AN UNPALATABLE VICTORY: LEGACY OF JUTLAND

Dr Andrew Jeffrey analyses the Battle of Jutland, one of the key conflicts of the last year of the war

Intercepted at 3.40pm on May 30 1916, the enemy signal read simply ‘31 Gg 2490’. Speedily decrypted by Admiralty codebreakers led by Dundee-born Sir Alfred Ewing, the message indicated that the Kaiser’s High Seas Fleet would be leaving its German bases the following day.

This was priceless intelligence and, by 5.30pm that same afternoon, the great grey fleet moored in the Firth of Forth was preparing for action.

Billows of black smoke drifted towards the Fife shore as engineers lit hundreds of warship boilers and boats scurried to and fro with officers and ratings recalled from golf matches, football games, theatres in Edinburgh and a concert in Pittencrieff Park, Dunfermline.

One by one, as the sun set on a beautiful summer day, the warships slipped their moorings and headed out into the North Sea. HMS Lion, flagship of Vice-Admiral Sir David Beatty, was followed by the battlecruisers Princess Royal, Queen Mary, New Zealand, Tiger and Indefatigable, the battleships Warspite, Barham, Valiant and Malaya, 15 cruisers, 27 destroyers and a seaplane tender.

It was a formidable display of naval power and it was being repeated at both Scapa Flow and Invergordon. So was Britain about to get a second Trafalgar, a decisive naval victory that would win the war?

Heavily outnumbered, the Germans had no intention of engaging the Royal Navy head-on, instead they hoped to lure British warships into the path of U-boats stationed off their Scottish bases.

But the U-boat ambush failed and, by the early afternoon of May 31, 250 British and German warships were converging on a point 100 miles off the Danish coast.

At 2.10pm the Rosyth-based cruiser HMS Galatea hoisted the ‘Enemy in Sight’ signal and, two minutes later, her forward six-inch gun fired the first shot of the Battle of Jutland.

The 12-hour sea fight that followed has been minutely analysed and argued over for more than a century. Briefly though, Beatty’s Rosyth force found itself confronted by the entire German High Seas Fleet and turned north-west under heavy fire in an apparent attempt to escape.

The Germans gave chase only to find that Beatty had led them under the guns of the much larger Royal Navy Grand Fleet. Now the Germans had to about turn and run for home, a manoeuvre they executed with considerable skill under intense fire.

Somewhat tardily, the British set off in pursuit and four German ships were sunk in a confused night action. But, due to misread intelligence, signalling failures and resolute counter-attacks, the opportunity to inflict critical damage on the German battle fleet was missed.

The reckoning began as the listing, shell-battered battleship Warspite limped back into Rosyth on the afternoon of June 1, and it made grim reading for the Royal Navy.

Granted the Germans had lost eleven warships and 3,058 sailors killed and wounded, but British losses totalled 20 warships and 6,768 sailors killed or wounded.

Beatty’s Rosyth-based force had suffered grievously, its losses including two battlecruisers destroyed in vast explosions caused by unsafe cordite handling practices, and 2,725 of the men who had sailed so confidently from Rosyth two days before had died.

Despairing at the loss of so many ships and men, British commander-inchief Admiral Sir John Jellicoe wrote that: ‘... the result cannot be other than unpalatable.’

To many in Britain, Jutland bore all the hallmarks of a defeat and, at Invergordon, dockyard workers (who had never seen combat) booed as battle-scarred warships came in to land their dead and wounded.

Yet, while simple mathematics seemed to favour the enemy who were quick to claim a victory, the Royal Navy could easily absorb the loss of so many ships and men, losses that would, in any case, be eclipsed when the Battle of the Somme began a month later. When the dust settled, it was clear the German fleet had been forced to turn tail and run, leaving the Royal Navy’s steel grip on the North Sea unchallenged.

Her surface fleet reduced to little more than an expensive white elephant, Germany turned instead to unrestricted U-boat warfare on Britain’s Atlantic trade which, in turn, brought the United States into the war. So, while the Battle of Jutland might have been a tactical draw, it was a strategic victory for the Royal Navy as it forced Germany on to a course that would ensure it lost the war.