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A Lanchestrian Reappraisal of the Battle of Jutland

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A Lanchestrian Reappraisal of the Battle of Jutland This is a repository copy of Weight of Shell Must Tell : A Lanchestrian reappraisal of the Battle of Jutland. White Rose Research Online URL for this paper: https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/99759/ Version: Submitted Version Article: MacKay, Niall James orcid.org/0000-0003-3279-4717, Price, Christopher and Wood, Andrew James orcid.org/0000-0002-6119-852X (2016) Weight of Shell Must Tell : A Lanchestrian reappraisal of the Battle of Jutland. History. pp. 536-563. ISSN 1468-229X https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-229X.12241 Reuse Items deposited in White Rose Research Online are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved unless indicated otherwise. They may be downloaded and/or printed for private study, or other acts as permitted by national copyright laws. The publisher or other rights holders may allow further reproduction and re-use of the full text version. This is indicated by the licence information on the White Rose Research Online record for the item. Takedown If you consider content in White Rose Research Online to be in breach of UK law, please notify us by emailing [email protected] including the URL of the record and the reason for the withdrawal request. [email protected] https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/ History: The Journal of the Historical Association Weight of Shell Must Tell: A Lanchestrian reappraisal of the Battle of Jutland Journal:For History: Review The Journal of the Historical Only Association Manuscript ID Draft Wiley - Manuscript type: Original Article We re-analyse the 1916 battle of Jutland the major naval engagement of the First World War in the light of the understanding of dreadnought fleet tactics that developed over the decade leading up to it. In particular we consider the interaction of the calculus of Lanchester(s Square Law with fleet geometry and the commanders( decisions that determined it and with the shipbuilding decisions associated with the Lanchestrian trade-off Abstract: between quality and quantity. We re-examine the behaviour of the commanders in the light of this tactical analysis and conclude that the outcome of Jutland in spite of apparent ,ritish tactical and technological failings was the culmination of a decade of consistent and professionally insightful decision-ma-ing by the .oyal Navy which built and correctly wielded its decisive weapon the 0rand Fleet to achieve the required strategic victory. Page 1 of 34 History: The Journal of the Historical Association Weight of Shell Must Tell: A Lanchestrian reappraisal of the Battle of Jutland ABSTRACT: We re-analyse the 1916 battle of Jutland, the major naval engagement of the First World War, in the light of the understanding of dreadnought fleet tactics that developed over the decade leading up to it. In particular, we consider the interaction of the calculus of Lanchester’s Square Law with fleet geometry Forand the commanders’ Review decisions that determined Only it, and with the shipbuilding decisions associated with the Lanchestrian trade-off between quality and quantity. We re-examine the behaviour of the commanders in the light of this tactical analysis, and conclude that the outcome of Jutland, in spite of apparent British tactical and technological failings, was the culmination of a decade of consistent and professionally insightful decision-making by the Royal Navy, which built and correctly wielded its decisive weapon, the Grand Fleet, to achieve the required strategic victory. 1 History: The Journal of the Historical Association Page 2 of 34 The 1916 Battle of Jutland remains a subject of undiminished controversy as its centenary approaches.1 Much of this debate revolves around the question of victory and defeat, and the performance of the British commander, Admiral Jellicoe. The logical tension created by a rare combination of strategic victory and apparent tactical defeat naturally defies consensus. On the one hand Jellicoe, famously the only man on either side who could lose the war in an afternoon, was equally aware that he could not win it in the same time span and receives praise for a calculated performance that maintained Britain’s naval supremacy despite a negative and dispiriting exchange of human and materialFor losses. Conversely, Review Jellicoe’s apparently Only un-British playing of the percentages is contrasted with his subordinate Beatty’s embrace of the Nelsonian tradition of dash and daring, which, critics argue, could have delivered a crushing and unequivocal victory to Britain at a pivotal point in the war. The emotional edge to this debate is fuelled further by the addition of a declinist narrative, which places Britain’s dramatic losses of capital ships in the context of a perceived ongoing and accelerating industrial and institutional failure, particularly relative to Germany.2 1 The early controversy began with J. E. T. Harper’s Naval Staff Appreciation (later moderated into K. G. B. and A. Dewar, Narrative of the Battle of Jutland (London, 1924)), which was highly critical of Jellicoe (see also J. E. T. Harper, The truth about Jutland (London, 1927) and J. E. T. Harper and L. Gibson, The Riddle of Jutland (London and New York, 1934)). The written battle raged thereafter, exemplified by the pro-Beatty C. Bellairs, The Battle of Jutland: the sowing and the reaping (London, 1920) and the pro-Jellicoe Adm. Sir Reginald Bacon, The Jutland Scandal (London, 1924. The definitive history is A. J. Marder, From the Dreadnought to Scapa Flow: The Royal Navy in the Fisher era, 1904-1919, 5 vols (Oxford, 1961-1970). For an accessible modern summary see P. Hart and N. Steel, Jutland 1916 ─ Death in the Grey Wastes (London, 2003). For current German perspectives see M. Epkenhans, J. Hillmann, F. Naegler, Skagerrakschlacht: Vorgeschichte ─ Ereignis ─ Verarbeitung (Munich, 2009). Regarding our title we note that Jellicoe wrote to Churchill on 14/7/1914 that ‘The Germans would argue that their guns are of sufficient power to carry their projectiles through our comparatively weak armour [and] it has not been necessary to have heavier guns hitherto. I do not agree with them because I attach so much importance to weight of bursting shell’. A. Temple Patterson ed., The Jellicoe Papers: selections from the private and official correspondence of Admiral of the Fleet Earl Jellicoe of Scapa (Navy Records Soc., vols 108 and 111, 1966 and 1968), vol.I, item 31. Fisher was typically more exclamatory: ‘After all, the immense superiority of our 13.5“ guns MUST tell’ (Fisher to Jellicoe, 21/1/1915, Jellicoe Papers, item 103). 2 See, for example, C. Barnett, The Swordbearers: Supreme Command in the First World War (London, 1963). The second of the four case studies in the book is ‘Sailor with a flawed cutlass: Admiral Sir John Jellicoe’. The thesis is critiqued in E. Grove, ‘How flawed really was Britain’s cutlass? A critique of the Barnett thesis’, in A. Clesse and C. Coker, The Vitality of Britain (Luxembourg, 1993). 2 Page 3 of 34 History: The Journal of the Historical Association Recent work has tended to emphasize either technical issues or command and control within the wider context of the Royal Navy’s organizational culture.3 However, from one crucial perspective Jutland has yet to be addressed. Fifty years of technical development of capital ships had been accompanied by scant hard evidence concerning how best to use them: yet fleet tactics had to be developed, and there is a large body of writing on the topic from the twenty years preceding Jutland, almost entirely neglected in the recent resurgence of pre-First World War naval history.4 Its central theme is of the quantification and mathematization of the role of the ‘big gun’. In the early twentieth century, theoristsFor in many Review countries were exploring Only means of predicting victory or defeat in battle through the use of geometry and calculus. The most famous example is the British engineer and scientist F.W. Lanchester’s ‘square law’, which provided a revolutionary understanding of the effects of modern weaponry, and predicted that an outgunned force was likely to suffer an accelerating rate of loss relative to its opponent until it was completely destroyed.5 Even military 3 A substantial body of work by Sumida explores various aspects of the use of this rapidly-changing technology, ranging from the problem of fire control (J. T. Sumida, ‘British Capital Ship Design and Fire Control in the Dreadnought Era: Sir John Fisher, Arthur Hungerford Pollen, and the Battle Cruiser’, Journal of Modern History, 51 (1979), pp. 205-230) to that of the optimal range at which to fight (J. T. Sumida, ‘A Matter of Timing: The Royal Navy and the Tactics of Defensive Battle, 1912-1916’, Journal of Military History, 67 (2003), pp. 85-136), although his conclusions are disputed (M. Seligmann, ‘A German preference for a medium-range battle? British assumptions about German naval gunnery, 1914-1915’, War in History, 19 (2012), pp. 33-48). The technical aspects of gunnery control are dealt with by John Brooks, Dreadnought Gunnery and the Battle of Jutland: The Question of Fire Control (Abingdon, 2005), caustically reviewed by Sumida (J. T. Sumida, ‘Gunnery, Procurement, and Strategy in the Dreadnought era’, Journal of Military History, 69 (2005), pp. 1179-1187; response by J. Brooks, Journal of Military History, 70 (2006), pp. 195-200). Lanchestrian thinking is never discussed explicitly in this literature, but Sumida notes the dynamic nature of British tactical thinking, and the Royal Navy’s `Intelligent consideration of … fleet fire and movement – that is, the naval historical equivalent of “inherent military probability”’. The Royal Navy’s organizational culture and its effect on command and control is explored in a landmark work by Gordon (Andrew Gordon, The Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command (Annapolis, 1997)).
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