Irving, John - The Smoke Screen of Jutland (1966 1st. ed.)

Irving, Commander John - The Smoke Screen of Jutland

London, William Kimber, 1966, first edition

Hardcover. Black cloth. Title in silver on spine. With dust jacket
16,5 x 24 x 3,5 cm.
256 Pages

GOOD/ VERY GOOD
Small imperfections tot the dust jacket
Scribble on first free endpaper

Illustrated with black & white photo’s and drawings

It was the first and only time that the opposing British and German battle fleets were ever to meet. It was the first time the British fleet had been in major action for over a hundred years.
As the light scouting forces probed out across the North Sea towards Denmark, a British cruiser sighted a stopped steamer: Moments later, she saw that the steamer was not alone, for there were destroyers standing by – German destroyers.
Beyond them was a force of battle-cruisers under Admiral Hipper, and over the horizon beyond them was the whole German High Seas Fleet, which had left the safety of its ports to try to decoy and annihilate a portion of their enemy.
Now the had found the battle-cruiser force commanded by Admiral Sir David Beatty, a popular hero, wit a force of six battle-cruisers and the close support of four of the most powerful battleships in the world.
By 3,92 p.m., on 31st May 1916, Beatty was in action with the German battle-cruisers, and the Grand Fleet was 60 miles away. But he was certain of victory, for the Germans had only five battle-cruisers to match against his six, and he had the battleships as well.
But things were going wrong: within fourteen minutes, he had lost one battle-cruiser, which had blown up with appalling loss of life; and twenty-four minutes after that a second British battle-cruiser had vanished in a mushroom cloud of smoke and debris.
The tables had been dramatically turned. How had it happened?
Commander John Irving, R.N. retd., a midshipman in Ajax during the battle and a Second World War gunnery expert who has analysed all the records of the Battle of Jutland, including many unpublished ones of the highest importance had reached the startling conclusion in the instance that during this first action German guns claimed three times as many hits on British ships as the British guns claimed on them. Clearly there was something wrong, with a fleet that had cost so much to construct and upon which Britain’s safety and prestige depended. Was it the failure of the orders issued by its commanders, or of the system which governed the fleet’s dispositions?
Commander Irving had written a powerful defense of the Grand Fleet’s controversial Commander-in-chief, Sir John Jellicoe. He has produced ample evidence that it was the individuals who failed – the commanding officers who failed to report during the day that they had seen the enemy turn away into the distant mists, and who failed again at night tot report to Jellicoe that they had sighted the battleships of his adversary, Admiral Scheer; who omitted to open fire on ships that were attacking them, in case they were their own; and who dismissed as mere ‘breaches of procedure’ the failure of the strange ships to respond correctly when challenged. Gravest of all was the failure of the Admirality to pass on to Admiral Jellicoe a series of seven intercepted German signals stating the enemy’s exact positions and intensions throughout their last desperate dash for home through the night.
When dawn broke, the enemy had gone; Scheer had escaped defeat. Was it a British victory?
Only after the war could it be seen that it was the Battle of Jutland that made the ultimate victory of 1918 possible…

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