Dreadnought Gunnery and the Battle of Jutland

The Question of Fire Control

John Brooks

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781135765538
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

This new book reviews critically recent studies of fire control, and describes the essentials of naval gunnery in the dreadnought era.With a foreword by Professor Andrew Lambert, it shows how, in 1913, the Admiralty rejected Arthur Pollen's Argo system for the Dreyer fire control tables.

1
OLD CONTROVERSIES, NEW HISTORIES

On 2 October 1905, Portsmouth Dockyard laid the keel of the first all-big-gun battleship, HMS Dreadnought. She was completed in an astonishingly short time and, on 5 January 1907, sailed on her first, experimental cruise. Her construction marked the beginning of the era named after her, in which the world’s navies, those of Britain and Germany in particular, vied to reequip themselves with capital ships armed with many heavy guns of a single calibre. Dreadnought herself had ten 12-inch guns; she was also the first large warship to be fitted with turbine propulsion, which gave her a speed of 21 knots, three knots faster than most battleships in the British Fleet.¹

Between 1906 and 1908, the Royal Navy also constructed (though at a less frenetic pace) three large armoured cruisers that were even more radical. The eight 12-inch guns mounted on each of the Invincible class were of battleship calibre and their speed, again obtained from turbines, was an unprecedented 25 knots; yet their armour protection (a 6-inch belt and 7-inch barbettes) was no better than previous armoured cruisers. These ships, the first of the type later called battlecruisers, were built at the insistence of Admiral Sir John Fisher, First Sea Lord from October 1904, whose belief (if not always consistently expressed) was that they could combine in one hull the qualities needed to fight both armoured cruisers and battleships.² His brief to the 1905 Committee on Designs declared that the new type would render all other armoured cruisers obsolete, and that:

Indeed, the Armoured Cruisers are Battleships in disguise.

The committee itself concluded that their strong broadside fire ‘makes the Armoured Cruisers all the more qualified to lie in the line of battle if required to do so’ [original italics].³

Whether or not this claim was justified, even in 1905, it was certain that, until other countries also built dreadnoughts, any opponents of the new British ships would have fewer heavy guns, but more of lesser calibre that were capable of higher maximum rates of fire. However, the greater speeds of the dreadnought battleships and battlecruisers allowed them to dictate the range of battle; thus they could choose the long range at which their heavy guns were more accurate and at which lighter guns were less able to develop their full firing rate. But this tactic depended on their being provided with fire control that enabled them to hit frequently at long range. Dreadnought herself was equipped with a basic set of instruments; subsequently, two more elaborate fire control systems were developed in Britain, one by a civilian inventor called Arthur Pollen, the other from proposals put forward by a serving gunnery officer, Frederic Dreyer. Eventually, the Admiralty chose the Dreyer Tables rather than Pollen’s Argo system, though the decision was disputed, both in public and within the naval establishment. This book is a new study of these old controversies, of the consequences of the Admiralty’s choice in the battles of the First World War, and of the interpretations of these matters in recent naval histories.⁴

The development of long-range fire control at sea took place in the period of growing naval rivalry between Britain and Imperial Germany. Since her first Naval Law of 1898 Imperial Germany had been steadily building up her own battlefleet; from 1900 onwards, she laid down in each year two battleships and one armoured cruiser. Once details of Dreadnought became known, the start of construction of the battleships of the 1906 programme was delayed while they were redesigned to mount twelve 11-inch guns. Despite the late start, the tempo of completions was maintained, Nassau and Westfalen being commissioned in the autumn of 1909. In the first half of that year, the three ships of the Bellerophon class had joined the British Fleet; thus, albeit temporarily, the British lead in dreadnought battleships had been cut to two. In 1908, Germany had laid down her first dreadnought battlecruiser, the Von der Tann of the 1907 programme—though it was to be some years before it was learned that her armour protection was, to within a fraction of an inch, equal to that of contemporary British battleships. Furthermore, in the same year, Germany resolved to lay down annually three battleships and one battlecruiser under the programmes for 1908 to 1911.⁵ Thus, by forcing the technological pace, Fisher had started a new shipbuilding race; whereas Britain’s lead in pre-dreadnoughts was unassailable, Germany could hope to build a fleet of dreadnoughts that in size was not much smaller than Britain’s, and in quality might even be better. By the end of 1908, the strength of the German challenge was clearly apparent in Britain, further aggravating the tensions and rivalries between the two powers. The response, goaded by the agitation that ‘We want eight, and we won’t wait’, was dramatic. Powers were taken to build no fewer than eight ships (six battleships and two battlecruisers) under the estimates for 1909– 10. Furthermore, all but the first two battleships were to have 13.5-inch guns, while the two Lion-class battlecruisers were given improved protection and a yet higher speed of 28 knots. Though falling behind, Germany stayed in the race until 1911 but, by 1912, was obliged to allocate ever more of her increasing military expenditure to the Army. In contrast, Britain’s rate of construction increased further.⁶ At the outbreak of the First World War, the dreadnoughts in service with the German Navy numbered thirteen battleships and four battlecruisers; the Royal Navy had twenty battleships and nine battlecruisers. But even these numbers understate the extent to which Britain outbuilt Germany. A better indication is obtained from the situation on the eve of the Battle of Jutland. British yards had then supplied the Royal Navy with no fewer than forty-three dreadnought battleships and ten battlecruisers. Germany had completed only seventeen battleships and six battlecruisers.⁷

Despite its superiority in numbers, the Royal Navy recognised the Imperial German Navy as a worthy and dangerous opponent. Britain’s wartime strategy was to enforce a distant blockade of Germany, by means of the Battle Cruiser Fleet based at Rosyth, and the Grand Fleet in Scapa Flow and the Moray Firth. With Germany’s High Seas Fleet secure in its bases in the Heligoland Bight, the North Sea became a ‘no-man’s ocean’, though one in which the Germans hoped to reduce British numerical superiority by torpedo attacks and mining, and by attempting to lure isolated British squadrons within reach of their full battlefleet.⁸ Eventually, on 31 May 1916, off Jutland, an initial action between the opposing battlecruisers developed into a confused and indecisive encounter between the two fleets. The outcome was a profound disappointment for the Royal Navy, which lost many more ships and men. But, despite its tactical successes, it was the High Seas Fleet that, at dawn on 1 June, withdrew to its bases. Strategically, nothing had changed. In terms of cold numbers, the loss of three battlecruisers barely dented Britain’s numerical predominance, whereas Germany could ill afford to lose her latest battlecruiser.⁹

The opening action at Jutland, between the German battlecruisers and a British force of battlecruisers and fast battleships under the command of Vice Admiral Sir David Beatty, is now known as the Run to the South. Despite its restrained language, the initial assessment of the British Commander-in-Chief (C.-in-C.), Admiral Sir John Jellicoe, was gravely critical.

The disturbing feature of the battle-cruiser action is the fact that five German battle-cruisers engaging six British vessels of this class, supported after the first twenty minutes, although at great range, by the fire of four battle ships of the ‘Queen Elizabeth’ class, were yet able to sink the ‘Queen Mary’ and ‘Indefatigable’…the result cannot be other than unpalatable.

The anonymous author of an article in Brassey’s Annual for 1924, who was clearly not one of Beatty’s supporters in the Jutland controversy then raging, was a great deal blunter:

there is no precedent at all for a British squadron superior to its opponents in speed and gun-power being outfought and defeated in fifty-three minutes.¹⁰

In reality, probably only Tiger had a clear speed advantage.¹¹ It must be recognised that, even after the loss of Queen Mary, Beatty barely flinched; it was the German commander, Vice Admiral Franz von Hipper, who turned away from the fire of the battleships and the threat of a destroyer attack. Nonetheless, there can be no doubt that the Run to the South was a disaster for British arms. The losses can be partly explained by the inferior armour protection and the exposed and inflammable propellant charges in the British ships, and the effective armour-piercing German shell.¹² But these factors were important only because the British battlecruisers were decisively beaten in the gunnery duel; in the whole action they made no more than eleven hits compared with at least thirty-four scored by their opponents.¹³

There is now something of a broad consensus on the main cause of this failure of British gunnery and how it had arisen.

The British undoubtedly paid a severe penalty for the failure to adopt before the war the system devised by Arthur Hungerford Pollen… The Pollen system would undoubtedly have enabled the British battlecruisers to hit before they were hit in return, thus offsetting their deficiencies in armour protection and unsuitable propellant.¹⁴

Instead of [Pollen’s] effective Argo Clock, Dreyer had persuaded the Admiralty to adopt a plagiarized and inferior instrument codesigned by himself and… Keith Elphinstone.¹⁵

In taking observed and estimated data, and adding both manual delays and mechanical errors, Dreyer’s system deprived the guns of the responsiveness of direct observation, and yet failed to produce accurate results in conditions of fast-changing rates of change of range and bearing.¹⁶

By the eve of World War I, fire control devices had become so complex that the admirals who had to decide what to approve and what to reject no longer understood what was at issue… Decisions were therefore made in ignorance, often for financial or personal or political reasons.¹⁷

What the effects on Jutland might have been if most of the British heavy ships had been fitted with the Argo Clock is of course largely conjectural; but its obvious superiority to the system actually installed, together with the fact that the Queen Mary, which did the best shooting of Beatty’s ships, was fitted with the Argo Clock Mark IV leaves one in little doubt that they would have been substantial.¹⁸

Had all British capital ships been equipped with Pollen’s ‘Argo Clock’ at Jutland…the outcome…might after all have been the destruction of the High Seas Fleet by sheer weight of numbers for which the Royal Navy pined.

Yet defective technology, reflecting the ...