With its terrible loss of life and serious faults in fighting protocols for a then modern sea battle, the British nation was aghast in 1916 when the expected Trafalgar style victory over the German fleet not only failed to materialise, but what did was three times the deaths and more ships lost than the Germans, who on those two measures claimed victory. The carnage of the Somme was shortly to follow, so 1916 was a sobering year for Britain, its pride and its Empire. It was also the first year of grief for families on a scale not previously imagined or foreseen.
A century later as commemorations are organised to remember the dead of Jutland on both sides, a more measured view suggests that what was at one level a failure of battle potential, was at another a strategic victory. For the German fleet retreated to port, never to venture out again and the Royal Navy enforced its blockade, which reduced German civilians to malnutrition and hunger, which at times came close to starvation. Later in the Atlantic, the German counter-attack with U boats sinking vast tonnages of merchant shipping carrying essential supplies, Great Britain came as close as it ever got to losing the war.
These are sobering reflections since both strategies were aimed at bringing the enemy to its knees through civilian suffering rather than battlefield triumph, a form of warfare of which the United States has never been victim except at its own hand in the Civil War. It is perhaps fitting that the UK referendum on whether to remain a member of the EU comes in the interval between the centenaries of Jutland and the Somme.
It also trumps all other reasons of why it is we joined the EU in the first place and why it is imperative that we remain as one of the keystone powers of perhaps the greatest union of conciliation in history.