The Battle of Jutland

Historyczne Bitwy

by Geoffrey Bennett, Rodney Bennett (Introduction)

At the end of May 1916, a chance encounter with Admiral Hipper's battle cruisers has enabled Beatty to lead the German Battle Fleet into the jaws of Jellicoe's greatly superior force, but darkness had allowed Admiral Scheer to extricate his ships from a potentially disastrous situation. Though inconclusive, at the Battle of Jutland the German Fleet suffered so much damage that it made no further attempt to challenge the Grand Fleet, and the British blockade remained unbroken.

Captain Bennett has used sources previously unavailable to historians in his reconstruction of this controversial battle, including the papers of Vice-Admiral Harper explaining why his official record of the battle was not published until 1927, and the secret "Naval Staff Appreciation" of 1922 whose criticism were so scathing that it was never issued to the Fleet. Also included are numerous battle plans, photographs and an introduction by Bennett's son. 2006 is the 90th anniversary of the battle.

Genres: History, World War I, Military Fiction, Naval History, Nonfiction, Military History

208 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1964

About the author

Captain Geoffrey Martin Bennett DSC, FRHS (1908–1983) was a British Royal Navy officer and author. He also wrote fiction as "Sea-lion".

Reviews

[Andrew Wardle · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars. Detailed but readable account of the only major action between Britain's Grand Fleet and Germany's High Seas Fleet in WWI. Unlike previous writers about the battle, the author had access to all available documents, and he produces a balanced and fair analysis of the conduct of the battle by the opposing commanders. The failings of both sides, and the mitigations for them, are clearly and judiciously laid out. The maps are very good. The "human" story is skilfully intertwined so that it does not overwhelm the objective history, but makes it clear that despite its inconclusive result, this was no sparring match: there were nearly 10,000 casualties (most killed) in a few hours of actual battle.
Only one small fault - the author repeats other historians in assigning the aristocratic "von" indiscriminately to senior German officers. In fact the British Navy was far more toff-heavy than the German. Germany, being a continental power, attracted aristocrats to her army, not her upstart navy. Both Scheer and Hipper were solidly middle-class, Hipper the son of a Bavarian shopkeeper who died when the future admiral was 3.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

While I've been interested in military history since I was a kid, I've never been too keen on naval history. Perhaps it say more about me than about naval history, but I've always found the movements of ships on the sea harder to follow than the movements of armies on land. That is compounded in the case of a battle like Jutland, that even its protagonists found hard to follow.

Yet I was able, more or less, to follow the course of these events in Geoffrey Bennett's book. I was also struck by the parallels between Jellicoe's situation in the North Sea and that of the commanders on the Western Front. Jellicoe's fleet covered many miles compared to the fleets of Nelson a century earlier, yet command and control techniques had changed little. As French and Haig had to command modern armies with the tools of Wellington, so Jellicoe had to command a modern fleet with the tools of Nelson - visual observation and flags to communicate the findings thereof. Not surprisingly, these tools were insufficient for him to spring his moderately complex trap and wipe out Scheer's fleet at Jutland.