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Showing results for tags 'beatty jellicoe mythbusting'.
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There is a myth I've seen online and had plenty of arguments about. The myth says that Beatty was a superior admiral to Jellicoe. Absurd to anyone in the know but it persists. I believe it persists because some people see their own personality in Beatty and therefore stick up for him. Where to start? Jellicoe was involved in the building up of the technical side of the RN in WW1. He knew that the RN AP shells did not work and that he had a powerful but flawed instrument under him. Jellicoe knew that the RN was doing as much as it could against the Central Powers with blockade and amphibious warfare and that destroying the German fleet won the Allies nothing. At Jutland Jellicoe had 0 scouting data from Beatty and therefore had to make decisions based upon instinct, hunches, and reasoning about what effect his choices would have given what the enemy might be doing. He chose right and crossed the T, letting his superior weight of shell tell. Beatty did not fire his signals officer for personal reasons, costing him battles given the fact that his flagship could not give orders in battle. At Jutland he went charging after the enemy, leaving the 4 most powerful ships in the world behind due to the lower speed of those ships (Queen Elizabeth class) and once again, poor signals. The magnitude of this error is clear when one realizes that Hipper had 5 ships to Beatty's 6. Beatty could have had 10, 4 with 15 inch guns, had he wanted them. Instead he left them behind. Beatty's main task was to inform Jellicoe of German positions which he did not do. I'm not sure why this is even a myth but I wanted to help bust it here. The best book I've read on WW1 naval combat is Robert K Massie's Castles of Steel. Very entertaining as well as informative. Trigger warning: I really hate link rot so I spammed this paper on Jutland. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1468-229X.12241 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/303546167_Weight_of_Shell_Must_Tell_A_Lanchestrian_Reappraisal_of_the_Battle_of_Jutland https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Weight-of-Shell-Must-Tell%3A-A-Lanchestrian-of-the-of-MacKay-Price/af53aec74cccb3a10eac3489aa233dfc9b247cea https://pure.york.ac.uk/portal/en/publications/weight-of-shell-must-tell(186a432d-44bc-4f9b-8ee5-6f6245e1ad44)/export.html https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/99759/1/Jutland.PreReview.pdf