The Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command

Name: The Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command
Author: Andrew Gordon
ISBN: 0719555426

by Andrew Gordon

He tells a very interesting and quite sensational story. It caused a huge stir when it came out. It tackles two themes, which most people would say were not related at all. One is the story of the rise of the Grand Fleet, the great British battle fleet that fought in the First World War, a technical story of ship design, and so on, and why things didn’t go exactly right for the British when the war came. The second is a story about the social and psychological world of British naval officers. What sort of people were they? What did they think, how and why did they think it? Who became a naval officer, and what was the kind of world in which they were shaped? It’s written in a highly surprising, unusual way. It starts in the First World War, running up to the Battle of Jutland. It leads you into the Battle of Jutland. And, at the height of the battle, it stops and asks how they had got there. It then goes back 25 years, to a celebrated naval disaster in 1893 when the flagship of the Mediterranean Fleet was rammed in a collision in naval manoeuvres and sank, taking the commander-in-chief with her. The commander-in-chief had been a man identified with the doctrine of initiative and independence, that the commander-in-chief must rely on his captains to use their initiative to conduct their ships according to his wishes. But after the collision, which arose entirely because the captains had failed to think for themselves, the dead admiral was blamed. It was all his fault. He shouldn’t have talked about initiative. They should have been running on rigid tramlines. Everything should be ordered by the commander-in-chief in person and no captain should presume to sharpen a pencil without authority. And the whole mental world of the Royal Navy, as Andrew Gordon explains it, was shaped as an authoritarian, centralised world in which bigger and bigger fleets were more and more tightly organised, running according to more and more rigorous rules. And so he leads us all the way back to Jutland again. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter He explains it in many ways but, in particular, he draws attention to the different characters. Sir John Jellicoe, the commander-in-chief, is the supreme professional in a world of rules. Everything is run according to massive volumes of Grand Fleet battle orders. Every captain has got battle orders the size of several telephone directories. But the battle cruisers are run by Sir David Beatty. And Beatty is a completely different person. He is the supreme chancer, a handsome, lucky, brave, brilliant, but less than thorough man who’s got to the top by a whole series of lucky—and, in some cases, unscrupulous—manoeuvres. His battlecruisers’ interaction was going to exemplify why rules and regulations were what was wrong with the Navy. They were going to show what dash and gallantry would do. What it actually did was cause three battle cruisers to blow up because they had dismantled all their anti-flash precautions. So the Beatty approach comes unstuck quite badly, but it doesn’t stop Beatty himself going on to be First Sea Lord in the post-war Navy. Strictly speaking there were two separate commands, the battle fleet and the battle cruiser fleet. Beatty had just managed to get his ships a separate command. Up until then he had been the second in command, but a slightly detached command. What Andrew Gordon is doing with great technical skill is explaining how, in his interpretation, a lot of what had happened goes back to bad mistakes made 25 years before. But the force of the book is quite considerably more than that. Andrew Gordon wasn’t just a good, if very eccentric, historian. He was also an officer in the Royal Naval Reserve, at a time when the RNR’s main job was mine sweeping. That is a very skilled business indeed, which involves extremely precise navigation. And Andrew is a watch-keeping officer with many years of experience of mine sweeping in fog and in the North Sea; a man who could write from complete personal understanding about the business of organising a big fleet steaming in company because, unlike almost all other naval officers nowadays, he had done an enormous amount of it himself. There are very few naval officers who can remember doing this kind of thing now. The RNR doesn’t do it anymore. And he was quite unashamed to say things which no modern academic historian would say, that this experience has vital lessons for us today, not as historians but as naval officers. And he says, in so many words, ‘you admirals are in the same position as Jellicoe. Pay attention to this because it matters.’ And I can tell you, it caused a sensation in the Royal Navy and an almost equally large sensation in the US Navy, which is what he was really pointing at. I think it was a helpful sensation. I wonder if they’ve forgotten it now. But it made them think about a lot of things which they hadn’t been thinking about at all. And it’s really not what modern historians expect to do. Historians expect to stay safely in their universities. They don’t expect to set out and teach admirals—or anybody else for that matter—how to run the world. But Andrew Gordon was very willing to do it and with immense style and wit. It’s a tremendous read and very, very funny.

Recommended by

Nicholas Rodger

"He tells a very interesting and quite sensational story. It caused a huge stir when it came out. It tackles two themes, which most people would say were not related at all. One is the story of the rise of the Grand Fleet, the great British battle fleet that fought in the First World War, a technical story of ship design, and so on, and why things didn’t go exactly right for the British when the war came. The second is a story about the social and psychological world of British naval officers. What sort of people were they? What did they think, how and why did they think it? Who became a naval officer, and what was the kind of world in which they were shaped? It’s written in a highly surprising, unusual way. It starts in the First World War, running up to the Battle of Jutland. It leads you into the Battle of Jutland. And, at the height of the battle, it stops and asks how they had got there. It then goes back 25 years, to a celebrated naval disaster in 1893 when the flagship of the Mediterranean Fleet was rammed in a collision in naval manoeuvres and sank, taking the commander-in-chief with her. The commander-in-chief had been a man identified with the doctrine of initiative and independence, that the commander-in-chief must rely on his captains to use their initiative to conduct their ships according to his wishes. But after the collision, which arose entirely because the captains had failed to think for themselves, the dead admiral was blamed. It was all his fault. He shouldn’t have talked about initiative. They should have been running on rigid tramlines. Everything should be ordered by the commander-in-chief in person and no captain should presume to sharpen a pencil without authority. And the whole mental world of the Royal Navy, as Andrew Gordon explains it, was shaped as an authoritarian, centralised world in which bigger and bigger fleets were more and more tightly organised, running according to more and more rigorous rules. And so he leads us all the way back to Jutland again. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter He explains it in many ways but, in particular, he draws attention to the different characters. Sir John Jellicoe, the commander-in-chief, is the supreme professional in a world of rules. Everything is run according to massive volumes of Grand Fleet battle orders. Every captain has got battle orders the size of several telephone directories. But the battle cruisers are run by Sir David Beatty. And Beatty is a completely different person. He is the supreme chancer, a handsome, lucky, brave, brilliant, but less than thorough man who’s got to the top by a whole series of lucky—and, in some cases, unscrupulous—manoeuvres. His battlecruisers’ interaction was going to exemplify why rules and regulations were what was wrong with the Navy. They were going to show what dash and gallantry would do. What it actually did was cause three battle cruisers to blow up because they had dismantled all their anti-flash precautions. So the Beatty approach comes unstuck quite badly, but it doesn’t stop Beatty himself going on to be First Sea Lord in the post-war Navy. Strictly speaking there were two separate commands, the battle fleet and the battle cruiser fleet. Beatty had just managed to get his ships a separate command. Up until then he had been the second in command, but a slightly detached command. What Andrew Gordon is doing with great technical skill is explaining how, in his interpretation, a lot of what had happened goes back to bad mistakes made 25 years before. But the force of the book is quite considerably more than that. Andrew Gordon wasn’t just a good, if very eccentric, historian. He was also an officer in the Royal Naval Reserve, at a time when the RNR’s main job was mine sweeping. That is a very skilled business indeed, which involves extremely precise navigation. And Andrew is a watch-keeping officer with many years of experience of mine sweeping in fog and in the North Sea; a man who could write from complete personal understanding about the business of organising a big fleet steaming in company because, unlike almost all other naval officers nowadays, he had done an enormous amount of it himself. There are very few naval officers who can remember doing this kind of thing now. The RNR doesn’t do it anymore. And he was quite unashamed to say things which no modern academic historian would say, that this experience has vital lessons for us today, not as historians but as naval officers. And he says, in so many words, ‘you admirals are in the same position as Jellicoe. Pay attention to this because it matters.’ And I can tell you, it caused a sensation in the Royal Navy and an almost equally large sensation in the US Navy, which is what he was really pointing at. I think it was a helpful sensation. I wonder if they’ve forgotten it now. But it made them think about a lot of things which they hadn’t been thinking about at all. And it’s really not what modern historians expect to do. Historians expect to stay safely in their universities. They don’t expect to set out and teach admirals—or anybody else for that matter—how to run the world. But Andrew Gordon was very willing to do it and with immense style and wit. It’s a tremendous read and very, very funny."

20th Century Naval History · fivebooks.com