John Brooks (5) (1942–)

Although this is not the first book you should read about the still controversial battle, Brooks has a lot to offer the informed reader. Essentially, Brooks is seeking to answer the question how this all wound up looking like a tactical failure for the Royal Navy, which entails lining up all the factors that went into John Jellicoe's thinking as commander of the British Grand Fleet. What it essentially boils down to is that while Jellicoe verged on the notorious for his fear of underwater weaponry, he did have legitimate reasons for those fears; this still didn't prevent him from seeking decision when the chance presented itself. However, losing contact with the German High Seas Fleet overnight is always going to look like a dodgy matter, particularly since it's the communication procedures that Jellicoe established himself that failed him. Still, no British commander would have taken on the Germans in their own waters, when there was no real need. Perhaps the most useful point that Brooks makes, in the course of a really excellent examination of the night-time skirmishing between the two forces, is that the British destroyer force was scattered and decimated at dawn, and that alone was a factor that would have given any commander legitimate pause.… (más)

An essential addition to modern appraisal of the Royal Navy's Dreyer Fire Control Tables which it used to calculate gunfire solutions at the Battle of Jutland in World War I. Prior to the emergence of this book, the arcane subject was covered primarily by the writings of a single influential author, Professor Jon Sumida. The book up-ends several longstanding misconceptions of what the Dreyer tables could do, and compares them favorably in some, but not all aspects to the Argo Aim Correction system consistently championed by Professor Sumida's works, most notably "In Defence of Naval Supremacy".

Foremost amongst Brooks's additions to the field is to illustrate in the clearest terms that most of the Dreyer tables used at Jutland were "helm free" and therefore capable of factoring out the influence on the gunfire solution of the maneuvering of one's own vessel. This is paired with a nuanced mathematical derivation that softens the impact of an acknowledged deficiency of the Dreyer tables in that their range integrating "clocks" could not continuously vary their output beyond the first derivative (rate of change of range) by demonstrating that the resultant errors never attain significant magnitudes in plausible encounters.

Brooks offers his own detailed accounting of why Admiral Beatty's battle cruisers fared so poorly in their gunnery exchange with the German Scouting Group in their Run to the South, attributing the difficulty to clumsy handling of the British ships which kept many of them blinded by funnel smoke and a reflexive disregard of trends suggested in the few accurate ranges taken. The impression taken is that it would have mattered little what equipment was processing the sparse range data taken under the circumstances. It is unlikely that this contention will convince every reader, but I took it as a voice of reason and one worth considering even if not regarded as conclusive.

A bookshelf featuring both the works of Sumida and Brooks is one that crackles with energy. It is difficult to think that there will not be further clarification, contention, and perhaps some resolution in future offerings from the two men.… (más)