pose of this article to trace the events of this, the only great naval battle in the late war, in detail, but rather to deal with misconceptions which have grown up in the public mind due to false presentation of the facts, and to show where faults lay which led to failure, and where credit should be given for services not hitherto appreciated.

It is regrettable that the present Board of Admiralty should have had inserted in a fly-leaf of the Official History an announcement tending to detract from its value and accuracy, which may be taken by some to mean that they associate themselves with personal criticisms as discreditable as they are unjust. The Admiralty, throughout its preparation, has been in a position to check and correct statements in this History, indeed, it is their business to do so, for it is prepared at the country's expense. The notice therefore leaves the impression that prevailing influences in the existing Board would have a different interpretation put on some of the facts, but are at a loss to refute them.

In any case the main details are irrefutable and can now be studied calmly and dispassionately from an independent point of view. For convenience it is as well to recall the order of events:

(1) The German plan to entice our forces out, while submarines waited off the entrance to their ports, and to endeavour to overwhelm a detached part of our fleet with a superior concentration.

(2) The setting forth of the rival fleets, neither knowing the full significance of the impending clash.

(3) The battle-cruisers' meeting and action.

(4) The battle fleets' encounter and the enemy's repeated efforts to escape.

(5) The German fleets' break through our lines at night, and the failures to inform the Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Fleet of the fact.

(6) The enemy's escape back into harbour, and the disillusion of our command at daybreak the following day.

The first significant feature is the complete failure of the initial part of the German plan; indeed of the submarine as a weapon from the beginning to the end of these operations.

Admiral Scheer had as many as sixteen submarines

out, with orders to lie in wait for our ships when they put to sea. Whether all these were in position is not known, but the fact remains that in spite of a few feeble attacks the whole Grand Fleet sailed, after dark, it is true, crossed the North Sea, fought within easy distance for submarines from the enemy's coast, steamed off that coast all one night, and returned to its base next day without appreciable interference by submarines. This is but an example of the fact, well known to those who served afloat in the late war, that, properly escorted and moving at a good speed, the large surface ship is not at the mercy of the submarine. The difficulties which submarines found in attacking a number of ships in convoy are intensified a hundred-fold in a fleet action with friend and foe crossing and recrossing at high speed, apart from which it is extremely difficult for the slowmoving submarine to reach an unknown scene of action in time, much more to manœuvre into position to attack. Although there were several alarms, no submarines took part in the Battle of Jutland on either side.

The next point of interest is to note the effect on the course of events of another new invention in naval warfare-wireless. It was due to the interception by the Admiralty of the enemy's wireless signals that the preliminary assembly of the German High Sea Fleets in the Jade Roads was detected. Wireless gave us the warning which led to the Grand Fleet being sent to sea, but wireless misled us into believing that the enemy's battle fleet was still in harbour when it was really at sea. Scheer, the German Commander-in-Chief, shifted his 'call-sign' to a shore station on sailing, and both Jellicoe and Beatty were in ignorance that the enemy's battleships were out until they were actually sighted by Commodore Goodenough in the 'Southampton' after the battle-cruisers had been engaged for three-quarters of an hour. A point which is frequently lost sight of, especially by a less careful chronicler than Sir Julian Corbett, is the time taken to code, send, and decode a wireless message. For instance, at a late stage in the day, after the enemy had twice Broken off the battle, Beatty, fearful of losing him in the approaching dusk, sent a wireless message to the Commander-in-Chief, 'Submit van of battleships follow battle-cruisers. We can then cut off whole of Vol. 241.-No. 478.

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enemy's battle fleet.' This was dispatched from the 'Lion' at 7.50 p.m., but did not reach Jellicoe's hands till after 8 p.m. He instantly acted on it, and by 8.7 p.m., Jerram, commanding the leading squadron of battleships, had the order to act as Beatty had requested, but by this time Beatty himself had lost sight of the enemy, so quickly do the phases of a modern naval battle change.

A glaring misstatement, in relation to wireless messages, is that made in the account in the Encyclopædia Britannica,' where allusion is made to the Admiralty messages to the Commander-in-Chief during the night following Jutland, giving him an intercepted position and course of the enemy. The account states that this was received by Admiral Jellicoe at 10.41 p.m. The author has fallen into the common trap of those without staff training of ignoring the difference between time of dispatch and time of receipt of a message. It was in fact nearly 11.30 p.m. before Jellicoe received the message. The account also accuses the Commander-in-Chief of not giving Beatty this useful intelligence. The normal wireless organisation of a fleet is doubtless unknown to the writer or he would have been aware that, as a detached commander, Beatty had a ship detailed to take in Admiralty messages. These are some of the pitfalls and delays in connexion with wireless which need to be appreciated.

The potentialities of aircraft in modern sea fighting are to be seen, even at this comparatively early stage in their development. They had a profound influence on Scheer's plan. His original scheme to entice the Grand Fleet out was a bombardment of Sunderland by the battle-cruisers with the battle fleet in support, but he dared not venture so far from his base without airship reconnaissance to give him warning of the approach of superior forces. He waited a fortnight for suitable weather for the airships to operate, and then had to abandon his intentions for the alternative plan which kept him nearer his own waters. The morning after the battle it was the naval airships which told him he was safe from pursuit and which gave him news of the Grand Fleet. On our side, the fleet was lamentably illequipped with aircraft. One small sea-plane carrier,

only, accompanied the fleet. One solitary sea-plane went up, sighted and reported the enemy, but so little importance was attached to this form of reconnaissance, apparently, that the Lion' did not receive the wireless signal of the observer. So much for the newest elements in naval warfare.

First contact was made with the enemy by one of those trivial incidents which often precipitate great events. A stray merchant ship attracted the attention simultaneously of the flanking units of the rival battle cruisers. Each closed to investigate the stranger, and in a moment the spark was ignited which started the grand conflagration of Jutland.

It was unfortunate for us that the meeting came about prematurely, for, at the time, Beatty with the battle-cruisers and 5th Battle Squadron to the southwestward and Hipper with the High Sea Scouting Group to the southward, were both converging on Jellicoe with the battle fleet, standing down from the north-eastward.

The light cruisers at first led the enemy on to the northward, but Beatty, not knowing that the German battle fleet was following Hipper, proceeded to cut him off from his line of retreat, found himself in sight of the enemy battle-cruisers, and was soon engaged in a running action which was drawing him away from Jellicoe. Although this did not, in all probability, delay the ultimate meeting of the main fleets, Beatty pressed his attack in a way he would presumably not have done had he had full knowledge of the situation, and it cost him dear. In the three-quarters of an hour during which his six battle-cruisers were engaging Hipper's five ships of similar class, Beatty lost two of his force in fair fight. This may, in part, be accounted for by the fact that the enemy had an appreciable advantage as regards light, but there is no evading the fact that the Germans had better shell, that their ships were better protected, and that their gunnery was superior to that of our battle-cruisers.

The failure of the British shell to penetrate the German armour at the oblique angle of impact due to the long range is one of the tragedies of Jutland. Jellicoe, himself, has come in for criticism in the matter as a former Controller of the Navy (3rd Sea Lord), but

this is entirely unjust. It was while he held office that the Ordnance Committee were pressed to produce armour-piercing shell which would fulfil these requirements, but, when he went to sea, an amenable successor yielded to Treasury pressure in this as in many other vital matters of material, and the money for the necessary experiments was not secured. What this parsimony cost us in the day of battle it is impossible to compute.

The plunging fire of the German battle-cruisers pierced the thin horizontal armour of our ships, and their shell penetrated to our vessels' vitals. Until the outbreak of war, ten thousand yards had been regarded as a long range, and it was not realised that modern actions would be fought at ranges where the angle of descent of the shots would be such that the flat deck of a ship might present a greater target than the side and that it was necessary to provide thick horizontal armour as well as heavy side armour.

In addition to this, the Germans had profited by their experience in the Dogger Bank action to fit extra safeguards against the flash of a bursting shell penetrating from a turret down into the magazine.

As to gunnery, there can be no question that the shooting of the German capital ships both by day and night was of a very high order. That it was no better than our own battleships, especially the fine 15-inch ships in Rear-Admiral Evan-Thomas' 5th Battle Squadron, there is no reason to dispute, but the battle-cruisers which had been based on Rosyth appear to have suffered from lack of facilities for target practice such as existed at Scapa Flow. This was one of the reasons which led Jellicoe, a keen gunnery expert, to resist the transfer of the Grand Fleet to the southern base until the outer defences of the Firth of Forth were complete. The battle-cruiser action showed that our ships were not a match for those of Hipper's squadron either in the accuracy of their individual shooting or in the organisation for the concentration of two or more ships on one of the enemy.

'Indefatigable' was sunk in a duel with Von der Tann,'' Queen Mary' succumbed to the concentrated fire of 'Derfflinger' and 'Seydlitz.' It was probably the concentrated fire of the Derfflinger' and the leading