Dreadnought Gunnery and the Battle of Jutland: The Question of Fire Control (review)

The effectiveness of long-range naval gunnery during the Russo-Japanese War ushered in the era of the all-big-gun dreadnought. Although naval guns could fire great distances, achieving hits was an important technological goal within the international naval race. Battleship fire control involved iteratively measuring the range and bearing to the target, accounting for one's own ship's movement, and solving differential equations involving the rate of change of bearing and range. Accurate observations, coupled with an effective electromechanical computer, could direct shells onto the predicted location of a targeted ship.

The British Royal Navy pursued various combinations of devices. Previous historiography has focused on the Admiralty's 1913 rejection of fire-control machinery offered by the civilian entrepreneur Arthur Pollen in favor of that developed by Frederic Dreyer, a Royal Navy officer. In this view, Dreyer's system was plagiarized partially from Pollen but was inferior and contributed to the sinking of two British battlecruisers during the Battle of Jutland and the death of almost 2,300 crewmen.

John Brooks, a former computer engineer, has refined his King's College London doctoral thesis, completed under naval historian Andrew Lambert, into a meticulously argued revision of early-twentieth-century British fire control. Brooks drew on his engineering background to analyze the details of each evolving component in both the Pollen and Dreyer systems. His account is based on extensive analysis of Admiralty records and detailed comparisons of each stage in the development of the competing systems. If there is a weakness in this book, it is in the sometimes confusing presentation of the evolution of numerous, seemingly similar, fire-control components. (Having served as an officer in an old, all-gun destroyer whose fire-control systems contained similar, but newer, electromechanical components, I engaged this book with some familiarity.) The early chapters recounting the detailed evolution of the competing Pollen and Dreyer systems are necessary to understand the merits of each system, their chronological relationships, and the role of the Royal Navy in their development and employment. Nonetheless, a more careful organization would have eased a reader's comprehension of the subassemblies within the different fire-control machinery considered and tested by the Royal Navy.

Brooks's last four chapters deal with: the influences behind the Admiralty's selection of the fire-control machinery it would take into World War I; fire-control training and operation in the fleet; an assessment of the Royal Navy's fire-control equipment during and after the Battle of Jutland; Brooks's argument for a new historical assessment of the Royal Navy's treatment of new technologies; and the claimed superiority of the civilian-outsider Pollen's Argo system. In his careful analysis of the battlecruiser action at Jutland, Brooks dispels the contention that Pollen's system would have better served Admiral David Beatty. The problem was not an inability of the British systems to calculate the change in range rate of their German adversaries; rather, that measured ranges "were too few and too inaccurate" (p. 285). Based on his analysis of Royal Navy records, Brooks maintains that at "no time did the rates come anywhere near the maximum values for which the Dreyer Tables were designed (+/– 2000yds/min.)" (p. 285). The problem for Beatty's force at Jutland lay not in its fire-control machinery per se, but with its operation and Beatty's tactical errors.

One of the key arguments for the superiority of the rejected Pollen system was the award made to him by the Royal Commission on Awards to Inventors (RCAI) after its 1925 hearing. Brooks's review of the RCAI hearings indicates that two of its key members "had not clearly grasped" the functional distinctions between components of the Pollen and Dreyer systems. The award made to Pollen was justified, according to Brooks, for his "undoubted contributions to the development of fire control" (p. 292). However, the...