The single best work of reportage about the battlecruiser, ever, by
a war correspondent who was with Beatty's Battlecruiser Squadron at
Jutland. Filson Young: the Bob Woodward of battlecruisers.An
excerpt: Here, then, was the ideal type for which Lord Fisher in
our conversations had so often sighed; and I was secretly
disappointed when, on my mentioning Fisher's name, Beatty merely
smiled. And I was still more crestfallen when, a few days later, I
spoke of Beatty enthusiastically to Lord Fisher, he gave me a
blank, sour look and said: "Really? Never met him."I did not know
the Navy as well in those days as I know it now, or I would have
been less surprised than I was that the obviously ablest men in
control of naval affairs were far from seeing eye to eye with one
another, and even (what was more remarkable) neglected to make any
real study of one another's aims and potentialities. Naval thought,
where it existed, was divided into camps, each one regarding
victory over the others as essential to victory over the Germans.
Thus Lord Charles Beresford, whose best work in his retirement was
his untiring public advocacy of naval efficiency, gave one in
private a most alarming impression that the Navy was already
practically in German control; and one of his mildest views of Lord
Fisher was that he was a madman who, on the eve of war, had
deliberately scrapped the majority of our cruisers. Winston
Churchill was at one time probably one of the men most disliked by
the Navy at large; but when one tried to discuss his administration
seriously, one was told stories of his bad manners: as, for
example, of his going on board a ship, entering the wardroom,
ringing the bell and sending for the Commander - a solecism the
gravity of which one must have lived in a wardroom to appreciate.
And yet, one felt, it was not quite an argument against his
efficiency as an administrator. But all the naval officer saw was a
man to whose power our sacred naval traditions were committed, and
who apparently knew or cared so little for the smallest of them
that the greatest might well be in peril at his hands. The
anti-Churchill camp was a very strong one. He, on the other hand,
seemed to regard Lord Fisher as a dangerous genius to be caught,
chained, tamed, and made careful use of; Lord Fisher regarded him
(I am speaking of the two years before the war) as a politician to
be fought or flattered, made or destroyed, according to his degree
of adaptability to the great purpose.
General
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