More from Robert K. Massie, Castles of Steel: Britain, Germany, and the Winning of the Great War at Sea.

Decades ago I read John Irving’s The Smoke Screen of Jutland and so was familiar with the course of the battle. I had not known, or had forgotten one story:

One captain wore irregular dress. New Zealand’s John Green had a green stone tiki pendant around his neck, and his waist was wrapped in a black-and-white flax Maori kilt called a piu-piu , both gifts presented to the ship by a tribal chief during the battle cruiser’s visit to the Dominion in 1913. Along with the gifts came the chief’s request that they be worn by the captain whenever New Zealand went into action; if this ritual was faithfully observed, he promised, the battle cruiser would not be seriously harmed. On this day , the news that the captain was wearing his necklace and his kilt spread reassurance among the crew . And when the Battle of Jutland was over , New Zealand, hit only once by a heavy shell, was the only one of Beatty’s six battle cruisers to suffer no significant damage and escape all casualties.

Her sister ship H.M.S. Indefatigable was blown up in the battle with the loss of almost all hands, as was the Queen Mary a little later. This led Admiral Beatty to say “There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today.” Later in the day Invincible, one of the victors at the Falkland Islands, suffered the same fate.

After the Battle Admiral Jellicoe, commander of the British Grand Fleet, was severely criticized for not pursuing the the German High Seas Fleet. His defense was that his fleet was not trained for a night action and that such a pursuit would expose it to a torpedo attack, a concern that he had documented before the battle. Jellicoe knew that he was “the only man on either side who could lose the war in an afternoon”. He was eventually replaced as commander of the Grand Fleet.

[Britain’s senior admiral had been dismissed by a costumed railway man, acting on behalf of a prime minister whose attitude toward the “High Admirals” was “Sack the lot!” The man who had trained the Grand Fleet for battle, who had issued the crucial deployment command at Jutland and sent the German navy fleeing into harbor, whose fleet had enforced the blockade that destroyed Germany’s will to fight, and who, before departing, had broken the back of the U-boat campaign, was gone.