HMS Resolution commissioned

The HMS Resolution was commissioned on this date in 1916.  She would serve through both World Wars and survived being torpedoed during the Second World War.

HMHS Britanic, sister ship to the Titanic, sunk by mine

The intended White Star liner Britannic, serving the English war effort as a hospital ship, hit a mine at 08:12 on this date, in 1916, in the Kea Channel off of Greece.

She sank in a period of a little under an hour. She was the largest ship to be sunk during the First World War.

1,035 of the passengers survived the sinking.  30 lost their lives.  A further 38 were injured in the incident.  The ship carried no patients, but rather 1,065 servicemen and women, of which 673 were crew for the vessel, 315 members of the Royal Army Medical Corps and 77 were nurses.  Oddly, one of the nurses was a survivor of the sinking of the Titanic.

The Britannic was the last of the Olympic class of White Star liners.  She had only been commissioned in December 1915 after being launched in February 1914.  She had never served in her intended role.  Her loss made the Olympic the last member of the three ship class.

HMS Courageous Commissioned

The HMS Courageous was commissioned on this day in 1916.  She was the first in her class of cruisers, the Courageous class.

She was decommissioned following the Great War, but then would be rebuilt as an aircraft carrier in 1924 through 1928. On September 17, 1939, she was sunk by the U-29.

Page Updates; 2016

 January 5, 2016:

They Were Lawyers:  Nicholas "The Chieftain" Moran.

January 8, 2016:

They Were Lawyers:  Michael Punke

January 9, 2016:

Movies In History:  The List:   This is a January 9, 2016 addition that only lists the movies we've posted and reviewed in this series of posts here on the main page.  As additional movies are added, the page will be updated, but the updates won't be posted on this or subsequent update threads, as that new page only lists threads that appear here, on the main page.

They Were Clerics:   Delores Hart, Noella Marcellino.

January 12, 2016:

They Were Clerics:  Barbara Nicolosi. 

They Were Soldiers:  Sam Elliot.

January 30, 2016:

They Were Hunters or Fishermen:  Craig Strickland, Kenny Sailors, Ariel Tweto, Alfred, Von Stauffenberg, Alexander Von Stauffenberg, Berthold Von Stauffenberg, Claus Von Stauffenberg.

They Were Farmers:  Kenny Sailors.

They Were Soldiers:  Alec Guinness.

February 4, 2016

They Were Soldiers:  Kenny Sailors

They Were Clerics:   Monique Pressley

February 16, 2016

They Were Farmers:  Thomas Jefferson, William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, Ulysses S. Grant, Lyndon B. Johnson, Jimmy Carter.

They Were Hunters or Fishermen:  Antonin Scalia, Elena Kagan

March 24, 2016

They Were Hunters or Fishermen:   Lev Davidovich Bronstein (Trotsky), Alfred the Great

March 25, 2016

They Were Hunters or Fishermen:   Chuck Woolery

They Were Soldiers:  Chuck Woolery

They Were Clerics:  Antonio Vivaldi

March 29, 2016

The Were Lawyers:  Patrick Pearse

They Were Soldiers:  James Connolly

April 2, 2016

The Poster Gallery:  Posters of World War One:

 

May 3, 2016: 

They Were Soldiers:  James and Walter McIlhenny. 

August 17, 2016

They Were Clerics:  John McLaughlin. 

August 18, 2016 

They Were Solders:  Steve Bannon

The Poster Gallery:  Posters of World War One

 

September 1, 2016:   

They Were Solders:  Gene Wilder 

September 15, 2016

They Were Lawyers:  Basil W. Duke

 They Were Solders:   Hugh O'Brian

September 27, 2016:

They Were Solder:  Arnold Palmer

October 5, 2016

They were Hunters or Fishermen:   Arthur Davidson, William S. Harley.

October 9, 2016

They Were Teachers

This page was added.  Like the "they were" threads on this site, this thread was an individual thread on this blog for quite awhile.  I've let this one languish for quite awhile and even forgot that I'd posted it, but ran across it the other day and set it aside as its own page.

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.

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.

HMHS Britanic sunk by mine on this day in 1916

The HMHS Britannic, a sister ship of the Titanic, was sunk by a mine in the Aegean.  Thirty lives were lost in the sinking.  She was the largest ship lost during the war.  She was serving in the  Royal Navy as a hospital ship.