Fans pick 100 books like Jutland

The Battle of Jutland has fascinated many people down the years. Who won? Some say it was a ‘draw’, others that in terms of ships lost, the Germans ‘won’, but in truth, though the British lost more ships, they ‘won’ a strategic victory in that the High Seas Fleet never again challenged the Royal Navy on the High Seas. As Churchill said, Admiral Jellico was the one man who could have lost the war in an afternoon.

Ever since the ‘inconclusive’ Battle of Jutland there has been a controversy over how it was fought and the outcome. The British media expected a new Trafalgar, or a new Glorious First of June, with the German High Seas Fleet annihilated in a great clash of arms in which ship matched ship and slugged it out. When that didn’t happen, they turned on the Royal Navy and the Commander in Chief of the… show more.

Of the many books available on the Battle of Jutland, this one is a very professional look at what went wrong.

It acknowledges the key issue that no one in either fleet had any experience of handling fleets of this size and type, or fighting a battle at the ranges their guns were capable of reaching. Admirals Harper and Bacon remain thoroughly professional in their analysis of the failings on the British side, identifying such things as poor communication of orders by signal, poor signal security—Beatty’s flagship signalled by lamp a request for the night’s challenge and reply and received them from Princess Royal. So did at least one of the German ships which later used the challenge to confuse a British cruiser…

A key finding was that many of the British admirals had no ‘staff’ trained to process information, draft orders in a sensible manner, and transmit them. Key… show more.

This is a book on one of the most dramatic periods in international history. Why were political leaders and diplomats in the 1910s unable to stop the world’s descent into chaos and global conflict?

In addition to providing exceptional detail on key historical episodes, the book also highlights how easy it is for localized conflict to escalate and expand, with disastrous consequences. 

This book makes fascinating reading as it examines the German Battlecruisers (the Germans actually referred to them as Panzerkreuzers—Armoured Cruisers) and they carried smaller calibre main guns than their British counterparts, sacrificing gun power for better protection with heavier armour. They took an enormous amount of punishment at Jutland, but only one was lost to battle damage, the others survived to fight again another day—and they did, though not in the North Sea, but against the Russians in the Baltic.

Anyone who has read anything at all about the Battle of Jutland will have realised that the British and German ‘Battlecruisers’ did most of the fighting, and suffered the heaviest losses. This book gives details of the German ships involved, their design, evolution, build and most interesting, the actual log accounts of the engagement make for even more fascinating study.

My grandfather fought in the Battle of Jutland, as a young gunnery lieutenant; the hero of The Redeemed, Leo, would do likewise as a boy seaman. I needed insight into men’s experience and found it above all in this book (put together by two naval officers who’d themselves taken part.) It is composed of sixty personal accounts from men of all ranks and is edited to give a gripping chronology of what remains the largest naval battle in history.

If the Age of the Dreadnoughts fires your imagination, this book certainly fired mine. It is the most authoritative book written on the Battle of Jutland and the British Naval Command in WWI.

Beyond a mere recounting of who commanded and what ships were involved, this book takes a deep dive into the naval strategy of the time, how and why ships were built, and how they were sailed and fought, down to tactical details that end up determining decisive battle outcomes that changed the naval history of WWI.

Learn everything from orders of battle, ship handling, and turn by decisive turn in the swirling battle that defined an era at sea—Jutland. Gordon let me shovel in the historical coal to support my books, one that also touched on an alternate outcome of the battle of Jutland. 

A lot of ink has been spilt on why the Royal Navy was unable to overpower the German fleet at the battle of Jutland. Some focus on flaws in equipment and ship design, others on flaws in leadership and tactics, others still on poor fighting methods. This book examines the subject in the round and shows, contrary to received wisdom, that in gunnery at least, the Royal Navy entered the battle with the instruments best suited to its needs. Such failures as there were – and there were many – were largely down to individual command decisions on the day.

Following the story of the Battle of Jutland, as told here, felt like being in a dark room and looking for a black cat that wasn’t there. Bad intelligence, poor planning, and very bad luck turned this naval engagement into an extremely costly draw, the casualties suffered by both sides looking more like senseless sacrifice comparable with the horrors of trench warfare.

Underwater weapons of all types have had a major influence on naval warfare in the twentieth century. Despite this, studies of them to date have not been all they might be either in terms of quantity or quality. Richard Dunley rectifies this in respect of the mine with a major evaluation of its place in Royal Navy thinking and planning in the first decade and a half of the twentieth century. As a result, this is an important book and a major contribution to the literature.

This is the book that got me into naval history and made me want to be a naval historian.

Bennett was a serving officer in the RN and the son of a naval officer. He writes with pace, experience, and clarity about the major naval encounters of the First World War. It is a book that would be a good primer for anyone wanting to start the WW1 at sea journey. I purchased it in a second-hand bookshop in Cambridge and never looked back.