Beatty takes command of the Grand Fleet

On 29 November 1916 the First Lord of the Admiralty, Arthur Balfour, announced in the House of Commons the greatest changes in the command of the Royal Navy since the beginning of the war. Admiral John Jellicoe, commander of the Grand Fleet since August 1914, was to become First Sea Lord, that is, the professional head of the navy. His place at the head of the fleet was taken by Vice-Admiral David Beatty, until then commander of the battlecruisers. The outgoing First Sea Lord, Henry Jackson, was going to the post of President of the Royal Naval College at Greenwich. Balfour added that the decisions had been taken earlier, but the announcement had been delayed for military reasons. By the time of the announcement Beatty was already in command of the fleet.

The submarine crisis

The changes were forced above all by the submarine war. In the autumn of 1916 German submarines were again sinking more and more merchant ships, and the existing methods of defence, as Balfour himself admitted, were proving to be half-measures. The press and Parliament also criticised the Admiralty for the unpunished raids by German destroyers in the Strait of Dover and the air raids on the coast. For weeks Jellicoe had been sending alarming memoranda to London about the growing threat to shipping. According to the British official history of the war at sea, he therefore seemed the man who ought now to take responsibility for it.

The British official history states that on 22 November, as Jellicoe was preparing to take the fleet out for exercises, he received a telegram offering him the post of First Sea Lord. Jellicoe himself described in his memoirs that the telegram arrived on 24 November, just before his flagship, the battleship Iron Duke, slipped her moorings. The fleet’s chief of staff, Admiral Charles Madden, advised him to accept so that he could put his own views on fighting submarines into practice himself. After the exercises Jellicoe handed over command to his second-in-command, Admiral Cecil Burney, and on 27 November met Balfour at Rosyth. He accepted the post and learned then that Beatty would succeed him. On 28 November, “with a very heavy heart”, he left the Iron Duke. According to his memoirs, in taking leave of the crew he predicted that he himself would now become the target of the same attacks as his predecessor.

The young admiral

Beatty was 45 and clearly younger than most of the admirals he now commanded. He was renowned for dash and daring. At the Battle of Jutland it was his battlecruisers that first engaged the Germans and led the High Seas Fleet under the guns of Jellicoe’s battleships, but they lost three ships in doing so. Ever since the battle a dispute had been going on in the navy and in the press over whether more of the blame for the incomplete result lay with Jellicoe’s caution or with Beatty’s mistakes. Beatty’s appointment, with promotion to acting admiral, did not settle this dispute. According to his biographers, however, there was no real alternative to him.

The changes at the top were accompanied by the replacement of many commanders. Burney went with Jellicoe to the Admiralty as Second Sea Lord, and Rear-Admiral Alexander Duff took over the new Anti-Submarine Division. At Beatty’s request command of the battlecruisers passed to William Pakenham, who had served in these ships for years, and Rear-Admiral Osmond Brock became chief of staff to the new commander-in-chief.

After the change

According to the British chronology of the war, Jellicoe officially took up the office of First Sea Lord on 4 December. The very next day the prime minister, Herbert Henry Asquith, resigned, and in the new cabinet of David Lloyd George Balfour was replaced at the Admiralty by Edward Carson. Beatty took over from Jellicoe the cautious strategy agreed after the August sortie of the High Seas Fleet, and although he was regarded as an advocate of bold action, he did not seek battle at any price. He commanded the Grand Fleet until the end of the war, and on 21 November 1918 he received the surrender of the German fleet, which sailed into the Firth of Forth and from there went on to internment at Scapa Flow.