Distant Victory: The Battle of Jutland and the Allied Triumph in the First World War (review)

Andrew Gordon, in his book Rules of the Game: Jutland and British NavalCommand, states that entering World War I the Royal Navy suffered from a certain intellectual lassitude brought on during "the long calm lee of Trafalgar." Perhaps it did, but all new books on the Battle of Jutland unquestionably labor in the long stark shadow of Gordon's 600+-page magnum opus. Daniel Allen Butler's Distant Victory certainly does.

In its favor, Distant Victory is a good read. Butler's thesis is that Jutland was a major strategic victory that shaped the outcome of World War I; it was not the draw or tactical German success it has sometimes been made out to be. Such a thesis is reasonable and defensible, but not a startlingly new assertion. The book makes two points well—that Jutland was tied very closely to the public relations fiasco that was the sinking of the Lusitania, and that the personalities of admirals Jellicoe, Scheer, Beatty, and Hipper had more to do with the outcome on 31 May 1916 than the technical idiosyncrasies of various classes of Dreadnoughts. His short portraits of each of the four admirals are enjoyable and illuminating. Butler's admiration for Sir John Jellicoe is shared by this author, so it is hard for me to fault the way a slight bias creeps in when Butler compares Beatty negatively to Jellicoe. But what hurts the book is not bias, or even its surprising number of factual errors. In the opening section Butler wrongly states that the Continental System was in place at the time of Trafalgar, and that the Battle of Austerlitz took place before, not more than a month after, Nelson's triumph. Later, he misidentifies the battlecruiser Tiger as a "Lion" class ship, and dates the loss of the battleship Royal Oak to 1940 rather than 1939. Butler's descriptions of Arthur Balfour as a "political hack" and Neville Chamberlain as a "buffoonish amateur" are silly and gratuitous, as his hero worship for the "genius" Winston Churchill is cloying. These are minor problems, but annoying.

What hurts the book most is its lack of historiographical context and engagement. Butler uses no citations, and his bibliography reveals astonishing holes. Collected papers and selected secondary sources do not seem to have been supplemented by digging at the Public Record Office. No journal articles are listed in the Sources section. Critical scholarship seems to have gone unread. Butler talks about early steam battleships but does not list John Beeler in his bibliography. He discusses Sir John Fisher without mentioning Jon Sumida or Nicholas Lambert. He describes World War I naval operations without reference to Paul Halpern, and talks about Tirpitz without so much as a whiff of Holger Herwig. Such oversights cast doubt on the author's analysis and conclusions.

Overall, Distant Victory is an entertaining introduction to the Jutland era in naval history, but is shallow and incomplete. It provides a good read for buffs, but little of use for historians. Not recommended as value for money in a professional's collection.