From: phs172m@vaxc.cc.monash.edu.au (Stephen Harker)
Subject: Re: Jutland
Organization: Physics Department, Monash University, Australia
Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1992 17:32:42 GMT


From phs172m@vaxc.cc.monash.edu.au (Stephen Harker)

In article <Bx97JB.27F@law7.DaytonOH.NCR.COM>, seb@tadtec.co.uk writes:
> 
> From seb@tadtec.co.uk
> 
> [I have removed quite a bit of stuff, hopefully it is still clear]
>
> The initial assesment of Jutland was that it had been a British defeat
> (although this was played down in any official comments at the time, of
> course) but subsequent events and analysis suggested a fairer verdict was a
> marginal British victory.  Consider the following:
> i)  A few days after Jutland, the British fleet was still had substantially
> more battleships able to put to sea than the Germans.

	True, to reinforce the point John Stoffel mentioned in a subsequent
post Jellicoe reported to the admiralty that he had 26 dreadnoughts and 6
battlecruisers ready for sea at 4 hours notice.  Scheer on the other hand
had his best three dreadnoughts in docks for weeks, as were all of his
battlecruisers.  Derfflinger and Seydlitz were not ready for sea for nearly
seven months.  You just have to look at photographs of the German ships
after the battle to see how badly they were hit, Oakeshott has some good
pictures of this.

> ii) After Jutland, the German fleet never ventured to sea again. 

	This is not true.  For example on August 13th almost 3 months after
Jutland all available ships, 2 battlecruisers and 18 dreadnoughts, were out
planning to bombard Sunderland.  The Grand Fleet also sailed to catch them. 
Unfortunately for the British a Zepellin reported a cruiser/destroyer force
as a 30 ships including some battleships.  So the High Seas Fleet diverted
to catch this force (and failed).  Because of this they avoided the trap
being set for them, again see Oakeshott.

> The British fleet's performance *was* fairly abysmal, but to blame the 
> failure to inflict greater damage on the Germans on Jellicoe...  What were 
> the major failings on the British part? 

	Interestingly only once were more than 3 enemy ships visibl from
Iron Duke at any one time.  Iron Duke was Jellicoe's flagship.  This
relates to the poor communications mentioned below.

> i)  Failure to communicate contact reports adequately or at all 
> ii) Poor gunnery 
> iii) Battlecruisers blowing up. 
>  
> Communications were mainly done by flag signals.  What flags were flown 
> tended to be obscured by all the smoke from a couple of hundred 
> coal-burning ships ploughing up the ocean.  The cruiser and battlecruiser 
> commanders repeatedly failed to report what the enemy were doing & those 
> reports they did make were *not* exactly models of clarity. 
> 
> Poor gunnery was at least in part due to minimal practise due to a desire 
> to keep costs down.  A classic case of "for a ha'porth of tar".  I seem to 
> remember that German procedures were better, too, but I can't remember 
> details of the differences (I'm at work, far away from source books).  Was 
> it that centralised gunnery directors were used by the Germans? 

	The British gunnery was pretty good actually.  The major period of
poor gunnery was that by the Battlecruiser squadron against Hipper.  In
this period the British were first attacking on a curving course involving
high rates of change of bearing and range on their own ships.  The Germans
were on a stable course.  This need not have been the case with the British
as they had devised a very good analog computing system (the Argo clock) to
predict the enemies position given good observations, unfortunately this
was not installed and the inferior Dreyer table used.  Pollen describes
this, he is the son of the inventor of the Argo clock.  This could have
been a great advantage over the Germans, but was thrown away.

	The German optics and rangefinders were superior which helped of
course.  However in the initial phase the German ships were seen against a
dull eastern sky, while the British were silhouetted against a clear blue
sky.  Poor light caused a lot of gunnery problems to both sides during the
battle, again the British had been offered improved rangefinders with
better light gathering powers by Pollen in 1913, this could have been
significant.  The British ships all had, and used, director firing, the
Germans did use a better gunnery technique of ladder firing which found the
range very quickly.  However the 5th Battle Squadron (Queen Elizabeths)
gave superb gunnery, and the battleships in the short period they were
engaged did very well.

	The other problem after Jutland was the British not being prepared
or equipped for night fighting.  Again Pollen had wanted to work on
designing night fighting equipment pre WW1, but this was rejected!

	However one major problem with the British was the quality of their
armour piercing rounds.  Many shells failed to explode at all, while other
armour piercing rounds broke up rather than penetrate.  When they worked
the fuses set off the rounds _before_ penetrating.  The result was mainly
surface damage to the German ships or to the top compartments.  Hipper
himself said afterwards that it was only the poor quality of the British
bursting shells that saved his squadron from disaster.  The British later
improved their shell design and reliability and these shells had far
superior effect, this is mentioned briefly by Peter Smith.

> "There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today", to quote 
> Beatty, who was commanding the battlecruisers.  It's thought the problem 
> was fire-flashes going down ammunition hoists & into the magazines.  The
> Germans had apparently had a very narrow escape at the Battle of Dogger 
> Bank earlier in the war and had made modifications to overcome the problem. 
>  The British weren't aware of the problem prior to Jutland, so no 
> modifications.  Boom!  Oh, look, there goes another battlecruiser... 

	While this is true it should be stressed that both British and
German designers had been aware of the problems of flash before the war. 
They had taken _inadequate_ precautions rather than none at all - Peter
Hodges describes some of the British anti-flash precautions pre WW1.  So 
Dogger bank lead the Germans to improve their flash precautions, rather
than to introduce them.  On the whole it is more probable that the loss of
the battlecruisers was due to the penetration of the magazines by German
rounds rather than flash.  WW1 designs had inadequate deck armour, and the
British battlecruisers combined this with weak belt armour which would make
this comparatively easy.  Lion of course did have a flash problem and
narrowly avoided destruction by flooding of the appropriate magazine.

>-----------------------------------------------------------------------

	The blindfold game, Ewart Oakeshott,
	Pergamon Press, 1969, SBN 08-013282-0, LCC card 78-80729

	The Big Gun: Battleship main armament 1860-1945, Peter Hodges,
	Conway Maritime Press/USNI Press, 1981, ISBN 0-85177-144-0

	The Great Gunnery Scandal, Anthony Pollen
	William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd, 1980, ISBN 0-00-216298-9

	The Great Ships Pass, British Battleships at War 1939-45
	Peter C Smith, William Kimber & Co. (1977), ISBN 0-7183-0175-7

-- 
Stephen Harker			phs172m@vaxc.cc.monash.edu.au
Monash University		Baloney baffles brains: Eric Frank Russell

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