Today 100 years ago the Grand Fleet leaves Scapa Flow and Rosyth …

Having written so much about naval aviation in the course of writing The Man Who Built the Swordfish: Sir Richard Fairey, 1887-1956 (still a working title, but the title given to the most likely publisher – with a much belated submission date of this time next year), it would be remiss of me not to note what was taking place in Scotland and the North Sea exactly one hundred years ago today.  With Admiralty code-breakers cognizant of the High Seas Fleet leaving port en masse, Jellicoe’s Grand Fleet sailed out of Scapa Flow to rendezvous with Beatty’s Battle Cruiser Fleet, which had already departed its base at Rosyth.  Today it’s hard to imagine the sight off Orkney and at the mouth of the Firth of Forth as the dreadnoughts under smoke-greyed skies steamed out into open water for what all rightly deemed a date with destiny.  The loss of 6 cruisers, 8 destroyers, and over 6000 men on the night of 31 May-1 June 1916, and Jellicoe’s decision not to turn south and pursue Scheer and Hipper, haunted the Royal Navy for the rest of the war and much of the interwar period – for all the RN’s myriad achievements between 1914 and 1918 it took another world war, and the triumphs of Cunningham, Sommerville, Horton, et al, to restore in the public’s mind the Senior Service’s credentials as a battle-fighting force.  While sceptics like Eric Grove still find it hard to see the outcome of Jutland as a strategic success, this is a widely-held view today, encouraged not unsurprisingly by the Royal Navy itself.  Nick Jellicoe, in Channel 4’s documentary on the battle, defended his grandfather’s decision to maintain the integrity of the Grand Fleet as a guarantee that the Germans would remain trapped in port and subject to crippling blockade; on the British side the villain in the piece was David Beatty, ever ready to rewrite history.  This now mainstream view was advanced in Admiral Lord West’s Radio 4 documentary at the start of the month, and is presumably the basis for Dan Snow’s BBC2 film ‘Battle of Jutland: The Navy’s Bloodiest Day’; I’ve yet to see the latter, but I know it was made in close collaboration with the RN and the National Museum of the Royal Navy.  Nick Jellicoe was a speaker on 21 May at the University of Southampton Lifelong Learning study day I organised and ran, ‘Not Just Jutland: the Royal Navy during the First World War, 1914-18′.  In the morning session Mike Farquarson-Roberts, one-time very senior medical officer and the author of a terrific short history of the RN and WW1, and fellow naval historian Duncan Redford, late of the NMRN, each strongly made the case that from a strategic viewpoint the battle was a victory for the Royal Navy and decisive in terms of the Allies’ eventual victory: it ensured the blockade could be maintained and it reinforced the restricted operations of the German surface fleet given that by 1916 all raiders stationed across the globe two years earlier had been destroyed or neutralised.  Thus Germany was starved into defeat, with Redford unashamedly treating the Western Front as a costly and bloody sideshow to an essentially maritime struggle.  Well, up to a point, Lord Copper.  Yes, the blockade was devastatingly effective, but the Central Powers could have fought on for an awful lot longer without the eastern and south-eastern – and even the Italian – fronts; and significantly, by the summer and autumn of 1918 Germany was demonstrably losing the war in the west.  Critically, had there not been resistance in both western and eastern theatres in the first place, most notably the French holding the line on the Marne (and the same for the BEF at Amiens in April 1918), then the Wilhelmine Reich and its allies would have secured control across the whole of the European land mass at little cost, leaving the Central Powers able to exploit continental resources and thus withstand maritime blockade (as was the case for Hitler’s Germany following its 1940 triumph in the west).  I suspect Duncan had his tongue at least partly in his cheek when dismissing the land war, but he was absolutely right to highlight how demonstrably successful the Royal Navy was in every department other than the Trafalgar-style battle the general public had been led to expect would determine the course of the war. The Royal Navy’s embrace of new technology in the decades preceding the First World War, and across the next four years, was remarkable, and nowhere more so than in its projection of naval air power – the RNAS was so far ahead of its military counterpart that it could famously attack Zeppelin sheds before and at Christmas 1914, its partnership with Shorts meaning seaplanes flown at the start of the war were operable at the end in a way in which no RFC ‘stringbag’ could possibly have been.  The RNAS’s capacity for innovation across the course of the conflict was astonishing, witness the combat aircraft and carriers in service at the point when it merged with the Royal Flying Corps to form the RAF on 1 April 1918.  Dick Fairey’s story is inseparable from that of the RNAS, as becomes clear in the third chapter of my book.  He had a lot more in common with Beatty than Jellicoe, not least their shared love of fishing and shooting, but I feel confident CRF would have recognised that here was a man not to be trusted: Duncan Redford described the RN’s impressive record 1914-18 as a team triumph, but, as I suggested in my summing up at the end of the study day, it’s hard to see Beatty as a team player – and ironically, if any admiral bears responsible for the unhappy experience of the Fleet Air Arm in the 1920s and 1930s then it is Jellicoe’s successor as C-in-C Grand Fleet and then First Sea Lord.  A further irony is that it took  Beatty’s flag captain at Jutland, Ernle Chatfield, to re-establish the FAA as a credible force late in his tenure as Chief of the Naval Staff [Chatfield was a highly effective FSL, but is overshadowed by his successors Pound and Cunningham as he was head of the RN in time of peace not war].