“THE only man on either side who could lose the war in an afternoon.” No commander-in-chief has ever gone into battle with a greater weight on his shoulders than Admiral Sir John Jellicoe in 1916. Churchill’s words were no exaggeration: for the Royal Navy to lose control of the North Sea, and, therefore, sea supremacy, would have meant national defeat.
In the decade before the First World War, the Germans had tried to outbuild Britain in dreadnoughts, the revolutionary, all-big-gun (initially 12-inch, increasing to 15-inch), heavily armoured battleships named after the first of their class, HMS Dreadnought, launched in 1906. The Royal Navy had just managed to keep ahead in the “dreadnought race” and when war came, Jellicoe’s Grand Fleet, from its lonely fastness at Scapa Flow in the Orkneys,…