The War at Sea: Jutland (1916) & the Real U-Boat Campaign

Military History: World War I

Chapter 7 · The War at Sea: Jutland (1916) & the Real U-Boat Campaign

Before 1914 Britain and Germany had raced to build huge battleships, and both expected a great sea battle early in the war. It took nearly two years to come, and it didn't settle much. The war at sea was really decided by two slower struggles: Britain's blockade of Germany, and Germany's submarine campaign against the ships that kept Britain fed.

Two Fleets, Two Strategies

Britain's Grand Fleet

Based at Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands, it didn't need to win a battle. Simply by existing, it kept the German fleet in port and enforced a blockade that cut Germany off from overseas trade.

Germany's High Seas Fleet

Smaller, and unable to win a straightforward battle. Its hope was to trap and destroy part of the British fleet, evening up the odds before a larger battle.

The Stakes

Winston Churchill later wrote that the British commander, Admiral Sir John Jellicoe, was "the only man on either side who could lose the war in an afternoon." Losing the Grand Fleet would have left Britain open to invasion and starvation.

The Real Continuity With Earlier Chapters This is the same logic as Trafalgar's century of command of the sea (Military History: The British Empire, Chapter 4) and the Union blockade (Military History: The US Civil War, Chapter 4): the side that controls the sea lanes can slowly strangle the other without ever winning a dramatic battle.

Jutland: 31 May – 1 June 1916

In late May 1916 the German fleet under Vice-Admiral Reinhard Scheer came out, with a scouting force of battlecruisers under Vice-Admiral Franz Hipper ahead of it, hoping to draw out and destroy British battlecruisers. British codebreakers in the Admiralty's "Room 40" had detected the German fleet was about to sail, so the whole Grand Fleet was already at sea.

British (Jellicoe & Beatty)German (Scheer & Hipper)
Dreadnought battleships2816 (plus 6 older pre-dreadnoughts)
Battlecruisers95
All warships15199
Men killedAbout 6,100About 2,550
Ships sunk14, including 3 battlecruisers (about 113,000 tons)11, including 1 battlecruiser (about 62,000 tons)
  • Afternoon, 31 May Vice-Admiral Sir David Beatty's battlecruisers clash with Hipper's. Two British battlecruisers explode and sink within minutes. Beatty reportedly remarks: "There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today."
  • Late afternoon Beatty turns north, leading the unsuspecting German fleet toward Jellicoe's main battle fleet.
  • Early evening Jellicoe deploys his battleships across the German line of advance. Twice the German fleet runs into overwhelming fire, and twice Scheer turns away under cover of torpedo attacks and smoke.
  • Night, 31 May – 1 June In confused night fighting, the German fleet slips through the rear of the British fleet and gets home.
Why Did British Ships Explode? Three British battlecruisers blew up almost instantly. They carried less armour than battleships, but the bigger problem was unsafe handling of propellant: to fire faster, crews had left cordite charges and flash-proof doors open between the gun turrets and the magazines. A single hit could send a flash down to the magazine and blow up the whole ship.
Who Won? Germany sank more ships and killed more men, and claimed a victory. But the German fleet had narrowly escaped destruction and never again seriously challenged the Grand Fleet. Britain's control of the North Sea, and the blockade, continued unchanged. A popular summary, often attributed to an American newspaper, put it neatly: the German fleet had assaulted its jailer, but was still in jail.

The British Blockade

From 1914 Britain enforced a "distant" blockade, closing the English Channel and the northern exits to the North Sea rather than sitting off German ports. Neutral ships were stopped and searched, and cargo headed for Germany was seized — including, increasingly, food.

Hunger in Germany

Combined with poor harvests and the demands of the German army, the blockade caused real food shortages. The winter of 1916–17 became known as the "turnip winter," when turnips replaced potatoes as a staple. The German government later claimed hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths from malnutrition; the true figure is debated, but hunger badly weakened German morale by 1918.

The U-Boat War

Germany's answer to the blockade was the submarine, or U-boat (from Unterseeboot). It could sink ships without ever facing the Grand Fleet.

  • 22 September 1914 A single submarine, U-9, sinks three old British cruisers in under an hour, killing about 1,460 sailors. Navies suddenly take submarines seriously.
  • February 1915 Germany declares the waters around Britain a war zone where merchant ships may be sunk without warning.
  • 7 May 1915 U-20 sinks the British liner Lusitania off Ireland; 1,197 people die, including 124 Americans. Outrage in the United States forces Germany to restrict its submarine attacks.
  • 1 February 1917 Germany resumes unrestricted submarine warfare, sinking any ship in the war zone, including neutral ones.
  • April 1917 The worst month of the war for Allied shipping: over 600,000 tons sunk.
A Deliberate Gamble German naval planners calculated that sinking enough shipping would force Britain to seek peace within about five or six months — before the United States, which they expected to join the war, could make a difference. They were right that America would join: the US declared war on 6 April 1917, helped along by the Zimmermann Telegram, a German proposal of a military alliance to Mexico decoded by Room 40 and published. They were wrong about Britain collapsing.

The Answer: Convoys

Safety in Numbers

The Admiralty had resisted grouping merchant ships into escorted convoys, believing large groups would be easier targets. When convoys were finally introduced from May 1917, the results were dramatic: in the following months, of nearly 9,000 ships sailing in convoy, only 27 were lost to U-boats, compared with hundreds of ships sailing alone.

Why Convoys Worked The ocean is huge. Scattered single ships gave submarines many chances to find a target; a convoy made the sea look empty most of the time, and when a U-boat did find one, it had to attack under the eyes of escort warships. It's the same pattern this course keeps finding: a new weapon (the U-boat) gained a big advantage until the defence adapted with an organisational answer rather than a technical one.
A Rehearsal for 1939–1945 Both the U-boat campaign and the convoy system were repeated on an even larger scale in the Second World War's Battle of the Atlantic.

Questions to Sit With

Can a battle where one side lost more ships and men still be a victory for that side? What makes Jutland a good test case?
Was unrestricted submarine warfare a reasonable gamble for Germany in 1917, given what its leaders knew at the time?
Why do you think the Admiralty resisted convoys for so long, when they turned out to be so effective?

Quick Reference — Chapter 7

  • Britain's Grand Fleet (Scapa Flow) kept Germany's High Seas Fleet in port and enforced a blockade; Jellicoe could "lose the war in an afternoon"
  • Jutland, 31 May – 1 June 1916: 151 British vs 99 German warships; Britain lost 14 ships and about 6,100 men, Germany 11 ships and about 2,550 men
  • British battlecruisers exploded because of unsafe cordite handling; the German fleet escaped but never seriously challenged the Grand Fleet again
  • The British blockade caused food shortages in Germany, including the 1916–17 "turnip winter"
  • U-boats: U-9 sank three cruisers (September 1914); the Lusitania was sunk on 7 May 1915 (1,197 dead, 124 Americans)
  • Unrestricted submarine warfare resumed on 1 February 1917; over 600,000 tons were sunk in April 1917; the US declared war on 6 April 1917
  • Convoys from May 1917 cut losses dramatically (27 of nearly 9,000 convoyed ships lost in the first months)

What's Next

Chapter 8: The Eastern Front & Russia's Real Collapse (1917).