Last Ride of the High Seas Fleet: Battle of Texel 1918 (a Drachinifel What If)

[Weaver]

Last Ride of the High Seas Fleet - Battle of Texel 1918

A Drachinifel video from a couple of years ago in which he explores the question: What If the German Grand Fleet hadn't fallen prey to mutinies and sailed as planned for one final, all-out battle in the North Sea at the end of the war? His wargame group ran a series of games and then they colated all the common results and eliminated the oddball ones, although he goes over some of the latter at the end.

The result is kinda 'yikes'...  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrTeYcRXDEw

[sideshowbob9]

Haven't watched the video but a scenario where the HSF forces battle with the Grand Fleet (as opposed to attempting to isolate a portion) results in them being curb-stomped in 1916. In 1918? Ridiculously more so. The only hope of "victory" for the HSF is to engage and sink a detached wing of the Grand Fleet and then withdraw quickly and they knew it. Anything else is fantasy.

[Weaver]

The plan was real: the ships were ordered to sail, but several crews mutinied and the operation was cancelled:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_order_of_24_October_1918

The intention was to do as much damage to the Grand Fleet as possible, thereby improving Germany's position in the peace negotiations. Whether that was realistic is debateable to say the least, but it came within a hair's breadth of being launched, and as Drach's video shows, no version of it where the two fleets actually meet ends well.

[NARSES2]

Part of the reason for the mutiny was that the High Seas Fleet's commanders saw it as a "last ride of the Valkyries" death ride and the ordinary seaman didn't fancy it at all. However the reasons for the mutiny went far, far deeper than that. It was possibly the tipping point however.

After being cooped up in harbour for nigh on two years you also have to ask how many of the ships were fit for combat, let alone the crews ? They were able to sail to Scapa after that time, but fight ?

Building any of that into a wargames scenario is very difficult and in all honesty would in all probability take all the fun out of it.

[Weaver]

Part of the reason for the mutiny was that the High Seas Fleet's commanders saw it as a "last ride of the Valkyries" death ride and the ordinary seaman didn't fancy it at all. However the reasons for the mutiny went far, far deeper than that. It was possibly the tipping point however.

After being cooped up in harbour for nigh on two years you also have to ask how many of the ships were fit for combat, let alone the crews ? They were able to sail to Scapa after that time, but fight ?

Building any of that into a wargames scenario is very difficult and in all honesty would in all probability take all the fun out of it.

Well in the composite scenario that Drach put together several ships mutiny at sea towards the end of the battle. Since the composite was put together from nine actual wargames played, I suspect that morale rules WERE in play, just with a higher starting level than in reality in order for anything to actually happen. Essentially, the what if question being answered here is "what if morale had been high enough for the ships to successfully put to sea?"

Maybe Germany was doing slightly better between Jutland and Texel in this timeline. Slightly better food/pay/conditions for the crews and/or some successful small-scale operations. For example, in April 1917 there was an attempt to intercept a Norway convoy that only failed due to bad intelligence: a day earlier or later and it could very well have connected with a detachement of the Grand Fleet with a decent chance of success.

[sideshowbob9]

If the HSF goes all last march of the ents, they could deal some damage to the Grand Fleet, that's true. Not enough to actually matter on a strategic scale and the day after they are done as a fighting force. The undamaged remainder aren't particularly frightening for the Ecuadorian Navy. The sailors mutinied for a very good reason!

The numbers tell. No amount of dice-rolling will change them.

[Weaver]

The point of the exercise wasn't a suicide run though. Hipper thought he had a reasonable chance of doing some damage AND getting a significant fraction of his ships back to port, with a better result for Germany in the peace negotiations as a result. He acknowledged that there was a real risk of getting cut off, and that if that happened, it would turn into a "today is a good day to die" scenario, and he sanguine about that, but it wasn't what he was aiming for.

A major factor in the mutiny however was that crews either misread Hipper's intentions, and/or took a more realistic view of the probabilities than he did. They thought it was intended/fated to be a suicide run and that was the tipping point for the mutinies.

Numbers are indeed important, but "dice rolls" are a very real factor in real life battles: the USN could hardly have won Midway at all, let alone as decisively as they did, without Lady Luck tilting the table their way, pretty firmly, on several occasions. Mutinies are the very definition of a crazy dice-roll: the consequences for screwing up are huge, and the mutineers have to recruit enough crew to pull it off without alerting loyal officers. That means EVERY "conversion conversation" they have has to be perfectly judged. Say the wrong thing to the wrong person once, and they're screwed.

[NARSES2]

The German Navy was probably the most revolutionary part of the German forces long before Hipper came up with this idea so unless you ignore that in any rules you come up with your'e not going to get an enjoyable wargame out of this scenario. Just one of the reasons why very few people wargame latter WWI scenarios, it's so difficult to "enjoy" it.

The mutinous state of the High Seas Fleet was the reason Doenitz concentrated so much on the morale and well being of the German Navy in WWII and they stayed the most disciplined through to the end in the majority of cases. He'd learnt the lesson well.

[Weaver]

You don't have to 'ignore' the morale situation to get the plan going, just adjust it a bit. That is, after all, the very essence of a what-if scenario: what if things were different? What if Hipper et al realised in 1917 what Doenitz realised later, and headed off the morale crash with better conditions for the crews?

Drach's group clearly wern't ignoring morale in their wargames because it came up as a factor in the outcomes: several ships DID mutiny and surrender at the end of the engagement.

'Enjoyment' is a very subjective criteria: some people enjoy 'Germans won WWII' or 'WWIII happened in 1983' scenarios, while others find them disturbing and/or depressing.

[sideshowbob9]

It's role-playing with dice. Instructive, useful data, indicative of a potential outcome, it is not.

The most advanced computers ever conceived couldn't simulate every bulkhead, every seam, the flight of every shell, the roll of every wave, every mote of smoke on the horizon, every flagging sinew of gunner & stoker. So you'll excuse me if I don't find a youtuber going "well I rolled a six so Orion is sinking and then I rolled a six so that's Benbow gone" particularly authoritive.

In 1918, simply put, Britannia rules the waves. It would be the last time she ever would. To knock her off that pedestal, Germany would require a far greater what-if than improved morale!

[zenrat]

...The most advanced computers ever conceived couldn't simulate every bulkhead, every seam, the flight of every shell, the roll of every wave, every mote of smoke on the horizon, every flagging sinew of gunner & stoker...

Waxing very lyrical there Bob.   

[Weaver]

It's role-playing with dice. Instructive, useful data, indicative of a potential outcome, it is not.

The most advanced computers ever conceived couldn't simulate every bulkhead, every seam, the flight of every shell, the roll of every wave, every mote of smoke on the horizon, every flagging sinew of gunner & stoker. So you'll excuse me if I don't find a youtuber going "well I rolled a six so Orion is sinking and then I rolled a six so that's Benbow gone" particularly authoritive.

In 1918, simply put, Britannia rules the waves. It would be the last time she ever would. To knock her off that pedestal, Germany would require a far greater what-if than improved morale!

I'm not entirely sure what we're arguing about now, but somehow I get the impression that your problem is either with Youtubers or wargamers, rather than with anything specific to Drach's video.

To be clear, in case you still haven't watched it, Drach got exactly the outcome you think he should have got: the High Seas Fleet sorties as per their real-life plan, they don't get enough lucky breaks to get away with it, and the Grand Fleet annihiliates them in an incredibly bloody battle that breaks their already shaky morale, leading to the only survivors being those that surrendered. Game Over for Germany. Conclusion? The planned sortie was a very bad idea and the mutinies that led to it being cancelled almost certainly saved thousands of lives. It kinda makes your blood run cold that they even seriously considered it, let alone got as far as issuing the orders.

If anything, this exercise vindicates the usefulness of well-designed wargames in simulating real outcomes. It's worth remembering that real-life navies have been using wargames for analysis and training since at least the 1930s (maybe earlier), and in the absence of computers, yes, they used dice.

Here's a real-life example of military wargaming that produced useful, instructive data and generated tactics that were validated in actual combat:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Approaches_Tactical_Unit

[sideshowbob9]

For the removal of doubt, I don't have a problem with wargaming per se. I'm sure it is very entertaining for those so inclined and certainly inspirational for sites such as this one. "My problem" I suppose is the use of the phrase "collate results" in your first post which implies some sort of scientific method in obtaining them. More generally the idea that a wargame contains any useful results that may affect, influence or otherwise impinge upon the historical record. Even the most ridiculously complex wargame is far too simplistic, as I have already intimated.

Ultimately, I am asking for some circumspection on ALL re-takes of historical events. It is far too easy to re-write history in the information age. That may not be the case here but it is very much in my mind these days.

Oh and for the record, I absolutely, positively have a problem with someone's opinion piece being elevated to anything approaching the shadow of a fact just because they have a youtube account. They'll let anybody on there these days.


Legal disclaimer: certainly, I'm aware my own little opinion piece has no more weight than any other but I wanted to put it out there nonetheless.

[Weaver]

"Collate results" is simple use of correct English: they ran nine wargames, eliminated outlying "one-off" results, then constructed a single narrative from the events that were common to most of them. It's hard to imagine what the most rigorous scientist would have done differently, other than run more simulations with more time and money, when the point of the entire exercise is to investigate events that didn't happened and can't be recreated full-scale.


As to the value of wargames, you've simply ignored the example I gave you. REAL militaries have been using wargames for at least a century (probably longer) to investigate military problems and have DEMONSTRABLY produced useful and relevent data as a a result. Even a full-scale military exercise is no more than a 'wargame': is it 'realistic' to have tanks popping smoke cannisters instead of blowing up, umpires running around telling people they're dead/alive/reincarnated and everybody involved knowing they face no threat of death, injury or real consequences? Wargames have their limitations just as military exercises do, but if they're all futile and pointless, then every military on the face of the planet has been wasting vast amounts of time and money on them for an awfully long time now.


Nobody here, or in Drach's video, is trying to "re-write history", have any "impact on the historical record" or elevate an "opinion piece" to anything more than an interesting thought experiment. It is abundantly clear to anyone watching his video that this is the case: he lays out what actually happened, then explains his reasons for speculating on what MIGHT have happened differently (principally that other people keep asking him), then lays out his methodology, and only then gives a 'dramatised' account of the results. These are exactly what you'd expect, whether you'd spent ten minutes reading the Wikipedia page or ten years studying naval history at university.

THIS IS A WHAT-IF SITE.

DRACH'S VIDEO IS A WHAT-IF EXERCISE.

What we do here is always speculation and opinion. It isn't history: that's the point. We routinely consider questions ranging from "what if TSR2 hadn't been cancelled?" to "what if aliens landed on the White House lawn?", and the very fact that these discussions result in disagreements that cannot be resolved by reference to recorded facts demonstrates that history isn't what we're doing. Drach's video sits entirely within the range of what we do here, and he's gone to far more trouble to produce and reality-check his results than 99% of us do when writing backstories for our models. Furthermore what-ifs, or "counterfactuals", are an established and accepted part of historical study, because they help to demonstrate understanding of the issues and shed light on the thinking of period decision makers, who, of course, were absolutely engaged in considering a range of possibilities, only one of which could come to pass. I have three books of counterfactuals written by professional historians and there are many more.

Is all of this dangerous? Should this site, Alt-History, Drachinifel and a dozen other Youtube history channels and all the historians who've ever written a counterfactual just shut up and go home to "preserve the historical record?" Who even decides what the "historical record" is anyway? Ever heard the phrase "history is written by the winners?" There's plenty of deadly serious re-writing of history going on right now, by "respectable" people and organisations with a lot more clout than a Youtube channel or a little web forum.


As for Youtube, they always would "let anybody on there" and everybody knows that. We'll let anybody on here too....

[zenrat]

I live for the day someone uses one of my backstories to rewrite history.

Not that its very likely.