The Battle of Jutland

[manclad]

There looks to be a good documentary on BBC2 at 9pm tonight about the last clash between 2 fleets of Battleships/Dreadnoughts from the Royal Navy Grand Fleet and the German Navy High Seas Fleet.
I knew that the Royal Navy lost more ships than the High Seas Fleet and that nominally the Germans claimed a victory for the engagement,but that they never tried to challenge the Royal Navy again in a surface battle,but that they turned instead to unlimited U-boat warfare,and uitimately this is what dragged the USA into WW1.
But I never realised that the Royal Navy suffered such heavy casualties with over 6,000 sailors killed, and also around 2,500 losses in the German High Seas Fleet in the space of a day or so.

 

[Wilf Wild 1937]

A Tactical Defeat but a Strategic Victory is how I've heard it described.

Essentially they won, in terms of losses, but they couldn't afford to take the casualties in both men and ships from risking a second battle whereas we could and our blockade of Germany continued.

If we''d pursued them after they'd turned back towards port we probably would have annihilated them but ran a small risk (they'd fired torpedoes) of losing the fleet and the entire war.

Jellicoe was seen as a bit of a tosser by the public for not pursuing but he did the only sensible thing and used the fleet to achieve the required objective which was maintaining the blockade.

The fact that the Germans never used their remaining surface fleet again was effectively the same as sinking it, without inflicting casualties, albeit I suppose if we had we could have redeployed some of our fleet on convoy protection against the U boats.

The blockade was what eventually broke Germany although we wouldn't have lasted much longer.

 

[bluevillain]

Says it all to me as an ex RN.