The Battle of Jutland

By Geoffrey Bennett

The Battle of Jutland: At the end of May 1916, a chance encounter with Admiral Hipper's battlecruisers has enabled Beatty to lead the German Battle Fleet into the jaws of Jellicoe's greatly superior force, but darkness had allowed Admiral Scheer to extricate his ships from a potentially disastrous situation. Though inconclusive, at the Battle of Jutland the German Fleet suffered so much damage that it made no further attempt to challenge the Grand Fleet, and the British blockade remained unbroken. Captain Bennett has used sources previously unavailable to historians in his reconstruction of this controversial battle, including the papers of Vice-Admiral Harper explaining why his official record of the battle was not published until 1927, and the secret "Naval Staff Appreciation" of 1922 whose criticism were so scathing that it was never issued to the Fleet. Also included are numerous battle plans, photographs and an introduction by Bennett's son. 2006 is the 90th anniversary of the battle.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pen and Sword
• Release date: Jun 10, 2015
• ISBN: 9781473866713

Reviews for The Battle of Jutland

[johnphelan-2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

While I've been interested in military history since I was a kid, I've never been too keen on naval history. Perhaps it say more about me than about naval history, but I've always found the movements of ships on the sea harder to follow than the movements of armies on land. That is compounded in the case of a battle like Jutland, that even its protagonists found hard to follow.

Yet I was able, more or less, to follow the course of these events in Geoffrey Bennett's book. I was also struck by the parallels between Jellicoe's situation in the North Sea and that of the commanders on the Western Front. Jellicoe's fleet covered many miles compared to the fleets of Nelson a century earlier, yet command and control techniques had changed little. As French and Haig had to command modern armies with the tools of Wellington, so Jellicoe had to command a modern fleet with the tools of Nelson - visual observation and flags to communicate the findings thereof. Not surprisingly, these tools were insufficient for him to spring his moderately complex trap and wipe out Scheer's fleet at Jutland.

[dinadansfriend · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Geoffrey Bennett was a naval officer whose career had begun prior to WWII. Though only eight at the time of the Battle of Jutland, he was born into a naval family, and spent the bulk of his wartime career as a signals officer, eventually commanding a "Bay" Class Corvette in the latter days of WWII. His account of Jutland has had the compliment of being translated into German. The difficulties of the RN's signal service during the encounter receive adequate discussion in this competent book. I read a 1964 initial printing copy.