The summer of 2016 saw the 100th anniversary of the battle of Jutland, the only large-scale naval battle fought in World War I. Two new histories of the battle have joined the dozens published since the dreadnoughts of the Kaiser's High Seas Fleet and the British Grand Fleet returned to port on 1 June 1916. Jutland: The Unfinished Battle and The Battle of Jutland reach similar conclusions but differ sharply in style and will appeal to different audiences.

In his excellent discussion of gunnery, Brooks addresses three problems that led to British failures at Jutland. First, although battleship guns could fire at ranges of ten miles, British rangefinders and fire-control instruments were unsatisfactory. Worse, as Jellicoe himself knew as early as 1910, British armor-piercing shells were unreliable: in the battle, the vast majority burst on impact before penetrating armor. And, worst of all, explosions of poorly stored cordite propellant that the big guns used inflicted most of the British casualties, which were double the German losses.

The battle of Jutland began when the two scouting forces—Hipper's battlecruisers and Beatty's battlecruisers and fast battleships—met in the North Sea, south of Norway and west of Denmark. Each side succeeded in drawing the other toward its own main fleet. Disastrously, however, Beatty and his men did not deploy their ships correctly and their gunnery was very poor. The smaller German force, on the other hand, shot quite well: their hits on the turrets of British battlecruisers ignited cordite fires that spread to magazines, causing the Indefatigable, the Queen Mary, and the Invincible to explode and sink, with the loss of over three thousand men. Both books explain that British insistence on rapid fire required too much cordite to be piled in the turrets and that magazine doors were left open. In addition, the German shells performed as designed, piercing armor and then detonating. German protection of both their propellant and ships was far superior.

Two hours after the battlecruiser action began, the two main fleets met—to the great shock of Admiral Scheer, who had no idea the Grand Fleet was at sea. Admiral Jellicoe's much larger force (151 ships vs. 99) pounded the lead German battleships for several minutes, until Scheer made emergency turns to escape. When Scheer sent his battlecruisers and destroyers to attack the British, Jellicoe turned away in fear of German torpedoes. As darkness fell, the main fleets lost contact and the High Seas Fleet ran for home. Throughout the night, there were sharp encounters between the fleets—mostly destroyers and cruisers, though one old German battleship was torpedoed and sunk—while Admiral Jellicoe steamed south, unwittingly allowing the Germans to reach safety. He had received precious little information from the British ships that had engaged the enemy and was unready for a night action.

As may be seen in the following passage, Brooks technical prose makes for hard reading:

Several things stand out: Brooks reports time using a 12-hour clock, not the standard military 24-hour clock.[2] The sentence beginning "These turns by Blue Pendant…" is almost impenetrable, despite a long discussion of signal flags and maneuvering earlier in the book. Brooks also uses two bearing systems: the flag signal called for a turn to Southwest by South, and the guns of the Iron Duke were pointed on a bearing of "G28," that is, Green 28, or 28 degrees to starboard, while G90 would be pointing to a target broadside to the ship. The 290 pages on the actual combat feature many tables of signals between ships, but only six (mediocre) maps. (Jellicoe provides sixteen pages of photographs and paintings; Brooks none at all.)

By the afternoon of 1 June, both fleets, except for a few damaged vessels, were back in port, and the recrimination and finger-pointing in Great Britain had begun. Both books conduct postmortems of the battle. Brooks reviews technology and tactics in a long chapter on what went wrong in British ships, with special attention to signaling. Admiral Jellicoe had been in the dark much of the time and did not learn about the destruction of Beatty's battlecruisers until he returned to port. During most of the action, especially the night fighting when Scheer cut across his fleet's wake to escape, he had no idea where the German ships were.

Brooks's book ends with the battle, but Nick Jellicoe tells the story of the rest of World War I at sea, claiming that the German fleet's narrow escape at Jutland led directly to unrestricted submarine warfare in 1917. The High Seas Fleet was mostly confined to harbor for the remainder of the war and its poorly fed sailors mutinied two weeks before the armistice that ended the war. After the armistice, the German dreadnoughts steamed into Scapa Flow, the Grand Fleet's base, to surrender. They were eventually scuttled by their crews. Jellicoe ends his book with a long chapter titled "The Controversy: An Unfinished Battle"—essentially a survey of the unpleasant history of books on Jutland, most of them partisan, and many blaming either Admiral Jellicoe or David Beatty for both the poor performance of British ships and letting the German fleet escape destruction. This is another quite personal section; it ends with Nick Jellicoe's father marching behind Admiral Jellicoe's coffin at his funeral in 1935.

Jutland remains a thorny subject. Both books debate the historical question "who won the battle?" The British, with their centuries of naval dominance, their tradition of Nelsonian élan, and their larger, newer, and better armed fleet, nonetheless returned home with heavy losses and no victory. Yet Scheer and Hipper, whose warships had acquitted themselves so well, never again sought battle with the Grand Fleet. Despite the costly prewar arms race of the Dreadnought era, the Great War would be decided on land.