The Major Battles of the First World War: WWI, Mons, Tannenberg, Marne, Ypres, Flanders, Gallipoli, Verdun, Jutland, the Somme, Passchendaele by Bill Price

Author:Bill Price [Price, Bill]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Somme, allies, combat, trenches, battle, World War
Publisher: RW Press
Published: 2013-07-08T07:00:00+00:00

Jutland

Early in 1916, the Kaiser decided to stop the unrestricted submarine warfare he had started a year earlier because of fears that it would provoke the Americans into joining the war on the side of the Allies, leaving the German navy with little to do. This coincided with the appointment of the aggressive Vice-Admiral Reinhard Scheer to the position of commander of the German High Seas Fleet, replacing the more cautious Admiral Hugo von Pohl, who had become seriously ill. Scheer began to take the High Seas Fleet further out into the North Sea than Pohl had dared, hoping to catch up with the British battlecruiser squadron commanded by Vice-Admiral David Beatty, which came out of its base at Rosyth on the Firth of Forth regularly to conduct patrols and, if it had encountered the larger German Dreadnaught class battleships of the High Seas Fleet, would have been seriously outgunned.

Another Trafalgar?

Scheer’s plan was to use a small force of five battlecruisers to lure Beatty towards the German battleships, but on 28 May the British intercepted German radio transmissions which were then decrypted by Room 40, the branch of naval intelligence dealing with cryptography, named after the room where it had originally been set up in Admiralty House in London. The messages gave the British details of the German plans, together with the knowledge that the High Seas Fleet would be leaving its base at Wilhelmshaven in two days’ time, giving them time to plan a trap of their own. Beatty sailed out of Rosyth on 30 May at about the same time as Scheer left Wilhelmshaven, but the British Grand Fleet, commanded by Admiral Sir John Jellicoe, also came out of its base at Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands with the intention of meeting Beatty off the coast of Jutland, the mainland of Denmark, in the expectation that Beatty had drawn the German fleet into following him there.

The British anticipated another Trafalgar, the battle in which Nelson decisively defeated a combined force of French and Spanish ships in 1805 during the Napoleonic War, and, given their superiority in numbers, it was not an unreasonable position to take. The Grand Fleet was composed of 150 ships altogether, against the 100 ships of the High Seas Fleet, but the gross numbers masked a wider disparity in capital ships, the largest battleships and battlecruisers, of which the British enjoyed an almost two to one advantage, further enhanced because six of the German battleships were of the slower and more lightly armed pre-Dreadnaught class which had become obsolete with the introduction of Dreadnaughts and limited the rest of the German fleet to sailing at their speed.

The first action began at about 2.30 p.m., 1430 hours in naval terms, of 31 May, when Beatty’s battlecruiser squadron, heading east, encountered the smaller German scouting squadron led by Vice-Admiral Franz von Hipper, which was heading in a southerly direction, towards the main German fleet. Beatty turned south himself, engaging with Hipper’s ships and giving chase in what is now referred to as the ‘run to the south’.

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