Debate Magazine
Seeing as World War I is back in fashion, here's something I've been meaning to post about for ages. From Wiki: At the time, Jellicoe was criticised for his caution and for allowing Scheer to escape. Beatty, in particular, was convinced that Jellicoe had missed a tremendous opportunity to annihilate the High Seas Fleet and win what would amount to another Trafalgar... The controversy raged within the navy and in public for about a decade after the war. Criticism focused on Jellicoe's decision at 19:15. Scheer had ordered his cruisers and destroyers forward in a torpedo attack to cover the turning away of his battleships. Jellicoe chose to turn to the southeast, and so keep out of range of the torpedoes. If, instead, he had turned to the west, could his ships have dodged the torpedoes and destroyed the German fleet..? Part of the justification/explanation for Jellicoe throwing in the towel and going home even though his fleet probably outnumbered and outgunned the Germans, thus earning himself an undeserved reputation as a bit of a coward, is not mentioned in that section of the Wiki entry and is a bit more prosaic than that. The point was that even though people had worked out how to send Morse messages by radio ("wireless") twenty years earlier and the German navy had adopted the technology, the British Fleet still communicated using flags, making it more or less impossible to operate a fleet after dark. The awesome Flags Of The World site explains.
