Battle of Jutland.

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Couple of stuff

British Comms, night fighting and initiative was very poor during the battle. This was also something that needs fixing in later times. German ships were metres from British ones and the British ships never fired back do poor show.

Coal dust is quite explosive as the Russians found out at Tsushima.

Welsh coal burned very cleanly and powerfully giving the RN an advantage in speed. Coal bunkers were actually used as armour.

German coal was nasty and created a lot of detritus which gunked up their furnaces.

So during the battle, men working in what we would call Hell, full of fire and brimstone, were shovelling coal at a staggering rate.
 
Whenever I hear about the Battle of Jutland, I remember something my father told me. He served on battleships during WWI and was on his first (training) cruise (to England) when the British ships came back into port after the battle. When he told me about it, some 60 years later, he was still shaking his head at what he saw. He described the British ships as having holes in them large enough to drive trucks through and said with disbelief, "And they said THEY won."

The US was still neutral at the time and my dad was a wide-eyed kid who had joined the Navy a few months prior, when his mother signed the papers for him to join just days after his 16th birthday (January 17, 1916). That cruise was his most memorable by far. Not only did he see what was left of the British fleet, but he got to stand in review for the King of England during that trip. His dress uniform was still new. Only the sailors with the best looking uniforms were selected for that detail.



-Irish
 
Anyone remember the "board game" by Avalon Hill "Jutland"?
Anyone have any friends who would play Jutland with you?
Anyone have access to a gymnasium floor to play it on?
 
Lets play another.

How could the Germans win the Battle of Jutland?

No aliens, Exocets, Superman, Radar or laser beams.

Purely 1916 and totally plausible.

Short answer is 100% nope. The Germans wouldn't even get out of port.

Maybe Zeppelins could direct on stragglers. Maybe get the Grand Fleet on a minefield surrounded by U-boats.

Maybe the RN would do a Black Prince and just get in formation.

Germans didn't win at Jutland coz they could never win in the first place.

A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?
 
I am war of attrition guy.

Don't like these big battles.

Would have failed in the IJN big time.

Maybe I would have not bothered with Jutland. Royal Navy is winning so why risk it? Any outcome could only be adverse. Let the Kaiserliche sail about.

My strategic aim is to blockade and business is good. No need to endanger the status quo. So charging after the High Seas Fleet don't sit right with I.
 
For a plausible German victory at Jutland, I like to consider not what the Germans could have done better, but what the British could have done worse.

From what I understand, gunnery training was MUCH worse during the late 19th century in the Royal Navy. I read that it was outright avoided, because it got the ships dirty. Once incident at Egypt I believe was quoted as an example on how atrocious British gunnery was.

Now, the British got their act somewhat together in the early 20th century. Imagine if they hadn't. Imagine if they had stuck to traditions and shiny appearances, relying on their reputation on anyone challenging them, until someone does and it turns out to be a house of cards.
 
British gunnery and shells was very hit and miss if you pardon the expression.

So they certainly gave the Germans far more of a help than they should.

The British could out range the Germans but poor visibility meant that the extreme ranges were not possible and it was a very close engagement. The Germans with their shorter range, weaker guns were given a better opportunity.

The obvious example is with the Battlecruiser engagement where the Germans fired first when the RN easily outranged them. Why? Don't know. Said the RN rangefinding was faulty.

The Battlecruisers were bad with gunnery as they were based in the Forth and so couldn't fire their guns much. The rest of the Grand Fleet were based in Scapa in Orkney and so did have space for target practice.

This led to Battlecruisers having to increase their rate of fire to try and walk to the target and led to the removal of safety procedures which led to the catastrophic failures.

The issue is that the Scheer did a runner as soon as he realised the predicament he was in. So how would you stop that? Even if RN never landed a shell he would have still have done a 180.

One trick could have been to catch Beatty's squadron and have time to have a full High Seas Fleet v Battlecruisers which is exactly what was Hippers and Scheers dream scenario.

In a nutshell, the Germans were very lucky to get away and the British were their own worst enemy as various failures came back to bite them. The British scored all sorts of own goals and still won.

In the perfect world, the RN should have annihilated the High Seas Fleet but didn't. So that's why Scheer didn't go for round 2.
 
The Basket said:
The Battlecruisers were bad with gunnery
Click to expand...

The battlecruisers were bad at gunnery because Beatty didn't practise as much as he should have. Jellicoe knew this and the results speak for themselves. HMS New Zealand is an example; it is recorded that it had the highest rate of fire of all the British battlecruisers at Jutland, expending almost all of its ammunition, but it hit absolutely nothing.

It was no coincidence that Beatty's flagship was known as the Gin Palace.
 
The Battlecruisers at Jutland that did have good gunnery such as Invincible were based at Scapa so it was to do with basing at Firth of Forth where gunnery was not practiced. The hardware was not at fault.

HMS Tiger had bad gunnery because she was a wartime ship that never got a good work up and so never got the kinks ironed out.

Even best case scenario is that gunnery is about the 10% hit rate so not exactly a high bar to begin with and will get progressively worse in bad visibility.
 
1) Germans have better SIGINT and know their coded communications are being read.
2) Understand your enemy's command and control limitations, including the lack of initiative from RN captains, poor gunnery practice, dodgy shells (this was known before Jutland, not yet fully acted on), and very poor ship to ship communications and overall terrible abilities to get and keep situational awareness.
3) All German ships great and small have wireless communications sets
4) Set the trap. Position two dozen U-Boats and every available torpedo boat destroyer off Jutland, and another dozen w/t equipped U-Boats (or whatever available) off Scapa and Rosyth.
5) Zeppelins, all the Zeppelins...."oh the humanity!", deployed to the east of Jutland in advance, out of sight connected by wireless to the fleet. Zeppelins have been training with the fleet for this day.
6) Announce that the HSF is sailing for Jutland, and hit go....

That's the preparation work.... now to close the trap and make the kill. Jellicoe and Beatty set sail, U-Boats outside Scapa and Rosyth, using regular Morse code send wireless message pretending to be a neutral transport, but actually announces the fleet has sailed. First, the Zeppelins report the Grand Fleet has been spotted. The German torpedo boats race forward.

A lot of the above may seem unlikely, but what reality showed was that the Germans played to Britain's strengths whilst ignoring their own. Germany was a leader in airships, radio communications, torpedo and submarine warfare, naval gunnery and munitions quality. Most of these advantages were known by the Germans, but instead they sailed an inferior-sized naval force straight into the Grand Fleet.
 
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My answer and question to any strategy or idea is...cough....

'What happens when it all goes horribly wrong?'

And horribly wrong it will go.

The best strategy in any military situation is best summed up as...

'Brute force and ignorance!'

You have more battleships or tanks or men and you let fly.

Planning anything in the North Sea is totally impractical as the weather is a law upon itself. A Zeppelin is useless in poor visibility and U-boats were slow and often unreliable. In fact U-boats and Zeppelins were part of Jutland plans and did absolute zip.

A kill zone kinda makes sense full of mines and subs and torpedo boats but the RN has to sail in it and that's a maybe. Never plan on what you enemy should do. It's not a good idea. The Japanese Navy in ww2 were full of ideas like that and it never really worked.

It's not happening. No way would the High Seas Fleet knowingly engage with the Grand Fleet. Never.
 
Generally speaking the British Grand Fleets standard of gunnery was very good but the BC fleet was poor as they didn't practice as much as they should have done. The German standards were arguably the best of the period and for those interested the USN standards were very poor.

After they declared war a number of the US BB's came to the UK and didn't do well in training shoots. The ships themselves were absolutely first class but they couldn't hit a thing.
 
I'm glad you brought that up Glider.
I was "studying up" on Jutland. Okay, watching Drachinifel, Jutland in time-lapse, etc. on YouTube. Drachinifel mentioned U.S. gunnery wasn't up to snuff. Based on the posts here on RN gunnery, USN shooting must have been terrible.
Drachinifel also posted a Jutland "what if". The U.S. battleships spouted heavy smoke and sparks from coaxing every last rpm of the coal burning engines. The U.S. sent coal burning ships to England for easier fueling. In his scenario these battleships had damaged their engines keeping up with RN ships.
How true might that be? Perhaps the USN ships weren't so first class? At least the battleships sent over to England?
 
The British seemed quite afraid of submarines, some described the fear as "periscopitis". Didn't Beatty at one battle hold back his ships because he thought he saw a periscope?

Maybe submarines could have been utilized not with intend to make an actual kill, but by trying to make the most of the enemies fear out of it. An area denial strategy?
 
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