After Jutland: The Naval War in North European Waters, June 1916-November 1918

"In a certain sense, this is half a book because Goldrick has written two books. One is called After Jutland and one is called Before Jutland . And you won’t be surprised to learn that Before Jutland is the first half of the First World War and After Jutland is the second half of the First World War , and really they belong together. But for publishing reasons, they came out as two different books and so I selected one of them. They’re both extremely good and extremely good in the same kinds of ways. It’s a story which has been told many times before, but nothing like as well. It’s a story of the war at sea, and predominantly, the war at sea in European waters, which is where a great deal of it—not quite all of it—was fought. It’s above all a story of the Royal Navy and the Imperial German Navy at war against each other. You might say that this has been done before an enormous number of times, and most of the senior officers wrote their memoirs. But as you find in so much naval history, earlier works nearly all just repeat the memoirs of the leading participants. And the leading participants, astonishingly enough, write about themselves and reproduce their own ideas. They don’t generally criticize their own ideas, or even other people’s ideas. What James Goldrick does is to look at the war from the practicalities of what you actually had to do to fight at sea during the First World War. Very few people who’ve read books about the war will ever have been exposed to explanations of the practicalities. For example, take a simple question like how you navigate. How did you find your way around the North Sea during the First World War? It’s extremely foggy and there were no kinds of electronic navigation aids available at all. How do you find your way around? How do you meet your friends? How do you find your enemies? How do you simply avoid running aground or getting shipwrecked, all of which things happened very frequently. A lot of warships in the First World War were wrecked in and around the North Sea. There were lots of other perils. Both sides laid minefields all over the place. Neither side knew where they had laid the mines very accurately, because the mine layers couldn’t navigate very well. So they knew roughly where they laid the minefields, but roughly is not really good enough. If you’re trying to find your way through a minefield, you really need to know very accurately indeed. And they couldn’t do it. “Since naval warfare is inherently and inescapably technical, the secret of victory was frequently a question of effective technology” Suppose two fleets are trying to meet one another, as in the celebrated example at the Battle of Jutland. Two British forces were trying to rendezvous. One was being pursued by the German fleet, and the other was pursuing it. But when it came to the point, the two fleet flagships—the big ships with every possible navigational aid available then, and a lot of experts on board—their respective ideas of their positions were 12 miles out. They thought they were going to meet but actually they were 12 miles apart. It makes rather a big difference, especially as they were trying to organise their formations to fight alongside one another. You’re trying to organise a formation to meet an enemy whose whereabouts and actual course and position you couldn’t predict at all accurately. These are the kind of practical issues that very few people who read books on naval history have ever been confronted with. There are dozens of these issues related to how you man and organise ships and how you fuel them. Most of these ships run on coal because they’re steamships. But ‘coaling’ a ship was an immensely laborious and pretty dangerous job involving huge amounts of exhausting physical labour by virtually every single person on board, which has to be repeated every few days. A battlecruiser going at full speed is burning about 600 tons of coal an hour. Ships burn prodigious amounts of coal. The Grand Fleet, the main British fleet, has enough coal to stay at sea for about three days, after which they have to go back to port again, which makes quite a big difference to what you can do. So actually, continuous naval war really resolves itself into a series of short voyages. This book describes the practicality of taking your fleet to sea and fighting. It’s quite an eyeopener. James Goldrick is really good at these kinds of things. That’s partly because he is a very unusual man, in that he has made two highly successful but quite different careers simultaneously. He is an Australian naval officer who had a highly successful career and retired as a rear admiral. And he’s a naval historian. And somehow, although these are both—as I can testify—extremely demanding full-time professions, he’s managed to do both of them. He’s managed to write a whole series of fascinating and interesting and important books and articles and a distinguished naval career in the Royal Australian Navy. And he’s made himself an expert in the First World War and fighting in the North Sea, which is not the sea in which he has spent all his naval career, though he’s visited it pretty frequently."