Comments by "doveton sturdee" (@dovetonsturdee7033) on "The Battle of Jutland: Clash of Dreadnoughts" video.

James Henderson Absolutely! That must explain why the High Seas Fleet spent the rest of the war anchored in the Jade, while the Blockade starved the German civilian population into surrender. Your post is well up to your usual perceptive standards.
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Of course Jutland was a British victory, in the strategic sense. Battles are generally waged in pursuit of a wider aim, and in the case of Jutland the outcome was to demonstrate to Scheer that the High Seas Fleet would never be able to break the blockade on Germany imposed by the Grand Fleet. As a result, the High Seas Fleet stayed out of action until it mutinied, and the Royal Navy starved Germany to defeat by late 1918. As to the subsequent 'massive defeat' I presume you mean like the River Plate action, the first and second Battles of Narvik, the sinking of Bismarck, the Battle of the Barents Sea, the Battle of North Cape, and the big one, the Battle of the Atlantic?
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Beatty was extremely wealthy and had 'influence' in the right places. Also, as Jellicoe's successor as commander of the Grand Fleet, and later as First Sea Lord, he was in a position to censor the official record, and ensure that it said the right things about him.
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Because after Jutland the High Seas Fleet never dared challenge the Grand Fleet again. On 5 June Scheer told the Kaiser as much, and pressed him to authorise unrestricted submarine warfare. The British blockade continued, and Germany was starved into submission. Outgunned? During the main action (1900 -1945), only one Grand Fleet battleship (Colossus) was hit, and by two shells only, whilst the High Seas Fleet received 37 hits. Outsmarted? Jellicoe successfully crossed Scheer's T, and Scheer only managed to escape catastrophe by executing his Battle Turn Away. Outkilled? Yes, because of inept handling and poor propellant practices within the Battlecruiser fleet, but in the main fleet action the Germans received a drubbing.
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Or, I outmanouevred the High Seas Fleet, crossed it's T, hammered it with 38 hits on German capital ships between 1900 & 2039, compared to 2 hits on my own battleships, and forced it to run for the Jade. As a result, I maintained control of the North Sea, ensured the Blockade continued, and played a major part in the eventual allied victory.
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Just as the Russians lost more men than the Germans at Stalingrad, but people claim it as a Russian victory. Oh, er, hand on a minute. Why not tell us about the manner in which the High Seas Fleet exploited their 'victory' during 1916 - 1918? It really shouldn't take you long.
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@youraveragescotsman7119 Moreover, the High Seas Fleet, whilst it made two brief sorties later in 1916, carefully avoided risking any further encounter with the Grand Fleet, but largely stayed at anchor in the Jade. As a result, the British Northern Patrol maintained the Blockade, and systematically starved the German population. Anyone who believes that Jutland was anything more than, as far as the battlecruiser forces were concerned, a tactical success for the Germans would do well to read about the 'Turnip Winter.' No wonder that, by late 1918, Germany was on the verge of revolution, and the High Seas Fleet had mutinied.
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Actually, there was little to choose between the two battlefleets. The British had 296 guns of 12 inch and above, and obtained 110 hits. (0.37 hits per gun.) The Germans had 200 guns of 11 inch and above, and obtained 80 hits (0.40 hits per gun.) British overall figures are skewed by the poor performance of the Battlecruiser fleet. Beatty had always placed rate of fire ahead of accuracy (hence his foolish encouragement of his captains to store cordite above the protective blast doors) with the result that Jellicoe's Grand Fleet (and Evan Thomas' BS5) fired 2626 heavy shells to obtain 98 hits, or 26 rounds per hit, while the battlecruisers fired 1650 shells to achieve 26 hits, or 64 rounds per hit. The most accurate shooting by either side by individual squadrons was by Evan Thomas' superb 5th Battle Squadron of 'Queen Elizabeths.' You are right about internal design, but this was to a large extent inevitable. The Germans built their heavy ships to operate in the North Sea at short range for short periods. Crew facilities were cramped and uncomfortable, but in harbour crews could use accommodation ships and shore barracks. The British, because of their world wide commitments, built ships which could operate for extended periods away from shore facilities, hence the need for more open spaces within the ship itself. As to what was wrong with 'our bloody ships,' my view is that the main problem was the free and easy, 'it will be all right on the day' attitude of the man who said it, David Beatty.
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@johnringel9892 Certainly, there is no doubt that Jutland was a German tactical victory, but Scheer was never able to achieve what he sought most, which was to trap and destroy a detached section, such as a Battle Squadron, of the Grand Fleet, which would bring about equality of numbers, which would enable him to threaten the blockade on Germany which the RN had imposed. I think that an American writer summed the battle up rather neatly when he wrote :- 'The High Seas Fleet has assaulted it's jailer, but it is still in jail.'
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I think he was a Midshipman aboard 'Collingwood' but he was certainly at Jutland. I wonder if anyone ever referred to him as 'Snotty' the common nickname for Mids. at the time?
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@xcritic9671 Well, in the earlier action, Prince of Wales, a sister ship of KGV, took seven hits, none of which fully exploded because her all-or-nothing armour was a generation ahead of the outdated incremental armour fitted to Bismarck, and the shells passed through unarmoured sections, which did not trigger them.
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Jutland wasn't intended to be a fleet action. The intention was to lure the Grand Fleet to sea, over a number of pre-planted U-Boat traps. The German hope was that the British numerical superiority could be reduced by U-boats and mines. The trap failed entirely. Of 19 boats allocated, only 2 sighted the Grand Fleet, and only one made an attack, which failed. Scheer then found himself in a battle which he desperately did not want to fight, had his T crossed, with visibility against him. Certainly, he extricated his fleet with a mixture of skill and good fortune, but he knew how lucky he had been, and never took a similar risk again. The reality is that, strategically, Jellicoe won simply by not suffering losses from within his battleship fleet. British control of the North Sea and therefore, maintenance of the Blockade, continued unimpaired. The effect of the Blockade was made manifest during what the Germans called the 'Turnip Winter' when possibly as many as 700000 German civilians died of starvation & hypothermia. As a New York newspaper commented of Jutland, 'The German Fleet has assaulted it's jailer, but it is still in jail.'
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It was a tactical victory for the Germans, but a strategic victory for the British. After Jutland, the High Seas Fleet never challenged the Grand Fleet again, and ended the war in a state of mutiny. By contrast the British were able to maintain the blockade of Germany which effectively starved her into submission.
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Odd, then, that Admiral Scheer wrote to the All Highest immediately after the battle stating that the High Seas Fleet could never break the stranglehold the Royal Navy had on the North Sea. As a result, the systematic gradual starvation imposed by the British continued, eventually resulting in the collapse of civilian morale. At the same time, the inability of the High Seas Fleet to do much more than skulk in the Jade led to mutiny and revolution among the crews. Some victory!
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@wolfsoldner9029 Actually, they hoped to catch and destroy a detached portion of the Grand Fleet, ideally a single battle squadron, in order to reduce the imbalance in numbers and produce a situation which might bring about a battle on more equal terms. At Jutland, they failed utterly, which resulted in the pessimistic report from Scheer to the All Highest. The successes against Beatty's battlecruisers, whilst making good propaganda, were largely irrelevant in terms of relative fleet strengths.
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@motomass8458 Only the Battlecruiser Fleet stacked cordite outside the blast doors, because their commander, Beatty, placed more importance on rate of fire than accuracy of fire. This explains the poor performance of the battlecruisers. The Grand Fleet & 5th Battle Squadron practised safe handling of cordite, achieved creditable levels of accuracy, and emerged from the battle with only minor damage. The Battlecruiser Fleet abandoned their previous foolish habits after Jutland as well.
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The conclusion that Jutland was a British strategic victory is based on the fact that the High Seas Fleet never again risked encountering the Grand Fleet in battle. A Trafalgar style victory wouldn't seriously have affected the German war effort, which was almost entirely land based. In effect, after Jutland, the High Seas Fleet became a nebulous, 'Fleet in Being,' rather than a credible threat, which prevented the British from using their battleships elsewhere (although, unlike in WW2, it isn't easy to see where they could have been used anyway) but didn't even stop the transfer of some Grand Fleet destroyer flotillas to the Battle of the Atlantic in 1917. Furthermore, all the time the High Seas Fleet swung peacefully around cables in the Jade, the British blockade imposed increasing misery upon the German civilian population (read up on the Turnip Winter) and destroyed their morale, whilst Scheer's enthusiastic support for unrestricted submarine warfare eventually brought the United States into the war on the Allied side.
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Except of course for the fact that Geoffrey Bennett's analysis of the battle demonstrates that the most effective and accurate performance in terms of gunfire by capital ships of either side was that of the Fifth Battle Squadron, i'e', Warspite, Barham, Valiant, and Malaya.
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@FRAGIORGIO1 Alas, no.
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Well, if the High Seas Fleet never intended to challenge the Blockade, then the German government could have saved a lot of time and misery by seeking to negotiate surrender terms at least two years earlier than historically, because unless the blockade was challenged, there was only ever going to be one ending to the Great War. Incidentally, if the High Seas Fleet wasn't intended to challenge the Blockade, why exactly did it exist at all?
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Not many, just the battlecruisers.
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@xcritic9671 Correct. Neither KGV nor Rodney were hit at all in the final action against Bismarck.
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@xcritic9671 If you mean Prince of Wales, most of the seven hits were aft of the catapult, on the unarmoured part of the ship. The fifth hit, abreast of her aft funnel, caused 600 tons of flooding, but her operations were only slightly affected. A far bigger problem was the teething trouble experienced with the quadruple turrets, but after repairs she was able to re-engage later in the day.
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@Cervando The Americans were our allies? In May 1916? Try again. In May 1916 there was considerable anti-British feeling in the United States as a result of the Contraband Control operations being carried out by the Royal Navy. Understandably, the US Government was more than a little disgruntled at their merchant shipping being intercepted on the high seas by the British. In any case, wasn't the remark correct? Didn't the German Navy assault it's jailer, and wasn't it, after the assault, still in jail? German planning prior to Jutland involved two ambitions. The first was to use U-boat traps and mines to sink a few British Battleships, and the second was to isolate and destroy a Battle Squadron from the Grand Fleet in order to make fleet action feasible. They never came remotely near to either. As to losses, the bulk of British losses occurred to the Battlecruiser fleet in the early part of the action, largely due to the shortcomings of it's commander, David Beatty. In the main action between the battlefleets, the Germans scored precisely two hits on one British battleship, Colossus, whilst suffering almost 40 hits on their own heavy ships. As a result, Scheer, shrewdly, ran for safety, and never risked the High Seas Fleet again. The question no one seems able to answer is ' if the High Seas Fleet was unable to challenge the blockade, then what purpose, if any, did it serve?' The blockade strangled the life out of Germany, and all the time the High Seas Fleet swung peacefully at anchor in the Jade.
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@Cervando Surely, the assessment in the New York newspaper isn't prejudiced, it is simply a succinct summing up of the Battle of Jutland. The Germans had achieved a tactical victory in the early battlecruiser action, largely because of the foolishness of David Beatty, but in the main action between the two battleship fleets Jellicoe could claim the same, with two hits on Grand Fleet capital ships compared to 39 on German capital ships. When Scheer extricated his fleet and ran for port, Jellicoe was right not to risk a confused night action. His duty was to preserve his fleet intact in order to maintain control of the North Sea and to ensure that the blockade continued. Serious losses to the High Seas Fleet would have had minimal effect on the German war effort, whereas serious losses to the Grand Fleet would have, potentially, been catastrophic for the Allies. I really don't know what would have been the opinion had the situations been reversed. I suspect we must agree to differ!
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@Cervando Well, however you view it, after Jutland the Germans abandoned attempts to challenge the Grand Fleet, the British control of the North Sea continued, and the Blockade starved Germany into submission. Your comments on the Spanish Armada don't recognise the wider picture. The Armada was sent to convey an invasion force across the Channel. It failed. The Battle of Gravelines forced the Spanish ships to cut their anchors and head north around Scotland. In total, possibly as much as a quarter of the fleet failed to return to Spain. To suggest that the action was not an English victory is absurd, on a par with those who claim that the British didn't sink the Bismarck because scuttling charges might have been detonated a few minutes before she sank, bringing forward the actual sinking by a few minutes. Certainly, the English Armada failed, but there again so did the Spanish Armadas of 1596 & 1597. The Treaty of 1604 certainly didn't favour Spain. It confirmed that Spain would no longer seek to impose Roman-Catholicism in England, and would acknowledge the legitimacy of the Protestant monarchy. Not, of course, that any of this has the slightest relevance to Jutland
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@Cervando In point of fact, in May 1916 Germany was viewed with more sympathy in the United States than Britain. As Professor Kennedy wrote, 'Germany retained a more favoured position within the American Congress and large swathes of the public in the spring of 1916. That governmental and public perception of Germany would change rapidly as the autumn of 1916 came to pass, and that change was a direct result of the Battle of Jutland. While Germany was held in good odour in the United States in the immediate aftermath of the great sea battle, the question of Germany’s desire and willingness to use unrestricted submarine warfare was an issue of concern to America.' As to arguments about the Armada, or the War of Jenkins' Ear, from my experience most people in the UK under the age of about 40 know virtually nothing about British history, or, come to that, any history, at all!
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They were stacked around the turrets because their Admiral, David Beatty, was more concerned with rate of fire than accuracy or safety. Beatty was extremely wealthy and well-connected, and subsequently became C-in-C Grand Fleet, and First Sea Lord, a position which enabled him to ensure that his failures at Jutland were either minimised or concealed in official publications. The best that can be said of him was that he learned from his mistakes, and the lunacy of cordite in turrets was never repeated (despite some of the baseless claims often encountered about the sinking of Hood) although I suspect that this was of little comfort to the families who suffered as a result of his foolishness. The armed forces of all nations had/have people similar to Beatty.
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@submarineinthesky8946 Not so much wrong with the ships, more wrong with the bloody Admiral!
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Of course it was a British victory. Battles are fought to attain specific objectives. The British attained theirs, whereas within days of the engagement Scheer had informed the Kaiser that the High Seas Fleet had been lucky to escape. He then urged the All Highest to order unrestricted submarine warfare.
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