On the eve of the decisive showdown with Napoleonic France, Admiral Horatio Nelson was offered the opportunity to select any officer from the Navy List to serve in his fleet. Nelson’s confident, if not arrogant response was “Choose yourself, the same spirit actuates the whole profession.” The end result was Trafalgar, one of the most decisive and strategically important naval victories in the history of warfare. A century later things were much different in the Royal Navy. The “long calm lee of Trafalgar” had taken its toll on the war fighting spirit and abilities of the British naval officer corps. When the navy failed to achieve another Trafalgar-like victory at Jutland in 1916 against the Germans former First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill commented “We had more captains of ships than captains of war.”
In this substantively and physically weighty tome, Andrew Gordon sets out to discover how and why the mighty British navy could have fallen so far from the heights of Trafalgar to the relative depths of Jutland.
“The Rules of the Game” is actually two full-length, distinct books in one. The first is a highly detailed account of the Battle of Jutland. I have read several accounts of the battle before, but nothing compares to the clarity, analysis, and authority that Gordon delivers here. The sequence of the battle is told almost exclusively from the British perspective and includes an almost minute-by-minute account of both phases of the engagement – the so-called battle cruiser duel and the engagement between the main battles fleets.
Gordon pays particularly close attention to the issuing, receipt and interpretation of signals between British ships during the battle. Even after nearly a century the fog of war has not dissipated from the battle of Jutland. There is a general lack of reliable primary sources; many of the critical details are therefore subject to conflicting personal testimony, which were given in the years after the battle when an acrimonious debate among the surviving officers poisoned relationships and skewed perspectives. Gordon aims simply for truth and seeks neither indictment nor exoneration of the major players. In his words, “Jutland is not a ‘zero-sum game’ of credit and blame between Jellicoe-ites on the one hand and the Beatty-ites on the other.” Nevertheless, Gordon’s central conclusion is that the swashbuckling David Beatty was culpable of many tactical sins and failure of judgment throughout the battle. Most notably, he positioned the 5th Battle Squadron (consisting of the four new, world-class Queen Elizabeth class battle cruisers under Hugh Evan-Thomas) too far to the rear in the original cruising formation, thus ensuring that those critical ships could not be fully brought to bear if the Germans were encountered. And he failed in one of his core missions: providing accurate and timely information to John Jellicoe and the British Grand Fleet on the speed and bearing of the German High Seas Fleet once it had been engaged to ensure that the German “risk fleet” could be led into a trap and destroyed.
The other book – and the more important one – is a thoughtful and probing analysis on the effects of a long peace on military institutions and their associated doctrines. Gordon’s basic thesis is that peacetime militaries tend to attract and promote “authoritarian” personalities, as defined by Professor Norman Dixon in his 1976 book “On the Psychology of Military Incompetence.” In layman’s terms, authoritarians are spit-and-polish, by-the-book types who thrive in the highly structured and hierarchical nature of peacetime armed forces. This natural tendency was reinforced and exacerbated by the advent of steam tactics and complex signaling that “had the effect of ritualizing the Navy’s concept of battle in a way that ballroom dances were to ritualize courtship.” The officers most associated with this school were the commanding officers of the British Grand Fleet at Scapa Flow under John Jellicoe and the officers of the 5th Battle Squadron under Evan-Thomas. Gordon notes that such authoritarian officers exemplified the Victorian and Edwardian concepts of chivalry. They tended to have close connections to the British royal family (e.g. Evan-Thomas was a life-long friend of King Edward), were often affiliated with the Royal Geographic Society and/or participated in dangerous polar exploration expeditions, and were often Craft Freemasons. Their concept of battle was one of highly orchestrated maneuvers depending on detailed signals emanating from the fleet commander.
On the other end of the spectrum were the “autocrats” (again, the term comes from Dixon). The archetype autocrat is the jaunty David Beatty. These are the men who scorned convention and, as a result, suffered from slower promotions in the peacetime navy. Beatty had the rare fortune to experience real combat as a naval officer while on a gunboat supporting the British at Omdurman in 1898 where he also had a chance encounter with a young Winston Churchill – two events that paid handsome dividends in his naval career. The autocrats embraced the Nelsonic concept of initiative and daring in combat. As Gordon notes and the autocrats stressed, “It was forgotten that at Trafalgar no tactical signal emanated from the flagship after the fighting started.”
Gordon maintains that the decisive event that led to the failures of Jutland actually occurred a generation before the battle, off the coast of Lebanon in 1893. It was there and then that two British battleships (the Mediterranean flagship Victoria and the Camperdown) collided in broad daylight when an erroneous signal from the flagship was executed even though the obvious outcome was the sinking of the Victoria and claiming the life of the Mediterranean commander-in-chief, Admiral George Tryon. Tryon had been a passionate critic of the signaling culture then taking deep root in the navy and fought hard to inculcate instead a set of action principles that would guide individual behavior in combat much as Nelson was able to rely on at Trafalgar. Tryon had promoted a “TA system” that consisted of just a few signals to be used in battle when smoke, fire and fear would likely make the smooth transmission of signals difficult, if not impossible. The tragedy came to be associated with the dangers of maneuvering under the very loose “TA system” even though it was not in effect the collision occurred. The subsequent court martial forced the navy to consider the issue of blind obedience to orders, even when those orders will clearly end in disaster.
This is one of the best books I have read over the past few years. It has substance, style, and piercing insights into the nature of military organizations in times of extended peace. For anyone interested in military culture and military doctrine this is a “must read.”
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