THE BRITISH NAVY
IN BATTLE

BY
ARTHUR H. POLLEN

ILLUSTRATED

Garden City New York
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
1919

COPYRIGHT, 1919, BY
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF
TRANSLATION INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES,
INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN

CONTENTS

LIST OF LINE CUTS

THE BRITISH NAVY IN BATTLE

CHAPTER I
A Greeting by Way of Dedication

Xmas, 1915.

To the Admirals, Captains, Officers and Men of the Royal Navy and of the Royal Naval Reserve:

To the men of the merchant service and the landsmen who have volunteered for work afloat:

To all who are serving or fighting for their country at sea:

To all naval officers who are serving—much against their will—on land:

Greetings, good wishes and gratitude from all landsmen.

We do not wish you a Merry Christmas, for to none of us, neither to you at sea nor to us on land, can Christmas be a merry season now. Nor, amid so much misery and sorrow, does it seem, at first sight, reasonable to carry the conventional phrase further and wish you a Happy New Year. But happiness is a different thing from merriment. In the strictest sense of the word you are happy in your great task, and we doubly and trebly happy in the security that your great duties, so finely discharged, confer. So, after all it is a Happy New Year that we wish you.

If you could have your wish, you of the Grand Fleet—well, we can guess what it would be. It is that the war would so shape itself as to force the enemy fleet out, and make it put its past work and its once high hopes to the test against the power which you command and use with all the skill your long vigil and faithful service have made so singly yours to-day. And in one sense—and for your sakes, because your glory would be somehow lessened if it did not happen—we too could wish that this could happen. But we wish it only because you do. Although you do not grumble, though we hear no fretful word, we realize how wearing and how wearying your ceaseless watch must be. It is a watchfulness that could not be what it is, unless you hoped, and indeed more than hoped, expected that the enemy must early or late prove your readiness to meet him, either seeking you, or letting you find him, in a High Seas fight of ship to ship and man to man. We, like you, look forward to such a time with no misgiving as to the result, though, unlike you, we dread the price in noble lives and gallant ships that even an overwhelming victory may cost.

Your hopes and expectation for this dreadful, but glorious, end to all your work do not date from August, eighteen months ago. When as little boys you went to the Britannia, you went drawn there by the magic of the sea. It was not the sea that carries the argosies of fabled wealth; it was not the sea of yachts and pleasure boats. It was the sea that had been ruled so proudly by your fathers that drew you. And you, as the youngest of the race, went to it as the heirs to a stern and noble heritage. So, almost from the nursery have you been vowed to a life of hardship and of self-denial, of peril and of poverty—a fitting apprenticeship for those who were destined to bear themselves so nobly in the day of strain and battle. To the mission confided to you in boyhood you have been true in youth and true in manhood. So that when war came it was not war that surprised you, but you that surprised war.

When the war came, you from the beginning did your work as simply, as skilfully, and as easily as you had always done it. Not one of you ever met the enemy, however inferior the force you might be in, but you fought him resolutely and to the end. Twice and only twice was he engaged to no purpose. Pegasus, disabled and outraged, fell nobly, and the valiant Cradock faced overwhelming odds because duty pointed to fighting. Should the certainty of death stand between him and that which England expects of every seaman? There could only be one answer. In no other case has an enemy ship sought action with a British ship. In every other case the enemy has been forced to fight, and made to fly. It was so from the first. When two small cruisers penetrated the waters of Heligoland with a flotilla of destroyers, the enemy kept his High Seas Fleet, his fast cruisers, and his well-gunned armoured ships in the ignoble safety of his harbours and his canal. He left, to his shame, his small cruisers to fight their battle alone. Tyrwhitt and Blount might, and should, have been the objects of overwhelming attack. But the Germans were not to be drawn into battle. The ascendancy that you gained in the first three weeks of war you have maintained ever since. Three times under the cover of darkness or of fog, the greater, faster units of the German force have—in a frenzy of fearful daring—ventured to cross or enter the sea that once was known as the German Ocean. Three times they have known no alternative but precipitate flight to the place from which they came.

Not once has a single merchant ship bound for England been stopped or taken by an enemy ship in home waters. But fifty-six out of eight thousand were overtaken in distant seas. It has been yours to shepherd and protect the vast armies we have sent out from England, and so completely have you done it that not a single transport or supply ship has been impeded between this country and France. From the first there has not been, nor can there now ever be, the slightest threat or the remotest danger of these islands being invaded. Indeed, so utter and complete has been your work that the phrase “Command of the Sea” has a new meaning. The sea holds no danger for us. Allied to other great land powers, we find ourselves able and compelled to become a great land power also. The army of four millions is thus not the least of your creations.

So thorough is your work that Britain stands to-day on a pinnacle of power unsurpassed by any nation at any time.

Has the completeness of your work been impaired by the ravages of the submarine? Its gift of invisibility has seemed to some so mystic a thing that its powers become magnified. Because it clearly sometimes might strike a deadly blow, it was thought that it always could so strike, till madness was piled upon madness, and it seemed as if the very laws of force had been upset, and ships and guns things obsolete and of no use. But you have always known—and we at last are learning—that this is idle talk, and that as things were and as they are, so must they always be; and that sea-power rests as it always has, and as it always will, with the largest fleet of the strongest ships, and with big guns well directed and truly aimed.

It did not take you long to learn the trick of the submarine in war, and had things been ordered differently, you might have learned much of what you know in the years of peace. But you learned its tricks so well that it has failed completely to hurt the Navy or the Army which the Navy carries over the sea, and has found its only success in attacking unarmed merchant ships. These are only unarmed because the people of Christendom had never realized that any of its component nations could turn to barbarism, piracy, and even murder in war. It would have been so easy, had this utter lapse into devilry been expected, to have armed every merchant ship—and then where would the submarine have been? But even with the merchantmen unarmed, the submarine success has been greatly thwarted by your splendid ingenuity and resource, your sleepless guard, your ceaseless activity, and the buccaneers of a new brutality have been made to pay a bloody toll.

Take it for all in all, never in the history of war has organized force accomplished its purpose at so small a cost in unpreventable loss, or with such utter thoroughness, or in face of such unanticipated difficulties.

It was inevitable that there should be some failures. Not every opportunity has been seized, nor every chance of victory pushed to the utmost. Who can doubt that there are a hundred points of detail in which your material, the methods open to you, the plans which tied you, might have been more ample, better adapted to their purpose, more closely and wisely considered? For when so much had changed, the details of naval war had to differ greatly from the anticipation. In the long years of peace—that seem so infinitely far behind us now—you had for a generation and a half been administered by a department almost entirely civilian in its spirit and authority. It was a control that had to make some errors in policy, in provision, in selection. But your skill counter-balanced bad policy when it could; your resources supplied the defects of material; too few of you were of anything but the highest merit for many errors of selection to be possible.

And the nation understood you very little. Your countrymen, it is true, paid you the lip service of admitting that you alone stood between the nation and defeat if war should come. But war seemed so unreal and remote to them, that it was only a few that took the trouble to ask what more you needed for war than you already had.

And you were so absorbed in the grinding toil of your daily work to be articulate in criticism; too occupied in trying to get the right result with indifferent means—because the right means cost too much and could not be given to you—to strive for better treatment; too wholly wedded to your task to be angry that your task was not made more easy for you. Hence you took civilian domination, civilian ignorance, and civilian indifference to the things that matter, all for granted, and submitted to them dumbly and humbly, as you submitted silent and unprotesting to your other hardships; you were resigned to this being so; and were resigned without resentment. If, then, the plans were sometimes wrong, if you and your force were at other times cruelly misused, if the methods available to you were often inadequate, it was not your fault—unless, indeed, it be a fault to be too loyal and too proud to make complaint.

If we took little trouble to understand you, we took still less to pay and praise you. There is surely no other profession in the world which combines so hard a life, such great responsibilities, such pitiful remuneration. But small as the pay is, we seize eagerly every chance to lessen it. If we waste our money, we do not waste it on you. But we fully expect you to spend your money in our service. The naval officer’s pay is calculated to meet his expenses in time of peace. Now a very large proportion of the pay of cadets, midshipmen, sub-lieutenants, and lieutenants necessarily goes in uniform and clothes. The life of a uniform can be measured by the sea work done by the wearer. Sea work in war is—what shall we say?—three to six times what it is in peace. But we do nothing to help young officers to meet these very ugly attacks on their very exiguous pay. We do not even distribute the prize money that the Fleet has earned.

Some day, when this war is won, it may be realized that it has been won because there is a great deal more water than land upon the world, and because the British Fleet commands the use of all the water, and the enemy the use of only a tiny fraction of all the land. If France can endure, and if Russia can “come again”; if Great Britain has the time to raise the armies that will turn the scale; if the Allies can draw upon the world for the metal and food that make victory—and waiting for victory—possible; if the effort to shatter European civilization and to rob the Western world of its Christian tradition fails, it is because our enemies counted upon a war in which England would not fight. Some day, then, we shall see what we and all the world owe to you.

We may then be tempted to be generous and pay you perhaps a living wage for your work, and not cut it down to a half or a third if there is no ship in which to employ you. And if you lose your health and strength in the nation’s service, we may pay you a pension proportionate to the value of your work, and the dangers and responsibilities that you have shouldered, and to the strenuous, self-sacrificing lives that you have led, for our sakes. We may do more. We may see to it that honours are given to you in something like the same proportion that they are given, say, to civilians and to the Army. We may do more still. We may realize that to get the best work out of you, you must be ordered and governed and organized by yourselves.

But then again we may do nothing of the kind. We may continue to treat you as we have always treated you; and if we do, there is at any rate this bright side to it. You will continue to serve us as you have always served us, working for nothing, content so you are allowed to remain the pattern and mirror of chivalry and knightly service, and to wear “the iron fetters” of duty as your noblest decoration.

CHAPTER II
A Retrospect

August, 1918.

In looking back over the last four years, the sharpest outlines in the retrospect are the ups and downs of hopes and fears. Indeed, so acutely must everyone bear these alternations in mind, that to remark on them is almost to incur the guilt of commonplace. For they illustrate the tritest of all the axioms of war. It is human to err—and every error has to be paid for. If the greatest general is he who makes the fewest mistakes, then the making of some mistakes must be common to all generals. The rises and reversals of fortune on all the fronts are of necessity the indices of right or wrong strategy. These transformations have been far more numerous on land than at sea, and locally have in many instances been seemingly final. Thus to take a few of many examples, Serbia, Montenegro, and Russia are almost completely eliminated as factors; our effort in the Dardanelles had to be acknowledged as a complete failure. But at no stage was any victory or defeat of so overwhelming and wholesale a nature as to promise an immediate decision. The retreat from Mons, Gallipoli, Neuve Chapelle, Hulloch, Kut—the British Army could stand all of these, and much more. France never seemed to be beaten, whatever the strain. Even after the defection of Russia, a German victory seemed impossible on land. Never once did either side see defeat, immediate and final, threatened. A right calculation of all the forces engaged may have shown a discerning few where the final preponderance lay. The point is that, despite extraordinary and numerous vicissitudes, there never was a moment when the land war seemed settled once and for all.

This has not been the case at sea. The transformations here have been fewer; but they have been extreme. For two and a half years the sea-power of the Allies appeared both so overwhelmingly established and so abjectly accepted by the enemy, that it seemed incredible that this condition could ever alter materially. Yet between the months of February and May, 1917, the change was so abrupt and so terrific that for a period it seemed as if the enemy had established a form of superiority which must, at a date that was not doubtful, be absolutely fatal to the alliance. And again, in six months’ time, the situation was transformed, so that sea-power, on which the only hope of Allied victory has ever rested was once more assured.

Thus, after the most anxious year in our history, we came back to where we started. This nation, France, Italy, and America no less, we have all returned to that absolute and unwavering confidence in the navy as the chief anchor of all Allied hopes. Not that the navy had ever failed to justify that confidence in the past. There was no task to which any ship was ever set that had not been tackled in that heroic spirit of self-sacrifice which we have been taught to expect from our officers and men; there had never been a recorded case of a single ship declining action with the enemy. There were scores of cases in which a smaller and weaker British force had attacked a larger and stronger German. Ships had been mined, torpedoed, sunk in battle, and the men on board had gone to their death smiling, calm, and unperturbed. If heroism, goodwill, a blind passion for duty could have won the war, if devotion and zeal in training, patient submission to discipline, a fiery spirit of enterprise could have won—then we never should have had a single disappointment at sea. The traditions of the past, the noble character of the seamen of to-day—we hoped for a great deal, nor ever was our hope disappointed. And when the time of danger came, when our tonnage was slipping away at more than six million tons a year, so that it was literally possible to calculate how long the country could endure before surrender, it never occurred to the most panic-stricken to blame the navy for our danger. The nation saw quite clearly where the fault lay, and the Government, sensitive to the popular feeling, at last took the right course.

But it was a course that should have been taken long before. For, though the purposes for which sea-power exists seemed perfectly secure and never in danger at all till little more than a year ago, yet there had been a series of unaccountable miscarriages of sea-power. Battles were fought in which the finest ships in the world, armed with the best and heaviest guns, commanded by officers of unrivalled skill and resolution, and manned by officers and crews perfectly trained, and acting in battle with just the same swift, calm exactitude that they had shown in drill—and yet the enemy was not sunk and victory was not won. Though, seemingly, we possessed overwhelming numbers, the enemy seemed to be able to flout us, first in one place and then in another, and we seemed powerless to strike back. Almost since the war began we kept running into disappointments which our belief in and knowledge of the navy convinced us were gratuitous disappointments. A rapid survey of the chief events since August, 1914, will illustrate what I mean.

THE FIRST CRISIS

The opening of the war at sea was in every respect auspicious for the Allies. By what looked like a happy accident, the British Navy had just been mobilized on an unprecedented scale. It was actually in process of returning to its normal establishment when the international crisis became acute, and, by a dramatic stroke, it was kept at war strength and the main fleet sent to its war stations before the British ultimatum was despatched to Berlin. The effect was instantaneous. Within a week transports were carrying British troops into France and trade was continuing its normal course, exactly as if there were no German Navy in existence. The German sea service actually went out of existence. Before a month was over a small squadron of battle-cruisers raided the Bight between Heligoland and the German harbours, sank there small cruisers and half-a-dozen destroyers, challenged the High Seas Fleet to battle, and came away without the enemy having attempted to use his capital ships to defend his small craft or to pick up the glove so audaciously thrown down. The mere mobilization of the British Fleet seemed to have paralyzed the enemy, and it looked as if our ability to control sea communications was not only surprisingly complete, but promised to be enduring. The nation’s confidence in the Navy had been absolute from the beginning, and it seemed as if that confidence could not be shaken.

Before another two months had passed we had run into one of those crises which were to recur not once, but again and again. During September an accumulation of errors came to light. The enormity of the political and naval blunder which had allowed Goeben and Breslau to slip through our fingers in the Mediterranean, and so bring Turkey into the war against us, at last become patent. There was no blockade. There were the raids which Emden and Karlsruhe were making on our trade in the Indian Ocean and between the Atlantic and the Caribbean. The enemy’s submarines had sunk some of our cruisers—three in succession on a single day and in the same area. Then rumours gained ground that the Grand Fleet, driven from its anchorages by submarines, was fugitive, hiding now in one remote loch, now in another, and losing one of its greatest units in its flight. For a moment it looked as if the old warnings, that surface craft were impotent against under-water craft, had suddenly been proved true. Von Spee, with a powerful pair of armoured cruisers, was known to be at large. As a final insult, German battle-cruisers crossed the North Sea, and battered and ravaged the defenceless inhabitants of a small seaport town on the east coast. Something was evidently wrong. But nobody seemed to know quite what it was.

The crisis was met by a typical expedient. We are a nation of hero-worshippers and proverbially loyal to our favourites long after they have lost any title to our favour. In the concert-room, in the cricket-field, on the stage, in Parliament—in every phase of life—it is the old and tried friend in whom we confide, even if we have conveniently to overlook the fact that he has not only been tried, but convicted. This blind loyalty is, perhaps, amiable as a weakness, and almost peculiar to this nation. But we have another which is neither amiable nor peculiar. We hate having our complacency disturbed by being proved to be wrong and, rather than acknowledge our fault, are easily persuaded that the cause of our misfortune is some hidden and malign influence. And so in October, 1914, the explanation of things being wrong at sea was suddenly found to be quite simple. It was that the First Sea Lord of the Admiralty was of German birth. With the evil eye gone the spell would be removed. And so a most accomplished officer retired, and Lord Fisher, now almost a mythological hero, took his place.

Within very few weeks the scene suffered

... a sea change.
Into something rich and strange.

Von Spee was left but a month in which to enjoy his triumph over Cradock; Emden was defeated and captured by Sydney; Karlsruhe vanished as by enchantment from the sea; and Von Hipper’s battle-cruisers, going once too often near the British coast, had been driven in ignominious flight across the North Sea and paid for their temerity by the loss of Blücher. Three months of the Fisher-Churchill régime had seemingly put the Navy on a pinnacle that even the most sanguine—and the most ignorant—had hardly dared to hope for in the early days. The spectacle, in August, of the transports plying between France and England, as securely as the motor-buses between Fleet Street and the Fulham Road, had been a tremendous proof of confidence in sea-power. The unaccepted challenge at Heligoland had told a tale. The British fleet had indeed seemed unchallengeable. But the justification of our confidence was, after all, based only on the fact that the enemy had not disputed it. It was a negative triumph. But the capture of Emden, the obliteration of Von Spee, the uncamouflaged flight of Von Hipper, here were things positive, proofs of power in action, the meaning of which was patent to the simplest. No man in his senses could pretend that our troubles in October had not been attributed to their right origin, nor that the right remedy for them had been found and applied.

There was but one cloud on the horizon. The submarine—despite the loss of Hogue, Cressy, Aboukir, Hawk, Hermes, and Niger, and the disturbing rumours that the fleet’s bases were insecure—had been a failure as an agent for the attrition of our main sea forces. The loss of Formidable, that clouded the opening of the year, had not restored its prestige. But Von Tirpitz had made an ominous threat. The submarine might have failed against naval ships. It certainly would not fail, he said, against trading ships. He gave the world fair warning that at the right moment an under-water blockade of the British Isles would be proclaimed; then woe to all belligerents or neutrals that ventured into those death-doomed waters. The naval writers were not very greatly alarmed. For four months, after all, trading ships—turned into transports—had used the narrow waters of the Channel as if the submarines were no threat at all. Yet, on pre-war reasoning, it was precisely in narrow waters crowded with traffic that under-water war should have been of greatest effect. These transports and these narrow waters were the ideal victims and the ideal field, and coast and harbour defence and the prevention of invasion, by common consent, the obvious and indeed the supreme functions the submarine would be called upon to discharge. From a military point of view the landing of British troops in France was but the first stage towards an invasion of Germany and, from a naval point of view, it looked as if to defend the French ports from being entered by British ships was just as clearly the first objective of the German submarine as the defence of any German port. Now six months of war had shown that, if they had tried to stop the transports, the submarines had been thwarted. Means and methods had evidently been found of preventing their attack or parrying it when made. Was it not obvious that it could be no more than a question of extending these methods to merchant shipping at large to turn the greater threat to futility? It was this reasoning that, in January and February, made it easy for the writers to stem any tendency of the public to panic, and when, towards the end of February, the First Lord addressed Parliament on the subject, and dealt with the conscienceless threat of piracy with a placid and defiant confidence, all were justified in thinking that the naval critics had been right.

And so the beginning of the submarine campaign, though somewhat disconcerting, caused no wide alarm. An initial success was expected. It would take time to build the destroyers and the convoying craft on the scale that was called for, and so to organize the trade that the attack must be narrowed to protected focal points. And as absolute secrecy was maintained, both as to our actual defensive methods and as to our preparations for the future, there was neither the occasion nor the material for questioning whether the serene contentment of Whitehall was rightly founded.

Meantime, as we have seen, success had justified the solution of the October crisis. The attempt to probe deeper and to get at the cause of things was a thankless task. Those who could see beneath the surface could not fail to note in December and January that, while an exuberant optimism had become the mark of the British attitude towards the war at sea, a movement curiously parallel to it was going forward in Germany. The shifts to which the Grand Fleet had been put by the defenceless state of its harbours, though rigidly excluded from the British Press, has been triumphantly exploited in the German. Hence, when the enemy’s only oversea squadron was annihilated by Sir Doveton Sturdee, his Press responded with an outcry on the cowardice of the British Fleet that, while glad to overwhelm an inferior force abroad, dared not show itself in the North Sea. And, as if to prove the charge, Whitby and the Hartlepools were forthwith bombarded by a force we were unable to bring to action while returning from this exploit. The enemy naval writers surpassed themselves after this. And it looked so certain that the German Higher Command might itself become hypnotized by such talk that, before the New Year, it seemed prudent to note these phenomena and warn the public that we might be challenged to action after all, of the kind of action the enemy would dare us to, and what the problems were that such an action would present. And in particular it seemed advisable to state explicitly that much less must be expected from naval guns in battle than those had hoped, whose notions were founded upon battle practice. A battle-cruiser manœuvring at twenty-eight knots—instead of a canvas screen towed at six—mines scattered by a squadron in retreat, a line of retreat that would draw the pursuers into minefields set to trap them; the attacks on the pursuing squadrons by flotillas of destroyers, firing long-range torpedoes—these new elements would upset, it was said, all experiences of peace gunnery, because in peace practices it is impossible to provide a target of the speed which enemy ships would have in action, and because there had been no practice while executing the manœuvres which torpedo attack would make compulsory in battle.

Within a fortnight the action of the Dogger Bank was fought and Von Hipper’s battle-cruisers were subjected to the fire of Sir David Beatty’s Fleet from nine o’clock until twelve, without one being sunk or so damaged as to lose speed. The enemy’s tactics included attacks by submarine and destroyer which had imposed the manœuvres as anticipated—and the best of gunnery had failed. But Blücher had been sunk; the enemy had run away; so the warning fell on deaf ears; the lesson of the battle was misread. Optimism reigned supreme.

THE SECOND CRISIS

Within a month a naval adventure of a new kind was embarked upon, based on the theory that if only you had naval guns enough, any fort against which they were directed must be pulverized as were the forts of Liège, Namur, Maubeuge, and Antwerp. The simplest comprehension of the principles of naval gunnery would have shown the theory to be fallacious. It originated in the fertile brain of the lay Chief of the Admiralty, and though it would seem as if his naval advisers felt the theory to be wrong, none of them, in the absence of a competent and independent gunnery staff, could say why. And so the essentially military operation of forcing the passage of the Dardanelles was undertaken as if it were a purely naval operation, with the result that, just as naval success had never been conceivable, so now the failure of the ships made military success impossible also.

It was thus we came to our second naval crisis. The first we had solved by putting Lord Fisher into Prince Louis’s place. The lesson of the second seemed to be that there was only one mistake that could be made with the navy and that was for the Government to ask it to do anything. Mr. Churchill, as King Stork, had taken the initiative. Lord Fisher, the naval superman, had not been able to save us. It was clear that lay interference with the navy was wrong—equally clear that it would be wiser to leave the initiative to the enemy. And so a new régime began.

But, in reality, the lessons of the first crisis and the second crisis were the same. To suppose that a civilian First Lord is bound to be mischievous if he is energetic, and certain to be harmless if, in administering the navy as an instrument of war, he is a cipher, were errors just as great as to suppose that a seaman with a long, loyal, and brilliant record in the public service had put an evil enchantment over the whole British Navy because, fifty years before, he had been born a subject of a Power with which till now we had never been at war. Things went wrong in October, 1914, for precisely the same reasons that they went wrong in February, March, and April, 1915. The German battle-cruisers escaped at Heligoland for exactly the same reasons that the attempt to take the Dardanelles forts by naval artillery was futile. We had prepared for war and gone into war with no clear doctrine as to what war meant, because we lacked the organism that could have produced the doctrine in peace time, prepared and trained the Navy to a common understanding of it, and supplied it with plans and equipped it with means for their execution. What was needed in October, 1914, was not a new First Sea Lord, but a Higher Command charged only with the study of the principles and the direction of fighting.

But in May, 1915, this truth was not recognized. And in the next year which passed, all efforts to make this truth understood were without effect. And so the submarine campaign went on till it spent itself in October and revived again in the following March, when it was stopped by the threat of American intervention. The enemy, thwarted in the only form of sea activity that promised him great results, found himself suddenly threatened on land and humiliated at sea, and to restore his waning prestige, ventured out with his forces, was brought to battle—and escaped practically unhurt.

The controversies to which the battle of Jutland gave rise will be in everyone’s recollection. Another of the many indecisive battles with which history is full had been fought, and the critics established themselves in two camps. One side was for facing risks and sinking the enemy at any cost. The other would have it that so long as the British Fleet was unconquered it was invincible, and that the distinction between “invincible” and “victorious” could be neglected. After all, as Mr. Churchill told us, while our fleet was crushing the life breath out of Germany, the German Navy could carry on no corresponding attack on us; and when the other camp denounced this doctrine of tame defence, he retorted that victory was not unnecessary but that the torpedo had made it impossible.

THE THIRD CRISIS

Yet, within two months of the battle of Jutland, the submarine campaign had begun again, and, at the time of Mr. Churchill’s rejoinder, the world was losing shipping at the rate of three million tons a year! As there never had been the least dispute that to mine the submarine into German harbours was the best, if not the only, antidote, never the least doubt that it was only the German Fleet that prevented this operation from being carried out it seemed strange that an ex-First Lord of the Admiralty should be telling the world first, that the German Fleet in its home bases delivered no attack on us and therefore need not be defeated! And, secondly, as if to clinch the matter and silence any doubts as to the cogency of his argument, we were to make the best of it because victory was impossible.

This utter confusion of mind was typical of the public attitude. If a man who had been First Lord at the most critical period of our history had understood events so little, could the man in the street know any better?

Once more the root principles of war were urged on public notice. But it was already too late. Jutland, whether a victory, or something far less than a victory, had at any rate left the public in the comfortable assurance that the ability of the British Fleet was virtually unimpaired to preserve the flow of provisions, raw material, and manufactures into Allied harbours and to maintain our military communications. But soon after the third year of the war began, a change came over the scene. The highest level that the submarine campaign had reached in the past was regained, and then surpassed month by month. Gradually it came to be seen that the thing might become critical—and this though the campaign was not ruthless. Yet it was carried out on a larger scale and with bolder methods which the possession of a larger fleet of submarines made possible. The element of surprise in the thing was not that the Germans had renewed the attempt—for it was clear from the terms of surrender to America that they would renew it at their own time. The surprise was in its success. The public, still trusting to the attitude of mind induced by the critics and by the authorities in 1915, had taken it for granted that the two previous campaigns had stopped in December, 1915, and in March, 1916, because of the efficiency of our counter-measures. The revelation of the autumn of 1916 was that these counter-measures had failed.

It was this that brought about the third naval crisis of the war. Once more the old wrong remedy was tried. The Government and the public had learned nothing from the revelation that we had gone to war on the doctrine that the Fleet need not, and ought not, to fight the enemy, and were apparently unconcerned at discovering that it could not fight with success. And so, still not realizing the root cause of all our trouble, once more a remedy was sought by changing the chief naval adviser to the Government.

But on this occasion it was not only the chief that was replaced, as had happened when Lord Fisher succeeded Prince Louis of Battenberg, and when Sir Henry Jackson succeeded Lord Fisher. When Admiral Jellicoe came to Whitehall several colleagues accompanied him from the Grand Fleet. There was nothing approaching to a complete change of personnel, but the infusion of new blood was considerable. But this notwithstanding, the menace from the submarine grew, when ruthlessness was adopted as a method, until the rate of loss by April had doubled, trebled, and quadrupled that of the previous year. All the world then saw that, with shipping vanishing at the rate of more than a million tons a month, the period during which the Allies could maintain the fight against the Central Powers must be strictly limited.

Thus, without having lost a battle at sea—but because we had failed to win one—a complete reverse in the naval situation was brought about. Instead of enjoying the complete command Mr. Churchill had spoken of, we were counting the months before surrender might be inevitable. During the ten weeks leading up to the culminating losses of April, a final effort was made to make the public and the Government realize that failure of the Admiralty to protect the sea-borne commerce of a seagirt people was due less to the Government’s reliance on advisers ill-equipped for their task, than that the task itself was beyond human performance, so long as the Higher Command of the Navy was wrongly constituted for its task. It was, of course, an old warning vainly urged on successive Governments year after year in peace time, and month after month during the war. Evidences of inadequate preparation of imperfect plans, of a wrong theory of command, of action founded on wrong doctrine but endorsed by authority, had all been numerous during the previous two and a half years.

THE FOURTH CRISIS

But where reason and argument had been powerless to prevail, the logic of facts gained the victory. At last, in the fourth naval crisis of the war, it was realized that changes in personnel at Whitehall were not sufficient, that changes of system were necessary. Before the end of May the machinery of administration was reorganized and a new Higher Command developed, largely on the long resisted staff principle.

Thus, after repeated failures—not of the Fleet but of its directing minds in London—a complete revolution was effected in the command of the most important of all the fighting forces in the war, viz., the British Navy. It was actually brought about because criticism had shown that the old régime had first failed to anticipate and then to thwart a new kind of attack on sea communications—just as it had failed to anticipate the conditions of surface war. It was at last realized that two kinds of naval war could go on together, one almost independent of the other. A Power might command the surface of the sea against the surface force of an enemy, and do so more absolutely than had ever happened before, and yet see that command brought, for its main purposes, almost to nothing by a new naval force, from which, though naval ships could defend themselves, they seemingly could not defend the carrying and travelling ships, upon which the life of the nation and the continuance of its military effort on land depended. The revolution of May saved the situation. At last the principle of convoy, vainly urged on the old régime, was adopted, and within six months the rate at which ships were being lost was practically halved. In twelve months it had been reduced by sixty per cent.

But the departure made in the summer of 1917, though radical as to principle, was less than half-hearted as to persons. Many of the men identified with all our previous failures and responsible for the methods and plans that have led to them, were retained in full authority. The mere adoption of the staff principle did indeed bring about an effect so singular and striking as completely to transform all Allied prospects. In April, defeat seemed to be a matter of a few months only. By October it had become clear that the submarine could not by itself assure a German victory. If such extraordinary consequences could follow—exactly as it was predicted they must—from a change in system which all experience of war had proved to be essential, why, it may be asked, was the adoption of the staff principle so bitterly opposed? Partly, no doubt, because of the natural conservatism of men who have grown old and attained to high rank in a service to which they have given their lives in all devotion and sincerity. The singularity of the sailor’s training and experience tends to make the naval profession both isolated and exclusive. And that its daily life is based upon the strictest discipline, that gives absolute power to the captain of a ship because it is necessary to hold him absolutely responsible, inevitably grafts upon this exclusiveness a respect for seniority which gives to its action in every field the indisputable finality bred of the quarter-deck habit. Thus, there was no place in Admiralty organization for the independent and expert work of junior men, because no authority could attach to their counsel. It is of the essence of the staff principle that special knowledge, sound, impartial, trained judgment, grasp of principle and proved powers of constructive imagination, are higher titles to dictatorship in policy than the character and experience called for in the discharge of executive command. But to a service not bred to seeing all questions of policy first investigated, analyzed, and, finally, defined by a staff which necessarily will consist more of younger than of older men, the suggestion that the higher ranks should accept the guiding coöperation of their juniors seemed altogether anarchical. The long resistance to the establishment of a Higher Command based on rational principles may be set down to these two elements of human psychology.

That successive Governments failed to break down this conservatism must, I think, be explained by their fear of the hold which men of great professional reputation had upon the public mind and public affections. It was notable, for example, that when our original troubles came to us at the first crisis, the Government, instead of seeking the help of the youngest and most accomplished of our admirals and captains, chose as chief advisers the oldest and least in touch with our modern conditions. It was, perhaps, the same fear of public opinion that delayed the completion of the 1917 reforms until the beginning of the next year. But, with all its defects and its limitations, the solution sought of the fourth sea crisis had made the history of the past twelve months the most hopeful of any since the war began.

THE NEW ERA

The period divides itself into two unequal portions. Between June and January, 1918, was seen the slowly growing mastery of the submarine. The rate of loss was halved and the methods by which this result was achieved were applied as widely as possible. But in the next six or eight months no improvement in the position corresponding to that which followed in the first period was obtained. The explanation is simple enough. The old autocratic régime had not understood the nature of the new war any better than the nature of the old. It had from the first, under successive chief naval advisers, repudiated convoy as though it were a pestilent heresy. In June, 1917, the very men who, as absolutist advisers, had taken this attitude, were compelled to sanction the hated thing itself. It yielded exactly the results claimed for it, but no more. It was in its nature so simple and so obvious that it did not take long to get it into working order. It was the best form of defence. But defence is the weakest form of war. The stronger form, the offensive, needed planning and long preparations. In the nature of things these could not take effect either in six months or in twelve. Nor is it likely that, while the old personnel was suffered to remain at Whitehall, those engaged on the plans and charged with the preparations for this were able to work with the expedition which the situation called for. For the first six months after the revolution, then, little occurred to prove its efficiency, except the fruits of the policy which instructed opinion had forced on Whitehall. But these, so far as the final issue of the war was concerned, were surely sufficient. For the losses by submarines were brought below the danger point.

It was not until the revolution made its next step forward by the changes in personnel announced in January that marked progress was shown in the other fields of naval war. The late autumn had been marked, as it was fully expected, once the submarine was thwarted, by various efforts on the part of the enemy to assert himself by other means at sea. A Lerwick convoy, very inadequately protected, was raided by fast and powerful enemy cruisers, and many ships sunk in circumstances of extraordinary barbarity. The destroyers protecting them sacrificed themselves with fruitless gallantry. There were ravages on the coast as well. Both things pointed to salient weaknesses in the naval position. At the time of the third naval crisis at the end of 1916, it had been pointed out that the repeated evidences of our inability to hold the enemy in the Narrow Seas ought not to be allowed to pass uncensured or unremedied. But the fatal habit of refusing to recognize that an old favourite had failed prevented any reform for a year. It was not until Sir Roger Keyes was appointed to the Dover Command and a new atmosphere was created that remarkable departures in new policy were inaugurated. This policy took two forms. First, there was the establishment of a mine barrage from coast to coast across the Channel, and simultaneously with this, North Sea minefields stretching, one from Norwegian territorial waters almost to the Scottish foreshore, and another in the Kattegat, to intercept such German U-boats as base their activities upon the enemy’s Baltic force. Two great minefields on such a scale as this are works of time. Nor can their effect upon the submarine campaign be expected to be seen until they are very near completion; but then the effect may possibly be immediate and overwhelming.

Principally to facilitate the creation and maintenance of the barrages, a second new departure in policy was the organization of attacks on the German bases in Flanders. Of these Zeebrügge was infinitely the more important, because it is from here that the deep water canal runs to the docks and wharves of Bruges some miles inland. The value of Zeebrügge, robbed of the facilities for equipment and reparation which the Bruges docks afford, is little indeed. It is little more than an anchorage and a refuge. To close Zeebrügge to the enemy called for an operation as daring and as intricate as was ever attempted. Success depended upon so many factors, of which the right weather was the least certain, that it was no wonder that the expedition started again and again without attempting the blow it set out to strike. Its final complete success at Zeebrügge was a veritable triumph of perfect planning and organization and command. It came at a critical moment in the campaign. A month before the enemy, by his great attack at St. Quentin, had achieved by far the greatest land victory of the war. He had followed this up by further attacks, and seemed to add to endless resources in men a ruthless determination to employ them for victory. The British and French were driven to the defensive. Not to be beaten, not to yield too much ground, to exact the highest price for what was yielded, this was not a very glorious rôle when the triumphs on the Somme and in Flanders of 1916 and 1917 were remembered. It cannot be questioned that the originality, the audacity, and the success of Vice-Admiral Keyes’ attacks on Zeebrügge and Ostend, gave to all the Allies just that encouragement which a dashing initiative alone can give. It broke the monotony of being always passive.

But the new minefields, the barrages, the sealing of Zeebrügge, these were far from being the only fruits of the changes at Whitehall. A sortie by Breslau and Goeben from the Dardanelles, which ended in the sinking of a couple of German monitors and the loss of a light German cruiser on a minefield, directed attention sharply to the situation in the Middle Sea. There was a manifest peril that the Russian Fleet might fall into German hands and make a junction with the Austrian Fleet at Pola. Further, the losses of the Allies by submarines in this sea had for long been unduly heavy. A visit of the First Lord to the Mediterranean did much to put these things right. First steps were taken in reorganizing the command and, before the changes had advanced very far, an astounding exploit by two officers of the Italian Navy resulted in the destruction of two Austrian Dreadnoughts, and relieved the Allies of any grave danger in this quarter.

Meantime, it had become known that a powerful American squadron had joined the Grand Fleet, that our gallant and accomplished Allies had adopted British signals and British ways, and had become in every respect perfectly amalgamated with the force they had so greatly strengthened. And though little was said about it in the Press, it was evident enough that the moral of the Lerwick convoy had been learned, nor was there the least doubt that the Grand Fleet, under the command of Sir David Beatty, had become an instrument of war infinitely more flexible and efficient than it had ever been. His plans and battle orders took every contingency into council so far as human foresight made possible. At Jutland, at the Dogger Bank, and in the Heligoland Bight, Admiral Beatty had shown his power to animate a fleet by his own fighting spirit and to combine a unity of action with the independent initiative of his admirals, simply because he had inspired all of them with a common doctrine of fighting. Under such auspices there could be little doubt that our main forces in northern waters were ready for battle with a completeness and an elasticity that left nothing to chance.

But if we are to look for the chief fruit of last year’s revolution, we shall not find it in the reorganized Grand Fleet, nor in the new initiative and aggression in the Narrow Seas, for the ultimate results of which we still have to wait. If the enemy despairs both of victory on land or of such success as will give him a compromise peace, if he is faced by disintegration at home and, driven to a desperate stroke, sends out his Fleet to fight, we shall then see, but perhaps not till then, what the changes of last year have brought about in our fighting forces. Meantime, the success of the great reforms can be measured quite definitely. In the months of May and June over half a million American soldiers were landed in France, sixty per cent. of whom were carried in British ships. No one in his senses in May or June last year would have thought this possible.

Looked at largely, then, last year’s revolution at Whitehall is in all ways the most astonishing and the most satisfactory naval event of the last four years. It is the most satisfactory event, because its results have been so nearly what was foretold and because it only needs for the work to be completed for all the lessons of the war to be rightly applied.

CHAPTER III
Sea Fallacies: A Plea for First Principles

What do we mean by “sea-power” and “command of the sea”? What really is a navy and how does it gain these things? How come navies into existence? Of what constituents, human and material, are they composed? How are the human elements taught, trained, commanded, and led? How are the ships grouped and distributed, and the weapons fought in war?

To the countrymen of Nelson, and to those of his great interpreter, Mahan, these might at first sight seem very superfluous questions, for they, almost of natural instinct, should understand that strange but overwhelming force that has made them. To the Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, to the Empires that owe allegiance to the British Crown, to the United States of America, sea-power is at once their origin and the fundamental essential of their continued free and independent existence. And it is their predominant races that have produced the world’s greatest sea fighters and sea writers. It is to the British Fleet that the world owes its promise of safety from German diabolism bred of autocracy. It is to sea-power that America must look if she is to finish the work the Allies have begun. With so great a stake in the sea, Great Britain and America should have fathomed its mysteries.

But, despite the fighters and the writers, the sea in a great measure has kept its secret hidden. In every age the truth has been the possession of but a few. Countries for a time have followed the light, and have then, as it were, been suddenly struck blind, and the fall of empires has followed the loss of vision. The world explains the British Empire of to-day, and the great American nation which has sprung from it, by a happy congenital talent for colonizing waste places, for self-government, for assimilating and making friends with the unprogressive peoples, by giving them a better government than they had before. And certainly without such gifts the British races could not have overspread so large a portion of the earth. But the world is apt to forget that there were other empires sprung from other European peoples—Portuguese, French, Spanish, and Dutch—each at some time larger in wealth, area, or population, than that which owed allegiance to the British Crown. In each case it was the power of their navies that gave each country these great possessions. Of some of these empires only insignificant traces remain to-day. They have been merged in the British Empire or have become independent. And the merging or the freeing has always followed from war at sea. It is the British sailors, and not the British colonists, that have made the British Empire. It is not because the settlers in New England were better fighters or had more talent for self-government, but because Holland had the weaker navy, that the city which must shortly be the greatest in the world is named after the ancient capital of Northern England, and not after Amsterdam. It was not England’s half-hearted fight on land, but her failure to preserve an unquestionable command of the sea that secured the extraordinary success of Washington and Hamilton’s military plans.

To all these truths we have long paid lip service. Years ago it passed into a commonplace that should ever national existence be threatened by an outside force, it would be on the sea that we should have to rely for defence. With so tremendous an issue at stake, why was our knowledge so vague, why has our curiosity to know the truth been so feeble? Perhaps it is that communities that are very rich and very comfortable are slow to believe that danger can hang over them. In the catechism used to teach Catholic children the elements of their religion, the death that awaits every mortal, the instant judgment before the throne of God, the awful alternatives, Heaven or Hell, that depend on the issue, are spoken of as the “Four Last Things.” Their title has been flippantly explained by the admitted fact that they are the very last things that most people ever think of. So has it been with America and England in the matter of war. The threat seemed too far off to be a common and universal concern. It could be left to the governments. So long as we voted all the money that was asked for officially, we had done our share. And, if statesmen told us that our naval force was large enough, and that it was in a state of high efficiency, and ready for war, we felt no obligation to ask what war meant, in what efficiency consisted, or how its existence could be either presumed or proved. We had no incentive to master the thing for ourselves. We were not challenged to inquire whether in fact the semblance of sea-power corresponded with its reality. The fact that it was on sea-power that we relied for defence against invasion should, of course, have quickened our vigilance. It, in fact, deadened it. For we had never refused a pound the Admiralty had asked for. We took the sufficiency of the Navy for granted and, with the buffer of the fleet between ourselves and ruin, the threat of ruin seemed all the more remote.

A minority, no doubt, was uneasy and did inquire. But they found their path crossed by difficulties almost insuperable. The literature of sea-power was based entirely upon the history of the great sea wars of a dim past. Mahan, it is true, had so elucidated the broad doctrines of sea strategy that it seemed as if he who ran might read. But lucid and convincing as is his analysis, urbane and judicial as is his style, Mahan’s work could not make the bulk of his readers adepts in naval doctrine. The fact seems to be that the fabled mysteries of the sea make every truth concerning it elusive, difficult for any one but a sailor to grasp. The difficulties were hardly lessened by Mahan’s chief work having dealt completely with the past. The most important of the world’s sea wars may be said to begin with the Armada and to end in 1815. In these two and one quarter centuries the implements of naval warfare changed hardly at all. Broadly speaking, from the days of Howard of Effingham to those of Fulton and Watt, man used three-masted ships and muzzle-loading cannon. Hence the history of the Great Age deals very little with the technique of war.

To the lay reader, therefore, the study of sea-power, based upon these ancient campaigns, seemed not only the pursuit of a subject vague and elusive in itself, but one that becomes doubly unreal through the successive revolutions of modern times. It was like studying the politics of an extinct community told in records of a dead language. The incendiary shell, armour to keep the shell out, steam that made ships completely dirigible in the sense that they could with great rapidity be turned to any chosen course, these alone had, by the middle of the last century, completely revolutionized the tactical employment of sea force. Steam, which made a ship easier to aim than a gun, gave birth to ramming; and naval thought was hypnotized by this fallacy for nearly two generations. By the end of the century the whole art had again been changed, first by the development of the monster cannon, and next, a far more important invention, the mountings that made first light, and then heavy, guns so flexible in use that they could be aimed in a moderate sea way. These and the invention of the fish torpedo and the high speed boat for carrying it—that in the twilight of dawn and eve would make it practically invisible—brought about fresh changes that altered not only the tactics of battle, but those of blockade and of many other naval operations.

But, great and surprising as were the changes and developments in naval weapons and the material in the last half of the nineteenth century, they were completely eclipsed by the number and nature of the advances made in the first decade and a half of the twentieth. If, to the ordinary reader, the lessons of the past seemed of doubtful value in the light of what steam, the explosive shell, the torpedo, and the heavy gun had effected, what was to be said in the light of the kaleidoscope of novelties sprung upon the world after the latest of all the naval wars? For between 1906 and 1914 there came a succession of naval sensations so startling as to make clear and connected thinking appear a visionary hope.

First we heard that naval guns, that until 1904 had nowhere been fired at a greater range than two miles, were actually being used in practice—and used with success—at distances of ten, twelve, and fourteen thousand yards. It was not only that guns were increasing their range, they were growing monstrously in size and still more monstrously in the numbers put into each individual ship, so that the ships grew faster than the guns themselves, until the capital ship of to-day is more than double the displacement of that of ten years ago. And with size came speed, not only the speed that would follow naturally from the increase in length, but the further speed that was got by a more compact and lighter form of prime mover. Ten years ago the highest action pace a fleet of capital ships would have been, perhaps, seventeen knots. Now whole squadrons can do twenty-five per cent. better. And with the battle-cruiser we have now a capital ship carrying the biggest guns there are, that can take them into action literally twice as fast as a twelve-inch gun could be carried into battle twelve years ago. Thus with range increased out of all imagination, and vastly greater speed, the tactics of battle were obviously in the melting pot.

But these were far from being the only revolutionary elements. There followed in quick succession a new torpedo that ran with almost perfect accuracy for five or six miles and carried an explosive charge three or four times larger than anything previously known. It had seemed but yesterday that a mile was the torpedo’s almost outside range. Then, at the beginning of the decade of which I speak, the submarine had a low speed on the surface, and half of that below it, with a very limited area of manœuvre in which it could work. It seemed little more, many thought, than an ingenious toy capable, perhaps, of an occasional deadly surprise if an enemy’s fleet should come too near a harbour, but seemingly not destined to influence the grand tactics of war. But in an incredibly short time the submarine became a submersible ocean cruiser, with three times the radius of a pre-Dreadnought battleship, with a far higher surface speed, and able to carry guns of such power that they could sink a merchant ship with half-a-dozen rounds at four miles. In this, even the dullest could see something more than a change in naval tactics. Might not the whole nature of naval war be changed? For the long range torpedo that could be used in action, at a range equal to that at which the greatest guns could be expected to hit; the submarine that, completely hidden, could bring the torpedo to such short range that hits would be a certainty, the invisible boat that could evade the closest surface cordon and, almost undisturbed, hunt and destroy merchantmen on the trade routes—that, but for the submarine, would have been completely protected by the command won by the predominant fleet—wonderful as these new things were, they were far from exhausting the new developments of under-water war. Great ingenuity had been shown not only in developing very powerful mines, but in devising means of laying them by the fastest ships, so that not only could these deadly traps be set by merchantmen disguised as neutrals, but by fast cruisers whose speed could at any time enable them to evade the patrols. And, finally, it was equally obvious that the submarine could become a mine layer also. There was, then, literally no spot in the ocean that might not at any moment be mined.

Add to all this, that while wireless introduced an almost instant means of sending orders to or getting news from such distant spots that space was annihilated, airships and aeroplanes—with some, as many thought, with a decisive capacity for attacking fleets in harbour—seemed to make scouting possible over unthought of areas. Can we blame the landsman who set himself patiently to learn the rudiments of the naval art if, after a painful study of the past, he found himself so bemused by the changes of the present as to wonder if a single accepted dogma could survive the high-explosive bombardment of to-day’s inventions? It almost looked as if nothing could be learned from the past and less, if possible, be foretold about the future. If the understanding of sea-power in the days of old had been the possession of but a few, it seemed that to-day it must be denied to all.

It is, therefore, not surprising that extraordinary misunderstandings were—and are—prevalent. Only one truth seemed to survive—the supremacy of the capital ship. But this, too, became an error, because it excluded other truths. To the vast bulk of laymen the word “navy” suggested no more than a panorama of great super-Dreadnought battleships. From time to time naval reviews had been held, and the illustrated papers had shown these great vessels, long vistas of them, anchored in perfectly kept lines, with light cruisers and destroyers fading away into the distance. Both in the pictures and in the descriptions all emphasis was laid upon the ships. And in this the current official naval thought of the day was reflected. If any one wished to compare the British Fleet with the German or the German with the American, he confined himself to enumerating their respective totals in Dreadnoughts, and let it go at that. His mental picture of a fleet was thus a perspective of vast mastodons armed with guns of fabulous reach and still more fabulous power, gifted, some of them, with speed that could outstrip the fastest liner, and encased, at least in part, in almost impenetrable armour.

He would know generally, of course, that such things as cruisers, destroyers, and submarines not only existed, but were indeed necessary. He would know vaguely that cruisers were useful for cruising, and destroyers for their eponymous duties—though he would have been sorely puzzled if he had been asked to say exactly what the cruising was for, or what the destroyers were intended to destroy. He would have heard of the mystic properties of torpedoes, and of mines, and of certain weird possibilities that lay before the combination of the torpedo with the submarine. Similarly, if one challenged him, he would admit, of course, that guns could only be formidable if they hit, and that fleets could only succeed in battle if their officers and crews were properly trained and skilfully led. But these were things that could not be tabulated or scheduled. They did not figure in Naval Annuals, nor in Admiralty statements. They were stumbling blocks to the layman’s desire to be satisfied—and he took it for granted that they were all right, and was content to measure naval strength by the number of the biggest ships, and so rate the navies of the world by what they possessed in these colossal units only. Thus, he would always put Great Britain first, and recently Germany second, with the United States, Japan, and France taking the third place in succession, as their annual programmes of construction were announced. And just as he thought of navies in terms of battleships, so he thought of naval war in terms of great sea battles. A reaction was inevitable.

Four years have now passed since Germany struck her felon blow at the Christian tradition the nations have been struggling to maintain—and so far there has been no Trafalgar. The German Fleet, hidden behind its defences, is still integral and afloat, and though the British Fleet has again and again come out, its battleships have got into action but once, and then for a few minutes only. For four years, therefore, the two greatest battle fleets in the world seem to have been doing nothing; and to be doing nothing now! And so, if you ask the average layman for a broad opinion on sea-power to-day, he will tell you that battle fleets are useless. For a year or more he has heard little of any work at sea except of the work of the submarine. To him, therefore, it seemed manifest that the torpedo has superseded the gun and the submarine the battleship. His opinions, in other words, have swung full cycle. Was he right before and is he wrong now, or was his first view an error and has he at last, under the stern teachings of war, attained the truth?

He was wrong then and he is wrong now. It was an error to think of sea-power only in terms of battleships. It is a still greater error to suppose that sea-power can exist in any useful form unless based on battleships in overwhelming strength. It is true that the German submarines did for a period so threaten the world’s shipping as to make it possible that the overwhelming military resources of the Allies might never be brought to bear against the full strength of the German line in France. It is also true that they have added years to the duration of the war, millions and millions to its cost, and have brought us to straits that are hard to bear. They were truly Germany’s most powerful defence, the only useful form of sea force for her. But it is, nevertheless, quite impossible that the submarine can give to Germany any of the direct advantages which the command of the sea confers.

These simple truths will come home convincingly to us if we suppose for a minute that, at the only encounter in which the battle fleets met, it had been the German Fleet that was victorious. Had Scheer and Von Hipper met Beatty and Jellicoe in a fair, well-fought-out action, and sunk or captured the greater part of the British Fleet so that but a crippled remnant could struggle back to harbour—as little left of the mighty British armada as survived of Villeneuve’s and Gravina’s forces after Trafalgar—would it ever have been necessary for Germany to have challenged the forbearance of the world by reckless and piratical attacks on peaceful shipping? Quite obviously not. For with her battle-cruisers patrolling unchallenged in the Channel, the North Sea, and the Atlantic, with all her destroyers and light cruisers working under their protection, no British merchantman could have cleared or entered any British port, no neutral could have passed the blockading lines. British submarines might, indeed, have held up German shipping—but we should have lost the use of merchant shipping ourselves. Our armies would have been cut off from their overseas base, our fighting Allies would have been robbed of the food and material now reaching them from North and South America and the British Dominions, and the civil population of England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, would have been threatened by immediate invasion or by not very far distant famine. And this is so because command of the sea is conditioned by a superior battleship strength, and can only be exercised by surface craft which cannot be driven off the sea.

Let us look at this question again from another angle. It is probable that Germany possessed, during the summer of 1917, some two hundred submarines at least. She may have possessed more. These submarines were, for many months, sinking on an average of from twenty to twenty-four British ships a week, and perhaps rather more than half as many Allied and neutral ships as well. It was, of course, a very formidable loss. But of every seventeen ships that went into the danger zone, sixteen did actually escape. How many would have escaped if Germany could have maintained a fleet of fifty surface ships—light cruisers, armed merchantmen, swift destroyers—in these waters? Supposing trade ships were to put to sea and try to get past such a cordon just as they risk passing the submarines, how many could possibly escape? What would be the toll each surface ship would take—one a fortnight? One a week? One a day?

These are all ridiculous questions, because, could such a cordon be maintained, no ship bound for Great Britain would put to sea at all. It would not be sixteen escaping to one captured; the whole seventeen would so certainly be doomed that they all would stay in port. So much the war has certainly taught us. When, on August 4, 1914, the British Government declared war on Germany, the sailing of every German ship the world over was then and there stopped. A hundred that were at sea could not be warned and were captured. Those that escaped capture made German or neutral ports. But the order not to sail did not wait upon results. The stoppage of the German merchant service was automatic and instantaneous. It would have been raving insanity to have risked encounter with a navy that held the surface command.

Three months later the situation was locally reversed in South American waters. Von Spee, with two very powerful armoured cruisers and three light fast vessels, encountered a very inferior British force under Admiral Cradock off Coronel, and defeated it decisively. Von Spee’s victory meant that in the Southern Atlantic there was no force capable of opposing him. Instantly every South American port was closed. No one knew where Von Spee might turn up next. Not a captain dared clear for England. Even in South Africa General Botha’s hands were tied. A section of the Transvaal and Orange Colony Dutch had risen in rebellion, and had made common cause with the Germans in South West Africa. With Von Spee at large there was no saying what help he would bring to the enemy, and the risk that communications with the mother country might be cut, was a real one. For four weeks the South African Government was paralyzed.

Then followed the most brilliant piece of sea strategy in the war. Two battle-cruisers were sent secretly and at top speed to the Falkland Islands. They reached Port Stanley on December 7, and on the next morning at eight o’clock, Von Spee, in obedience to some inexplicable instinct, brought the whole of his forces to attack the islands. It was the most extraordinary coincidence in the history of war. It was as if a man had been told that a sixty-pound salmon had been seen in a certain river, had thrown a fly at random, and had got a bite and landed him with his first cast. The verdict of Coronel was reversed. Four out of five German ships were sunk. The Dresden escaped, but only to hide herself in the fjords of Patagonia. Germany’s brief spell of sea command in the South Atlantic had ended as dramatically as it began. And within twenty-four hours the laden ships of Chile and the Argentine had put to sea, the underwriters had dropped their premiums to the pre-war rate, and the arrangements for the invasion of South West Africa had begun.

Once more it had been proved that the course of sea traffic is governed by sea command, and sea command means the general power to use the ocean for what it truly is, the highway that connects all the ports of the world together. To use, that is to say, exclusively; to limit its use to the power possessing that command, and to those other powers that might be friendly to them, or to neutrals unconcerned with the war altogether. Never in history has this command been complete. From Trafalgar to 1815, the British, if ever, commanded the sea adversely against their enemies. But they lost anything from six hundred to one thousand ships a year, and it was never possible to stop the whole of the enemy’s trade. Before submarines were ever heard of, then, command could not be made absolute. Strangely enough, steam changed all this. To-day the surface command against surface force is virtually absolute. In August, 1914, Germany had in all a dozen armed vessels on the high seas prepared to attack British shipping. They took and destroyed fifty-six vessels only. All but three were destroyed or driven to intern in very few months. Save for a raider or two—exceptions that prove the rule—no surface attack has been made on the Allies’ ocean trade since then. And there has been no ocean trade in German bottoms at all. In a sense, then, the submarine has only restored to the weaker belligerent a part—and only a small part—of the powers he possessed in the days of sailing fleets. It gives him a limited power of attack on his enemy’s supply. But, two cruises of the Deutschland notwithstanding, it has returned him none of his old trading power. And, as the course of the submarine war has shown, so long as he limits the attack on trade to proportions which the neutral world can put up with, the power of attack is so restricted as to be without military value. The attempt, then, to get a kind of command of the sea by submarine alone could only be made at the cost of turning the whole neutral world into an enemy world. And from the German point of view, the tragedy of the thing is this. The attempt was made, the whole world has become hostile, and the thing has failed.

In these two popular fallacies—the pre-war error that battleships were everything, and the present error that they are absolutely useless, and that it is the submarine that reigns at sea—we see, as it appears to me, convincing proofs that an exposition of the A B C of sea fighting would not be a work of supererogation. I have spoken of these fallacies as popular fallacies, but they are not limited to the unlettered, nor are they foreign to men of affairs. They have, on the contrary, flourished most in ministries, and been strongly held by those whose business it should have been not only to follow or express, but to mould, public opinion. A British statesman, afterwards Prime Minister, said once in Parliament: “I believe that since the Declaration of Paris, the fleet, valuable as it is for preventing an invasion of these shores, is almost valueless for any other purpose.” Most strange of all, the strongest exponents of these heresies have been certain naval officers themselves. It would be interesting to essay to account for this, as it seems to me the strangest curiosity of our times. Let it suffice for the moment to state that what up to a year ago was a dominating faith, is recognized universally to-day as a devastating tissue of errors.

Had the root principles of sea-power been properly understood, these errors never could have prevailed. For it is popular opinion that is ultimately responsible for the kind of government each nation has. On it depends the kind of navy that each government creates, and hence the measure of safety at sea that each nation enjoys. The tragic history of the last four years shows how this opinion can be misguided into an almost fatal tolerance of what is false.

When will a new Mahan arise to set things right? The world needs a naval teacher.

CHAPTER IV
Some Root Doctrines

War is a condition which arises when the appeal to reason, justice, or fear has failed and a nation wishes, or in self-defence is compelled, to bring another to its will by force.

Force is exerted by armies on land and naval fleets at sea. It is the primary business of the armed force in each element to defeat that of the enemy in battle, and so disintegrate and destroy it. The beaten nation’s power to fight is thus brought to naught. Its resolution to renew the attack or to continue resistance is broken down. If defeat throws it open to invasion without power of stopping the invader, its national life, internal and external, is paralyzed and it is compelled to bow to the will of the conqueror. In its simplest conception, then, war is a struggle between nations in which the opposing sides pit their armed forces against each other and have to abide by the issue of that combat.

It is rarely, however, that a single battle between armies has decided the issue of a war. The campaigns of Jena and Sadowa are indeed instances in point. But they are in their way as exceptional as is the Boer War—decided without a pitched battle being fought at all. These may be regarded as the extremes. Normally, war may end victoriously for one side without the other having been deprived of the means of continuing even effective resistance. In such cases it is some moderation in the victor’s terms, some change in the ambition of the partially defeated side, or, at least, a sense that no adequate results can be expected from further fighting, that has brought about the cessation of hostilities.

But, again, there are wars in which the issues can admit of no compromise at all. The invasions of Tamerlane, Attila, and the Mohammedan conquerors were not wars but campaigns of extermination. It is in such a war that we are engaged to-day. The stake for every country is of a vital character, so that compromise is indistinguishable from defeat, and defeat must carry with it the negation of everything which makes national life tolerable. The Germans have convinced themselves that there is no alternative to world dominion but downfall, and the civilized world is determined that there shall be no German world dominion. Such a struggle by its nature permits of no end by arrangement or negotiation. It must go forward until either one side or the other is either militarily defeated or until the economic strain disintegrates the state. In such conditions a secondary form of military pressure may be of paramount importance.

Now if we go back to our first definition of war, as a struggle in which the opposing sides pit their armed forces against each other and abide by the issue of the combat, we must remember that, just as it is rare for a war to be decided by a single combat, so is it rare for a single combat to dissipate and destroy an army. Ordinary prudence dictates that there shall be protected lines or some strong place into which it can retreat in the event of defeat. And when it is thus compelled to abandon open fighting and seek a position of natural or artificial strength, it becomes the business of the stronger to complete the business by destroying and penetrating the defences. But if this is too costly a proceeding, the stronger tries to contain the force so protected and passes on, if possible, to investment and siege. The simplest case of this is the complete encirclement and siege of the great city or camp, of which the war of 1870 gave two such striking examples in Metz and Paris.

When war calls out the whole manhood of many nations and turns them into fighting forces, it is obvious that there cannot be equality of force in all the theatres. Where either side is weaker, it is compelled locally to adopt the same tactics that a defeated force adopts. It must, that is to say, go upon the defensive. It entrenches and fortifies itself. Thus, as military operations, the attack and defence of fortifications may become general, and this without either side being necessarily able to inflict the pressure of siege upon its opponent, siege being understood to mean severing of communications with the outside world. But, clearly, where siege is possible, as was the case with Metz and Paris, the attacking force becomes also the investing force. It can rely upon the straits to which it can reduce the besieged to bring about that surrender which, ex hypothesi, would have been the result of the battle had the weaker not declined it.

Battle and siege are thus in essence complementary modes of war and all military action may roughly be defined as fighting, or some method of postponing fighting, or steps or preparations towards fighting.

SEA WAR

War at sea is carried on, as we have seen, by naval fleets. The immediate object of a fleet is to find, defeat, and destroy the enemy’s fleet. The ultimate or further objective which is gained by such destruction is to monopolize the use of the sea, as the master highway, by retaining freedom for the passage of the victor’s ships while denying such passage to those of the defeated. The power to insist on this exclusive control of sea communications is called “command of the sea.”

If the war is a purely naval war, that is, limited to the use of naval forces and hence directed solely to naval ends—as was the war between England and France, in the course of which the United States gained their independence—the command of the sea can theoretically be won by a single victorious battle. For if the main force of one side is destroyed, that belligerent becomes incapable of questioning the supremacy of the enemy, and hence must limit his sea action to sporadic attempts on communications. These can never be maintained to a degree that can be decisive, simply because a power greater than can be brought to the attack can be employed for their defence. Success in such a war, then, can simply be measured in terms of trade or of sea supply; defeat by the economic loss that its cessation must cause. There have been purely naval wars in the past and, could a combination be formed of countries whose aggregate sea-power was greater than that of Great Britain, a purely naval war might occur again. But it could only be brought about by such a conjuncture for the reason that Great Britain is the only country to which a purely naval defeat would mean such utter and immediate ruin, that her surrender to her sea conqueror would follow inevitably and promptly. This is so because, whereas almost every country is to some extent dependent upon sea supplies, Great Britain exists only in virtue of them.

To us, therefore, the advantages that derive from possession of command of the sea are overwhelming; and our possession of it adversely to any other country must be disadvantageous, exactly in proportion as that country is dependent upon sea supplies.

In a war which is both naval and continental, as in the present war, command of the sea means much more than the power to deny the gain and comfort of sea supplies. The side that is defeated at sea, or avoids fighting for fear of defeat, may lose not only everything which can come to it directly or indirectly from the use of ships, but will suffer from the added disadvantage that a military use can be made of sea communications in the enemy’s possession. The side that commands the sea can carry on its ocean traffic, and supply not only its civil population but its armies and its fleets from abroad. It can ally itself with continental nations and send its military forces away in ships and land them in friendly ports. It can prevent the sea invasion of its own, of its allies’ territory, and of its colonial possessions. It can stop not only the enemy’s own sea trade, but all neutral sea trade that directly or indirectly can benefit him, so that he is cut off from all supplies, whether raw material, food, or manufacture, not produced in his own territories or in those with which he has land communications. If the sea force of the side possessing command includes means of engaging stationary defences with success, and removing passive sea defences from the approaches to the enemy’s coast and harbours, then it can even beat down the enemy’s coast protection and invade him directly. The nation with sea command, then, threatens its opponents with attack by land at every point and, pending its development, can to the extent to which the enemy is dependent on overseas traffic for the necessaries of life, or for the maintenance of his armies at full fighting strength, subject him to all the rigour of siege.

The command of the sea which makes the exercise of these menaces possible, is, as we have seen, the fruit of victory over the enemy’s armed forces. But if that enemy is weaker and follows at sea the course which, as we have seen, an army inferior on land must adopt, viz., declines battle and withdraws his fleet behind defences to postpone it, he thereby to a great extent surrenders the sea command to the stronger. And if the stronger knows his business, he at once uses this command to subject his opponent to the economic disadvantages set out above. Siege by sea, then, like siege on land, may be the consequence of, but is always the alternative to, victorious battle in bringing about a decision. For while victorious battle robs the defeated nation of any possibility of warding off further attack by force, siege undermines the will and resolution of the civil population to endure, and thus calls forces into existence which will compel the enemy’s government to surrender.

The command of the ocean ways are, then, of tremendous consequences in war—so great, indeed, that the control of sea communications has often been put forth as the primary object to be aimed at by sea-power. That it is the object of sea-power victoriously used we have already seen. But so long as the enemy possesses forces that actually disturb the tranquil enjoyment of sea communications, command is certainly qualified, and if he have in reserve unused and unimpaired forces for attacking and defeating the fleet which secures command, the command of the sea cannot be said to be unconditionally possessed. Consequently, if destruction of the enemy’s armed forces is a necessary condition to real—because indisputable—sea command, it is for victorious battle and for nothing else that fleets exist.

These propositions are not only obviously true; they seem to be truly obvious. But in recent history we have witnessed the curious spectacle that an inversion of the order of these two statements did actually create two different and opposed schools of naval thought. The first school saw in victory the first and constant preoccupation of the fleet. It concerned itself, therefore, chiefly with the essentials to victory, and as victory can only come from fighting, it was at the elements of fighting that it worked. It sought to find the most perfect methods of using weapons, because it realized that it was only from the evolution of these that right tactics could be deduced. It studied the campaigns of the past to discover the two great groups of doctrine that our fighting ancestors have bequeathed to us, the first dealing with the science of strategy, the second with the principles of command. They realized that weapons and the ships that carry them do not fight themselves, but must be fought by men; and they wished those men rightly educated and trained in the subtle and complex science of their high calling. To them, in short, sea war was an affair of knowledge applied by men trained both in the wisdom and in the lofty spirit of those that had excelled in naval war before. And, faithful to the traditions of the past, no less than eager for research into all the undeveloped potentialities of the products of modern progress, they pinned their faith on ability to force the enemy to battle, and to beat him there when battle came.

The other school went for a short cut to naval triumph. If only they could get a fleet of ships so big, so fabulously armed, so numerous as to make it seem to the enemy that his fleet was too feeble to attack, why then battle would be made altogether superfluous, and no further worry over so unlikely a contingency was necessary. They did not, therefore, trouble to inquire either into the processes needed for bringing battle about, or into what was necessary for success when battle came. They passed on to the contemplation of what can only be the fruit of victory—as if victory were not a condition precedent!

It was, unfortunately, this group, hypnotized by a theory it did not understand, which controlled naval policy in Great Britain for the ten years preceding the war, and for the first three and a half years of it. Their error lay, of course, in supposing that a fleet, so materially strong and numerous that its defeat was unimaginable because no attack on it could be conceived, must—so long as any serious lowering of its force by attrition was avoided—be the military equivalent to one which had already defeated the enemy; that “invincible” and “victorious” were, in short, interchangeable terms. So masterful was this obsession that their apologists—shutting their eyes to the obvious and appalling consequences of this creed in action—two years after the event, still regarded the only encounter between the main fleets in this war as a great victory, because the larger, by avoiding the risk of close contact with the lesser, came out of the conflict with forces as substantially superior to the enemy’s as they were before the opportunity of a decisive battle had been offered.

The group in question had, indeed, become possessed of one truth. It was simply that preponderant force is a vital element. But by holding it to the exclusion of all other truths they were blinded not only to the crucial business of studying the intellectual and technical essentials to fighting, but even to the orthodox meaning of the communication theory of sea war, on which they had so eagerly, but ignorantly, seized. For the true doctrine is, as we have already seen, just this, that when an enemy refuses battle, the stronger navy’s sole remaining offensive is to cut him off from communication with the sea. It must do this, as we have seen, to restrict his supplies, to weaken his armed forces, to strike at his prosperity and the comfort of his civil population, and thus obtain that partial paralysis of his national life, the completion of which can only be got by a victory that disarms him. And these things, which are the results of blockade, are also the intended results. But they are not intended for their own sake only, nor, primarily, to make the enemy surrender to avoid them. They are inflicted to force the enemy to the battle which he has refused, because it is only by battle that he can relieve himself from them. A stringent blockade, then, is the primary means of inducing a fleet action, and hence we see that siege, while truly the only alternative to battle, is something much more.

Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that, viewed in its right relation to the true theory of war—a state of things in which a conflict of wills between nations is settled by a conflict of their armed forces—it is almost the primary object of siege to bring this conflict about and so to hasten the issue. From the definition the aim of war is the enemy’s defeat and not merely his surrender. And battle is necessary to defeat.

The failure to realize this elementary truth was the cause of much more than an omission to fathom the technique of fighting, the fruits of which we shall find, when we come to the consideration of the naval actions of the last three years and note the curious result of the Jutland deployment and the inconclusive character of so many of the artillery encounters which have occurred, and the extraordinary prolongation of those which were not inconclusive. It brought about what is, at first sight, something even more astonishing, viz., an actual indisposition by those in control of the British Navy, to adopt, when the enemy refused battle, the only course that could compel him to it, though it was actually the first article of their creed to gain the power to do this very thing.

Great Britain went to war at midnight August 4, 1914. The Grand Fleet went to its war stations. The High Seas Fleet withdrew to the security of the Kiel Canal. Within a day no enemy trading ships dared put to sea. Within a week, transports were carrying a British army to France. Our merchantmen continued their sea trading almost as if nothing had happened. But, though the German flag vanished from the seas, neutral vessels were free to use the German ports until the following March, and for another six months the enemy was free to import, in almost any quantities that he liked, certain forms of food, cotton, fats, and many of the ores and chemicals which were the indispensable raw material of the propellants and explosives vitally necessary to him in a prolonged war.

By permitting this, we showed that our policy, in other words, was not to attack but to wait attack, and then not to do anything to compel the enemy to attack. Our sea statesmen had not indoctrinated the civil government with a clearly defined policy that it was prepared to enforce at the opening of hostilities. Yet in a matter of this kind it was exactly at the opening of hostilities that a stringent blockade, accompanied by a generous rationing of sea supplies to the neutrals bordering on Germany, could have been proclaimed and enforced with the least friction. For, in the first place, Germany’s declaration of war was so entirely unprovoked and sudden, and her first measure of war, the invasion of Belgium—when her soldiery became at once outrageous—combined the world over to create a neutral opinion strongly in favour of the Allies. Next, the fact that Great Britain’s participation in the war was both professedly and actually in loyalty to the identical obligation to Belgium which Germany had violated, predisposed America, for the first time since the colonies proclaimed their independence, to an active sympathy with the British ideal, perhaps because for the first time that ideal appeared to them to be one that was purely chivalrous. It was then everything that the psychological moment should have been seized. Nor could it have been difficult to see that, if the opportunity was allowed to slip by, the mere fact that a half measure—to wit, the suspense of German shipping—had been enforced, must lead to a new condition, namely, a hugely magnified trade through the neutral ports. This trade, it is true, was nominally confined to goods that were not contraband of war. But contraband is an elastic term, and, to make things worse, the British Government proclaimed its intention—so little had war-trained thought prepared its policy—of accepting the provisions of the unexecuted Declaration of London as defining what contraband was to be. This gave the enemy the liberty to import materials indispensable to his manufacture of munitions and of armament, was one of which full advantage was taken. It was bad enough that cotton, indispensable ores, the raw materials of glycerine as well as the finished product, were poured into the laboratories, the factories, and the arsenals of Germany without stint or limit. It was, if possible, worse that this traffic created gigantic exporting interests in America which, once vested, made the restriction of them wear the appearance of an intolerable hardship when, many months too late, more stringent measures were taken. So powerful indeed had these interests become, that the real and rigid blockade which, under the doctrines of the “continuous voyage” and the “ultimate destination” would from the first have been fully consonant with international law, was actually never attempted at all until the United States themselves became belligerents.

For fourteen months, then, we witnessed a state of things so paradoxical as to be without parallel in history. It was our professed creed that the fleet existed to seize and control sea communications. The enemy conceded us this control and, so far from using it to straiten him so relentlessly that he would have no choice but to fight for relief from it, we actually permitted him to draw, through sources absolutely under our control, for essentials in the form of overseas supplies that he needed in a war which all the world realized must now be a prolonged one. The traditional naval policy of the country was thus not reflected in the action of the country’s government, because that policy had no representation in the Navy’s counsels. There is, perhaps, no single heresy for which so high and disastrous a price has been paid.

It would appear, then, that our pre-war naval policy did not contemplate that immediate and stringent sea pressure that would compel the enemy to action, nor yet the closest and most vigilant kind of watch that would have brought him to action in the promptest and most fatal manner when circumstances compelled him to come out. Nor is it difficult to see why this was so. To profess the communication theory of sea war without realizing that the control of communications is the result of victory, that is, setting up a consequence as an aim while ignoring its cause, inevitably led to the inverted error, an unwillingness so to employ the control of communications, when the enemy ceded them without victory, as to force the enemy into battle as the only hope of escaping an intolerable condition. Not having contemplated and prepared for battle as the first aim of naval policy, they left an instinctive disinclination to force on an affair which they suddenly realized would be as critical as it was certainly unanticipated. It is this which explains possibly the greatest paradox in history, viz., that Germany proclaimed a strict blockade of Great Britain before Great Britain proclaimed such a blockade of Germany.

CHAPTER V
Elements of Sea Force

Having established the truth that the primary purpose of a navy is to fight and its immediate object victory, we must next pass on to ask of what it is that naval force consists and by what processes it fights and wins. All fighting is done by men using weapons. At sea the men and weapons have to be carried in ships. The ships and weapons have to be designed and selected, and the men have to be converted from ignorance into accomplished fighting units. Finally, the ships and the weapons must be employed in accordance with certain methods and in obedience to certain dynamic laws—the technique, the tactics, and the strategy of war. It may simplify the subject to summarize the elements of naval force as follows. It may be said to consist:

1. Of the main weapon-bearing ships built for fighting fleet actions.

2. Of smaller armed ships of many kinds necessary for the right use of the main fighting ships and for the subsidiary operations leading up to, or following from, fleet actions.

3. Of means other than ships—aircraft, mines, and the like—for entrapping and injuring the main fleets and cruisers of the enemy, for defending and attacking bases, and for making certain sea areas dangerous or impassable to the enemy’s forces.

4. Of the personnel to man, fight, and command the ships and to direct the operations of the separate squadrons and fleets at sea; and

5. Of that higher central command on shore that, by designing and selecting the material, by training the officers and men, creates sea force; that discovers the right method of using weapons; that elucidates the tactics that follow from such use; that develops the strategy which the strength and situation of rival forces makes best; that as a preparation for war, keeps the whole force ready in all particulars; that in war, directs it to the greatest advantage.

To get the best naval force it is clear, then, that you want

(a) Ships whose tactical properties are superior to those which the enemy possesses, and you want more of them.

(b) Weapons delivering a more devastating blow, that can reach to longer ranges, and can be employed with higher rapidity.

(c) Methods of employing both the ships and the weapons that will assure to them the utmost scope of efficiency so as to strike at the enemy—if possible—before the enemy can strike, and will keep them in use when conditions of movement, light, and weather have become too difficult for the enemy to overcome.

(d) A personnel of higher moral, better discipline, and greater skill.

(e) A staff of officers to train and command this personnel, adept in all the craft of fighting, instinct with the loftiest patriotism, and masters of the art of leadership.

(f) A supreme command, not only equally conversant both with the doctrine that can be gathered from a study of the past and with the resources that modern scientific and industrial development place at the disposal of the fighting men, but consciously cultivating what may be called a prophetic imagination, by which alone future developments can be anticipated, and guided throughout, and always, by regard to the public interest only.

The factors that enter are first, material; secondly, men; and, thirdly, the intellectual, spiritual, and moral activities necessary for shaping and turning the first two to their purpose.

Looked at largely, the elements have been enumerated above in the inverse order of their importance. For, clearly, the qualities of the ship are much less important than the qualities of the weapons that she carries. A slow, unarmoured battleship, carrying accurate, quick-firing, long-range guns, is a better fleet unit than a fast, perfectly protected ship with weapons unlikely to hit, because ill-made, poorly mounted, or badly ammunitioned. And the power and range of the weapons are less important than the science and methods with which they are employed. An old 12-inch gun that can be used with constant effect at 12,000 yards when the change of range is high, the target often obscured by smoke, and the firing ship constantly under helm, is an infinitely more effective weapon than a new 15-inch that, in spite of a legend range of 20,000 yards, cannot be made to hit in action conditions. And it is from right method that are derived right tactics by which, in turn, the decisive massing of ships in action is obtained. Again, the best of ships’ weapons and methods must be absolutely useless unless the discipline, moral, and skill of those who use them are equal to the strain of fighting. Again, it is highly improbable that you will have good discipline and skill unless you have good leaders, for the excellent reason that it is the officers who make the men; certainly, if they exist in spite of there not being good leaders, weak or heartless leadership can throw them altogether away. The Revolution robbed the French Navy of nearly all its trained officers—and, though possessed of better ships and courageous crews, that navy never fought with real effect in the Great War of from 1792 to 1815. Again, however excellent your ships, weapons, and methods, your moral and your courage, unskilful command at sea and ignorance of the true principles of tactics may rob you of victory. And, lastly, unless those who are responsible for the creation of the material and the training of human force, and for the chief command and general strategy before and during war, are equal to their task unless they keep in close and real touch with the active service, not only is it almost impossible that a force of very high efficiency can exist, but quite impossible that a right direction can be given to it in war.

The reader will very likely detect in the foregoing category of precedence a trite maxim of Napoleon’s elaborated into a series of sonorous, if illustrative, commonplaces. But this is a matter in which, even at the cost of being hackneyed, it is absolutely necessary that certain points should be clearly established. First, looking at the whole subject of sea force as a problem in dynamics, it should be constantly before our eyes that a navy is so highly complex an affair that it can only act rightly when all the elements of which it is composed are employed in accord with the principles peculiar to each, and are combined so that each takes its due place in relation to the rest. It is, for example, quite conceivable that you might have a fleet or a flotilla equipped with the best material, its personnel instructed and expert in the best methods, commanded in detail and directed by the chief command according to the soundest principles of tactics and strategy, and yet that such a unit might fail in winning its legitimate purpose, simply because of some failure to base its operations on correct data. The omission to provide all the means for obtaining intelligence that science and experience suggest, or, having employed them and got the raw material, an inability to interpret and transmit it rightly and promptly to the officer in command, might send a fleet upon its mission either to the wrong place or at the wrong time, or with the wrong dispositions. In considering naval science, then, it is, so to speak, axiomatic to recognize that, as its extent and variety are almost infinite, the task of elucidating and teaching its principles and their application, so that every person making up the organism which is to set the science into action shall act in the light of true doctrine, requires an intellectual effort of incalculable magnitude, just because the dynamic laws governing each element are extraordinarily obscure, and because the number of elements is so extraordinarily great. To be part perfect, then, may vitiate the whole effort.

But if a whole science must be explored and its principles universally inculcated, it would seem as if a wholly untenable ideal was being put forward. But there is no escape from this ideal. For the laws of science are ruthless. Just as “the wages of sin is death,” so is failure the fruit of false doctrine. And the cruelty of the things lies in this, that what seems an almost infinitesimal infidelity may bring a large and noble effort, greatly conceived and gallantly executed, to disaster.

The scale of the task prescribes the scale of the instruments for its discharge. It was clearly beyond the scope of a single individual as chief professional adviser to the Admiralty, I will not say to solve, but even to keep account of, all the intricate problems which require investigation. Indeed, for many years before the war it was fully realized that only a properly organized war staff could even make a beginning from which a right understanding of naval war in modern conditions could derive. The necessity for this had constantly been urged upon successive governments. The matter came to a head when, in 1909, the Cabinet appointed a committee from its own members to consider Lord Charles Beresford’s very grave statements as to the condition of the Navy. This committee never published the evidence by which Lord Charles and his associates tried to establish their case. But in the course of a brief report which was published they said that they had been impressed “with the difference of opinion amongst officers of high rank and professional attainments regarding important principles of naval strategy and tactics, and they look forward with much confidence to the further development of a naval war staff, from which naval members of the Board and flag officers and their staffs at sea may be expected to derive common benefit.” Observe, that the most experienced officers of the day differed with regard to important principles of tactics! The technical officers of the navy knew that this absence of doctrine “among officers of high rank and professional attainments” arose very largely out of a total want of exact data as to the precise effect our weapons could be expected to have upon the enemy, and the effect the enemy’s weapons could be expected to have upon us. If there was no agreement as to how to use weapons there could be no agreement as to their value and, without such agreement, any common doctrine of tactics must be impossible. And with tactics in the melting-pot, strategy must be pure guesswork.

The 1909 committee had hoped that an extended war staff would bring order out of chaos. But by 1911 there had still been nothing done to realize its pious aspirations. When Mr. Churchill took office, then, in the autumn of that year, he had the conclusions of the Beresford Committee to guide him as to the state of strategy and tactics and a state of things in the matter of guns, torpedoes, and mines, no less than the manifest trend of active naval thought, to show where the beginnings of reform must be made.

Mr. Churchill became First Lord in circumstances which were very unexpected, and his first public announcement raised hope to the highest point. For, over the date of New Year’s Day, 1912, there was published by the First Lord a Memorandum which contained a passage on which every optimist fastened. This document defined the root need of naval force with masterly precision. Coming so soon, expressed with such clarity and conviction, it seemed to be not so much a collection of eloquent and thoughtful sentences logically compacted, but a profession of intentions that must definitely turn the current of naval life into the only channel that could assure right progress. Mr. Churchill, in short, had quite evidently grasped the fundamental truth that the whole structure of naval war was based upon the mastery of weapons and, as evidently, intended the pursuit of this mastery to be the watchword of his administration. His actual words were as follows:

“Unit efficiency—that is to say, the individual fighting power of each vessel—is in the sea service for considerable periods entirely independent of all external arrangements and unit efficiency at sea, far more so than on land, is the prime and final factor without which the combinations of strategy and tactics are only the preliminaries of defeat, but with which even faulty dispositions can be swiftly and decisively retrieved.”

At last, then, the man and the moment had come together. To the new First Lord had been given the vision that the moment called for. At last, the consistent, concerted, co-ordinated effort would be made which, proceeding by investigation, analysis, reason, and experiment, would lead us to the root truths of one weapon after another. When the conditions of action were analyzed and the problems they propounded isolated, a measure of our capacity to deal with them would be afforded, and not only would the points of our incapacity be made clear, but the reasons for that incapacity and the character of the measures needed for the remedy would be automatically shown by the analysis. For the first condition for solving any problem is its accurate, scientific, and exhaustive statement. And, if the statement is sufficiently full, it almost carries the solution with it. Let the problems of the gun, torpedo, mine, and submarine once be set out in full, and the principles on which we should proceed to get the utmost out of them in attack, and the utmost against similar efforts by the enemy in defence, would become very clear indeed. In short, when all available knowledge was put before those capable of appreciating it, weighing it, and drawing from it right deductions, progress in a right direction would be assured because, for the first time, it would be established on a scientific foundation.

Nor, indeed, was this all. For no such inquisition could be made in fundamentals without the work being reflected in every other department of naval activity. In place of uninstructed conjecture, we should have, as a basis of naval thought and plan, the reasoned conclusions of expert knowledge.

There was the more reason for this optimistic view because Mr. Churchill’s Memorandum went on to indicate the machinery by which alone right methods can invariably, because together impartially and impersonally, be discovered. For the particular occasion of the Memorandum was the establishment of a new and extended war staff for which, since 1904, we had all been waiting. This, the First Lord explained, must have four carefully differentiated but very important tasks.

It was first, the Memorandum said, “to be the means of preparing and training officers for dealing with the extended problems that await them in stations of high responsibility.” Its second function was to sift, develop, and apply the results of history and experience, and to preserve them “as a general stock of reasoned opinion available as an aid and as a guide for all who are called upon to determine in peace or war the naval policy of the country.” Its third function was the exhibition of the vast superiority which a well-selected committee of experts possesses over even the most brilliant expert working by himself. The Staff was to be a “brain far more comprehensive than of any single man, however gifted, and tireless and unceasing in its action, applied continuously to the scientific study of naval strategy and preparation.” Finally, this Staff, carefully selected from the most promising officers, whose work would train them for the highest command, making all history and experience the province from which to draw the raw material of its doctrines, engaged tirelessly and unceasingly in applying this doctrine to the guidance of the civilian authorities by defining the requirements of our war preparation and war strategy, was also to be the executive department through which the higher command would issue its authoritative orders. “It is to be an instrument capable of formulating any decision which has been taken, or may be taken, by the executive, in terms of precise and exhaustive detail.”

To those hopefully disposed this departure, then, seemed beyond words momentous. For thirty years, whatever disagreement there may have been in the navy, there was absolute unanimity as to the need of a staff for the study of war and the formulation of campaign plans. So long as weapons in use could be mastered by the personnel of the ships without dependence on methods of fire control and so forth extraneously supplied, this was indeed the navy’s chief and overmastering need. Had such a staff existed even sixteen years ago, it is quite inconceivable that we could imperceptibly have drifted into dependence on extraneous methods for the right use of weapons, without the staff responsible for preparation for war, bringing the fact of this dependence to the notice of its chief. And, the principle once recognized that staff organization is the only road to infallibility, the institution of an additional staff for the study of so vital a matter must inevitably have followed. The existence of one competent, impartial, and impersonal expert body would automatically have resulted in the creation of another.

But actually when this new staff was so resoundingly established at the beginning of 1912, some amongst the optimists began to wonder whether there might not be a fly in the ointment of their content. It was pointed out that to create a staff for dealing “with the combinations of strategy and tactics” before any machinery existed for elucidating the essentials of “unit efficiency” did most certainly have the air of putting the cart before the horse. But to doubt that this machinery would follow seemed too absurd in face of the tremendous emphasis that Mr. Churchill had laid upon its necessity. If, without unit efficiency, “the combinations of strategy and tactics were only the preliminaries of defeat,” whereas if it existed a position in which tactics had failed, “could be retrieved with swiftness and decision,” it was manifestly unthinkable that such efficiency could be left to chance, or assumed to exist on the ipse dixit of any official. Obviously the First Lord, having put his hand to the minor and secondary matter, would not delay action at least as drastic in the major primary.

The institution of the War Staff, then, was watched with sympathetic interest in the full expectation, not only that it must lead to great results, but that it must be followed—as, of course, it should have been preceded—by one for fathoming all the potentialities of the means employed in the attack and defence of fleets.

But the War Staff was never put into the position to discharge the functions which the 1909 committee had designated as its main purpose. So far from being an authority equipped for the exhaustive study of war and how to prepare for it, the whole apparatus of fighting was carefully excluded from its purview. It had no connection with the departments administering gunnery, torpedoes, submarines, aircraft, or mines. As to some of these activities, there were as a fact no departments solely charged with their control before the War Staff was instituted. They were not entrusted to the War Staff. And no new staffs were created! If the strategical vagueness, to which the Beresford Committee had borne witness in 1909, arose largely, as many supposed, from the uncertain state of naval technique, then, so far as the War Staff was concerned, this vagueness had to continue—for technique was not their concern.

The consequences were demonstrated in many striking ways as the war progressed. But not the least curious result was the confusion that arose as to the offensive and defensive aspects of naval strategy and preparation. In the debate on the Naval Estimates of 1916 a violent attack on Admiralty policy by Mr. Churchill left Mr. Balfour with no alternative but to break the brutal truth to us that, at the outbreak of war, we had not a single submarine-proof harbour on the East Coast. Reflect for a minute what this means. In the years which have elapsed since Lord Fisher came to the Admiralty as First Sea Lord, two altogether revolutionary changes have been made in naval war.

1. Until 1904 the 12-inch guns of our battleships were weapons that no one would have thought of using beyond the range of 4,000 yards. The identical guns have been used in this war at 11,000, 12,000, and 13,000 yards. The advance in range owes nothing to improvements in the gun. It has been brought about by improvements in sights, in range-finders, and in the organization called fire control.

2. Again, in 1904 the submarine, or submersible torpedo-carrying boat, had indeed been proved to be a practical instrument for war, but was still in its infancy. By 1907, when Captain Murray Sueter wrote his well-known work on the subject, it had become obvious that the tactics of battle, no less than the defence of fleets, stood to be completely changed by its actual and probable developments.

Now every new engine of war—and as a long-range weapon the modern gun is such—creates a double problem. There is the art of using it in attack; there is the art of countering it when it is in the enemy’s hands. With every new development, then, the Navy has to learn a new offensive and a new defensive. In the matter of guns, there is but one defensive that can be perfectly successful. It is to develop a method of using them so rapid, so insistent, and so accurate that the enemy’s guns will be out of action before they can be employed against us. Failing this there is a secondary defensive, viz., to protect ships by armour. Finally, you may keep out of range of the enemy’s guns by turning or running away. The adoption of armour calls for no perfection either of tactical organization or technical practice. It is a matter which can be left to the metallurgists, engineers, and constructors. The purely naval policy, then, would have been either to develop the use of guns offensively, which, as we have seen, must also be the best defence, or with a purely defensive idea, solely to enjoin the tactic that will avoid the risks inseparable from coming under the enemy’s fire. To the country that was completing nearly two battleships to any other country’s one, that aspired to command the sea, that hoped to be able to blow any enemy fleet out of the water if it got the chance, it would seem obvious that there could be only one gunnery policy; to wit, push the offensive to the highest possible extent.

Again, the distinguishing feature of submarines is their capacity to approach the strongest of vessels unseen and then, in waters superficially under hostile command, to strike with the most deadly of all weapons. As they gained in speed and radius of action, it became obvious that wherever a fleet might be—whether at sea or in harbour—it must, unless it were protected by effective passive defences while in harbour, and by numerous mobile guards when at sea, be exposed to this insidious and, if successful, deadly form of attack.

The basic supposition of British naval policy has been to maintain a fleet sufficiently powerful to drive all enemy’s craft within his harbours and defences. The proposition has only to be stated for it to be clear that the navy could not have expected, except in rare circumstances, to have any targets for its submarines, whereas it was as certain as any future thing could be, that every British ship would be a constant target for the enemy’s submarines. British policy in regard to submarine war should, then, have been mainly, if, indeed, not wholly, defensive.

Thus, if there was one form of offensive imperatively imposed on us, it was that of naval artillery; and if there was one form of defensive not less imperatively incumbent, it was the provision of adequate protection against submarines.

It is now, of course, common knowledge that it was exactly in these two particulars that Admiralty policy from 1904–1914 was either discontinuous, vacillating, and self-contradictory, or simply non-existent. So far as it cultivated anything, it was a defensive tactic for the gun and offensive tactics for the submarine! On the latter point let the non-provision of a safe anchorage on the Northeast coast stand for the whole. If you pick up a Navy List for any month in any year prior to August, 1914, you will look in vain for any department of Whitehall, any establishment at a principal port, any appointment of flag officer or captain, to prove that there was at any time an individual or a committee charged with the vital problem of protecting the British Fleet against enemy submarines when war broke out. The necessity had indeed been realized. It was set out by Captain Sueter in 1907. It had been urged on the Board of Admiralty. But no action was taken.

This, of course, was bad enough. The case of gunnery was worse, for if you compare the Navy List of August, 1914, with that of the corresponding month of the year that Mr. Churchill took office, you will find that it was to his administration that we owe the abolition of the only officer and department in the navy competent to advise or direct methods of gunnery adequate for war. From 1908 to 1913 the Inspectorship of Target Practice had been effective in giving shape, and to some extent, a voice, to the alarm, anxiety, and indignation of the navy at the manner in which gunnery administration boxed the compass of conflicting policies. With the suppression of the office there came administrative peace—and technical chaos.

Why were not these problems, each and all of them, thoroughly investigated and their solutions discovered before war began?

Mr. Churchill supplies us with the answer. He closes his article in the London Magazine of September, 1916, with a protest against naval operations being more critically and even captiously judged than military operations. They are so judged, he tells us, because of the apparent simplicity of a naval battle, and the obvious character of any disaster that happens to any unit of a fleet. Regiments may be thrown away upon land and no one be any the wiser, but to lose a ship is an event about which there can be no dispute. It is regarded as a disaster, and at once somebody, it is assumed, must be to blame. This is hard measure on the seaman. Surely, an admiral, he tells us, has a greater claim upon the generosity of his countrymen than a general. “His warfare is almost entirely novel. Scarcely one had ever had any experience of sea fighting. All had to learn the strange new, unmeasured, and, in times of peace, largely immeasurable conditions.”

Now this is really a very striking admission. Whence arose this theory that naval warfare consisted of unfathomable mysteries? Perhaps the explanation is as follows: Popular interest in the navy was first thoroughly aroused by Mr. Stead’s Pall Mall articles in the middle eighties. It is from the controversies that he aroused that Brassey’s and the other annual naval publications emerged. For twenty years newspaper interest in shipbuilding programmes, design, and so forth, advanced in a crescendo of intensity. The many and startling departures in naval policy that characterized Lord Fisher’s tenure of the first professional place on the Board of Admiralty, brought this interest to a climax. There was a controversial demand for more costly programmes involving political and journalistic opposition, which in turn provoked greater vigour in those that advocated them. Thus the whole of naval policy had to be commended to popular—and civilian—judgment. And it followed that the advocates of expansion had to employ arguments that civilians could understand. They very soon perceived that success lay along the line of sensationalism. Larger and faster ships, heavier and longer range guns carrying bigger and more devastating shells, faster and more terrifying torpedoes, those new craft of weird mystery, the submarines—all these things in turn and for considerable periods were urged upon the public and the statesmen in terms of awe and wonder. But the Augurs, instead of winking behind the veil, came finally to be hypnotized by their own wonder talk. Who cannot remember that ever-recurring phrase, “the untold possibilities” of the new engines of war? They got to be so convinced on this subject that they made no effort to find out precisely what the possibilities were, and Mr. Churchill’s phrase that I have just quoted, “the strange new, unmeasured, and largely immeasurable conditions,” exactly summed up the frame of mind of those who were responsible for naval policy up to and including Mr. Churchill’s time. If all these problems were insoluble, if the conditions were immeasurable, if the possibilities of new weapons were really untold and untellable, what was the use of worrying about experiment and knowledge, judgment and expertize? It was this frame of mind that led a humorist to suggest that the materialists ought really to be called the spiritualists.

It was all very unfortunate, because any rightly organized system of inquiry, investigation, and experiment, would have dissipated this atmosphere of mystery once and for all. When new inventions are made that affect the processes of industry, it is not the men who go about talking of their “untold possibilities,” their “incalculable” effects, and their “immeasurable” results, that get the commercial advantage of their development. It is those who take immediate steps to investigate the limits of their action and the precise scope of their operations who turn new discoveries to account. To talk as if the performance of guns, torpedoes, submarines, and aircraft were beyond human calculation, was really a confession of incompetence. The application to these things of the principles of inquiry universally employed in other fields was always perfectly simple, and had it been employed we should not have begun the war with wondering what we could do, but knowing precisely what we ought to do. It was want of preparation in these matters that was undoubtedly one of the deciding factors in tying us down both to defensive strategy and to defensive tactics.

Once grasp what are the possibilities open to the enemy’s armed forces; once realize the scope the mine and torpedo possess; once analyze their influence both on strategy and on tactics, with the new problems that they create both for cruising force and for naval artillery in action, and it becomes exceedingly clear what it is that your own fleet must be prepared to do. Had these things been realized at any time between 1911 and 1914, should we have had our own naval bases unprotected against submarine attack? Should we have been without any organization for using mines offensively against the enemy? Still more, should we have been practically without any means whatever of preventing the enemy using mines against us? We should have had a fleet composed of different units, organized, trained, and equipped in a very different way.

CHAPTER VI
The Actions

The naval operations suggested and described in the following chapters are the surprise attack that Germany did not deliver, the destruction of Koenigsberg, the capture of Emden, Cradock’s heroic self-sacrifice off Coronel, the destruction of Von Spee’s squadron off the Falkland Islands, the affair of the Heligoland Bight, the pursuit of Von Hipper across the Dogger Bank, the battle of Jutland, and finally, the operations carried out against Zeebrügge and Ostend in the fourth year of the war. I have not in these chapters followed strict chronological order, but have arranged them so as to present the problems of sea fighting as they arise in a crescendo of interest and complexity.

Modern war is fought in conditions to which history offers no parallel. Both the British and German Governments have maintained the strictest reserve in regard to every operation. When one reads the despatches it is quite obvious to the least instructed student of war, that their publication has been guided by the consciousness that within two or three days of issue the text would be in the enemy’s hands. Every atom of information, then, that could be of the slightest value to the Germans has been ruthlessly excised, with results to a great extent ruinous to lay comprehension of the events described. This being so, I wish it clearly to be understood that every opinion or judgment expressed in these chapters must obviously be subject to modification and revision when further information becomes available. Generally speaking, too, the plans I have included with the text have no pretence whatever to be authentic, but are presented simply as diagrammatic ways of making the text intelligible. No more can be claimed for them than that they should not be inconsistent with the information officially given. The plans of the Falkland Islands engagements are the only exceptions. These I believe to be substantially correct.

In the destruction of Koenigsberg the main interest is the solution of a gunnery problem in itself not very intricate, if once the means of carrying it out exist and the right method of procedure is recognized. But in the actual operations the men on the spot had to do an immense number of things before the problem could be tackled at all, and in the solution of the gunnery problem they had to learn from the beginning and so discover, from their failure at the first attempt, the method which was so brilliantly successful on the second. In this respect the story isolates a single and, as I have said, a simple problem in gunnery and illustrates what is meant by right technique. Apart from this, the story is full of human interest and exhibits the exceptional advantages which naval training gives to those who have to extemporize methods of dealing with circumstances and difficulties without the guidance of experience.

In the Sydney-Emden engagement we have a very good example of the modern single ship action. Not the least of its points of interest is that Sydney seems to have lost her rangefinder a very few minutes after the action began. At first sight it would seem to be an absolutely disabling loss. In some quarters more emphasis has been laid on the value of a good rangefinder to fire control than to any other element of that highly debated branch of naval science. But in this engagement, as in that of Koenigsberg, the enemy was destroyed by a ship that did not use a rangefinder at all. The action thus not only shows the place which the observation of fire takes in the art of sea fighting, but illustrates in the highest degree the value of long practice in gunnery. Since 1905 every commissioned ship in the fleet has worked assiduously on this problem, and, whether the methods in use have been good, bad, or indifferent, this practice produced a race of officers extraordinarily well equipped for dealing with fire control as a practical problem. It is highly probable, if the methods and instruments they have been given have not always been of the best, that this fact, by throwing them on their own resources, did much to stimulate that singular capacity for extemporization which we shall see illustrated in the Koenigsberg business. Moreover, this is a faculty in which our officers seem to excel the Germans greatly. In this fight, as in so many others, it was the enemy who first opened fire, and it was his opening salvoes that were the most accurate. But the enemy has seldom kept this initial advantage, whereas we shall generally find the British personnel improving as the action proceeds. It would appear, then, that as the material suffers the Germans, who are most dependent on it, have on the whole shown less resource than our own officers.

In the action off Coronel the heroic self-sacrifice of the British force overlays the technical interest. In one respect it is altogether unique, for it is the only action in this war in which the weaker and faster squadron sought action with one of incalculably greater fighting power but of inferior speed. Neither side seems to have manœuvred in a way that would have added to the difficulties of fire control, but as, apart from manœuvring, the shooting conditions were extraordinarily difficult, one is forced to the conclusion that the deciding factor was less the great superiority of the enemy’s force, as measured by the weight of his broadsides, than the still more marked superiority that arose from his having a more modern and more homogeneous armament.

At the Falkland Islands the all-big-gun ship appeared for the first time in a sea action and, although opposed by vessels whose armament was no match for such heavy metal, it was actually employed according to the tactics officially set out as the basis of the Dreadnought idea in design; the tactics, that is to say, of keeping away from an enemy, so as to maintain a range favourable to the more powerfully gunned ship. The battle resolved itself into three separate actions, and it was on this principle that Sir Doveton Sturdee fought the Graf von Spee and his two battle-cruisers, and that the Captain of the Cornwall engaged Leipzig. But, curiously enough, in the engagement between Kent and Nürnberg a different principle is seen at work. Captain Allen pursued at full speed until he had crippled the enemy’s engines, and then, as his speed fell off, continued to close till he was able to silence him altogether at a range of 3,000 yards. Thus on a single day two diametrically opposed tactical doctrines were exemplified by officers under a single command.

In each of these four actions the tactics of the gun escaped complication by the distractions and difficulties which torpedo attack imposes on long-range gunnery. In our next action, the affair off Heligoland, the torpedo figures largely, because visibility was limited to about 6,000 yards. The affair off Heligoland cannot be described as an engagement. It was primarily a reconnaissance in force developed into a series of skirmishes and single ship actions, which began at seven in the morning and ended at mid-day. Submarines, destroyers, cruisers of several types and, finally, battle-cruisers, were employed on the British side. There were sharp artillery engagements between destroyers, there were torpedo attacks made by destroyers on light cruisers and by submarines on battle-cruisers. But they were not massed attacks on ships in formation, but isolated efforts at marksmanship, and they were all of them unsuccessful. This failure of the torpedo as a weapon of precision is of considerable technical interest. The light thrown on gunnery problems by the events of the day is less easy to define. The chief interest of this raid into the Bight lies in the strategical idea which prompted it and in its moral effects on the British and German naval forces. That Sir David Beatty, in command of four battle-cruisers, should coolly have challenged the German Fleet to fight and that this challenge was not accepted, was extremely significant. It was of special value to our side, for it showed the British Navy to possess a naval leader who knew how to combine dash and caution and marked by a talent for leadership as conspicuous as the personal bravery which had won him his early promotions.

These qualities were still better displayed in the engagement off the Dogger Bank. This action is remarkable in several respects. For the first time destroyers were here employed to make massed torpedo attacks on a squadron of capital ships. The particular defensive functions of such torpedo attacks will be discussed in the proper place. Suffice it to say here that no torpedo hit, but that the British were robbed of victory by a chance shot which disabled Sir David Beatty’s flagship, and deprived the squadron of its leader when bold leadership was most needed. Why the action was broken off by Rear-Admiral Moore, who succeeded to the command, has never been explained, and the unfortunate wording of an Admiralty communiqué gave the world for some time an impression that Sir David Beatty—of all people—had retreated from the threat of German submarines.

The battle of Jutland eclipses in technical interest all the other engagements put together. It presents, of course on a far larger scale, all the problems hitherto met separately. We are still far too imperfectly informed as to many of the incidents of this battle for it to be possible to attempt any complete analysis of its tactics, or to indicate the line on which judgment will ultimately declare itself. We are, for example, entirely without information either about the method of deployment prescribed by the Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Fleet at six o’clock, or of the theory on which the night attack by the destroyer on the retreating German Fleet was ordered. We do not know how it was that a misunderstanding[A] arose between the battle-cruiser fleet and the battle fleet as to the time and place of junction, nor the arrangements which resulted in contact with the German Fleet being lost after the action was over. It is, therefore, only possible to discuss those points on which light has been thrown by the despatch, and the principles of action which the Commander-in-Chief has set out in various speeches delivered after he had ceased to command at sea.

[A] The positions of the two fleets at six o’clock had been estimated by dead reckoning, both in Lion and in Iron Duke. The two reckonings did not agree, and the Commander-in-Chief said in the despatch that such a discrepancy was inevitable. The word “misunderstanding” in the text must not be taken to mean that the calculation in either fleet was avoidable, still less reprehensibly, wrong.

In the engagement off the Falkland Islands, it will be remembered that there was a marked contrast between the tactical methods followed in the pursuit of Von Spee and those adopted by Captain Allen in his pursuit of Nürnberg. In the battle of Jutland we shall find a still more marked contrast between the strategic conceptions of the two leaders of the British forces.

Admiral Beatty seems to have acted throughout as if the enemy should be brought to battle and destroyed, almost regardless of risk. The Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Fleet seems to have been willing to engage only if he could do so without jeopardizing the forces under his command. The one was bent on victory, the other seemed satisfied—so long as the enemy were thwarted in any ulterior purpose—if only the British Fleet were saved from losses.

It followed from such very opposite views, that their tactical methods differed also. At each stage of the action Sir David Beatty’s tactic was to get his forces into action at the first possible moment and to keep them in action as long as possible. Thus when the news first reaches him that the enemy is to the northeast, he leads his whole fleet at top speed straight for the Horn Reef to get between him and his base. And this he does without waiting for any information about the composition of the enemy’s force. Whether it is the battle-cruiser and light forces only, or the whole German Fleet, his first idea is to make sure that he is in a position to engage if he wishes to. As it was at 3:0 P.M., so it was at each stage after he got into action. The reduction of his squadron by one third does not seem to have upset the coolness of his judgment or the firmness of his determination in the least degree. When he found himself opposed, no longer by five battle-cruisers, but by sixteen Dreadnought battleships as well, he reversed the course of the fleet, made Evan-Thomas fall in behind him, and, during a holding action for the next hour, kept the Germans under his guns, risking their fire, threatening the head of their line, and half-cajoling, half-forcing Scheer northward to where the British fleets would be united. The moment contact becomes imminent—knowing that the light might at any moment fail—he forces the pace and discounts risks incalculably greater than at any time during the day, if only the enormous striking power of the Grand Fleet can be brought for once into action as a whole. And so, regardless of the punishment his fleet had received earlier in the day, he shortens the range from 14,000 yards to 12,000 and then from 12,000 to 8,000, in a last effort to hold the enemy, while the Grand Fleet deploys and comes into action. There is no foolhardiness in his tactics, for the speed that enables him to head the German line is not only the best defence of his own squadron against torpedo attack. He has made it almost impossible for the German destroyers to enfilade the Grand Fleet, if only it deploys at full speed on him. He knows, of course, that at 8,000 yards the side armour of his ships will not keep out the enemy’s shells. But he has demoralized the German gunfire by his own once before and, confident in the superior coolness and nerve of his officers and crews, he relies on this element again as the best defence of his squadron.

It is not till 6:50, when he realizes that his whole effort has miscarried, that he makes the entry in his despatch which seems to me one of the most tragic phrases ever used by a great master of fighting. He had been baulked of victory at the Dogger Bank by a chance injury to his ship, when his squadron came under the command of an Admiral trained in the tenets of Whitehall. Now on May 31 he had executed a master stroke of tactics. The armoured cruiser, designed to be a swift bully over the weak, he had used to confound and paralyze the strong. There had been many a discussion as to the tactical value of speed when the Dreadnought type was first designed, but no thinker had had the daring to forecast any such stroke as Sir David Beatty planned and executed off the Jutland Reefs. But it was a stroke struck in vain. “By 6:50 the battle-cruisers were clear of our leading Battle Squadron, then bearing about north northwest three miles and I ... reduced to 18 knots.”

There was no more to try for that day. When, a quarter of an hour afterwards, the Grand Fleet starts south, he hunts for and heads the German line again. But it is all to no purpose. Yet he does not give up hope. At half-past nine darkness makes further pursuit impossible, but at any rate “our strategical position was such as to make it appear certain that we should locate the enemy at daylight under most favourable circumstances.” It is plain, then, that he had a plan for next day’s battle, just as he had had one for the hard and costly day just passed. To the last the thought still preoccupies him that has been his guide throughout. The enemy must be found and destroyed.

The Commander-in-Chief, however, whatever his anxiety for victory, is plainly concerned throughout by the enormous responsibility that weighs upon him as the guardian of the fleet under his command. Only one of the ships was hit by gunfire and only one was struck by torpedo! In summing up the story of the day, “the hardest fighting,” he says, “fell to the lot of the Battle Cruiser Fleet ... the Fifth Battle Squadron, the First Cruiser Squadron, the Fourth Light Cruiser Squadron, and the flotillas.” But he must add a note, that the units of the Battle Cruiser Fleet were less heavily armoured than their opponents! The obsession of the defensive idea is obvious. “The enemy constantly turned away and opened the range under cover of destroyer attacks and smoke screens.” “The German Fleet appeared to rely very much on torpedo attacks, which were favoured by low visibility, and by the fact that we had arrived in the position of a ‘following’ or ‘chasing’ fleet. A large number of torpedoes were apparently fired, but only one took effect (on Marlborough), and even in this case the ship was able to remain in the line and to continue the action.”

“The enemy opened the range under cover of destroyer attacks ... which were favoured by the fact ... that we had arrived in the position of a ‘following’ ... fleet.” Had Admiral Jerram’s squadron followed full speed straight into the wake of the battle-cruisers, had the whole Grand Fleet deployed on Sir David Beatty’s track, the enemy’s business should have been finished, for Scheer never could have turned under such a concentration of fire. But the form of the deployment created the situation that Scheer needed. It exposed the fleet to the torpedoes. And the risk was not faced. Speaking eight months afterwards at the Fishmongers’ Hall, Admiral Jellicoe explained why. “The torpedo, as fired from surface vessels, is effective certainly up to 10,000 yards range, and this requires that a ship shall keep beyond this distance to fight her guns. As conditions of visibility, in the North Sea particularly, are frequently such as to make fighting difficult beyond a range of 10,000 yards, and as modern fleets are invariably accompanied by very large numbers of destroyers, whose main duty is to attack with torpedoes the heavy ships of the enemy, it will be recognized how great becomes the responsibility of the Admiral in command of a fleet, particularly under the conditions of low visibility to which I have referred. As soon as destroyers tumble upon a fleet within torpedo range the situation becomes critical for the heavy ships.”

At Jutland three British and one German battle-cruiser were sunk by gunfire. At Dogger Bank Lion was disabled by a chance shot. Ten German battleships and one British were struck by torpedoes on May 31. One of these, one only, and she in all probability hit simultaneously by several, blew up. The other nine German ships and Marlborough all reached port in safety. Surely, if the situation of heavy ships is “critical” when within torpedo range, their situation when within reach of heavy guns must be more critical still. Is it possible to distinguish and say that one form of risk is always, and the other never, to be run? Is not the issue identical with that raised by the abandonment of the Dogger Bank pursuit—if it is true that pursuit was abandoned, as the Admiralty told us, on account of the presence of submarines?

At any rate, we see in this attitude one that stands in sharp contrast to Sir David Beatty’s. He had faced torpedo attack in the Bight of Heligoland, and submarine attack in the Dogger Bank affair, and seemingly in the early fighting of May 31, without allowing the menace to influence him to avoid action. He took the right precautions against it. He had his cruisers and flotillas out as a screen, but having done all that was humanly possible to parry the attack he then, with a clear conscience, went for victory.

The same contrast is seen in the events of June 1. Sir John Jellicoe was perfectly willing to fight if the Germans would come out and fight on his conditions. At 4:0 A.M. an enemy Zeppelin flew over the fleet, so that its position was known to Scheer. Yet says the Commander-in-Chief, “the enemy made no sign.” His own pre-occupation is not to find the enemy, but his own light forces. He thinks it worth recording that he hung about the scene of the yesterday’s battle, “in spite of the ... danger incurred in waters adjacent to enemy coasts from submarine and torpedo craft.” Napoleon speaks bitterly of his admirals, who acted as though they could win victory without taking risks.

A strong case can, of course, be made for the doctrine on which Sir John Jellicoe acted on these two days, a doctrine endorsed by the Admiralty, so far at least as it was shown in action on the first and only opportunity the British Fleet was given of utterly destroying the enemy. The defence can hardly be put better than it was by Mr. Churchill in his London Magazine article. Nor am I concerned here to argue the pros and cons on a point on which there can be little doubt as to the judgment of posterity. I direct attention to the singular fact that the British Fleet on May 31 fought as two separate units until six o’clock, and that the leaders of the two sections were animated by conflicting theories of war. One admiral represents the fighting fervour of the fleet: the other the caution—perhaps the wise caution—of the Higher Command.

There is no getting out of this dilemma. If Admiral Jellicoe was right in refusing to face the risks inseparable from a resolute effort to make the battle decisive, then Sir David Beatty must have been wrong to have fought in a way which cannot be intelligently explained except on the basis that from first to last he had decisive victory as his object. If the tender care that brought the Grand Fleet through the action with hardly a man killed and only two ships touched, was right and wise, then the clear vision, all the more luminous for seeing and counting the cost, which exposed Indefatigable, Queen Mary, and Invincible to destruction, was woefully wrong. Now it seems extraordinary, if the strategy of waiting to fight till the Germans attacked was right—if this was the Admiralty doctrine—that it was not communicated to Sir David Beatty as well as to Sir John Jellicoe. If it was axiomatic to avoid the risk of ships being destroyed, so that Admiral Moore was right to break off the action at the Dogger Bank and Admiral Jellicoe right in letting the enemy “open the range under the cover of torpedo attacks,” why was not Admiral Beatty forbidden to jeopardize his ships, and Admiral Arbuthnot warned against any pursuit of the enemy’s cruisers or destroyers, that might possibly bring him within range of the German gunfire? How are we to explain Bingham’s attack on the head of the German line or Goodenough’s reconnaissance which brought him under the salvoes of the German guns at 12,000 yards? Is the doctrine of caution and ship conservation to apply only to battleships and not to battle-cruisers, armoured cruisers, light cruisers, and destroyers? Is it only the battle fleet that is not to fight except when it risks practically nothing by doing so? All these questions are forced to the student’s attention when he reviews the events here recorded.

Many defects in our preparations for war have been attributed to our lack of staff machinery in the years preceding the war. The defenceless state of the fleet’s bases, the absence of any policy for using mines, or the means for carrying one out, the contrast between our pre-war confidence in our gunnery methods and what they have achieved in action, these and a score of other deficiencies have been attributed, and probably rightly, to our failure to appreciate the fact that modern war is so various and complicated a thing, and employs instruments and weapons and methods, the full possibilities of which are so obscure that only a long concerted effort could analyze and unravel them, that no organ except a General Staff could possibly have laid down the right doctrine of war or ensured the means of its application. But of all the evidence of what we had lost by its absence, I know of none more striking than that from the outbreak of war until Sir David Beatty took command of the whole main forces of the navy, those forces should have been divided, and the two divisions commanded by men whose views as to the main purpose for which the force existed were utterly incompatible. It is amazing that Whitehall either never knew that this divergency of doctrine existed, or, knowing it, should not have secured that one or the other doctrine should predominate.

No official despatches descriptive of the attacks on Zeebrügge and Ostend have been published. For these extraordinary events, then, we have to rely upon the stories officially given out by the Admiralty’s descriptive writer and the interviews which the officers concerned were allowed to give to different journalists.

CHAPTER VII
1. Naval Gunnery, Weapons, and Technique

Before passing to the actions, it is important to have a clear idea of two things which these actions illustrate. The first is the nature of the advantage which heavy guns have over lighter pieces. In each of these actions the side which had the largest number of heavier guns, or generally heavier guns, was successful. A heavy shell obviously has far greater effect than a light shell when it hits. Its advantages in this respect do not need demonstration. It is as well, however, to make it quite clear why it is more probable that a heavy shell will hit.

And next, these actions illustrate the great advance in fire control which has been made in the last ten years, and they also show, and I think convincingly, the limitations of the systems in use. As my comments on these actions will be particularly directed towards showing the tactical developments that have followed on the advance of gunnery and towards what further tactical developments must follow from a greater advance, it is essential that the nature of the fire-control problem should be understood.

The principle of heavy guns being superior at long range is exemplified by the [Sketches 1] and [2]. [Sketch 1] represents the manner in which a salvo of guns may be expected to spread if all the sights are set to the same range. All guns lose in range accuracy as the range increases, but light guns more than heavy. If six 6-inch guns are fired at a target at 12,000 yards the shell will be apt to be spread out as shown in the top line. Six 9.2’s will fall in a closer pattern, as shown in the second line, six 12-inch in a still smaller space, and the 13.5 in one still smaller. Regarded simply as instruments for obtaining a pattern at a given range, heavy guns are, therefore, far more effective than light ones.

Big guns more accurate at long range, because more regular

But this is far from being the heavy guns’ only advantage, as will be seen from [Sketch 2]. The heavier the projectile is, the longer it retains its velocity. The angle at which a shot falls from any height depends solely upon its forward velocity while it is falling. [Sketch 2] shows the outline of a ship broadside on to the enemy’s fire, the shell being fired from the right-hand of the sketch. A is the point where the ship’s side meets the water. If the gun were shooting perfectly accurately and was set to 10,000 yards, all the shots would hit at this point. And clearly any shot set at a range greater than this, but one which did not carry the shot over the target, would hit the ship somewhere between the points A and X. Now if a 6-inch shot grazes the point X and falls into the water, it falls at the point B beyond the ship. But the angle at which it is falling is so steep that the difference in range between the point A and the point B is only forty yards. To hit, then, with a 6-inch gun the range must be known within forty yards. This interval is called the “Danger Space.”

Big guns need less accurate range-finding, because the danger space is greater

The 9.2 will fall at a more gradual angle, and the shot grazing on X will fall at C, which is twenty yards beyond B; and a 12-inch shell, falling still more gradually, will fall at D, which is 100 yards from A; and similarly the 13.5 at E, which is 150 yards beyond it. Hence, at any given range, far more accurate knowledge of range is necessary for hitting with a 6-inch gun than with a 9.2, with a 9.2 than with a 12-inch, and with a 12-inch than with a 13.5.

But we have seen from [Sketch 1] that, in proportion as the range gets long, so does the range accuracy of the gun decrease, and that this loss of accuracy is greater in small guns than in bigger. To hit with it at all a more perfect fire control is necessary, and for any given number of rounds a much smaller proportion of hits will be made. The advantage of the big gun over the small, merely as a hitting weapon, is twofold. It does not require such accuracy in setting the sight, and more shots fired within these limits will hit.

FIRE CONTROL

If ships only engaged when they were stationary the range would not change, and it could be found by observation without rangefinders. And even with rangefinders it can never be found at great distances without observation. But ships do not stand still, and when they move the distance between them alters from second to second. If these movements could be (1) ascertained, (2) integrated, and (3) the results impressed upon the sight, change of range would be eliminated, and we should have come back to the conditions in which ships were stationary. Fire control is successful in so far as it succeeds in doing these three things. [Sketches 3 and 4] show the process by which hits are secured, when the conditions are not complicated by changes in the range, that is, if these complications have been eliminated by fire control. The second two illustrate what these complications are. The ships turn away from each other and then turn towards each other.

The [rate graph (6)] shows the effect of these movements on the range and the rate at which it is changing from moment to moment.

The process shown in [Sketches 3 and 4] is called “bracketing.” Two shots are fired at a difference of, say, 800 yards. Observation shows the first to be too short, the second to be too far. The difference is bisected by the third shot. This places the target in one of the halves of the bracket. This half is bisected by the fourth shot, placing the target in a quarter. If an eighth of the bracket is less than the danger space, then the fifth shot must hit.

Range-finding by bracket

In [Sketch 5] the ships keep parallel courses for two minutes. The range does not change. The line in the [graph (6)] is, for these two minutes, horizontal. It is as if both were stationary. When the ships turn the range increases and the graph rises. But the graph is not a straight line but a curve. This shows that the rate also is changing. Each movement of the two ships, whether they keep steady courses or turn, alters the range and the rate. As projectiles take an interval of time to travel from the gun to the target, the range must be forecasted. B, then, cannot engage A unless he knows where A is going to be. He cannot know this until A has settled on a steady course. While A is turning, then he is safe from gunfire except by a chance shot. B cannot engage while he is himself turning unless he can integrate his own movements with A’s. It is this latter difficulty which largely explains the duration of modern actions. At the mean range of each engagement, with ships standing still, Sydney could have sunk Emden in ten minutes; Inflexible and Invincible could have sunk Scharnhorst and Gneisenau in fifteen. But it was ninety minutes before Emden was driven on the rocks, 180 before Scharnhorst sank, and 300 before Gneisenau went under.

The crux of sea fighting, changes of course and speed produce an irregularly changing range

In the ten years preceding the war, Admiralty policy, as shown by the official apology for the Dreadnought design and by the course of naval ordnance administration, had been governed by the purely defensive idea of providing ships fast enough to keep outside of the zone of the enemy’s fire, armed with guns that outranged him. The professed object was to have a chance of hitting your enemy when he had no chance of hitting you. At the Falkland Islands there was given a classic example of the tactics that follow from this conception. On the assumption that twenty-five 12-inch gun hits would suffice to sink each of the enemy’s armoured cruisers, it appeared that in this engagement the 12-inch gun had attained the rate of one hit per gun per 75 minutes. This figure may be contrasted with the one hit per gun per 72 seconds attained by the Severn in her second engagement with the Koenigsberg at the Rufigi. The contrast seems to show that it was only the obsession of the defensive theory that explained contentment with methods of gunnery so extraordinarily ineffective in battle conditions. For the difference in the rate of hitting was almost completely explained by the range being constant at the Rufigi, and inconstant at the Falklands. And the methods of fire control in use were proved at the Falklands to be unequal to finding, and continuously keeping, accurate knowledge of an inconstant range.

Again at the affair of the Dogger Bank, Lion, Tiger, Princess Royal, New Zealand, and Indomitable were in action for many hours against three battle-cruisers and an armoured cruiser, and for perhaps half the time at ranges at which good hitting is made at battle practice; and although two of the enemy battle-cruisers were hit and seen to be in flames they were able, after two and a half hours’ engagement, to continue their retreat at undiminished speed, and only the armoured cruiser, whose resisting power to 13.5 projectiles must have been very feeble, was sunk.

The lesson of Jutland is still more striking, and it is possible to draw the moral with a little greater precision since it has been officially admitted in Germany that Lutzow, Admiral von Hipper’s flagship, the most modern of Germany’s battle-cruisers, was destroyed after being hit by only fifteen projectiles from great guns. It is not clear from the German statement whether this means fifteen 13.5’s and omits to reckon 12-inch shells, or whether there were fifteen hits in all, some of the one nature and some of the other. The latter is probably the case; for we know from Sir David Beatty’s and the German despatches that it was Invincible’s salvos that finally incapacitated the ship and compelled Von Hipper to shift his flag. Lutzow was always at the head of the German line and so was exposed to the fire of our battle-cruisers for nearly three hours. If we assume that she was hit by ten 13.5’s and five 12-inch; if we further assume that the effect of shells is proportionate to their weight; if we take the resisting power of British battle-cruisers, German battle-cruisers (which are more heavily armoured than the British), and all battleships to compare as the figures 2, 3, and 4 respectively; if we further assume that the Fifth Battle Squadron did not come into effective action till the second phase began, and went out of action at 6:30, and that the battle cruisers were in action for three hours, and omit Hood’s squadron altogether, we get the following results: Five German battle cruisers were exposed to seventy-two hours of 13.5 gun fire and to twenty-four hours of 12-inch gun fire, and five German battleships were exposed to forty-eight 15-inch gun hours. Similarly—omitting Queen Mary, Indefatigable, and Invincible, seemingly destroyed by chance shots and not overwhelmed by gunfire—four British battle-cruisers were exposed to thirty-seven 12-inch and sixty 11-inch gun hours, and the Fifth Battle Squadron was exposed to one hundred and eighty 12-inch gun hours. Had both sides been able to hit at the rate of one hit per hour per gun, the Germans, roughly speaking, should have sunk six British battle-cruisers, and the four ships of the Fifth Battle Squadron nearly twice over; the Fifth Battle Squadron should have sunk four German battleships; and the British battle-cruisers seven German battle-cruisers! The number of hits received by the British Fleet has not been published, but it is probably safe to say that the Germans could not have made a quarter of this number of hits, nor the British ships more than a third. It would seem, then, that at most we made one hit per gun per three hours and the Germans one hit per gun per four hours.

At no time, throughout such parts of the action as we are considering, did the range exceed 14,000 yards, and at some periods it was at 12,000 and at others at 8,000. In battle practice not only on the British Fleet but in all fleets, hits at the rate of one hit per gun per four minutes at 14,000 yards have constantly been made. How, then, are we to explain the extraordinary difference between battle practice and battle results? In the former certain difficulties are artificially created, and methods of fire control are employed that can overcome these difficulties successfully. But these methods evidently break down when it comes to the quite different difficulties that battle presents. So far we are on indisputable ground. Whether fire control can be so improved that the difficulties of battle can be overcome, just as the difficulties of battle practice have been overcome is another matter.

The difference between action and battle practice is, broadly speaking, twofold. First, you may have to fight in atmospheric conditions in which you would not attempt battle practice. All long-range gunnery, whether on sea or on land, depends for success upon range-finding and the observation of fire, and as at sea the observations must be made from a point at which the gun is fired, the correction of fire becomes impossible if bad light or mist prevents the employment of observing glasses and range-finders. In the Jutland despatch particular attention was directed to the disadvantages we were under in the matter of range-finding from these causes. It would appear, then, that those who, for many years, had maintained that the standard service rangefinder would be useless in a North Sea battle, have been proved to be right.

The second great difference lies in the totally different problems which movement creates in battle. In battle practice the only movement of the target is that which the towing ship can give to it. Its speed and manœuvring power are strictly limited, whereas a 30-knot battle-cruiser can change speed and direction at will. The smallest change of course must alter the range, and the smallest miscalculation of speed or course must make accurate forecast of range impossible. But the movements of the target are only a part of the difficulty. Those that arise from the manœuvres of the firing ship may be still greater and more confusing. And so obvious is this that, in peace time, it used to be almost an axiom that to put on helm during an engagement—even for the sake of keeping station—should be regarded almost as a crime. But the long-range torpedo has long since made it clear that a firing squadron may have to put on helm. It must manœuvre, that is to say, in self-defence—a thing it would never have to do in battle practice. And when both target ship and firing ship are manœuvring, it is small wonder if methods of fire control, designed primarily for steady courses by one ship and low speed and small turns by the other, break down altogether. It is undoubtedly true that the mainspring of all defensive naval ideas is doubt as to the success of offensive action, and as the only offensive action that a battleship can take is by its guns, it would seem as if those who disbelieve in the offensive have had far too much reason for their scepticism.

THE TORPEDO IN BATTLE

It was the invention of the hot-air engine round about 1907 that converted the torpedo from a short- to a long-range weapon, and when, a year or two later, the feasibility of running one of these with almost perfect accuracy and regularity to a distance of five miles was demonstrated, it became quite obvious that a new and, as many thought, a decisive element had been introduced into naval war, the effect of which would be especially marked in any future fleet actions. Just what form its intervention would take was much discussed in three years, and the following quotation from a confidential contribution of my own on this discussion, written in December 1912, is perhaps not without interest as indicating the points then in debate:

“The tactical employment of fleets has, of course, recently been complicated, in the opinions of many, by the facts that the range of torpedoes is more than doubled; that their speed is very greatly increased; and that their efficiency (that is, the extent to which they can be relied upon to run well) has increased almost as much as their range and speed. This advance of the torpedo has followed very rapidly on the development of the submarine, and has led, quite naturally, to the suggestion that it should be employed on a considerable scale in a fleet action either from under-water craft or by squadrons of fast destroyers.

“The torpedo menace has undoubtedly confused the problem of fleet action in a most bewildering manner; but, with great respect to those who attach the most importance to this menace, there are, it seems to me, certain principles that should be borne in mind in estimating its probable influence.

“There is a world of difference between a weapon that can be evaded and one that cannot. You can, by vigilance, circumvent the submarine and dodge the torpedo—at any rate, in some cases. You can never double to avoid a 12-inch shell. It may yet be proved that not the least interesting aspect of modern naval warfare will be that the torpedo will thus put seamanship back to its pride of place.

“In any circumstances the torpedo, however highly developed, is not a weapon of the same kind as the gun. It seems to belong to the same order of military ideas as the cutting-out expeditions and use of fire-ships in olden days and the employment of mines of more recent date. It is, of course, an element in fighting, and a most serious element; a means of offence far handier, and with a power of striking at a far greater distance than has been seen in any parallel mode of war hitherto. And yet I should be inclined to maintain that it and its employment remain more in the nature of a ‘stratagem’ than of a tactical weapon, truly so called.

“Mines, torpedoes, a bomb dropped from an airship or aeroplane—these are all new perils of war. In the hands of a Cochrane their employment might conceivably be decisive. But it would need the conjunction of an extraordinary man with extraordinary fortune.

“Both Japanese and Russians lost ships by mines and torpedoes in 1906, and ships will be lost in future wars in the same way, but I find it hard to believe that the essential character of fleet actions or of naval war generally can be affected by them. It seems indisputable that the future must be with the means of offence that has the longest reach, can deliver its blow with the greatest rapidity, and, above all, that is capable of being employed with the most exact precision. In these respects the gun is, and in the nature of things must remain, unrivalled.

“The two directions in which fleet-fighting seems likely to be most noticeably affected by the new weapon are in the formation of fleets and the maintenance of steady courses, and in making longer ranges compulsory.

“I think there are other reasons why the tactical ideal set out above—viz., that of using long lines of ships on approximately parallel courses at equal speed in the same direction—will be questioned; but even if there were not, that a mobile mine-field can be made to traverse the line of an on-coming squadron, and do so at a range of 10,000 yards, and that ships formed in line ahead offer between five and six times more favourable a target to perpendicular submarine attack than a line of ships abreast, will make it certain that sooner or later there will be a tendency in favour of smaller squadrons and, even with these, of large and frequent changes of course, and possibly of formation, so as to lessen the torpedo menace.

“In other words, we must recognize that in the long-range torpedo we have a new element in naval battle, that of the defensive offensive. It is defensive because, if the range of the torpedo is 10,000 yards of absolute run, its range is greater if fired on the bow of an advancing squadron by the distance that squadron may travel—3,000 to 4,000 yards—while the torpedo is doing its 10,000. A very fast battle-cruiser, for instance, may have a speed only a few knots less than that of the under-water weapon. This means either keeping out of gun range of an enemy that is retreating, or taking the risk of torpedo attack. If you face the risk, you must be ready to manœuvre to avoid it.

“It looks, then, as if long-range gunnery and gunnery under helm were: the first, compulsory, and the second, inevitable.”

[(LARGER)]

THEORY OF DEFENSIVE USE OF TORPEDO IN RETREAT.

In the above sketch the black silhouette shows the position at the moment the torpedo is fired; the white silhouette the position the ship has reached when the torpedo meets it. In the upper sketch the ship is running away from the torpedo, in the lower one coming to meet it. The distance run by the torpedo is the same in each case, but the range at the moment of firing is 6,000 yards in the upper case and 13,300 in the lower

CHAPTER VIII
The Action That Never Was Fought

August, 1914.

Take it for all in all, the most remarkable thing about the naval war is that it took the Germans by surprise. They had planned the most perfect thing imaginable in the way of a scheme for the conquest of all Europe. It had but one flaw. They left Great Britain out of their calculations—left us out, that is to say, not as ulterior victims, but as probable and immediate combatants. We were omitted because Germany assumed that we should either be too rich, too frightened, or too unready to fight. So that, of all the contingencies that could be foreseen, simultaneous sea war with Great Britain and land war on two frontiers, was the one for which almost no preparations had been made. Hence to undo Germany utterly at sea proved to be a very simple business indeed.

Much has been made of this statesman or that admiral having actually issued the mandate that kept the Grand Fleet mobilized and got it to its war stations two days before war was declared. But there is here no field for flattery and no scope for praise, and the historical interest in identifying the actual agent is slender. It has always been a part of the British defensive theory that the main Fleet shall be ever ready for instant war orders. Of the fact of its being the plan, we need no further testimony than Mr. Churchill’s first Memorandum after his elevation to the control of British naval policy and of the British Fleet. The thing, therefore, that was done was the mere mechanical discharge of a standing order.

Once the Fleet was mobilized and at its war stations, German sea power perished off the outer seas as effectually as if every surface ship had been incontinently sunk. There was not a day’s delay in our using the Channel exactly as if no enemy were afloat. Within an hour of the declaration of war being known, no German ship abroad cleared for a German port, nor did any ship in a German port clear for the open sea. The defeat was suffered without a blow being offered in defence, and, for the purposes of trade and transport, it was as instantaneous as it was final.

Nor was it our strength, nor sheer terror of our strength, that made the enemy impotent. He was confounded as much by surprise as he was by superior power. In point of fact, the disparity between the main forces of the two Powers in the North Sea, though considerable, was not such as to have made Germany despair of an initial victory—and that possibly decisive—had she been free to choose her own method of making war on us, and had she chosen her time wisely. In August 1914 three of our battle cruisers were in the Mediterranean, one was in the Pacific, one was in dockyard hands. Only one German ship of the first importance was absent from Kiel. In modern battleships commissioned and at sea, the German High Seas Fleet consisted of at least two Königs, five Kaisers, four Helgolands, and four Westfalens. All except the Westfalens were armed with 12.2 guns—weapons that fire a heavier shell than the British 12-inch. The Westfalens were armed with 11-inch guns. They could, then, have brought into action a broadside fire of 110 12-inch guns and 40 11-inch. Germany had, besides, four battle-cruisers, less heavily armed than our ships of the same class, quite as fast as our older battle-cruisers and much more securely armoured. So that if protection—as so many seem to think—is the one essential quality in a fighting ship, they were more suited to take their share in a fleet action than our battle-cruisers could have been expected to be.

On our side we had twenty battleships and four armoured cruisers. In modern capital ships, then, we possessed but twenty-four to nineteen—a percentage of superiority of only just over 25 per cent., and less than that for action purposes if the principle alluded to holds good. It was a margin far lower than the public realized. At Jutland we lost two battle cruisers in the first forty minutes of the action. Had such an action been fought, with like results, in August, 1914, our surviving margin would have been very slender indeed. But the enemy dared not take the risk. He paid high for his caution. Yet his inferiority should not have paralyzed him. At Jutland he faced infinitely greater odds. His numbers were not such as to make inglorious inactivity compulsory had he been resourceful, enterprising, and willing to risk all in the attack. It certainly was a position that bristled with possibilities for an enemy who, to resource, courage, and enterprise, could add the overpowering advantage of choosing the day and the hour of attack, and could strike without a moment’s warning.

If the German Government had realized from the start that in no war that threatened the balance of power in Europe could we remain either indifferent or, what is far more important, inactive spectators, then they would have realized something else as well, something that was, in point of fact, realized the moment Germany began her self-imposed—but now impossible—task of conquering Europe by first crushing France and Russia. She would have realized as then she did, that if Great Britain were allowed to come into the war her intervention might be decisive. It would seemingly have to be so for very obvious reasons. With France and Russia assured of the economic and financial support of the greatest economic and financial Power in Europe, Germany’s immediate opponents would have staying power: time, that is to say, would be against their would-be conquerors. The intervention of Great Britain, then, would make an ultimate German victory impossible. In a long war staying power would make the population of the British Empire a source from which armies could be drawn. Beginning by being the greatest sea Power in the world, we would necessarily end in becoming one of the greatest military Powers as well. The two things by themselves must have threatened military defeat for Germany. Nor, again, was this all. For while sea power, and the financial strength which goes with sustained trade and credit, could add indefinitely to the fighting capacity and endurance of Russia and France, sea power and siege were bound, if resolutely used, to sap the fighting power and endurance of the Central Powers.

To the least prophetic of statesmen—just as to the least instructed students of military history—the situation would have been plain. And there could be but one lesson to be drawn from it. To risk everything on a quick victory over France or Russia was insanity. If the conquest of Europe could not be undertaken with Great Britain an opponent, the alternative was simple. Either the conquest of Great Britain must precede it or the conquest of the world be postponed to the Greek Kalends.

Was the conquest of Great Britain a thing so unattainable that it had only to be considered to be discarded as visionary? No doubt, had we been warned and upon our guard, ready to defend ourselves before Germany was ready to strike, then certainly any such scheme must have been doomed to failure. But I am not so sure that a successful attack would have been beyond the resources of those who planned the great European war, had they from the first, grasped the elementary truth that it was necessary to their larger scheme. For to win the conquest of Europe it would not be necessary to crush Great Britain finally and altogether. All that was required was to prevent her interference for, say, six months, and this, it really seems, was far from being a thing beyond the enemy’s capacity to achieve.

The essentials of the attack are easy enough to tabulate. First, Germany would have to concentrate in the North Sea the largest force of capital ships that it was possible to equip. Her own force I have already enumerated. Had Germany contemplated war on Great Britain she would, of course, not have sent the Goeben away to the Straits. The nucleus of the German Fleet, then, would have been twenty and not nineteen ships. To these might have been added the three completed Dreadnoughts of the Austrian Fleet, the Viribus Unitis, Tegetthof, and Prinz Eugen—all of which were in commission in the summer of 1914. They would have contributed a broadside fire of 36 12-inch guns—a very formidable reinforcement—and brought the enemy fleet to an almost numerical equality with ours. A review at Kiel would have been a plausible excuse for bringing the Austrian Dreadnoughts into German waters. Supposing the British force, then, to have been undiminished, the war might have opened with a bare superiority of five per cent. on the British side.

But there is no reason why British strength should not have been reduced. Knowing as we now do, not the potentialities, but the practical use that can be made of submarines and destroyers, it must be plain to all that, had Germany intended to begin a world war with a blow at Great Britain, she might well have hoped to have reduced our strength to such a margin before the war began, as to make it almost unnecessary to provide against a fleet action. Most certainly a single surprise attack by submarines could have done all that was desired.

By a singular coincidence, an opportunity for such an attack—an opportunity that could hardly have failed of a most sinister success—offered itself at the strategic moment when the Central Powers had already resolved to use the murder of the Archduke as a pretext for an unprovoked attack on Christendom. All our battleships of the first, second, and third lines, all our battle-cruisers commissioned and in home waters, almost all our armoured cruisers and fast light cruisers, and the bulk of our destroyers and auxiliaries were, in the fateful third week in July, gathered and at anchor—and completely unprotected—in the fairway of the Solent. There were to be no manœuvres in 1914, but a test mobilization instead, and this great congregation of the Fleet was to be a measure of the Admiralty’s capacity to man all our naval forces of any fighting worth. The fact that this gathering was to take place on a certain and appointed date was public property in the month of March. A week or a fortnight before the squadrons steamed one by one to their moorings, a plan of the anchored lines was published in every London paper. The order of the Fleet, the identity of every ship in its place in every line, might have been, and probably were, in German hands a week before any single ship was in her billet. From Emden to the Isle of Wight is a bare 350 miles—a day and a half’s journey for a submarine—and in July 1914, Germany possessed between twenty and thirty submarines. It was a day and a half’s journey if it had been all made at under-water speed. What could not a dozen Weddigens and Hersings have done had they only been sent upon this fell mission, and their arrival been timed for an hour before daybreak on the morning of July 18? They surely could have gone far beyond wiping out a margin of five big ships, which was all the margin we had against the German Fleet alone. They could, in the half light of the summer’s night, have slipped five score torpedoes into a dozen or more battleships and battle-cruisers. They could have attacked and returned undetected, leaving Great Britain largely helpless at sea and quite unable to take part in the forthcoming European war.

Germany could, of course, have done much more to complete our discomfiture. A hundred merchant ships, each carrying three brace of 4-inch guns, and sent as peaceful traders astride the distant trade routes; the despatch of two score or more destroyers to the approaches of the Channel and the Western ports, and all of them instructed—as in fact, eight months afterwards, every submarine was instructed—to sink every British liner and merchantman at sight, without waiting to search or troubling to save passengers or crew—raids organized on this scale and on these principles could have reduced our merchant shipping by a crippling percentage in little more than forty-eight hours. The two things taken together—the assassination of the Fleet, the wholesale murder of the merchant marine—must certainly have thrown Great Britain into a paroxysm of grief and panic.

What a moment this would have been for throwing a raiding force, could one have been secretly organized, upon the utterly undefended, and now indefensible, eastern coast! Secretly, skilfully, and ruthlessly executed these three measures could have done far more than make it impossible for Great Britain to take a hand in the defence of France. They might, by the sheer rapidity and terrific character of the blows, have thrown us so completely off our balance as to make us unwilling, if we were not already powerless, to make further efforts even to defend ourselves. At least, so it must have appeared to Germany. For it was the essence of the German case that the nation was too distracted by political differences, too fond of money-making, too debilitated by luxury and comfort, too conscious of its weak hold on the self-governing colonies, too uncertain of its tenure on its oversea Imperial possessions, to stand by its plighted word. The nation has since proved that all these things were delusions. But it was no delusion that Great Britain would be very reluctant to participate in any war. And we need not have fallen so low as Germany supposed and yet be utterly discomposed and incapable of further effort, had we indeed, in quick succession or simultaneously, received the triple onslaught that it was well within the enemy’s power to inflict.

Even had these blows so failed in the completeness of their several and combined effects as to crush us altogether, had we recovered and been able to strike back, what would have been the situation? It would have taken us some months to hunt down and destroy a hundred armed German merchantmen. If 100,000 or 150,000 men had been landed, the campaign that would have ended in their defeat and surrender could not have been a very rapid one. Our re-assertion of the command of the seas might have had to wait until the dockyards, working day and night shifts, could restore the balance of naval power. Suppose, then, we escaped defeat; suppose these assassin blows had ended in the capture or sinking of a hundred merchantmen in the final overthrow of Germany’s sea power—could these things have been any loss to Germany, if it had been the price of swift and complete victory in Europe? In the unsuccessful attack on Verdun alone she threw away not 150,000 men but three times that number. There is not a German merchantman afloat that has been worth sixpence to her country since war was declared, nor in the first two years of war did the German Fleet achieve anything to counter-balance what the German Army lost by having to face the British as well as the French Army in the west. The sacrifices, then, would have been trivial compared with the stake for which Germany was playing. If it had resulted in keeping us out of the Continent for six months only, our paralysis, even if only temporary, should have decided the issue in Germany’s favour.

Greatly as Germany dared in forcing war upon a Europe altogether surprised and almost altogether unready, yet in point of fact she dared just too little. Abominably wicked as her conduct was, it was not wicked enough to win the justification of success. If war was intended to be inevitable from the moment the Serbian ultimatum was sent, the capacity of Great Britain to intervene should have been dealt with resolutely and ruthlessly and removed as a risk before any other risk was taken. It sobers one to reflect how changed the situation might have been had German foresight been equal to the German want of scruple. Looking back, it seems as if it was but a very little thing the enemy had to do to ensure the success of all his plans.

Had any one before the war sketched out this programme as one which Germany might adopt, he would perhaps have been regarded by the great majority of his countrymen as a lunatic. But to-day we can look at Germany in the light of four years of her conduct. And we can see that it was not scruple or tenderness of conscience or any decent regard for the judgment of mankind that made her overlook the first essential of success. We must attribute it to quite a different cause. I am quoting from memory, but it seems to me that Sir Frederick Pollock has put the truth in this matter into exact terms. “The Germans will go down to history as people who foresaw everything except what actually happened, and calculated everything except its cost to themselves.” It is the supreme example of the childish folly that, for the next two years, we were to see always hand in hand with diabolical wickedness and cunning. And always the folly has robbed the cunning of its prey.

In the edifying tales that we have inherited from the Middle Ages, when simple-minded Christian folk personified the principle of evil and attributed all wickedness to the instigation of the Devil, we are told again and again of men who bargained with the Evil One, offering their eternal souls in payment for some present good—a grim enough exchange for a man to make who believed he had a soul to give. But it is seldom in these tales that the bargain goes through so simply. Sometimes it is the sinner who scores by repentance and the intervention of Heaven and a helpful saint. But often it is the Devil that cheats the sinner. The forfeit of the soul is not explicit in the bargain. There is some other promise, seemingly of plain intent, but in truth ambiguous, which seems to make it possible for sin to go unpunished. Too late, the deluded gambler finds the treaty a “scrap of paper.” The story of Macbeth is a case in point.

Does it not look as if Germany had made some unhallowed bargain of this kind?—as if this hideous adventure was started on the faith of a promise of success given by her evil genius and always destined to be unredeemed? Is it altogether chance that there should have been this startling blindness to the most palpable of the forces in the game?—such inexplicable inaction where the right action was so obvious and so easy?

CHAPTER IX
The Destruction of “Koenigsberg”

The story of the destruction of Koenigsberg by the twin monitors Severn and Mersey in the Rufigi Delta, has an interest that far transcends the intrinsic military importance of depriving the enemy of a cruiser already useless in sea war. For the narrative of events will bring to our attention at once the extreme complexity and the diversity of the tasks that the Royal Navy in war is called upon to discharge. It is worth examining in detail, if only to illustrate the novelty of the operations which officers, with no such previous experience, may at any moment be called upon to undertake, and the extraordinary combination of patience, courage, skill, and energy with which when experience at last comes, it is turned to immediate profit. The incident possesses, besides, certain technical aspects of the very highest importance. For it gives in its simplest form perfect examples of how guns should not and should be used when engaged in indirect fire, and by affording this illuminating contrast, is highly suggestive of the progress that may be made in naval gunnery when scientific method is universally applied. The incident, then, is worth setting out and examining in some detail, and there is additional reason for doing this, in that the accounts that originally appeared were either altogether inaccurate or so incomplete as to be misleading. First, then, to a narrative of the event itself.

Koenigsberg was a light unarmoured cruiser of about 3,400 tons displacement, and was laid down in December 1905. She carried an armament of ten 4.1-inch guns, and was protected by a 2-inch armoured deck. The Germans had begun the construction of vessels of this class about seven years before with Gazelle, which was followed in the next year by Niobe and Nymphe, and then by four more—including Ariadne, destroyed by Lion in the affair of the Heligoland Bight—which were laid down in 1900. Two years later came the three Frauenlobs, and the Bremen class—five in number—succeeded these in 1903–4. In 1905 followed Leipzig, Danzig, and finally the ship that concerns us to-day. All these vessels had the same armament, but in the six years the displacement had gone up 1,000 tons. The speed had increased from 21½ knots to about 24, and the nominal radius of action by about 50 per cent. Koenigsberg was succeeded by the Stettins in 1906–7, the two Dresdens in 1907–8, the four Kolbergs in 1908–9, and the four Breslaus in 1911. Karlsruhe, Grodenz, and Rostock were the only three of the 1912–13 programmes which were completed when the war began. The process of growth, illustrated in the advance of Koenigsberg over Niobe, was maintained, so that in the Karlsruhe class in the programme of 1912, while the unit of armament is preserved, we find that the number of guns had grown from ten to twelve; the speed had advanced from 23½ to 28 knots, and the displacement from 3,400 to nearly 5,000 tons. As we know now, in the Battle of Jutland we destroyed light cruisers of a still later class in which, in addition to every other form of defence, the armament had been changed from 4.1-inch to 6.7 guns.

Koenigsberg, on the very eve of the outbreak of war, was seen by three ships of the Cape Squadron off Dar-es-Salaam, the principal port of German East Africa. She was then travelling due north at top speed, and was not seen or heard of again until, a week later, she sank the British steamer City of Winchester near the island of Socotra. There followed three weeks during which no news of her whereabouts reached us. At the end of the month it was known that she had returned south and was in the neighbourhood of Madagascar. At the end of the third week in September she came upon H.M.S. Pegasus off Zanzibar. Pegasus was taken completely unawares while she was cleaning furnaces and boilers and engaged in general repairs. It was not possible then for her to make any effective reply to Koenigsberg’s sudden assault, and a few hours after Koenigsberg left she sank. Some time between the end of September and the end of October, Koenigsberg retreated up one of the mouths of the Rufigi River, and was discovered near the entrance on October 31 by H.M.S. Chatham. From then onwards, all the mouths of the river were blockaded and escape became impossible. Her captain seemingly determined, in these circumstances, to make the ship absolutely safe. He took advantage of the high water tides, and forced his vessel some twelve or more miles up the river. Here she was located by aeroplane at the end of November. Various efforts had been made to reach her by gunfire. It was asserted at one time that H.M.S. Goliath had indeed destroyed her by indirect bombardment. But there was never any foundation for supposing the story to be true, and if in the course of any of these efforts the ship suffered any damage, it became abundantly clear, when she was finally engaged by the monitors, either that her armament had never been touched, or that all injuries had been made good.

The problems which the existence of Koenigsberg propounded were: first, Was it a matter of very urgent moment to destroy her? Second, How could her destruction be effected? The importance of destroying her was great. There was, of course, no fear of her affecting the naval position seriously if she should be able to escape; but that she could do some, and possibly great, damage if at large, the depredations of Emden in the neighbouring Indian Ocean, and of Karlsruhe off Pernambuco, had proved very amply indeed. If she was not destroyed then, a close blockade would have to be rigidly maintained, and it was a question whether the maintenance of the blockade would not involve, in the end, just as much trouble as her destruction. Then there was a further point. Sooner or later, the forces of Great Britain and Belgium would certainly have to undertake the conquest of German East Africa. While Koenigsberg could not be used as a unit for defence, her crew and armament might prove valuable assets to the enemy. Finally, there was a question of prestige. The Germans thought that they had made their ship safe. If the thing was possible, it was our obvious duty to prove that their confidence was misplaced.

If the ship was to be destroyed, what was to be the method of her destruction? She could not be reached by ship’s guns. For no normal warship of superior power would be of less draught than Koenigsberg, and unless the draught were very materially less, it would be quite impossible to get within range, except by processes as slow and laborious as those by which she had attained her anchorage. Was it worth while attempting a cutting-out expedition? It would not, of course, be on the lines of the dashing and gallant adventures so brilliantly drawn for us by Captain Marryat. The boats would proceed under steam and would not be rowed; they would not sally out to board the enemy and fight his crew hand to hand, but to get near enough to start a torpedo at him, discharged from dropping gear in a picket boat. To have attempted this would have been to face a grave risk, for not only might the several entrances be mined, but the boats clearly would have to advance unprotected up a river whose banks were covered with bush impenetrable to the eye. The enemy, it was known, had not only considerable military forces in the colony, but those well supplied with field artillery. And there were on board Koenigsberg not only the 4.1-inch guns of her main armament, but a considerable battery of eight or perhaps twelve, 3-inch guns—a weapon amply large enough to sink a ship’s picket boat, and that with a single shot. An attack by boats then promised no success at all, for the excellent reason that it would be the simplest thing on earth for the enemy to defeat it long before the expedition had reached the point from which it could strike a blow at its prey.

There was then only one possible solution of the problem. It was to employ armed vessels of sufficient gun-power to do the work quickly, and of shallow enough draught to get to a fighting range quickly. If the thing were not done quickly, an attack from the masked banks might be fatal. If the guns of such a vessel were corrected by observers in aeroplanes, they might be enabled to do the trick. Fortunately, at the very opening of the war, the Admiralty had purchased from the builders three river monitors, then under construction in England for the Brazilian Government. They drew but a few feet. Their free board was low, their centre structure afforded but a small mark; the two 6-inch guns they carried fore and aft were protected by steel shields. They had been employed with marked success against the Germans in their first advance to the coast of Belgium. When the enemy, having established himself in the neighbourhood of Nieuport, had time to bring up and emplace long-range guns of large calibre, the further employment of these river monitors on this, their first job, was no longer possible. For the moment, then, they seemed to be out of work, and here was an undertaking exactly suited to their capacity. It was not the sort of undertaking for which they had been designed. But it was one to which, undoubtedly they could be adapted. Of the three monitors Mersey and Severn were therefore sent out to Mafia Island, which lies just off the Rufigi Delta and had been seized by us early in the proceedings.

The first aeroplanes available proved to be unequal to the task, because of the inadequacy of their lifting power. The atmosphere in the tropics is of a totally different buoyancy from that in colder latitudes, and a machine whose engines enable it to mount quite easily to a height of 4,000 or 5,000 feet in Northern Europe, cannot, in Central Africa, rise more than a few hundred feet from the ground. New types of machines, therefore, had to be sent, and these had to be tested and got ready for work. For many weeks then, before the actual attack was undertaken, we must picture to ourselves the Island of Mafia, hitherto unoccupied and indeed untouched by Europeans, in the process of conversion into an effective base for some highly complicated combined operations of aircraft and sea force. The virgin forest had to be cleared away and the ground levelled for an aerodrome. The flying men had to study and master machines of a type of which they had no previous experience. The monitors had to have their guns tested and their structural arrangement altered and strengthened to fit them for their new undertaking. And indeed preparing the monitors was a serious matter. The whole delta of the Rufigi is covered with forest and thick bush—nowhere are the trees less than sixty feet high, and in places they rise to nearly three times this height. To engage the Koenigsberg with any prospect of success, five, six, or seven miles of one of the river branches would certainly have to be traversed. There was, it is true, a choice of three mouths by which these vessels might proceed. But it would be almost certain that the different mouths would be protected by artillery, machine guns, and rifles, and highly probable that one or all of them would be mined. The thick bush would make it impossible for the monitors to engage any hidden opponents with sufficient success to silence their fire. And obviously any portion of the bank might conceal, not only field guns and riflemen, but stations from which torpedoes could be released against them. It was imperative therefore, to protect the monitors from such gun fire as might be encountered, and to take every step possible to preserve their buoyancy if a mine or torpedo was encountered.

The Trent had come out as a mother ship to these two unusual men-of-war, and from the moment of their arrival, she became an active arsenal for the further arming and protection of her charges. Many tons of plating were laid over their vulnerable portions—the steering gear, magazines, navigating bridges, etc., having to be specially considered. The gun shields were increased in size, and every precaution taken to protect the gunners from rifle fire. Where plating could not be added, sandbags were employed. By these means the danger of the ship being incapacitated, or the crew being disabled by what the enemy could do from the bank, was reduced to a minimum. These precautions would not, of course, have been a complete protection against continuous hitting by the plunging fire of Koenigsberg’s artillery. The more difficult job was to protect the ships against mines and torpedoes. Their first and best protection, of course, was their shallow draught. But it was not left at that; and most ingenious devices were employed which would have gone a fair way to keep the ships floating even had an under-water mine been exploded beneath the bottom. At intervals, between these spells of dockyard work, the monitors were taken out for practice in conjunction with the aeroplanes. Mafia Island, which had already served as a dockyard and aerodrome, was now once more to come in useful as a screen between the monitors and the target. The various operations necessary for indirect fire were carefully studied. Gun-layers, of course, cannot aim at a mark they cannot see. The gun, therefore, has to be trained and elevated on information exteriorly obtained, and some object within view—at exactly the same height above the water as the gun-layer—has to be found on which he is to direct his sight. The gun is now elevated to the approximate range, a shot is fired and the direction of the shot and the distance upon the sight are altered in accordance with the correction. At last a point of aim for the gun-layer, and a sight elevation and deflection are found, and his duty then is to fire away, aiming perhaps at a twig or a leaf a few hundred yards off, while the projectile he discharges falls upon a target four, five, or even six miles off.

THE FIRST ATTEMPT

At last all was ready for the great attack. The crew had all been put into khaki, every fitting had been cleared out of the monitors; they had slipped off in the dark the night before and were anchored when, at 3:30 in the morning, all was ready. I will now let a participant continue the story:

“I woke up hearing the chatter of the seedy boys and the voice of the quartermaster telling someone it was 3:20. I hurried along to my cabin and was dressed in three minutes; khaki shirt, trousers, shoes, and socks. A servant brought me a cup of cocoa and some biscuits, and I then gathered the waterbottle and a haversack of sandwiches, biscuits, brandy flask, glass phial of morphia, box of matches, cigarettes, and made my way up to the top.

“It was quite dark in spite of the half moon partly hidden by clouds, and men wandering about the docks putting the last touches. It was impossible to recognize any one as all were in khaki and cap and helmet. By 3:45 all were at general quarters and at —— we weighed and proceeded. Both motor-boats were towing, one on either side amidships. Two whalers anchored off Komo Island, and burning a single light each, acted as a guide to the mouth. We soon began to see the dim outline of the shore on the right hand, and —— declared he could distinguish the mouth. There were four of us in the top. We arranged ourselves conveniently, —— and —— taking a side each to look out. The Gunnery Lieutenant took the fore 6-inch and starboard battery. I had the after 6-inch and port battery. I dozed at first for about ten minutes, but as the island neared woke up completely. We had no idea what sort of reception we should have, and speculated about it. It was quite cold looking over the top. The land came nearer and nearer. We were going slow, sounding all the way. On the starboard side it was quite visible as the light grew stronger and stronger. Suddenly when we were well inside the right bank we heard a shot fired on the starboard quarter, but could not see the flash. Then came another, but only at the third did we see where it came from. It was a field-gun on the right, but we had already passed it, and both it and the pom-pom were turned on the Mersey astern of us.

“At least nothing fell near us. It was still not light enough for us to judge the range, but as the alarm had been given we opened fire with the 3-pounders, starboard side, at the fieldgun. As we came up to the point on the port side I trained all the port battery on the foremost bearing, and opened fire as soon as the guns would bear. We were now going pretty well full speed. Some snipers were hidden in the trees and rushes, and let us have it as we went past. The report of their rifles sounded quite different from ours, but we were abreast before they started, and were soon past. It was just getting light. We were inside the river before the sun rose, and went quite fast up. It was just about dead low water as we entered, neap tide. The river was about 700 yards broad. The banks were well defined by the green trees, mangroves probably, which grew right down to the edges. The land beyond was quite flat on the left, but about four miles to the right rose to quite a good height—Pemba Hills. Here and there were native huts well back from the river; we could see them from the top though they were invisible from the deck. On either side as we passed up were creeks of all sorts and sizes at low tides, more of them on the port side than on the starboard. As we passed, or rather before, we turned the port or starboard batteries on them and swept either side. The gun-layers had orders to fire at anything that moved or looked suspicious. We controlled them more or less, and gave them the bearings of the creeks. —— was in charge of those on deck, and the crews themselves fired or ceased fire if they saw anything or had sunk anything. We checked them from time to time as the next creek opened up. We were looking ahead most of the time, but I believe (from ——) we sank three dhows and a boat. Whether they were harmless or not, I don’t know, but it had to be done as a precaution. We made a fine noise, the sharp report of the five 3-pounders and one 4.7 and the crackle of the machine guns (four a side) must have been heard for miles. The Hyacinth, the tugs, the Trent, the Weymouth, and other odd craft were demonstrating at the other mouths of the Rufigi, and we could hear the deep boom of their 6-inch now and then. I believe, too, that there was a demonstration by colliers, etc., off Dar-es-Salaam at the same time.

“I had thought that the entry would be the worst part, but it was not much. A few bullets got us and marked the plates or went through the hammocks but no one was hit, and as our noise completely drowned the report of their rifles I doubt if many knew we were being sniped. The forecastle hands knew all about it later on. As they hauled in the anchor or let it go they nipped behind any shelter there was, and could hear the bullets zip-zip into the sandbags. The Mersey astern was blazing away into the banks just as we were. There was probably nothing in most of the creeks—but we did not know it then.

“It was 6:30 o’clock by the time we reached ‘our’ island, where the river branches into three, at the end of which we were to anchor. We were steering straight up the middle of the stream, and then swung slowly round to port, dropped the stern anchor, let out seventy fathoms of wire, dropped the main anchor, went astern, and then tightened in both cables, so that we were anchored fast bow and stern. As soon as we steadied down a bearing was taken on the chart and the gun laid—about eight minutes’ work. It was then found that, thanks to the curious run of the current, the fore 6-inch would not bear, and we had to take up the bow anchor and let it go again to get us squarer towards the Koenigsberg.

“We could see the aeroplane right high up, and received the signal ‘open fire.’ We were not quite ready, however. From the moment when we turned to port to take up our firing position to the time we were finally ready and had laid both guns, occupied about twenty minutes. The Koenigsberg started firing at us five minutes before we were ready to start. Their first shot (from one gun only) fell on the island, the next was on the edge of it, and very soon she was straddling us. Where they were spotting from I don’t know, but they must have been in a good position, and their spotting was excellent. They never lost our range. The firing started, and for the next two hours both sides were hard at it. I don’t believe any ship has been in a hotter place without being hit. Their shooting was extraordinarily good. Their salvoes of fire at first dropped 100 short, 50 over, 20 to the right—then straddled us—then just short—then all round us, and so on. We might have been hit fifty times—they could not have fired better; but we were not hit at all, though a piece of shell was picked up on the forecastle.

“The river was now a curious sight, as dead fish were coming to the surface everywhere. It was the Koenigsberg’s shells bursting in the water which did the damage, and there were masses of them everywhere—mostly small ones.

“We were firing all the time, of course. I attended to the W/T, and passed the messages to the Gunnery Lieutenant, who made the corrections and passed them to the guns. —— watched the aeroplane and the banks as far as possible. —— attended to the conning tower voice pipe. We got H. T. fairly soon, and the Koenigsberg’s salvoes were now only four guns. We heard the boom; then before it had finished came whizz-z-z-z or plop, plop, plop, plop, as the shells went just short or over. They were firing much more rapidly than we, and I should think more accurately, but if I had been in the Koenigsberg I should, probably, have thought the opposite! All this time the 3-pounders had occasional outbursts as they saw, or thought they saw, something moving. Occasionally, too, the smoke and fumes from our funnel drifted across the top, and it was unpleasant for a minute or two. We could see now where the Koenigsberg was, and the smoke from her funnels, or that our shells made. She was firing salvoes of four with great rapidity and regularity, about three times a minute, and every one of them close. Some made a splash in the water so near that you could have reached the place with a boat-hook.