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.