Books like The Jutland Scandal — picked by fans

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.

I love this book because it encapsulates a theme that I very much enjoy reading and writing about.

A man discovers knowledge, in this case by accident, regarding a matter affecting the nominal head of government of his state (in this case, the USA), and the security organisation of the government (CIA) is desperate to track him down and eliminate him.

I like the aspect of will they or won’t they unmask and silence him. 

This is a book which lodges between the chase type of plot, and the "who dunnit."

The chase aspect revolves around a retired MI5 agent who is brought in to investigate a realised data leakage, and the painstaking process of eliminating suspects until the perpetrator is found. Not so much a "who dunnit," as a "who’s doing it." 

The story has authenticity inasmuch as the author was a member of the security services during the war.

The hero finds himself in the know about state secrets, which he has stumbled across accidentally. As a result, he finds he is being pursued by two separate organisations, his own state security and those of the Russians.

Throughout it’s a case of will he or won’t he escape the clutches of both MI5 and the KGB. Like it for the suspense it creates.

In this case, the hero possesses knowledge, by virtue of his profession, of particular armament systems, and members of another country are desperate to prevent his knowledge from being used by his home nation.

Again, I liked the suspense. I liked the aspect of an ordinary person being catapulted into the world of high intrigue, which he is ill-equipped to handle. The action takes place aboard a ship making a trip from Turkey into Europe, so the main character cannot escape from this capsule in place and time.

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.

This is the ‘Appreciation’ that Admirals Harper and Bacon responded to. It was never published or edited for publication at the time it was written by Captains A C and G B Dewar in 1920-21.

Both were firmly in the Beatty “charge the guns and slug it out ship to ship” faction and even Admirals Chatham and Keys, both Beatty supporters found it far, far too one-sided and likely to divide the RN into factions (Jutland still does). Though it was never published, copies did circulate and Churchill obviously had a copy since he quotes it in his own book “The World Crisis”. Eventually, in 1928, orders were given that all copies were to be collected and destroyed…some survived.

This book is remarkable in that it is the work of two historians who reproduce the original text with explanatory notes, annotations, and additional material. Reading it soon leads the reader… show more.

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.

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.