The Jutland Scandal: The Truth About the First World War's Greatest Sea Battles by Vice Admiral John Harper & Admiral Reginald Bacon

Author:Vice Admiral John Harper & Admiral Reginald Bacon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HISTORY / Military / Naval
ISBN: 9781848329393
Publisher: Frontline Books
Published: 2016-01-30T16:00:00+00:00

DIAGRAM 3

It is difficult enough to judge the change in position of a ship during the time a projectile is flying through the air when firing at long ranges, but it is infinitely more difficult to do so in the case of a torpedo travelling through the water. In fact it takes a torpedo ten minutes to traverse a range of 10,000 yards, and it is quite impossible to forecast where a ship would be after an interval of ten minutes in a naval action.

Moreover, although the gyroscope straightens the running of a torpedo, it cannot be expected to keep it straight enough to hit a single ship only 200 yards long at a distance of 10,000 yards. The torpedo may be written down as useless in a single-ship action at modern fighting ranges. When, however, a fleet comes to be the target the conditions are totally changed, since no longer is the object a single ship, but the target becomes a line of many ships. Let us see how this works out.

Take the example of the Grand Fleet, say with 24 battleships each about 600 feet or 200 yards long. The space from the bow of one ship to the bow of the next, A, B, was about 500 yards; the length of each ship, A, C, was 200 yards, so that the length of the space C, B was 300 yards.

Now it is easy to see that the whole line of ships from A to Z form one long target with 24 ships each 200 yards long, or 4,800 yards of ships and 23 blanks of 300 yards each.

The total length of the target was, therefore, 11,700 yards, of which 4,800 were vulnerable ships and 6,900 yards was blank space.

The chances of hitting 4,800 yards of ship compared with 6,900 yards of blank is as 48 is to 69, or nearly as two is to three, so that out of every five torpedoes fired at such a line of ships, two should hit ships and three should pass through the blanks. Moreover, the line is so long, nearly 12,000 yards, that if a torpedo were fired at the centre of the line from a distance of 10,000 yards it would have to be deflected 30 degrees to the right or left in order to miss the line.

If we have thoroughly grasped that the chances were that two torpedoes out of every five that were fired from 10,000 yards distance would hit ships of the Grand Fleet in single-line-follow-my-leader formation, we must agree that here was a very real and live danger and one which required all the wits of the Navy to minimize.

Well, of course, the problem had been discussed between naval officers for several years prior to Jutland, and Admiral Jellicoe decided, with the concurrence of all the other admirals, that the best means of defeating such an attack was to turn the ships away from an attack if the torpedo were fired from any position between abeam and half-way to right-ahead.

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