Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command

by Andrew Gordon

Many notorious military blunders have been set up by poor personal relationships (if not wilful taciturnity) between key participants, the need for whose informal collaboration seems, in retrospect, to have been blindingly obvious. “It is instructive to mark how the squabbles of historic admirals with their Admiralties and with their captains have played into the hands of the enemy.”

Shortly before dawn, as they took up cruising formation, Beatty’s squadrons began zigzagging: each heavy group turning in unison every 10 minutes, 2 points on either side of the mean line of advance, orchestrated from the centre by flag signals. That an admiral should attempt to control by flags the movements of a squadron 5 miles distant is a source of amazement to today’s signallers. There was much tradition connected with flags – indeed, a ship’s efficiency was partly measured by its smartness in handling, and responding to, flag signals – and the brightest and keenest boy-ratings had long been channelled into the signalling branch, for which they had to get 95% in their exams.

The senior officers of the 1910s were, by contrast, products of the privileged Victorian squirearchy, of the structural certainties of a secure patrician society, and, in their formative years, of the Fleet which had dozed unchallenged in the long calm lee of Trafalgar.

In the late Victorian Navy it was a well-suppressed secret – or, at best, a museum oddity, stuffed and mounted – that the professional conflict between obedience and initiative was at least two centuries old. And when spectacular tragedy dragged the debate into the public domain in the 1890s, the genie was adroitly shoved back in the bottle by a supremely efficient fraternity of officers who enjoyed the mellow sunlight of royal approval and included many of the future seagoing admirals of the dreadnought era – conspicuous among them Commander John Jellicoe and Lieutenant Hugh Evan-Thomas.

In the generations following Trafalgar, the attention of popular mythology was captured by the aura which Nelson cast over his fleet and over his countrymen. Thus was obscured the fact that his most essential contribution to British naval mastery was as a trainer of Collingwoods, Blackwoods and Hardys: his greatest gift of leadership was to raise his juniors above the need of supervision.

In some respects, however, the outward impression of blasé serenity was more a matter of form than of substance. In spite, or because, of Britain’s Olympian industrial lead, the Fleet was subjected to a stream of piecemeal advances in metallurgy, ordnance and engineering, which it neither welcomed nor knew how to synthesize into an operational doctrine – a task made harder by the absence, between 1860 and 1895, of homogeneous squadrons of major warships.

A wish to engage at a distance implied a shyness of close quarters; and gallant Victorians, like Admiral Sir John Commerell VC, “would have scorned [to do so] unless obliged”.41 But there were also persuasive practical reasons why there was little point in thinking in terms of long ranges. Accurate range-finding was still beyond technical reach.42 And the elevation of the gun could not be usefully calibrated, even had ranges been available, while the chemical composition of the powder remained erratic. None of this mattered at point-blank, the attraction of which was that the shell – by definition flying on a flat trajectory – would hit as long as the gun was pointing at the target.

Furthermore, until the Armstrong wire-wound breech-loading 12-inch of 1894, the Navy’s heavy ordnance failed to shake off a reputation for exploding. Although in reality the incidence of burst guns was very small, it was sufficient to engender acute nervousness among those who had to work them. Sailors were superstitious; and it was not unknown for the petty-officer who was supposed to pull the lanyard to faint with fear and for ratings to report sick to avoid being present. For their part, officers hated gunnery practice for, like funnels, gunfire meant dirt, and that cost them money. While the Admiralty provided for three coats of paint a year,43 a ship might need as many as eight, and the balance had to come from her officers’ pockets.

The doctrine of ramming had much to commend it. It was also a product of the tactical constraints of heavy guns. With fighting ranges of only three or four tactical diameters (= turning circle widths) and reloading cycles of three or four minutes, ramming seemed the only plausible way of remaining in control of an encounter between salvoes.

While the industrial revolution was elbowing its way on board, the Navy was receiving the benefit of organizational and administrative modernizations. The Victorian age saw the irresistible rise of accountancy management in all fields of official activity. It started roughly contemporaneously with the elevation of ‘pursers’ into ‘paymasters’, paid by salary in place of profit and percentage, and it spread outwards from the Admiralty until the ways of measuring efficiency – and even the understood meaning of naval discipline – had insidiously changed. In the 1840s “immense books of forms began coming aboard”.

Nevertheless the wholesale neglect of genuine warrior aptitudes (the “sheer monkey-wit, rat-catching instinct for war”, in Walter Cowan’s incisive phrase) in favour of narrow seamanship, housekeeping and show-piece talents, in the criteria by which efficiency was measured, penetrated every corner of the Fleet.

It was forgotten that at Trafalgar no tactical instruction emanated from the flagship after the fighting started; or that the battle would have ended much as it did if Nelson had been killed with the first shot, because his subordinates understood exactly his purposes and how each could best contribute to their realization. Now it was assumed that any admiral, who quite likely owed his rank to his sometime management of paintwork and obsolete seamanship acrobatics, would supply his subordinates with detailed and brilliant orders which need only be obeyed to the letter to bring about a new Trafalgar.

But these were not the widely recognized images of George Tryon. “He was the most formidable figure in the Royal Navy, with an equal capacity for instilling fear, loyalty and confidence in those serving under him”;77 and an irony of his labours is that this man who sought to reduce centralization and to devolve responsibility – to debunk the paralysing myth of the senior admiral’s infallibility – was regarded by his subordinates with “a professional confidence almost equal to that given to the Deity”.78

The fully rigged ‘Old Billy’ was one of the Navy’s smartest and best-loved flagships, and while Evan-Thomas’s flimsies from sea make it impossible to assert that this plum appointment was unmerited, there is a definite sense of its having been kept open for him. It has already been mentioned that Sir Algernon was a close relation; to this it may be added that Lady Lyons’s family lived near Hugh’s birthplace in Glamorgan. But if the job was won through ‘interest’ – the naval Taffia, one might call it – little surprise would have been evinced at the time and nor should it be in retrospect; that was the way the Navy worked: “the main qualification for appointment as flag-lieutenant was that of being a relation either of the Admiral or some friend of his.”69

And whereas the accident should have driven home with all the force of Camperdown’s ram the rightness of Sir George’s mission to train subordinate senior officers to exercise their own tactical judgement, to all intents and purposes it had the opposite effect. TA had been merely the means to an end; and the hidden cost of the Victoria affair was that, with Tryon’s death and the apparent discrediting of the means, the all-important end – the return of the Royal Navy to fundamental action-principles – was orphaned and implicitly tabooed.

Nelson’s main use to John Fisher was as a means of reminding the Navy that violence was its business and its heritage

On the one hand, many senior officers were content to be guided by the shining Victorian lodestar of chivalry, with its quixotic approach to combat. There was much more to Nelson than merely ‘engaging the enemy more closely’ – “Do not imagine that I am one of these hotheaded people who fight at an immense disadvantage without an adequate object” – but the Edwardian Navy, with its anti-intellectual tradition, still sheltered and promoted men whose repertoire of military skill (when explicit orders defaulted, and sometimes even when they did not) amounted to gallantry, muscle and frontal assault.

On the other hand, the ‘scientific’ school sought to organize order out of apparent chaos by agency of the Book (or, rather, a plethora of Books). This was, writ large, the old military preoccupation with ensuring an acceptable minimum level of performance by enforcing procedures which unavoidably suppress the maximum level. It militated towards the adoption of one-dimensional ‘material’ evaluations of tactical problems, and tended to overrate the enemy’s strength, for, while he would be credited with his full ‘on-paper’ assets, one’s own circumstantial handicaps were usually too obvious to exclude from the equation.

Most ‘experts’ seek to hold society hostage in a trap of technicalities and jargon, and then proffer the key in exchange for status and respect (one has only to think of lawyers). That way prosperity lies, at least for them. “There is to be found in all specialized subjects a strong tendency to make a mystery of the particular job.”

It is beyond question that Court influence was brought to bear in the interests of royal favourites among senior officers. Indeed George, because of loyalties formed during his fifteen-year naval career, was less discreet in this respect than his father.

In the longest perspective, the Royal Navy’s habits of tactical initiative had turned through an immense 200-year cycle. From the low of around 1700 they had risen, amid countless knocks and bruises, to the famous battle-wise high of the early 1800s; and then, in the century of maritime peace after the Napoleonic War, they had slipped insidiously down back to the original hidebound point of departure. The 1900s found the British Fleet’s outlook firmly regressed to the age when the sacred Signals and Instructions held sway. And while the British public of 1914 took for granted that another Trafalgar was imminent – indeed was their birthright – the professional conditioning of the officers in command of the Royal Navy’s mighty dreadnought squadrons made it more likely that a clash with the High Seas Fleet would be a repeat of (say) Verez Malaga in 1704 rather than of Trafalgar in 1805.

Hostilities play havoc with peacetime criteria, and before the end of 1914 Herbert Richmond was despairing (with hyperbole born of powerlessness) that “there is no doubt that we are the most appalling amateurs who ever tried to conduct a war.”54

Part of the shock of Jutland was the discovery of this mismatch of expectations, which, to some (the bullish and the strategically naïve), seemed little short of a betrayal.

The basic import of this book is how, while the Royal Navy was undergoing its fifty-year conversion from oak and canvas to steel and turbines, its once-clear, empiricist understanding of ‘product’ was pilfered from the lay-apart store by the vested interests of ‘process’, and how both the symptoms and the cost of that felony may be discerned, in various ways, at Jutland in 1916. To insist, glibly, that history always repeats itself is to reduce it to a set of unintelligent, negative superstitions.46 However, history, at the least, comprises an echo-chamber in which past and present voices can mingle; and, no less than any other human activity (and more than most), the military professions are susceptible to enduring pressures and syndromes.