CHAPTER 3
John Rushworth Jellicoe, Winston Churchill once said, was “the only man on either side who could lose the war in an afternoon.” In appearance, the new Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Fleet seemed an implausible bearer of this immense responsibility. A small, quiet man, fifty-five years old when he took command in 1914, Jellicoe had never been known to raise his voice. Those in the navy who knew him said that this was because he never had to; John Jellicoe was obeyed instinctively. From a distance, he looked nondescript. He was only five and a half feet tall.
[This is not as short as it may sound today. Like Jellicoe, King George V was five foot six; Winston Churchill was five foot six and a half, and Jellicoe’s famous colleague Admiral David Beatty was five foot seven.]
His brown eyes were set deep in a wrinkled, weathered face. His prominent nose, jutting from under a small, old-fashioned navy cap, made his profile distinctive, but far from handsome. Then, coming closer, people saw the feature that distinguished John Jellicoe: the light in his eyes, which simultaneously shone with bright intelligence and radiated patience, calm, and kindliness.
Jellicoe commanded the Grand Fleet in August 1914 because Jacky Fisher had insisted that no one else would do. Over many years, Fisher, the irrepressible founder of the modern Royal Navy, rushing through life from one volcanic controversy to the next, had steered this, his most promising protégé, from one assignment to the next, each leading to Fisher’s eventual goal: to have Jellicoe in command of the British fleet when war with Germany began. “Jellicoe to be Admiralissimo on October 21, 1914, when the battle of Armageddon comes along,” Fisher wrote in 1911. A year later, he added, “If war comes before 1914, Jellicoe will be Nelson at the Battle of St. Vincent [where Nelson served brilliantly under Admiral Sir John Jervis]. If it comes in 1914, Jellicoe will be Nelson at Trafalgar.” Now Admiralissimo of the armada Fisher had built, Jellicoe was ready. Twenty-two months of skirmishing would follow and then, on May 31, 1916, he would lead the most powerful British fleet ever sent to sea into the climactic naval battle of the war, the greatest clash of armored ships the world had ever seen.
Jellicoe’s strength was his thorough professionalism, his cool, analytical mind, and his iron self-control. He was neat, polite, and methodical. He believed in naval traditions, procedures, and decorum, among which were loyalty, scrupulous fairness, and genuine concern for the personal affairs of his officers and men. The fleet responded to Jellicoe’s transparent sincerity and obvious selflessness by giving him unreserved affection and trust. He was, said one of his Grand Fleet captains, “our beloved Commander-in-Chief, the finest character that ever was.”
Jellicoe’s professional experience and powers of concentration and organization were exceptional. He brought to his command an almost unparalleled technical knowledge and a lifelong, deeply ingrained confidence in himself. Beyond this, Jellicoe possessed something else rare among the hundreds of conventional officers on the Navy List: he had an original mind. It was not the mind of a dreamer and genius like Fisher, whose ideas ranged across the whole spectrum of naval affairs. Jellicoe’s was the practical, realistic mind of an engineer. Fisher asked Why? and Why not? Jellicoe asked How? and How much? When he found the answers, he understood, better than anyone else in the British navy, the difficulties the navy faced. He was aware of the technical achievements and rapid progress of the German navy. He knew that German ships were superior in armor protection and that German shells, torpedoes, and mines were more reliable than British. He was familiar with German skill in gunnery, in which he was himself an expert. As he warned Churchill on the eve of war, it was highly dangerous to assume, as Churchill did, that British ships were superior to German as fighting machines.
Jellicoe was not without weaknesses. Sometimes, loyalty to old friends blinded him to their limitations and made him slow to relieve them of command. A more serious flaw was his tendency to do everything for himself—his difficulty in delegating responsibility. Because of his own immense capacity for work and extensive grasp of technical detail, he often dealt with matters that might have been left to subordinates. During his rise to the top, one of his superiors noted that he “really does too much. He must learn to work his captains and staff more and himself less. At present he puts himself in the position of, say, a glorified gunnery lieutenant. This will not do when he gets with a big fleet. He must trust his staff and captains and if they don’t fit, he must kick them out!”
This advice did not change Jellicoe’s nature. As he rose higher and his responsibilities grew greater, his reluctance to delegate never left him. He had what he considered a powerful reason: knowing better than anyone else the strengths and weaknesses of his fleet, he did not want a subordinate’s monumental mistake to place that fleet in jeopardy. In sum, he did not want the war to be “lost in an afternoon” by somebody else. As supreme commander, with a consuming sense of the vital importance of the Grand Fleet to Great Britain, he remained fundamentally cautious. Accordingly, his knowledge of the flaws hidden within his ships produced a careful, undramatic strategy. No temptation, however glittering, was to be allowed to place the supremacy of the British Grand Fleet at risk. While John Jellicoe was Commander-in-Chief, the war would not be lost in an afternoon.
John Jellicoe, whose family and friends always called him Jack, was born into an English middle-class family in Southampton on December 5, 1859. His father, a captain in the Royal Mail Steam Packet Service, rose to become marine superintendent of the line and, eventually, commodore and a company director. Jack, the second of four sons, grew up in a harbor world where the primary events were the comings and goings of ships. Unsurprisingly, at twelve, in the summer of 1872, he joined the Royal Navy training shipBritannia as a cadet. He was small, almost diminutive, at four feet six inches, but he did well from the beginning; the head of the school called him “one of the cleverest cadets we have ever had.” When he left as a midshipman two years later, Jellicoe was first in his class of thirty-eight and had also managed to grow two inches. Outside the classroom, he was courteous, friendly, unassuming, and enthusiastic at sports: a model young man. These qualities earned him a rare prize, described by Commodore James Goldrick, a present-day historian who is also a serving officer in the Royal Australian Navy: “Jellicoe was admired not only by his seniors and subordinates, but also by his contemporaries, that most critical of audiences.” Yet Jellicoe never forgot his ultimate objective. On the flyleaf of one of his Britannia notebooks, a childish hand proclaims the book to be the “Property of Admiral Sir John Jellicoe.”
Britannia was the beginning of a lifetime of “Firsts” in seamanship, navigation, gunnery, and torpedoes. Jellicoe went to sea in sailing ships and coal-burning vessels; he sailed around the world, and in a single year, at the age of sixteen, he grew another five inches—up to five foot one. By 1886, the year he turned twenty-seven, he was five foot six—as tall as he would ever be. As a lieutenant on the battleship Colossus anchored at Spithead, he showed his strength, quick reflexes, and instinctive bravery when, in a high wind and with a strong tide running, a seaman fell overboard and was swept astern. Jellicoe saw what was happening and immediately jumped in. Colossus’s captain was watching: Jellicoe “swam with extraordinary vigor . . . [and] succeeded in reaching the man before he sank and in keeping him afloat until a boat picked them up. The bluejacket was brought aboard in-sensible but soon recovered. Lieutenant Jellicoe smilingly received my congratulations and walked quietly to his cabin to put on dry clothes.”
Jellicoe’s close connection with Jacky Fisher began in 1884, when Jellicoe was on the staff at HMS Excellent Gunnery School at Portsmouth, of which Fisher was captain. Thereafter, Jellicoe adopted Fisher’s beliefs in reform, efficiency, and readiness; in technological change, personnel management, and the importance of big guns and gunnery. In addition, from that time on, Jellicoe swam in the “Fishpond”—the pool of junior officers whom Fisher considered promising, whom he worked to promote, and who, like Jellicoe, would go on to higher command and fame. Fisher’s sponsorship sometimes carried penalties as well as rewards, but Jellicoe’s qualities were always so obvious that he managed to avoid the charge that his rise was due to favoritism. In September 1889, when Fisher became Director of Naval Ordnance, he brought Lieutenant Jellicoe along as his assistant. When Fisher went home at night, Jellicoe would still be at his desk, working sometimes until eleven p.m.
In 1891, Jellicoe, at thirty-one, was promoted to commander and sent to the Mediterranean Fleet as second in command of the battleship Victoria, flagship of Admiral Sir George Tryon. It was an assignment he was lucky to survive. When, on the afternoon of June 22, 1893, Tryon made an inexplicable blunder that sent Victoria into a fatal collision with Camperdown, Jellicoe was lying in his cabin with a fever of 103 degrees; he had been there a week, ill with dysentery. “I felt the shock,” he wrote to his mother,
and put on a pair of trousers and a coat and went on deck to superintend the launching of boats. I found the Camperdown had cut right into us and although we closed all the watertight doors, we seemed to be sinking fast. I had hardly started before the ship heeled right over, capsized, and went down eight minutes from the collision. As she went over, I climbed down the side and after being sucked down some way came to the top again. Any amount of men were killed by the propellers which kept on working as the ship went over as they fell onto them. It must have been an awful sight from the other ships. I was picked up. The curious thing is that my temperature today is normal so the ducking did me good.
Victoria went down with 358 of her 649 officers and men, including Tryon. Jellicoe was one of 291 survivors.
Returned to England and promoted to captain, Jellicoe again was working with naval ordnance when he happened to meet Sir Charles Cayzer, a self-made, wealthy shipowner. At Cayzer’s house, the guest was introduced to the host’s second daughter, Gwendoline. The navy captain was thirty-nine; the young woman was nineteen. There was an attraction, but Jellicoe’s career intruded. In 1897, Jellicoe was invited by Vice Admiral Sir Edward Seymour, Commander-in-Chief of the China Station, to serve as Seymour’s Flag Captain on the battleship Centurion. For three years, the assignment was routine. In Hong Kong and other Far Eastern ports, Jellicoe met and became friendly with the kaiser’s brother, Prince Henry of Prussia, then in command of the German East Asia Squadron, and with Captain Henning von Holtzendorff, later Commander-in-Chief of the High Seas Fleet and Chief of the German Naval Staff, and with other German officers. A closer bond between the British and German squadrons was forged in the summer of 1900 during the dramatic international effort to relieve the besieged Western legations in Peking. When the legations, surrounded and threatened by thousands of Boxer rebels, appealed for help, an international naval landing force of more than two thousand men was hastily assembled. Seymour, the senior Western naval officer, took command of the relief column and named Jellicoe his Chief of Staff. Setting off by train to reach Peking, seventy miles away, the force was blocked and attacked by thousands of Chinese. Jellicoe commanded troops under fire until one day he was hit by a bullet on the left side of his chest. The impact spun him around and left him spitting blood. A doctor, injecting morphine, told him that the wound was probably mortal, whereupon Jellicoe wrote his will in six lines, leaving everything to his mother.
While he lay stretched out in the bottom of a river sampan, heavily bandaged, his place as Seymour’s chief aide was taken by Captain Guido von Usedom, commander of the 500-man German contingent. Somehow, even in this unpromising place, Jellicoe’s medical prospects began to improve. The prospects for the international column, now in retreat, were not as bright. At one point, an English journalist tried to cheer him by concocting good news. Later the journalist wrote, “I don’t think I shall ever forget the contemptuous flash of the eyes Jellicoe turned on me or the impatient remark, ‘Tell me the truth. Don’t lie.’ ” Jellicoe recovered, but for the rest of his life, he carried the Chinese bullet in his lung.
Home in England after an absence of four years, Jellicoe found Gwendoline Cayzer waiting. He was forty-two; she was twenty years younger; they married in July 1902. Their age difference followed a pattern established by many career officers of the Victorian British army and navy. Some did not marry at all; Kitchener and Admiral of the Fleet Arthur Knyvet Wilson were examples. Others first established their careers up to the level of colonel or captain, then came home in their forties to marry much younger women and begin a family. In Jellicoe’s case, marriage was a pleasant and entirely conventional buttress to his career. His wife’s money from her father enabled them to live in a larger house than his navy pay could provide. In time, five daughters were born and eventually, when Jellicoe was fifty-nine and had retired from the navy, a son.
In October 1904, when Jacky Fisher became First Sea Lord, he summoned Jellicoe, as “one of the five best brains in the navy,” to help design Britain’s revolutionary all-big-gun battleship HMS Dreadnought, the ship that made all existing battleships obsolete and gave her name—dreadnought—to all subsequent battleships. This achieved, Jellicoe embarked on a steady climb up the ladder of promotion and responsibility, alternating between duty at sea and assignments at the Admiralty. For two years, he was Director of Naval Ordnance, responsible for the design and supply of all guns and ammunition for the navy. In 1907, he was promoted to rear admiral, knighted, and sent to sea as second in command of the Atlantic Fleet, based at Gibraltar. In 1908, Jellicoe returned to the Admiralty for two years as Third Sea Lord and Controller, where his task was the design, building, fitting out, and repairing of all ships of the Royal Navy. During these years, first at Naval Ordnance and then as Controller, Jellicoe’s growing knowledge of the technology of shipbuilding raised in him a concern about the Royal Navy’s weaknesses as well as its strengths. With Germany building the High Seas Fleet, he studied the comparative designs and capabilities of British and German warships and realized that in many respects his friends across the North Sea were building better ships. One German advantage, he wrote, “was that of far greater protection both in the way of armor above and below water, and in more complete water-tight subdivision below water as protection against torpedo or mine attack.” By extension, he realized that the superior hull subdivision in German capital ships was made possible by their greater beam. “Our vessels,” he said glumly, were “being limited in beam by the width of existing docks and the difficulty of persuading our government to construct newer and wider docks.”
Jellicoe also worried about the effectiveness of British heavy-gun shells fired at long ranges. To test his fears, he arranged trials, which demonstrated that the standard British naval shell was effective when fired at close range across a flat trajectory and hitting armor at a 90-degree angle. But when these same shells were fired at long range and struck armor at oblique angles, they often failed to penetrate and thus also failed to burst in the vitals of the target ship. Concerned, Jellicoe requested the Ordnance Board to design and produce a new armor-piercing shell effective at the ranges at which future sea battles were likely to be fought. Before the matter was resolved, he departed, and subsequent Controllers allowed it to drop.
Jellicoe’s desire to renew ties with some of the German naval officers he had known in China led him to accept an invitation to visit Germany in the summer of 1910. “I had a decided admiration and considerable liking for German naval officers and men,” he later wrote. “I knew personally a great many of the senior officers and I felt a great respect for the efficiency of the German navy.” Persuaded to come to the Kiel Regatta by his old comrade in arms Guido von Usedom, now an admiral in command of the naval base at Kiel, Jellicoe also saw Prince Henry, the kaiser’s brother, as well as William himself, who asked Jellicoe to race with him on his sailing yacht Meteor. The Royal Navy benefited from this German visit when Jellicoe subsequently obtained Admiralty approval for construction of two wide floating dry docks capable of lifting the largest battleships out of the water. “On my way to Kiel,” he later explained, “I passed through Hamburg where several large floating docks were in use for commercial liners. I visited the largest of these and discussed their use with Germans.” Besides their greater size, these docks had an additional significance, which became apparent during the war. “All our existing dock accommodation was in vicinity of the English Channel and the south of England,” Jellicoe explained. With no naval base on the North Sea where the Grand Fleet was based, he, as Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Fleet, arranged for one of these floating docks to be towed to Cromarty Firth, where it was used seventy times by battleships and battle cruisers, saving them the longer voyage and the need for a destroyer escort passing back and forth to the permanent docks at Plymouth and Portsmouth.
It was as controller at the Admiralty that Jellicoe had his first unpleasant experience with a politician. The Welsh firebrand and Chancellor of the Exchequer, David Lloyd George, struggling to limit government spending on armaments, vehemently opposed the allotment of large sums to the Royal Navy to counter the growth of the German fleet. In February 1909, Jellicoe pointed out that in the construction of gun mountings, a key factor in the time required to turn out completed battleships, the Germans had recently become more proficient; therefore, prudence demanded that Britain increase naval spending even more. At a meeting at which Jellicoe was present, the chancellor walked up and down, venting his anger. “I think it shows an extraordinary neglect on the part of the Admiralty that all this should not have been found out,” he said. “I don’t think much of any of you admirals and I should like to see Lord Charles Beresford at the Admiralty, the sooner the better.” Reginald McKenna, who was then First Lord, reacted quickly. “You knew perfectly well,” he said to Lloyd George, “that these facts [increased German skill in making gun mountings] were communicated to the Cabinet at the time and your remark was, ‘It’s all contractors’ gossip’—or words to that effect.”
In December 1910, Jellicoe left the Admiralty to become Commander-in-Chief of the Atlantic Fleet. He was at sea when he learned by wireless that his five-year-old daughter, Betty, had died of a mastoid infection; she had come to the dock perfectly healthy a few weeks before to see him off. In 1911, he became second in command of the Home Fleet and in 1912 was promoted to vice admiral and returned to the Admiralty as Second Sea Lord. By this time, few in the navy questioned Fisher’s wisdom in grooming Jellicoe for supreme command. Captain Wilhelm Widenmann, the German naval attaché in London, informed Tirpitz on January 11, 1912, “If one asks English naval officers which admiral would have the best chances for a brilliant career on the basis of his capability, one almost always receives the same answer: besides Prince Louis of Battenberg, unquestionably Sir John Jellicoe. Sir John possesses the absolute confidence of his superiors as well as his subordinates.”
During his two years as Second Sea Lord, Jellicoe and his family lived in a large, comfortable house in Sussex Square. Every morning, he walked two miles to the Admiralty, and every evening the two miles back. At the Admiralty, he found the new First Lord, Winston Churchill, fifteen years younger than himself, to be brilliant, assertive, and, he thought, dangerously self-confident. “It did not take me very long,” Jellicoe wrote later,
to find out that Mr. Churchill was very apt to express strong opinions upon purely technical matters. Moreover, not being satisfied with expressing opinions, he tried to force his views upon the Board. His fatal error was his entire inability to realize his own limitations as a civilian. I admired very much his wonderful argumentative powers. He surpassed the ablest of lawyers and would make a weak case appear exceedingly strong. While this gift was of great use to the Admiralty when we wanted the naval case put well before the government, it became a positive danger when the First Lord started to exercise his powers of argument on his colleagues on the Board. Naval officers are not brought up to argue a case and few of them can make a good show in this direction.
In May 1913, Sir John and Lady Jellicoe were invited to Berlin on the occasion of the marriage of William II’s only daughter. The guests included King George V of England and Tsar Nicholas II of Russia; the ceremony became the last meeting of prewar European monarchs before the outbreak of hostilities fifteen months later. Jellicoe, a minor figure among the royalty, nevertheless had a busy schedule. He was given a two-hour ride in a zeppelin; he was invited to lunch by the German chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, and then to dinner by the kaiser. After dinner with William, Jellicoe had a long conversation with the emperor and Tirpitz about the different methods used to select naval cadets in the two countries. Tirpitz, charmed by the Jellicoes, invited them to tea to meet his daughter, who had just returned from two years at Cheltenham Ladies’ College. Before leaving, Jellicoe asked the founder of the German navy to return the visit by coming to England and staying at his own house. “He thanked me,” Jellicoe said, “but said that he would certainly be murdered if he were to visit England, as the British objected so strongly to his naval policy.” While in Berlin, Jellicoe attended the annual dinner of the German naval officers who had served in China and, in the course of conversation, asked who were the rising men of the German navy. He was told that “certainly one of the future leaders” was an admiral named Reinhard Scheer.
In July 1913, Jellicoe’s term as Second Sea Lord was interrupted by a special assignment. In war games involving 350 warships, Jellicoe commanded the “Red Fleet,” representing a German naval force convoying an invading German army to England. The “army” was only a token force—three battalions of infantry and a battalion of marines—but Jellicoe managed to completely outmaneuver the defending “Blue Fleet,” commanded by Britain’s senior naval officer afloat, Sir George Callaghan, Commander-in-Chief of the Home Fleet. Avoiding Callaghan, Jellicoe successfully landed the invading troops at the mouths of the Humber and the Tyne. In fact, Jellicoe had done too well: Churchill, observing the exercises from Jellicoe’s flagship, Thunderer, hurriedly ended the maneuvers lest they tell the Germans how the thing might actually be done. There was a further consequence. Churchill was dazzled by Jellicoe’s “brilliant and daring” performance (he wrote to Jellicoe that “the results leave your naval reputation second to none”), and he was convinced that Fisher was right: here was the man to command the British fleet at the Battle of Armageddon.
On a London midsummer evening, Jellicoe sat alone in a first-class compartment on a train departing Kings Cross station for the north of Scotland. In his hand, he held a wax-sealed envelope containing a letter delivered to him by an Admiralty messenger a few moments before the train left the station. He was not to break the seal until instructed to do so by specific Admiralty order, but, to his consternation, he knew what the letter inside would say. The contents would make him Commander-in-Chief of the British Grand Fleet, the gray armada that would serve as the shield of the British empire and the sword of British naval supremacy. Once opened and read, the letter would bestow on him the greatest responsibility the navy could offer. Distractedly tapping the envelope on his knee, then turning to look out the window at England rushing past in the twilight, Jellicoe hoped that the order to open the letter would not come. The day was Friday, July 31, 1914.
Alone in his compartment through the night, Jellicoe had time to think about the events of the preceding three days and, especially, of that afternoon. On Tuesday, the twenty-eighth, Vice Admiral Jellicoe, the Second Sea Lord at the Admiralty, had gone to a dinner given by Lord Morley at which the other guests included Churchill; the Lord Chancellor, Richard Burdon Haldane; Field Marshal Earl Kitchener of Khartoum; and Lord Bryce, just returned from a long tour as British ambassador to the United States. When Jellicoe remarked conversationally to Bryce that the European horizon “looked to be very clouded,” Bryce asked what he meant. Jellicoe said it seemed as though England might soon be at war with Germany. “War with Germany?” Bryce exclaimed. “Absurd! Why, any British government that did such a thing would be thrown out of office immediately.” Twenty-four hours later, Churchill, who shared Jellicoe’s opinion, took the precautionary step of ordering the British First Fleet to proceed to the remote northern fastness of Scapa Flow.
With the fleet at its war station, Churchill and his colleague Prince Louis of Battenberg, the First Sea Lord, confronted another decision. For nearly three years, the First Fleet—soon to be renamed the Grand Fleet—had been under the command of Admiral Sir George Callaghan, a capable, popular sailor who was sixty-two years old. Callaghan had done well. The fleet had improved in readiness and in December 1913 the admiral’s two-year appointment had been extended for a third year. The succession thereafter was already arranged: in December 1914, Jellicoe would step into Callaghan’s shoes. Both men had accepted this turnover as a routine rotation of senior naval officers. The First Lord of the Admiralty, however, was not a naval officer, and famously had no special respect for naval routines and traditions. And Churchill, increasingly, had come to believe that, as a wartime commander, Callaghan would not do.
On Wednesday, July 29, as his fleet steamed north, Admiral Callaghan was not with his ships, but at the Admiralty in discussion with Churchill and Battenberg. During these face-to-face talks, Churchill’s doubts about Callaghan intensified. To some, sixty-two years might not seem old, but to the exuberant thirty-nine-year-old First Lord, it appeared to be the threshold of senescence. He worried that the admiral might fail under the mental and physical strains that war would put upon him. Jellicoe, on the other hand, was seven years younger, talented, experienced, and already in line to command the fleet as Callaghan’s successor.
During his meeting with Callaghan, Churchill resolved to accelerate the forthcoming change. He did not reveal this intention to Callaghan, and his first move was only a half step: he told Callaghan that, in order to relieve him of some of his burdens as Commander-in-Chief, he was sending Jelli-coe immediately to the Grand Fleet as second in command. The First Lord then summoned Jellicoe and gave him his new assignment. Callaghan appeared to welcome the arrangement and, before leaving London to join the fleet, arranged with his new assistant that the dreadnought Centurion should be Jellicoe’s flagship. But Churchill, although he said no more to either man on the twenty-ninth, did not intend that Jellicoe continue long as assistant. On Friday afternoon, the thirty-first, Jellicoe had a long conversation with the First Lord and the First Sea Lord. At this meeting, it became clear to Jellicoe that, “in certain circumstances,” he might abruptly be appointed Commander-in-Chief in succession to Callaghan; Jellicoe understood that “certain circumstances” had to do with the imminence of war. Still, nothing was settled. When Jellicoe boarded his train that night for Scotland, he understood that the final decision had not been made and that when the Admiralty decided, he would know because he would be instructed to open the envelope he held in his hand.
Jellicoe was a calm, orderly man, self-confident and ambitious, but always within the established framework of naval traditions. Given his respect for the decorum and hierarchy of the service, Jellicoe found the sequence of events orchestrated by Churchill distressing, even repugnant. He and Callaghan were brother officers and personal friends. “I had the most profound respect and admiration for him,” Jellicoe said. They had served together in China during the Boxer Rebellion and, when Callaghan became Commander-in-Chief of the First Fleet in 1911, Jellicoe had commanded the best of his battle squadrons. Now, after three years, Callaghan knew his fleet and its senior officers and ships intimately. Under these circumstances, the plan to push Sir George aside seemed outrageous, almost unthinkable. The Commander-in-Chief, Jellicoe knew, had no idea that he was about to be summarily replaced. Might he not regard Jellicoe’s participation—albeit involuntary and unwilling—as a personal betrayal?
Equally, Jellicoe worried “that the fleet might conclude that I had been in some measure responsible for the change.” The navy was an intensely loyal service and the fleet trusted and admired its Commander-in-Chief. A change of command would come as a shock and would be certain to breed resentment. None of this would be helpful to a new commander at the beginning of a war. Already, there was opposition in the fleet to Jellicoe’s coming even as second in command. Callaghan, on returning from the Admiralty to Scapa Flow, had told Vice Admiral Sir Lewis Bayly, commander of the 1st Battle Squadron, that Jellicoe would be coming as his assistant. Bayly had declared that the assignment of an assistant was an insult and said that if he had been the Commander-in-Chief he would have hauled down his flag in protest.
Jellicoe might be worried about what others would think, but his reluctance to succeed Callaghan had nothing to do with lack of personal confidence that he could do the job. At fifty-four, after a forty-two-year navy career, he knew that professionally, mentally, and physically he was ready to command the Grand Fleet. He was younger than Callaghan and had more recent experience with modern weapons. He knew that he was a better fleet commander than Callaghan. This had been made clear the previous year, in those naval maneuvers during which Jellicoe’s attacking Red Fleet had thoroughly outmaneuvered the defending Blue, led by Callaghan.
While Jellicoe worried how Callaghan and others would perceive his promotion, Churchill was hurrying to make it a fact. To remove Callaghan, a close friend of King George V, Churchill needed the king’s approval. On July 31, the day Jellicoe left for Scotland, the First Lord wrote to the king to warn him that should war come he would submit the name of Sir John Jellicoe for supreme command. Regretfully, Churchill said, he had come to the conclusion that Callaghan was too old. “These are not times,” he urged the monarch, “when personal feelings can be considered unduly. We must have a younger man. Your Majesty knows well the purely physical exertion which the command of a great fleet demands.”
The following day—Saturday, August 1—as Germany and Russia went to war, Churchill decided that Jellicoe’s appointment must be immediate. He wrote again to the king, asking “respectfully and most earnestly” for approval of the change. Confident that approval would come, the First Lord also wrote to Lady Jellicoe, saying of her husband, “We have absolute confidence in his services and devotion. We shall back him through thick and thin. Thank God we have him at hand.”
Meanwhile, that Saturday morning, Jellicoe reached the small Scottish North Sea port of Wick, where the light cruiser Boadicea was waiting to take him across the Pentland Firth to Scapa Flow. When he arrived, however, the town and harbor were enveloped in fog and the short voyage had to be delayed. While he waited, Jellicoe telegraphed to Churchill the first of a series of extraordinary messages pleading that the change of command not take place or, at the very least, be postponed. The first of these was sent at 10:30 p.m. on August 1:
PERSONAL: DETAINED WICK BY FOG. AM FIRMLY CONVINCED AFTER CONSIDERATION THAT THE STEP YOU MENTIONED TO ME IS FRAUGHT WITH THE GRAVEST DANGER AT THIS JUNCTURE AND MIGHT EASILY BE DISASTROUS OWING TO EXTREME DIFFICULTY OF GETTING IN TOUCH WITH EVERYTHING AT SHORT NOTICE.
THE TRANSFER EVEN IF CARRIED OUT CANNOT SAFELY BE ACCOMPLISHED FOR SOME TIME.
I BEG MOST EARNESTLY THAT YOU WILL GIVE MATTER FURTHER CONSIDERATION WITH FIRST SEA LORD BEFORE YOU TAKE THIS STEP.
JELLICOE
Believing that a career naval officer would better understand his position than the civilian First Lord, Jellicoe sent a copy of the telegram to Prince Louis, adding a sentence:
YOU WILL UNDERSTAND MY MOTIVE IN WIRING IS TO DO MY BEST FOR COUNTRY, NOT PERSONAL CONSIDERATIONS.
On Sunday morning, the second, still waiting at Wick for the fog to lift, Jellicoe sent another telegram, this one addressed to both the First Lord and the First Sea Lord:
REFERENCE MY PERSONAL TELEGRAM LAST NIGHT. AM MORE THAN EVER CONVINCED OF VITAL IMPORTANCE OF MAKING NO CHANGE. PERSONAL FEELINGS ARE ENTIRELY IGNORED IN REACHING THIS CONCLUSION.
Late in the morning, the fog thinned and Boadicea left Wick with Jellicoe on board. He arrived at Scapa Flow early in the afternoon and went on board Iron Duke to report to Callaghan. Jellicoe found his situation extremely awkward: “When I reported myself to the Commander-in-Chief, the knowledge of the event which was apparently impending made the interview both embarrassing and painful, as I could see that he had no knowledge of the possibility of his leaving the fleet, and obviously I could not tell him.”
While Jellicoe was with Callaghan aboard the flagship, a telegram came in to Centurion. The First Lord was tiring of Jellicoe’s protests:
I CAN GIVE YOU 48 HOURS AFTER JOINING. YOU MUST BE READY THEN.
But Jellicoe, just back from his painful interview with Callaghan, was not ready. From Centurion, he signaled at 11:30 p.m. on August 2:
PERSONAL TO THE FIRST LORD AND THE FIRST SEA LORD:
YOURS OF SECOND. CAN ONLY REPLY AM CERTAIN STEP CONTEMPLATED IS MOST DANGEROUS. BEG THAT IT MAY NOT BE CARRIED OUT. AM PERFECTLY WILLING TO ACT ON BOARD FLEET FLAGSHIP AS ASSISTANT IF REQUIRED TO BE IN DIRECT COMMUNICATION. HARD TO BELIEVE IT IS REALIZED WHAT GRAVE DIFFICULTIES CHANGE COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF INVOLVES AT THIS MOMENT. DO NOT FORGET LONG EXPERIENCE OF COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF.
Jellicoe slept poorly on Sunday night. On Monday morning, August 3, he tried again to reverse Churchill’s decision:
QUITE IMPOSSIBLE TO BE READY AT SUCH SHORT NOTICE. FEEL IT IS MY DUTY TO WARN YOU EMPHATICALLY THAT YOU COURT DISASTER IF YOU CARRY OUT INTENTION OF CHANGING BEFORE I HAVE THOROUGH GRIP OF FLEET AND SITUATION.
Jellicoe’s telegrams now stood somewhere between insubordination and farce, but he still refused to give up. At 11:30 the same morning, he made his final appeal:
ADD TO LAST MESSAGE. FLEET IS IMBUED WITH FEELINGS OF EXTREME ADMIRATION AND LOYALTY FOR COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF. THIS IS VERY STRONG FACTOR.
Winston Churchill had had enough. He was not only the First Lord of the Admiralty; he was also a member of a Cabinet and government making the ultimate decision for war or peace. Germany, Austria, France, and Russia already were at war and the German government had just presented a twenty-four-hour ultimatum to Belgium. Despite Britain’s treaty obligations to Belgium, four members of the Asquith Cabinet, opposed to British participation in any continental war, had resigned. Others were waver-ing. Churchill’s patience was exhausted and he had no further time for a fidgety admiral, even a prospective Commander-in-Chief. The First Lord’s final message, sent off on the afternoon of the third, allowed for no rebuttal:
I AM TELEGRAPHING COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF [CALLAGHAN] DIRECTING HIM TO TRANSFER COMMAND TO YOU AT EARLIEST MOMENT SUITABLE TO THE INTEREST OF THE SERVICE. I RELY ON YOU AND HIM TO EFFECT THIS CHANGE QUICKLY AND SMOOTHLY, PERSONAL FEELINGS CANNOT COUNT NOW ONLY WHAT IS BEST FOR US ALL. YOU SHOULD CONSULT HIM [CALLAGHAN] FRANKLY.
FIRST LORD
At four a.m. on Tuesday, August 4, Jellicoe received the signal to break the seal on his Admiralty envelope. As he knew it would, the letter inside contained his appointment as Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Fleet. Now obliged to act, he proceeded at once to board Iron Duke, where he found Callaghan already in possession of his own Admiralty signal:
THEIR LORDSHIPS HAVE DETERMINED UPON, AND H.M. THE KING HAS APPROVED, THE APPOINTMENT OF SIR JOHN JELLICOE AS COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF. YOU ARE TO STRIKE YOUR FLAG FORTHWITH, EMBARK IN THE SAPPHO OR OTHER CRUISER, AND COME ASHORE AT QUEENSFERRY, REPORTING YOURSELF AT THE ADMIRALTY THEREAFTER AT YOUR EARLIEST CONVENIENCE. THESE ORDERS ARE IMPERATIVE.
Callaghan’s emotions were under control. He had known that eventually Jellicoe would be his successor, but not that his own appointment was to be cut short. At the Admiralty conference only a week before, Churchill and Battenberg had given him no intimation that they were contemplating a change. Nevertheless, Callaghan behaved, Jellicoe said later, “as always, as a most gallant officer and gentleman, and his one desire was to make the position easy for me, in entire disregard of his own feelings.” The two admirals agreed that Jellicoe should take command the following day, August 5. Even as they were talking, however, another signal came in from the Admiralty ordering the fleet to sea that very morning. Callaghan decided to give up command immediately. At 8:30 a.m. on August 4, as the Grand Fleet was leaving the harbor, he hauled down his flag and left Scapa Flow.
The fleet watched him go with dismay and indignation. Most officers felt that it was grossly unfair that the man who prepared them for war should be so abruptly dismissed on the eve of battle. Two senior vice admirals commanding Grand Fleet battle squadrons, Warrender and Bayly, signed a joint telegram to the Admiralty asking that the decision be “reconsidered.” Beatty, commanding the battle cruisers, telegraphed extravagantly to Churchill and Battenberg that the change “would cause unprecedented disaster. . . . Moral effect upon the fleet at such a moment would be worse than a defeat at sea. It creates impossible problems for successor.”
[Writing to his wife, Beatty was more judicious: “We received the terrible news that the Commander-in-Chief has been relieved by Jellicoe. I fear he must have been taken ill. It is a terrible handicap to start a war by losing our Commander-in-Chief and it will break his heart. Jellicoe is undoubtedly the better man and in the end it will be for the best, but he hasn’t the fleet at his fingertips at present.”]
The Admiralty replied that their lordships understood these requests, but that they ought not to have been sent. Churchill—who later admitted that what had been done to Callaghan was “cruel”—telegraphed Jellicoe: “Your feelings do you credit and we understand them. But the responsibility rests with us and we have taken our decision. Take up your great task in buoyancy and hope. We are sure that all will be well.”
The fleet’s indignation was short-lived, and Jellicoe, quickly shouldering the burden of wartime command, soon gained universal respect. Nevertheless, two officers—the two most concerned—were slow to recover from the trauma. “I hope I never have to live through such a time as I had from Friday to Tuesday,” Jellicoe wrote on August 7 to Hamilton, his successor as Second Sea Lord. “My position was horrible. I did my best but could not stop what I believe is a grave error. I trust sincerely it won’t prove to be so. Of course, each day I get more into the saddle. But the tragedy of the news to the Commander-in-C was past belief, and it was almost worse for me.” To his mother Jellicoe wrote, “I felt quite ill and could not sleep at all. It was so utterly repugnant to my feelings. But the Admiralty insisted and four hours before the fleet left, I was ordered to transfer my flag as acting Admiral to the flagship and poor Sir George Callaghan left her utterly broken down. It was a cruel and most unwise step.” Fortunately for Jellicoe, his feelings on the matter had been transparent and it soon became clear that Callaghan had understood them. On August 21, the former Commander-in-Chief wrote to his successor:
My dear Jellicoe:
My disappointment has been made much easier to bear by the very kind letters I have been receiving these last few days.
Yours of the 13th which has just reached me is one of them and I am indeed grateful to you for all you say. It was a hard time, but we will forget it as we doubtless will both have many more shocks before it is all over.
The King was most kind and did a great deal to put me right with myself.
Good luck, old Chap
Three and a half years later, when Jellicoe’s only son, George, was born, Cosmo Lang, the Archbishop of Canterbury, came to the Isle of Wight to christen the child. Crossing the Solent on the same boat, Admiral Sir George Callaghan told the archbishop that all the admirals who had served with Jellicoe in the Grand Fleet had subscribed to purchase a gold christening cup, which he would present to Jellicoe. After the dinner following the service, Jellicoe took Callaghan aside and said to him, “Look here, old chap, I have long waited to have a chance of showing you some papers to prove that I did everything I could to avoid that painful episode which neither of us can forget. Here they are.” Instantly, Callaghan replied, “Damn your papers, my dear fellow, I don’t want to see them. I have never had any doubt about it.”
Burdened by the suddenness of his appointment and the pain it had inflicted, Jellicoe took up his immense responsibilities. With the great weapon placed in his hands, he had not only to shield the coasts of Britain from invasion, to guard the exits from the North Sea, and to foil the purposes of the German High Seas Fleet; he had to do more. The nation, the navy, the Admiralty, and the ebullient First Lord expected far more. All believed in Britain’s invincibility at sea and all looked to this small man to bring them victory. And it was not just victory they demanded, but the absolute, annihilating triumph at sea bestowed upon England a century before by another small British admiral: Horatio Nelson.