THE JUTLAND BATTLE.

Hawera Star, Volume XLVIII, 6 December 1924, Page 13

THE JUTLAND BATTLE.

■ = “ POOR GERMAN GUNNERY. ’ ’ HOW VISIBILITY AFFECTED THE BRITiSH FLEET. From a naval correspondent who has made an extensive ancfcareful study of the subject the British Navy League has recently received a series of articles contributed by him -to a journal in the north with the object of emphasising the point that visibility was the dominant factor in the battle of Jusland.

He stresses the point of the fearful disadvantage under which’the British Fleet, and particularly, the battlecruisers and Fifth Battle Squadron, fought, owing to the overwhelming advantage the Germans possessed on account of the visibility, from east to west being so' much better than from west to east. At 6.30 p.m. visibility—gone from bad to worse—was more in British favour than in German. In his covering letter the correspondent writes as follows:

“My object in the articles was ,to point out something like the following: The fine weather liiaximum gun range of the British Fleet was 19,000—22,000 yards; that of the German, 16,900 19,000 yards.

{ ‘Actually conditions of visibility during the battle-cruiser ‘ action were such that while the maximum German gun range remained at 16;000—19,000 that of the British was reduced to 9000 -11,000 yards. -As - the ranges never closed to less than 11,000, any effective return fire by the British cruisers was out of the question. Had German gunnery been even average, not a single British cruiser should have got back. The Germans had an absolutely overwhelming tactical advantage. “These conditions were very forcibly brought home to me once when out in the Channel. A strong easterly wind was blowing down Channel, raising a kind of vertical misty haze. We had to close to 3500 yards to see the target sufficiently well to fire at it., while‘to the west visibility was extreme—certainly twelve miles. If our target had been firing at us we should not have had a dog’s chatfce unless their gunnery was, to put it mildly, ‘rotten.’ This is, to my mind, the British cruiser action in a nutshell. Any writer on Jutland who does not grasp this point, in my humble opinion, will miss the dominant factor in-the battle. Sufficient information is now available from German sources to assign to ‘visibility’ not a relative value, but an absolute one. Absolute in tb? sense that it put the British cruisers out of action. An outstanding feature of Jutland was the poor German gunnery.”