OLD DUFFER'S
BOOK CORNER

The Rules of the Game

Andrew Gordon for John Murray

Jutland as a topic is one which I have usually avoided, I have enough vendettas of my own without pursuing others. In the gaming world the original Jutland was so obviously tooooo big that I missed it. Ben Knight's game for XTR was a much better work as a system to simulate quickly and effectively dreadnought warfare, but I felt it missed out in that the reasons for the actions of the various admirals was missing, no chance of steaming north into the Grand Fleet when you can see it coming towards you! Andrew Gordon's books shows what was missing - Chaos, and lots of it. Beatty and Evans-Thomas (battlecruisers and fast battleships respectively) both manage to get themselves in a terrible pickle of the kind that would tempt Scheer to keep moving towards them.

A complete landlubber I found Gordon's explanation of how this confusion could have arisen fascinating, and the organisational weakness saddening. As 5BS heads north at speed Gordon takes us away from the North Sea to the Med and the loss of Admiral Tryon in HMS Victoria (the basis of the Kind Hearts and Coronets death of Admiral D'Ascoyne). Tryon was (before he wigged out) the Royal Navy's best hope for Nelsonian manoeuvre, and (argues Dr Gordon) the fellows that followed him were good committee men and damn bad fighters. Back at the battle for the last third of the book we see the German turn and the night manoeuvres (not to mention the post-war spin battles).

Gordon is pretty fair in his explanations, and it is not within my abilities to question his technical arguments. The most interesting thing to me was that at no stage did the High Seas Fleet matter, it got very lucky at Jutland and still amounted to nothing. The Royal Navy was so magnificent its only real surface enemy was itself (and it gave a good account here regrettably). A big book, at times a bit technical but ultimately worth the steaming.

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© Copyright 1997 by Charles and Teresa Vasey.
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