Thursday, December 13, 1923. Mexican Federals Mobilize

Ruth Muskrat presented Gustavus Elmer Emmanuel Lindquist′s book The Red Man In The United States to President Calvin Coolidge.  Highly educated, the Oklahoma native had a Cherokee father and an Irish/English American mother.  A pioneer in many ways in both societies, she was a professional educator and died in 1982 at age 84.

The Federal Government was mobilizing in Mexico. 

And booze was flowing south.

Lord Alfred Douglas was sentenced to six months in prison for libeling Winston Churchill.  He had printed a newspaper article claiming that Churchill had been paid to release a false report about the Battle of Jutland in order to cause stocks to decrease in value so that a group of Jewish investors could take advantage of it, all of which was false, as well as racist.

Lawrence Sperry, age 30, inventor of the autopilot and the artificial horizon, died in an airplane accident over the English Channel. Taking off in fog, his airplane simply disappeared.

Thursday, August 16, 1923. Antarctic Governor

With at least an element of hubris, Viscount Jellicoe, the Governor General of New Zealand, was designated the Governor of the Ross Dependency in Antarctica.

There is something so British about this, it isn't funny. . . or rather it is.

Jellicoe commanded the Royal Navy at the Battle of Jutland, the singular great naval battle of the Great War, which by any rational definition was a Royal Navy victory and which demonstrated, beyond that, that the the surface fleet of the Imperial German Kreigsmarine was an expensive waste of resources. So he was due his honors.

Still, Jellicoe nearly defines the high empire age, which started to dwindle following World War One.

More locally, headline use of "last rights" was incorrect, but the grief was genuine.

The local news, June 2, 1916. The Battle of Jutland hits the news. . . but not quite accurately.

Residents of Cheyenne were waking up to the shocking news that the British had a "naval disaster", something that was far from the truth.

This is interesting in several respects.  One is that it still took some time for news of naval engagements, not surprisingly, to hit the wire services.  That isn't surprising.  The other interesting thing is, of course, the matter of perception. Today we'd regard the Battle of Jutland as a British victory or, at worst, a draw, albeit one with some serious British losses. At the time, however, the press, at least locally, was weighing the British losses to conclude the Royal Navy had been beaten.

It's also important to note, however, the propaganda aspect of this. 

As noted, the British effort at Jutland was to keep the German High Seas Fleet in harbor, or to sink it. Either way, the British had to keep it from breaking out into the North Atlantic.  If the Germans had managed to do that, the Germans may have seriously contested for control of the North Atlantic.  Indeed, what would have occurred is a big spike in the loss of commercial shipping, the probable near complete shut down of the sea life line to the Allies at this critical point in the war, and a massive game of cat and mouse until one or the other of the fleets got the advantage of the other. There's no real way to tell how that would have come out.

So, the British effort, as we know, was to keep the Germans from breaking out, either by keeping them bottled up, or destroying the fleet. An outright destruction of an opposing force would have been a great thing for the navy achieving it, but very risky at the same time.

It's widely assumed now that the Royal Navy had such an advantage in the final maneuvers at Jutland that it could have in fact destroyed the German Navy.  But what it it had?  It would have made little difference to the war effort, as the Allies could not effect a sea landing on the German coast. So the risk entailed in achieving that had to be weighed against the risk of loosing the British fleet.  If that had occurred, the Germans, absent a sudden American intervention, would have won the war within a matter of months. Even in the highly unlikely scenario of the United States intervening in 1916, it's quite uncertain that the US could have swept the Germans from the North Atlantic.  Jellicoe was right not to risk it.

In not risking it, of course, he was risking a later German outbreak, and the British had to live with that.  But, hindsight being 20/20, what actually occurred is that the German navy became an expensive liability to Germany.  It was impossible, in those days, not to keep the ships basically ready to put to sea at any time, which meant that the Germans had to consume expensive resources simply to keep the fleet.  Having determined not to use it again, the Germans would have been better off simply docking the entire thing and walking away from it, but no nation can do that.  So, the Germans consumed fuel, oil  and rations for something it could ill afford and didn't need.  German sailors, in turn, became radicalized and actually sparked the rebellion in 1918 that would bring Imperial Germany down.

The only part of the German Navy that remained viable was the submarine wing of it. But it was primitive and figured outside the morals of the Edwardian world.  Indeed, it quite frankly figures outside the morals of the world of 2016 as well.  Primitive ships that were barely able to engage in combat underwater, they relied upon stealth and darkness for cover, and normally attacked on the surface.  Tiny ships, they couldn't pick up the survivors of their attacks as a rule, and a single merchant seaman determining to fight on with small arms could sink them.  And yet Imperial Germany had to turn to them.

Before that, however, its High Seas Fleet would go back into harbor. Germany would report the British losses, which were truly grater than its own, and the Press would react as if it was a German victory, as seen here.

It wasn't.

The local news, June 1, 1916. No Jutland yet

But both the epic Battle of Verdun and the ongoing Punitive Expedition were.

And there's an education headline that looks surprisingly similar to those we read today.

So, on the day thousands lost their lives violently at sea, what did the local news look like? May 31, 1916

Well, given that the Battle of Jutland was a naval battle, we can't expect it to show up in the day's news, even the late editions, at all.

Indeed, something that's easy to forget about the battle, as we tend to think of the later battles of World War Two a bit more (which also features some large surface engagements, contrary to the myth to the contrary) is that World War One naval battles were exclusively visual in nature.

That's not to say that radio wasn't used, it most certainly was. But targeting was all visual.  And as the battle took place in the North Sea, dense fog and hanging smoke played a prominent role in the battle.

Now, we note that, as while the British and German fleets were using radio communications, they weren't broadcasting the news, and they wouldn't have done that even if it were the 1940s.  And the radio communications were there, but exclusively military.  News of the battle had to wait until the fleets returned home, which is interesting in that the Germans were closer to their ports, so closer to press outlets.  Indeed, the point of the battle was to keep the Germans in port, or at the bottom of the sea.

So, on this day of a major battle, maybe in some ways the major battle of World War One, what news did local residents see?

The death of Mr. Hill, and the draft Roosevelt movement were receiving headline treatment in Sheridan.

I'm surprised that there was a University of Wyoming student newspaper for this day, as I would have thought that the university would have been out of school by then.  Maybe not.  However.  Interesting to note that this was published the day after Memorial Day, so it was a contemporary paper.  Now, the current paper, The Branding Iron, is weekly, I think.  The crises of the times show up in the form of UWs early ROTC making an appearance on Memorial Day.

The Battle of Jutland Commences: May 31, 1916

The epic clash of the German and British fleets commences off of Jutland.  The end result is still debated, but that the British retained naval dominance in the Atlantic is not.

Of small interest here, Jutland is that Danish peninsula that juts into the North Sea and which some believe gave its name to the Jutes, once of the three Germanic tribes that immigrated to Great Britain in the 400s.

The 1916 naval battle has gone down as oddly contested in its recollections, which it still is today.  The Germans immediately declared it a victory, but as British historians have noted, the end result was that the German fleet was bottled up for the rest of the war where it did nothing other than consume resources and, in the end, contribute to revolt against its employer.

The battle is seen this way as Admiral Jellicoe did not crush the German fleet and because the British lost more men and ships than the Germans did.  In strategic terms, however, its clear that the British turned the Germans back and sent them back into port. . . forever.  Strategically, therefore, it was a British victory.  The debate otherwise is due to the lasting strong suspicion that the British could have actually continued the contest and demolished the German fleet, which would have ended any threat of German surface action for the remainder of the war.  Admiral Jellicoe did not do that, but then as was pointed out by Winston Churchill he was the only commander in the war who was capable of loosing the war in a day, which no doubt factored in his mind.  Had the British guess wrong in the battle, and the early stages of the battle were all guess work, the result may well have resulted in Allied loss in the war itself.

Jutland stands out as such a clash of naval giants that its somewhat inaccurately remembered as the "only" clash of dreadnoughts, which it isn't.  It was, however, a massive example of a naval engagement between two highly competent massive surface fleets.  It wasn't the first one of the war, but it would be the last one.  In spite of the seeming ambiguity of the result, the battle effectively destroyed Germany's surface fleet abilities forever.