WHAT HAPPENED AT JUTLAND.
WE publish elsewhere a review of Lord Jellicoe's most interesting book. After reading that book we do not wonder that Lord Jellicoe has won the affection and esteem of the whole of the Grand Fleet. The book is throughout magnanimous, direct, and transparently honest.
This is not to say that we can by any means rejoice at everything we read in it, but we are quite sure that the qualities we have mentioned will always be associated with Lord Jellicoe's personality and with his command of the Grand Fleet. When all this has been admitted, however, the nation will still ask whether the comparatively inde- cisive battle of Jutland could and should have been a complete victory. In this question is concentrated all the problems, all the strategic doctrine, and all the record of defects in the Navy which are set forth in Lord Jellicoe's book.
If we were to sum up in a few words Lord Jellicoe's explanation of why he did not, in Nelson's phrase, " engage the enemy more closely " at Jutland, and annihilate the German High Sea Fleet, we should say that he was pre- vented by a supreme consciousness of his great responsi- bilities. He felt that nothing lay between the Allies and disaster in the war but the Grand Fleet. The Grand Fleet was not only the shield but the cement of the whole Alliance. Lord Jellicoe, in effect, said to himself : " I cannot afford to take a single unnecessary risk. If the Grand Fleet is crippled to-day, the war will be as good as over to-night. Great Britain will almost certainly be starved out by the German submarines, and when the Allies no longer command the seas the Alliance will instantly collapse." This reasoning, in Lord Jellicoe's mind, was enormously reinforced by his sense that the Germans on many points of equipment and armament were superior to ourselves. He tells us that the German shells had a higher bursting-power than our own, that the German range-finder was extremely good, that the German method of finding the range quickly by " straddling " with simultaneous shots instead of by successive shots was very effective, and that the armour of the German ships resisted shell-fire and torpedoes much better than our own. He also bore in mind that the Germans had twice as many destroyers as we had, and that the range of torpedoes had become very great. Many readers of Lord Jellicoe's book when they have considered the case as he sets it out will no doubt exclaim : " Thank Heaven we had a man in command who was unwilling to take silly and vain- glorious risks ! The event has shown that it was really unnecessary to annihilate the German Fleet. Lord Jellicoe gave it a very severe warning, and, for the rest, it was enough to contain it in its harbours."
Of course, the contrary opinion to all this will be held quite as strongly, and having paraphrased as fairly as we can Lord Jellicoe's case, we must now look at the other side. We know that the decision between the opposing schools of thought must be largely a matter of temperament. Naval officers, strategists, and historians, according to their various temperaments, will probably go on discussing the rights and wrongs of Jutland to the end of time. It ought not to be forgotten, however, that when the battle was fought it was not true to say that the Navy stood between the Alliance and defeat in quite such a pointed and unreserved sense as we have found in Lord Jellicoe's words. May, 1916, when the battle of Jutland took place, was for the Allies one of the most depressing and critical pericd; of the war. The French were extremely hard pressed at Verdun ; the British attack on the Somme had not yet begun ; and the Germans had just enjoyed a most ominous success by capturing the Vimy Ridge. Some people even used to say at that time that the French were at their last gasp, and that there was little hope indeed that Great Britain could be saved from star- vation. We know now that we could survive all these critical conditions, but that, of course, was not known, and could not have been known, at the time. Things might very well have turned out otherwise. There is consequently a great deal to be said for the view that it was the imperative duty of the Grand Fleet to exert every means and strain every nerve to destroy the High Sea Fleet if it could possibly do so. It must never be forgotten that the German submarine campaign was based on the existence of the High Sea Fleet. If the High Sea Fleet had been destroyed, the submarine campaign would have collapsed, and all the horrors and the anxiety, and all the very real and terrible risks that the Allies had to run before fortune at last smiled on them, would have been avoided. The war might have been ended at least a year earlier. We think, then, that if Nelson had commanded the Grand Fleet with the unques- tioned superiority of ships and gun-power which Lord
Jellicoe possessed, he would not have turned away from the German Fleet.
We ought to add here that in saying this we do not for a single moment attribute to Lord Jellicoe any sort of personal disinclination to engage the enemy more closely. His book makes it perfectly plain that he had the supreme moral courage to be faithful to his trust as he conceived it rather than fair to himself. That was noble. Our criticism is directed rather against a school of thought which became fashionable is the Navy some fifteen years ago, and which even a layman may be forgiven for judging on its merits. According to this doctrine, it is not necessary to destroy the enemy's fleet so long as passage and communication can be made secure. The bias of Lord Jellicoe's book is in favour of that doctrine. Naval officers must decide this issue for themselves, and we trust that they will. We are sure that they can do so without personal arguments which would be not only irrelevant but grossly unfair. Every one, we think, must recognize that Lord Jellicoe carried out the principles of this school with supreme ability.
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