Jutland: World War I's Greatest Naval Battle (Foreign Military Studies) by

Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
Published: 2015-09-22T16:00:00+00:00

Documents

Introduction

Extensive material on the German naval war leadership in the North Sea in World War I, especially on the deployments of the High Seas Fleet, is only available in the files of the earlier Naval Archive (today in the Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv, Freiburg), which—except for individual research—has so far been treated analytically only in the semiofficial series Der Krieg zur See 1914–1918 (The Naval War 1914–1918), subseries Der Krieg in der Nordsee (The War in the North Sea).128 The most important source material, such as the war journals and battle reports, is found primarily in the holdings of RM (Naval Admiralty Staff), RM 8 (Kriegswissenschaft Abteilung [War Science Division of the Navy], formerly the Marine-Archiv [Naval Archive]), M 47 (Kommando der Hochseestreitkräfte [Command of the High Seas Fleet]), RM 49 (Befehlshaber im Flottenbereich [commanders in the fleet]) and RM 92 (Schwere un mittlere Kampfschiffe [heavy and midsize warships]). In the holdings of RM 8/878 to 889, the war journals and reports on the Battle of Jutland from all participating ships and staffs, the fleet chief’s Immediatbericht [direct report to the Kaiser], press reports, experience reports, attaché reports, etcetera, are in sorted collections, either in duplicated form or sometimes in the original. The individual files on battleships, battlecruisers, and cruisers (RM 92), along with the war journals and battle reports, contain very good photos of the battle damage (see, e.g., RM 92/3938 SMS Derfflinger and RM 92/3939 SMS König). These specific file holdings, since their restitution to the Federal Republic by Great Britain in 1958, have been used by only a few historians, such as Arthur J. Marder for his five-volume work From the Dreadnought to Scapa Flow and by N. J. M. Campbell.129

In the following selection of nine documents, the intent was to address all levels of the naval war: the setting of strategic goals of the naval war against Great Britain, the operational planning that led up the battle, the operational and tactical lessons from the evaluation of the various phases of the battle, and, just as important, the experience of battle duty and the damage control of a large battleship during and after the battle.

When it comes to the inner life of a large battleship with over thirteen hundred crew members during a battle, there are only a few surviving firsthand accounts that describe the interplay between ship command, weapons deployment, and mechanical operations, including damage control and firefighting.130 The fighting capability of a warship was (and is) essentially quite dependent on the training and deployment readiness of the crew. In an artillery battle with large surface ships, surviving a ship-to-ship battle depended on achieving a state of perfection in the cooperation between man and technology.131 Most of the crew experienced the event of battle and its effects on their own ship from their respective battle stations in the inner ship. Only the ship commanders or the personnel in the artillery turrets, on the signal deck, or in the observation post saw the enemy and were in the position to observe the details of the battle directly.

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