Why did the Brits do so poorly at Jutland?

Why did the Brits do so poorly at Jutland?

The british won you dope

Nobody was there to hold their hand.

Nevermind I got it mixed up with another battle I guess

Yes, but poorly
Your empire was merely dirt btw

>"there's something fucking wrong with our bloody worthless ships today, Nigel"

>"Nigel, don't stop for survivors, I have theater tickets tonight."

Aren't most empires dirt?

England's was mostly water.

the British suffered from shitty fuses (half the time they wouldn't detonate) and extremely thin-skinned battlecruisers. German battlecruisers were known for thicker armor. Furthermore, the Germans were known for having high-quality shells for their capital ships. Hence the 3-to-1 ratio on battlecruisers killed in Germany's favor. All three British battlecruisers fucking exploded when their magazines were hit. SMS Lützow was lost only after being shot and fucked up for literal hours, and even then was ultimately scuttled by a German destroyer.

Jellicoe was fucked by shitty weather and wasn't able to pin the High Seas Fleet where he wanted them. He nearly had them when Scheer emerged from the fog straight into the middle of the Grand Fleet, but he did an about turn and ran the fuck out of there. All four admirals -- Jellicoe, Scheer, Hipper, and Beatty -- performed well, all things considered. But superior German design/tech (unironically, for real) and weather handed the Germans the "tactical victory".

I had read at Veeky Forums (>inb4) that if the British Admiralty wanted to pursue the krauts this would had been another Trafalgar

Is it true?

Beatty didn't perform well. His poor ammunition handling procedures nearly fucked everything up.
Note that when the RN BBs actually met the Germans the battle turned and the HSF were forced to break contact.

Of course the real problem was the very concept of the British battlecruiser, glass cannons are not what you need for engaging well-gunned enemies

It could have been, but it would have been a difficult pursuit. The main way for it to have become another Trafalgar would have been a German fuck up following the about turn order, which was very risky and could have resulted in a complete clusterfuck of tangled German ships getting blasted by the entire RN battle line

>England
>Empire

Fuck Jutland had great quotes.
“Something lirks in that soup. We would do well not to thrust into it too deeply.”

>which was very risky and could have resulted in a complete clusterfuck of tangled German ships getting blasted by the entire RN battle line
this was also unlikely, because it was a highly-practiced maneuver. Both times that the HSF executed it during the battle were basically flawless, even in shitty conditions.

Most of the "poor performance" happened during the Battlecruiser action.
>Beatty had 4 of the new Queen Elizabeths attached to his squadron under Evan-Thomas.
>Evan-Thomas was not briefed on any standing orders under Beatty's command, or how things generally functioned under him.
>When Beatty ordered course changes after the Germans were sighted, Evan-Thomas did not receive the signals.
>The most powerful ships in the navy were at least 5 miles further back in the line than they should have been after the mistake was realized.
>Beatty did not slow down to let the slower Queen Elizabeths catch up.
>Beatty was windward of the Germans so smoke was blown back towards him, making targeting difficult.
>Because of another signalling error, two of Beatty's ships were attacking the same target, leaving one of Hipper's unengaged.
>Once Beatty realized he's being lead towards the whole High Seas Fleet, he orders a course reversal.
>Once again, the Queen Elizabeths don't get the signal and maintain their course.

Really most of the British difficulties were the result of poor conditions and flaws in ship design (arguably). Once the fleets were rejoined, Jellicoe performed very well.

>Be in the RN
>Prioritize rate of fire over accuracy and safety protocols
>Get into an engagement with enemy vessels that have better armour
>Miss most of your shots
>The eternal h*n hits you with a shell that has actually been aimed properly
>The explosion triggers a chain reaction because you kept explosive ammunition literally everywhere to achieve a high rate of fire
>Your ship is completely and utterly fucked
That's my understanding of the engagement at least

That's about 75% of the battlecruiser duel in a nutshell desu

Also, I should add about the Night Action:
>British Fleet is positioned between the Germans and their port.
>Germans try to slip through them under cover of darkness.
>Several engagements break out.
>Jellicoe thought the gunfire was from German destroyers harrying his screen.
>Some captains could see German battleships less than 5 miles away, but did not fire because that would violate their orders. Also did not radio for permission as breaking radio silence was against orders.

This was only the case in the BC division, the battle line itself was managed by not retarded people. Warspite for example suffered an obscene amount of damage and was in no danger of going pop

with 100 years of naval supremacy since Trafalgar the RN had little to fight against so while they had the numbers in ww1 their real fighting experience in big fleet battles was lacking. furthermore the Germans built their navy with the full knowledge that the RN were their rivals and so their should prepare accordingly. it did not help that some of the British sailors were so used to peacetime training doctrine so that the bulkheads between the guns the the ammo stores were kept open to keep the heels firing as fast as possible allowing fires to spread when Germans shells hit them. Jackie fisher did his best to prepare them but preparations can only do so much

Fisher was an idiot. The battlecruiser design itself was a flawed idea

You could make the argument that drawn out fleet actions aren't what they were designed for. A better demonstration of their ability was the pursuit of SMS Scharnhorst.

Warspite was a QE-class and was heavily armored, even for a super-dreadnought.
>man that literally revolutionized naval warfare forever and introduced the modern conception of the battleship is an idiot
hol' up
battlecruisers were a flawed idea, sure, but keeping armored cruisers in any case was also a shitty idea. tech at the time wasn't capable of producing heavy cruisers. propulsion systems weren't powerful/small enough to give large ships the speed of a cruiser without forcing the designers to sacrifice so much armor. by the late 20s this tech was achieved but naturally it was totally irrelevant by that point

maybe true with the battlecruisers but to dismiss him as an idiot overlooks him pulling the RN out of the Victorian era which was sorely needed

Though the Germans destroyed more material, they were themselves in danger of being cornered and destroyed, the entire German navy, only through luck did they escape into the night, the seas remained open to trade with Norway, and British.

The British achieved exactly what they wanted, the German admiralty did not, they failed to carved off an arm of the British navy with their feint, and dared not face them again.

Everybody else built 20th Century warships at the same time Fisher was, so that's nothing to speak of.

the idea of having a ship with the guns of a battleship and the speed of a cruiser doesn't sound so bad

It was though. Too expensive to waste on chasing a cruiser around, but not sturdy enough to risk in a major fleet action.

The german heavily armored designs were vindicated at Jutland.
The Seydlitz was hit 21 times by high calibre guns, multiple secondary calibre shells and a torpedo and survived the battle

obligatory pic of Seydlitz in port after the battle
she nearly sank and had to be towed back to harbor. I believe she was beached on a sandbar at one point to prevent her from sinking.

that could be just as easily be seen as an indictment of British shell production, rather than a vindication of german armour. The British had recognised that their high explosive shells were sub-standard in the run up to the war, and Jellicoe pushed for improvements, but nothing got done.

it's also a literal fact that British BC armor was paper thin. late-war German battlecruisers, like the Derfflingers, had armor comparable to early dreadnoughts.
it was very clearly a combination of faulty British fuses, which is well-documented, as much as it was the superior armor of German battlecruisers. As I mentioned previously, Lützow was lost only after repeated shelling all day long; all three British battlecruisers that were lost exploded after a single shell strike.

The bong fire control was horrendous, so no wonder the hit disparity.

Not really, German captains noted that the British battleship gunnery was accurate as was the gunnery of the 3rd battle cruiser squadron. The battle cruiser gunnery was shit for the 1st and 2nd squadrons due to the wrong lessons being learned from dogger bank and the lack of submarine protection for Beatty's squadron prohibiting practice. The one major gunnery advantage that Germany did have was ladder firing, where by they would fire several half salvoes at pre set distances in order to quickly get the range.

If anyone wants a really in depth analysis I would recommend Campbell's Jutland book.

There was a documentary somewhere on YouRube. I can't find it for the life of me. Anyway, they presented a very strong argument that the issue at Jutland was that, while the British fleet was technically superior, the failure to adopt/adapt to modern technologies (ex: Admirals attempting to communicate via flags in foggy weather instead of radio), miscommunication (fleet splitting up), incompetence (of the two main admirals [cant remember the names] one was so gung-ho to sink some Germans he ditched his fellow, more cautious counterpart, splitting the fleet), and disregard for safety (keeping doors/hatches to munitions directly open all the way to turret loading, shells and explosives lying everywhere, leading to hits on ships' turrets extending through the ships via fire/ammunition exploding until it hits the vessel's ammunition storage) all contributed to unnecessary and preventable British losses. Honestly, the level of British incompetence at Jutland displayed in yet the whole battle ended in a British win speaks volumes as to the power of the Royal Navy.
>Our Navy's so good we can literally fuck up at everything and still pull out a win, even if it's close
But what do I know? I'm just an Amerifat.

>YouRube
wut

he obviously made a typo

The bongs had to mass their entire fleet, entreat the Japs to take over in the Far East and even reinforce the Med, and still got raped at Jutland against an inferior force.

Your mums vag was dirt

>.
>>Some captains could see German battleships less than 5 miles away, but did not fire because that would violate their orders. Also did not radio for permission as breaking radio silence was against orders.
Didn't this happen twice? Where Brits did not engage because of standing orders/procedures. I remember reading about the communication (or lack thereof) errors and just thinking how much of a fuck up that is to let such initiative slip away.

Beatty essentially.

poor coordination with evan thomas, lax safety procedures in turrets which was a massive factor in turning hits to turrets into magazine detonations.

as I said Beatty, the grand fleet did none of those things and actually had the best accuracy of the battle, during its short engagement window

the british also had both more widespread use of director firing and a better fire control system.


as for ship design, the british battleships had better guns, the shells are a separate story but even with defective ammo the british shot up the german battleships pretty well in the short engagement, german guns fired shells that were basically too light to penetrate british armor and had too small a bursting charge when they did, hence Warspite despite getting a shell in her rudder and steering in circles in front of several german battleships was hit multiple times but without major damage or loss of life, the damage she did take being rapidly repaired.

the german ships did have superior internal subdivision, but this was largely as a result of being built for a single battle in a single theater and significantly reduced hability, the british ships were designed to be the crews long term home for globe spanning deployments, the germans lived in barracks at wilhelmshaven apart from when sortieing into the north sea.

essentially the germans won the battlecruiser action, and lost the main engagement, the engagement was not crushing only due to a well practised 'run away' manuver and defective ammo - post war study suggested that even in the short engagement the germans would have lost 6 battleships if the british ammo had been to spec.

tactically indecisive, strategically a briish victory

>the british ships were designed to be the crews long term home for globe spanning deployments
You whut m8ey? The bong navy was notoriously short-legged and logistically parasitical, which proved out in the conflict a couple decades later, when they were largely ineffective in the Indian Ocean and Pacific for that very reason.

We had so many weak spots on our cruisers I think

So many fucking ships just exploded

Why these orders?

Bong navy's ineffectiveness in WW2 against the Japs had nothing to do with being shortlegged logistically.

RedTube

>Bong navy's ineffectiveness in WW2 against the Japs had nothing to do with being shortlegged logistically.
Of course it did, they simply couldn't operate for any significant duration of time and intensity. In addition to all their other inadequacies, this was a big one.

You dumb motherfucker how about instead of trying to reconstruct history by imagining things in your head, you talk about things that actually happened? you know, talk about fucking history. When and in what way did the Bong navy suffer detrimentally from being shortlegged? You fucking can't say because you literally know jack shit about WW2.
Here, go google the two events I'll list and tell me how being shortlegged was the main issue:
>Force Z
Yeah logistics really fucked them up there
>Indian Ocean Raid
Yeah it was totally logistics that made Sommerville's fleet miss the Jap fleet, and not the fact that they were trying to hit them at night in the vastness of the ocean.

Fucking kys, retard.

i don't have my copy of Castles of Steel on me and I haven't read it in like six years but iirc Jellicoe didn't want to give his position away to the Germans and alert them that they were cut off, thereby necessitating a breakthrough to get back to Wilhelmshaven.

Kek. You triggered, bro?

There were many issues that resulted in the bongs getting BTFO off Malaya and in the Indian Ocean, lad. Their short range and logistical inadequacies were some of them.

Force Z, stumbling about, unable to bring naval aviation to bear, unable to make contact with the enemy, soon needing to return to base as operations longer than a few days impossible, Japanese deciding return to base will be interrupted

Indian Ocean, bongs extremely shortlegged, unable to retain coherent force at sea and in position to confront enemy, sending units hither and yon, enemy hunts them down and destroys them in detail, little pushback because operational cohererence impossible, due to range and duration and logistics failures.

Why don't you go ahead and kys then, retard.

but the crew lived on ship, now supply of oil and oil were a concern and with the fall of much of the RNs supply depot network in the pacific in ww2 did cause problems but the british ships were on peacetime and wartime deployments meant to be the crews home, the german fleet in ww1 expected to sortie out from port and be either home or dead within days

Beatty was incompetent and British battlecrusiers weren’t designed for line battle (they were glorified commerce raiders). German ships in general were better armoured because the High Seas Fleet was didn’t require the same range that British ships needed (the empire being rather large). Either way, the battle was still a British victory, if some what inconclusive tactically. It’s worth noting that with a few more hours sunlight, the HSF would have been at the bottom of the North Sea, since they were horrifically out of position vs the Royal Navy by the end of the battle.

>Force Z, stumbling about, unable to bring naval aviation to bear, unable to make contact with the enemy, soon needing to return to base as operations longer than a few days impossible, Japanese deciding return to base will be interrupted
You are litereally retarded, aren't you. Force Z was ambushed on its way to Singapore from Europe, it was not on a mission to look for an enemy.

>Indian Ocean, bongs extremely shortlegged, unable to retain coherent force at sea and in position to confront enemy, sending units hither and yon, enemy hunts them down and destroys them in detai
Uh no, Sommerville's forces and the Kidou Butai never engaged because the Brits tried to engage at night and KB wanted to engage during the day.
You are literally living in a sollipsistic world where history is whatever the fuck you imagine on the spur of the moment.

>Arguing with the bongposter.
Don't feed the troll. Just report and wait for his ban.

>the german fleet in ww1 expected to sortie out from port and be either home or dead within days
Which was exactly the bongs' situation, lad, and the reason they were so easily destroyed off Malaya and in the Indian Ocean, by a proper navy that was not so incompetent.

>the battle was still a British victory
No, Jutland is acknowledged as a kraut victory, the bongs having lost the battle to an inferior force.

umm sweetie it wasn't the royal navy which pussied out back to their ports

>Force Z was ambushed on its way to Singapore from Europe, it was not on a mission to look for an enemy.
You are an ahistorical retard. Force Z was looking for the enemy amphibious assault force off the East Coast of the Malay peninsula.


>Sommerville's forces and the Kidou Butai never engaged because the Brits
...were incompetent, had scattered their forces, were unable to bring the enemy to battle on their terms and were found and destroyed in detail, with the survivors fleeing to Madascar.

you decide for yourself

De Dolfijn is a big ship!

>The british won you dope
Sadly, I don't save brainlet wojak pics. It would come in handy for this post

>X retreats and doesn't come out to fight for the rest of the war
>X obviously won

Everyone was a winner

...

It truly was.

>500-thousand ton battleship

Literally what were they thinking?

literally untrue, Scheer in his own report said it was a defeat which clearly demonstrated that the high seas fleet could not challenge the grand fleet in a full scale fleet action.

the germans did well in the battlecruiser skirmish, but got wrecked attempting to combat the british battleship line, being outmanuvered and outgunned.

the germans survived because they ran, even with the faulty ammo the british were still doing far more damage to the germans than the germans to them in the brief battleline clashes

It was a German strategic defeat but one in which the Brits did very poorly.

yeah but the poor performance was in terms of failing to finish off the high seas fleet, they still ran them off like scalded dogs to use a certain autists pet phrase

Pursuit would have been extremely risky since it might have involved bringing the Royal Navy battle fleet within range of German torpedo boats, and naval mines.

>The battlecruiser design itself was a flawed idea
How? They did exactly what they were designed to do, provide a hard-counter to "armored cruisers" which were like battlecruisers, but smaller, slower, and less armed.

>How? They did exactly what they were designed to do, provide a hard-counter to "armored cruisers" which were like battlecruisers, but smaller, slower, and less armed.
because once you had ships that were not battleships but with battleship guns it was almost inevitable that at some point they would be asked to face battleship guns, and battlecruisers as a idea only work if the other side dont also build them. if they only hunt down armored cruisers and are kept out of battlelines then they are fine as at the falklands, but they fared poorly when up against big guns

the british did pursue, they broke pursuit only in the face of determined torpedo attack. But then it was more important to preserve the grand fleet than sink the high seas fleet, and thus turning to avoid torpedo attack was the predetermined and preapproved response

>why did they do so poorly
We won the battle. The goal was to keep the German fleet in port, and that's what happened. If this had still happened if we had lost all but one of our ships, and the Germans none, it's still our victory.
I find explaining war to Americans tiring because most of them genuinely believe that it's just a killing competition where body-count is all that matters. I wonder if the Germans believed they'd won in WW2 when the Soviets, who lost twice as many men as the Germans, marched into Berlin and raped everything in sight.

If the question is why did we lose so many ships, there are two reasons: our shells, and Beatty.
Firstly, our AP shells were defective. They were supposed to go through armour and then detonate, but they exploded way to early and didn't penetrate all the way through.
Second, Beatty lead Battlecruisers into a fight with other Battlecruisers when they were specifically built to turn away and use their speed to gain a more advantageous position. He led them straight into a slugfest and couldn't believe it when they exploded one after the other. Eventually he turned tail and led them straight into the Grand Fleet like he was supposed to but not after he got hundreds of men killed for no reason.

All the jabbering in the world cannot change the historical outcome. The bongs were defeated at Jutland by a much inferior force. They were forced to marshal their resources in the North Sea duckpond to confront that inferior force, a strategy which directly led a couple decades later to the above mentioned humiliations off Singapore and in the Indian Ocean. Political and military stupidity came together in the end and forced the inevitable outcome.

>battlecruisers as a idea only work if the other side dont also build them.
That's why you make sure that your BC's are bigger, faster, and more powerfully armed than the BC's of your geopolitical rivals. Potentially-hostile foreign power is building BC's armed with 12-inch guns and a top speed of 26 knots? Build yours with 14-inch guns and a top speed of 27 knots.

>The bongs were defeated at Jutland by a much inferior force.
Which side controlled the North Sea at the end of the battle?

they controlled the north sea, and the resulting blockade was critical in the eventual defeat of germany.

as for the idea that they were defeated, the german admiralty believed that the high seas fleet was defeated, and the facts bear this out the high seas fleet was forced to run for home rather than attempt to face the grand fleet in open battle.

even with the defective shells the german battleships suffered significant damage, and as a result following the battle the german fleets strength had declined relative to the grand fleet as a great number of their ships were unfit for battle.


its somewhat telling that even knowing that he had to defeat the grand fleet to break the blockade and thus free germany from the strangle hold scheer even knowing of the defective british shells refused to engage the british line not once but twice.


TL:DR, germans did ok in opening skirmish, massively outmanuvered in fleet action, and even with defective british ammo came off much worse in battleship clash, never dared face the grand fleet again.

>Can't tell the difference between tactical and strategic victories.

jutland was arguably both for the british, tactically they did drive the high seas fleet from the seas, and inflict heavy damage on its units while barring the battlecruisers which blew up suffering relatively little damage.

strategically it was unquestionably a victory as the germans concluded that the grand fleet could not be defeated in battle, leaving the Uboats as germanys only means of naval warfare

This is what an actual defeat looks like you chuckle-fucks. This was absolutely humiliating, and it had actual consequences, mainly the ground-warfare portion of the Gallipoli campaign, which proved equally catastrophic.

this is what happens when you give you 'c' team a bunch of obsolete ships and tell them to attack restricted waters without checking for mines, the basic problem was no one took the turks that seriously.

of course there were reasons for that, some of the turkish guns in the dardanelles forts had last been used in anger in the crimean war, and one of them had been used to fight napoleon.

>without checking for mines
They did plenty of checking. The problem was that a small turkish minelayer ship managed to sneak in during the night and lay a row of naval mines in an area that had already been declared safe. Losing so many large 20,000-ton ships to the actions of a single small vessel displacing less than 400-ton is a mess no matter how you slice it.