What happened at Jutland?
By Bill Jurens
In the 12 hours between 2.20pm on 31 May and 2.20am on 1 June 1916, the Royal Navy lost more than 100,000 tons of ships and almost 7,000 men to the guns of the German High Seas Fleet. Of these men, 4,200 – and 90,000 tons of ships – were lost due to explosions in their powder magazines. Within hours, three battlecruisers and one armoured cruiser had, without warning, quite literally disintegrated under German guns. One wag would comment that, at Jutland, the Royal Navy expended more propellant on itself than it did on the Germans.
Admiral Sir David Beatty, who witnessed the debacle while himself leading a battlecruiser group, is reported to have said: 'There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today!' How right he was.
Links in the great chain of death …
Great disasters rarely have simple causes. In mature technologies, accidents almost always represent the sum of a number of individually innocuous defects, linked together in a (usually) improbable chain of circumstance. And thus it was at Jutland, where inadequate armour, a risky choice of propellant, poor stowage of that propellant and tactical mismanagement formed a chain that pulled thousands to their deaths.
Let's look at the links one by one …
1 Inadequate armour
Clearly, the armour suite of each British battlecruiser
was inadequate or the German shells wouldn't have penetrated in
the first place. However, it wasn't that British armour was bad
compared to German plate – the Germans just tended to use a lot
more of it.
In that regard, one must remember that the warship designer is always caught in a 'zero sum game' regarding speed, armour, armament and endurance – or, to put it another way, what one borrows from Peter must be used to pay Paul. This means, for example, that an increase in armament must necessarily reflect an equivalent decrease in one or more of the other three.
The battlecruiser concept emphasised speed and armament at the cost of armour, resulting in a fast, thin-skinned ship with a heavy punch. But thin armour meant that hits from heavy shell could get you in very deep trouble – fast.
2 Risky propellant
The terms 'propellant' and 'powder' are
often used interchangeably; both mean a substance that is used to eject
a projectile from a barrel of a gun. Big guns require hundreds of pounds
of propellant (or powder) per shot in order to hit – and hurt – an
enemy that is often 10 or more miles away.
The British used a propellant called cordite in their big guns. This is a 'double-base' propellant containing both nitrocellulose and nitroglycerine. The latter enhanced cordite's power – its 'punch per pound' – albeit at the cost of an increased propensity to explode if mistreated. The German propellant used at Jutland, known as 'RPC 12', was actually quite similar to cordite, but it typically contained a bit less nitroglycerine and a bit more stabiliser to decrease the chance of accidental detonation.
The trade-off between stability and safety was a tricky one. The US Navy, feeling that nitroglycerine wasn't worth the candle, used a single-base (nitrocellulose only) propellant instead. Had the British done the same, their battlecruisers probably would not have exploded at all. But they would have carried fewer shells into action.
3 Poor propellant storage and handling
Propellants must be confined to make them burn and rather
heavily confined to make them explode. If ignition occurs in propellant
while awaiting firing, a relatively slow 'Roman candle' burn – which
might destroy a whole turret – is clearly preferable to an explosion,
which usually destroys the entire ship. The former requires arrangements
to vent the burning gases outboard before the pressures get high enough
to cause an explosion. But effective venting is hard to arrange: the
same vent that lets burning gases out can also let burning gases in.
Both the British and the Germans stored powder in sealed containers, to prevent the evaporation of volatiles and to decrease the chances of a runaway explosion in case of fire. In British turrets, the powder was removed from the containers before it was moved to the gun. The desire to hit the enemy fast and often meant that there was always the temptation to unload too many containers too soon and to 'work around' some of the safety interlocks to increase the rate of fire. Eventually, of course, luck would run out.
4 Tactical mismanagement
The battlecruiser represented an extension of the old
'armoured cruiser', tasked with scouting ahead of the fleet and running
down and sinking smaller enemies. They were designed to outgun anything
they could not outrun and outrun anything they could not outgun. They
were definitely not designed to slug it out with battleships.
The problem was that armour (or the lack of it) is largely invisible,
making it easy to forget that, even though the battlecruisers looked
like battleships, they really were not battleships.
The last link in the Jutland chain revolved around Admiral Beatty's decision to keep the battlecruisers in the battle-line with ships of equivalent gun power. Had logic been his guide, Beatty, faced with guns of equivalent calibre, should have turned and run. But who would have done so? It's the ultimate irony that, although British battlecruisers may have been designed to run from superior enemies, British captains were not – and, overall, that was probably a pretty good thing.
The aftermath
The losses at Jutland shook the Admiralty to the core. Careers rose and fell, arms waved and fingers pointed. Overall, the reactions were swift and perhaps excessive. With the exception of the Hood, the Royal Navy never built a battlecruiser again, and Hood 's armour was increased so much that it remained overweight throughout its career. Ships throughout the fleet were equipped with Heath Robinson-like anti-flash features that sometimes prevented the turrets from working at all.
The tactical limitations of the battlecruiser type were recognised and priorities re-set. Cordite, however, stayed; tests in the 1920s revealed that German and British propellant ignitability was, in fact, about the same. Cordite itself wasn't the problem; it was how the cordite was stored.
After the battle, both Jellicoe and Beatty tried to claim credit that was probably due to no one. Beatty's fans felt that he had had the battle won until Jellicoe had come along and lost it for him. Those in Jellicoe's camp felt that his battleships had, in fact, saved Beatty's skin. Jellicoe was replaced, and Beatty – promoted to first sea lord – refused to publish Harper's official history of the action, which criticised Beatty's tactics. As a result, the Narrative of the Battle of Jutland was not published until 1924, and then without official sanction.
Who won?
For the British, Jutland might be best described as a tactical defeat coupled with a strategic victory. But, as always in war, nobody won – except the Grim Reaper …
Bill Jurens is an active member of the Marine Forensics Panel (SD-7) of the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers, and a silver member of the US Naval Institute. He is also on the staff of the INRO (International Naval Research Organization), where he has long been an associate editor of their quarterly journal Warship International. He participated in the Channel 4 expeditions to find the Hood and Bismarck and to locate the wrecks of the battle of Jutland, and in James Cameron's Expedition Bismarck. He lives in Winnipeg, Canada, where he teaches engineering graphics at a local technical college.
