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.”
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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.