Notes by Sir John Fisher on New Proposals.
Organisation for War.
“If the Trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself to the battle?”
(St. Paul, I Corinthians, xiv. 8.)
The object of the following remarks is to make clear what has now to be done to organise and prepare for war. What are the two great essentials?
I. The Sufficiency of Strength and the Fighting Efficiency of the Fleet.
II. Absolute Instant Readiness for War.
To get these two essentials an immense deal is involved! It is believed they can both be got with a great reduction in the Navy Estimates!
This reduction, combined with an undeniable increase in the fighting efficiency of the Navy, involves great changes and depends absolutely on one condition:—
The Scheme herein shadowed forth must be adopted as a whole!
Simply because all portions of it are absolutely essential—and it is all so interlaced that any tampering will be fatal!
The country will acclaim it! the income-tax payer will worship it! the Navy will growl at it! (they always do growl at first!)
But we shall be Thirty per cent. more fit to fight and we shall be ready for instant war!
and in time when we get rid of our redundancies in useless ships and unnecessary men it will probably be 30 per cent. cheaper!
The outline of the various proposals will first be given. No one single point must be taken as more important than another. Each is part of a whole; As St. Paul well observes in the xii. Chapter of the I Corinthians:—
“The eye cannot say unto the hand, I have no need of thee: nor again the head to the feet, I have no need of you. Nay, much more those members of the body which seem to be more feeble, are necessary.”
So is it of this scheme! All its parts are essential for the perfection we must have if England is to remain the “Mistress of the Seas”!
The British Nation floats on the British Navy! So we must have no doubt whatever about its fighting supremacy and its instant readiness for war! To ensure this and at the same time to effect the economy which the finances of the country render imperative there must be drastic changes! To carry these out we must have the three R’s! We must be Ruthless, Relentless, Remorseless! We must tell interested people whose interests are going to be ignored that what the Articles of War have said since the time of Queen Elizabeth is truer than ever!
“It is the Navy whereon under the good providence of God, the wealth, peace, and safety of this country doth chiefly depend!”
If the Navy is not supreme, no Army however large is of the slightest use. It’s not invasion we have to fear if our Navy is beaten,
It’s Starvation!
What’s the good of an army if it has got an empty belly? In Mr. John Morley’s famous and splendid words at Manchester on November 8th, 1893: “Everybody knows, Liberals as well as Tories, that it is indispensable that we should have not only a powerful Navy, but I may say, an all-powerful Navy.” And when we have that—then History may repeat itself, and Mahan’s glorious words will be applicable in some other great national crisis! the finest words and the truest words in the English language!
“Nelson’s far-distant, storm-beaten ships, upon which the Grand Army never looked, stood between it and the dominion of the world.”—(Mahan, Vol. II, page 118.)
And the Navy must always so stand! Supreme—unbeaten! So we must have no tinkering! No pandering to sentiment! No regard for susceptibilities! No pity for anyone! We must be Ruthless, Relentless, and Remorseless! And we must therefore have The Scheme! The Whole Scheme!! And Nothing But The Scheme!!!
Just let us take one instance as an illustration of a mighty reform (lots more will follow later, but the sledge hammer comes in handy here!). During the 12 months ending June 30th, 1904 (this last month!) the ships of the Home Fleet, the Channel Fleet, and the Cruiser Squadron were in Portsmouth Dockyard for over 30 per cent. of the year! Disorganised and unfit for sea! See what this means! A battleship costs over £100,000 a year for its up-keep, irrespective of repairs, but it’s not the money waste! it’s the efficiency waste!
Every day those Fleets and Squadrons are not together, they are deteriorating!
It is only human nature that when in Portsmouth Dockyard, from the Admiral downwards, all are hankering after their homes! and somehow or other they get there! the fictions are endless and ingenious, and extend from “the cradle to the grave!” From an unexpected confinement to the serious illness of an aged relative! (nearly always a grandmother! and the baby is always the first one!)
What is the remedy?
It’s Nelsonic—and so simple!
Nelson could not leave Toulon with all his Fleet for nearly four months out of the year! No! he stayed there for two years without putting his foot on shore! What he did was to send one or two ships away at a time to get provisions and water, and to effect any needed repairs. Let us do the same! We want a fixed base for each Fleet (and so fixed for war reasons). Thus, for example, the Channel Fleet at Gibraltar, the Home Fleet at Bantry, or the Forth, and so on. But this is going into unnecessary detail, and anticipating other parts of the scheme which must be adopted to make this work! Thus it will be seen later on, that to enable this great economy in money to be effected (putting aside increase of fighting efficiency!), we must have two years’ commissions! But we can’t have two years’ commissions unless we have fewer ships in commission! But we can’t have fewer ships in commission unless we have a redistribution of our Fleet! But we can’t have a redistribution of our Fleet until we rearrange our strategy! and this strategy, strange to say, depends on our reserves, and our reserves depend on a fresh allocation of our personnel, and on a fresh system of service. We must have the new scheme of Long Service tempered by Short Service! And this again largely hangs on the types of fighting ships we are going to have! But what is the type of ship? Not one that goes to the bottom in two minutes from the effect of one torpedo, and drowns nearly a thousand men, and takes three years to replace, and costs over a million sterling! How many types do we want! This is quite easy to answer if we make up our minds how we are going to fight! Who has made up his mind? How many of our Admirals have got minds?
It will be obvious then that the whole of this business is a regular case of “the house that Jack built,” for one thing follows on another, they are all interlaced and interdependent! That’s why it was said to begin with:—
The Scheme! The Whole Scheme!! And Nothing but the Scheme!!!
One essential feature which has been overlooked must be mentioned before going further because imperatively necessary to ensure instant readiness for war, but it hangs on all the other points previously mentioned and which are going to be examined in detail.
The reduction in the number of ships in commission which is as necessary for fighting efficiency (when the whole Navy is mobilised for war) as it is conducive to an immense economy must be accompanied by and associated with two vital requisites:
I. Every fighting ship in reserve must have a nucleus crew.
II. The reinforcements for the fighting fleets and squadrons must be collected together while in the reserve at the most convenient ports and be placed under the Flag Officer who will take them to their war stations, and this Flag Officer to understand he will be shot like a dog in case of any inefficiency in these ships in war.
Unless this is carried out the great strategic scheme in contemplation could not be entertained nor could the number of ships in commission be reduced as is absolutely essential for the efficiency of those in reserve, not on the score of economy at all, but the reduction of ships in commission is imperative for the fighting efficiency of the whole fleet when mobilised.
So we thus get one more illustration of the interdependence of all portions of the scheme and beg again to refer to St. Paul as previously quoted.
It is convenient here to mention that the paucity of efficient Admirals is a most serious matter, and will probably compel the manufacture of Commodores or of Acting Admirals under a resuscitated Order-in-Council. The least capable in the respective ranks of the Navy are the Admirals. It’s not their own fault solely, they have had no education, and this blot will continue till we have a Naval War College established at Portsmouth, and Flag Officers and Captains, hoping for employment, can practically prove their capacity by manœuvring two fleets of destroyers against each other. This will be much cheaper and less risky to the Empire than their manœuvring with the big ships. Experiments on the scale of 12 inches to a foot are not economical!
Mr. Childers was our Attila! He was the “scourge” of the Navy in many ways, but most of all by his disastrous and frightfully costly retirement schemes. The secret of efficiency lies in large lists of Officers! You have then a large field of selection, and a great flow of promotion, and also no Officer considers it a stigma to be passed over in company with forty others, and so not to pose as a solitary monument of ineptitude as he appears at present to himself and his friends when passed over with the present small lists of Flag Officers.
Also “Selection by non-employment” goes so easily with large lists (and with large lists is accepted as a necessity, and not resented as a personal affront!).