lamentable.” Jellicoe’s system of command had been rigid, a “vestige of the Victorian past.” Beatty’s reconnaissance and reporting had been a “failure.” Beatty’s obsession with rapid firing and the resulting storage of cordite next to the gun turrets, rather than improper flash protection, had caused the loss of the battle cruisers.

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The role of the new weapons of the day—mines, torpedoes, and aircraft—had been overrated before the battle, and negligible in its outcome. Both navies had fought the battle unexpectedly and discovered it to be highly complex, and had fought under difficult conditions of wind, rain, smoke, heavy seas, and fading light. Both sides regarded it as an “unfinished battle.”

Strategically, Nicholas Jellicoe joins the bevy of historians who have argued that Jutland was a British victory. “The issue at stake,” he writes, “had been sea power.” One side exercised it; the other sought to gain it. Afterward, the arteries of seaborne commerce, Alfred Thayer Mahan’s maritime highways, remained open to Britain and closed to Germany. Reinhard Scheer, the putative “victor of the Skagerrak,” accepted this reality when, in his after-action report of 4 July 1916 to Wilhelm II, he forsook future “Jutlands” in favor of “the defeat of  British economic life” by way of unrestricted submarine warfare “against  British trade.”

The High Sea Fleet, in Churchill’s stinging remark of February 1912, indeed had been but a “luxury” fleet.

Holger Herwig