Quote:
Originally Posted by jason taylor
That is a bad excuse for a professional officer. Even I know that you make your decisions based on ALL the information you have and you better have a good reason for filtering intelligence.
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It happened like this:
The British and German battlecruiser forces, scouting ahead of their respective main battlefleets, had encountered each other, which was a surprise, because the (incorrect) SIGINT reports from the Admiralty had been that the Germans were staying home that day. The two battlecruiser forces did some fairly substantial fighting. Jellicoe had had reports about that, and about the British battlecruisers' sighting of the German battlefleet. The fighting had then been moving back towards Jellicoe and the British battlefleet, but there had been a remarkable lack of ongoing reports, and those that were coming in had significantly incorrect positions. Some of that was detectable when the positions were plotted, but some was not. Radio direction-finding was in its infancy in 1916, and ships weren't equipped for it, so it could not help.
The British tactical communications systems of the time had been optimised for a very top-down command style, which assumed that the commander on the scene would have complete information. Jellicoe's problem was that he needed to deploy his battlefleet from cruising order, which was a block of short columns steaming side-by-side, difficult for submarines to attack, to a single long line, so that all the battleships could fire broadsides without getting in each other's way. Because that long line took time to manoeuvre, he needed to get it into about the right place to start with.
It was a misty day, as is commonly the case in the North Sea, and the smoke of a lot of large coal-fired ships was not helping. It abruptly became clear from the sound of heavy gunfire that Jellicoe was going to encounter the German battlefleet sooner than the reports had led him to expect but there were no clear reports of just where it was relative to him, and the only ships visible through the mist were his own. He was forced to make the decision on inadequate information, and was fortunate to get the best choice available.
Edit:
The Rules of the Game, referenced above, is an excellent book on how things got to be this way, and what that implies for military organisations in general.