The Dreadnought Battle Cruiser.
The following imaginary dialogue I composed in 1904 to illustrate the text that “Cruisers without high speed and protection are absolutely useless”:—
“The ‘Venus,’ an Armoured Cruiser, is approaching her own Fleet at full speed!
“Admiral signals to ‘Venus’: ‘What have you seen?’
“‘Venus’ replies: ‘Four funnels hull down.’
“Admiral: ‘Well, what was behind?’
“‘Venus’ replies: ‘Cannot say; she must have four knots more speed than I had, and would have caught me in three hours, so I had to close you at full speed.’
“Admiral’s logical reply: ‘You had better pay your ship off and turn over to something that is some good; you are simply a device for wasting 400 men!’”
The deduction is:
ARMOUR IS VISION.
So we got out the “Dreadnought” Battle Cruiser on that basis, and also to fulfil that great Nelsonic idea of having a Squadron of very fast ships to bring on an Action, or overtake and lame a retreating foe. And in the great war this fast “Dreadnought” Battle Cruiser carried off all the honours. She sank the “Blücher” and others, and also Admiral von Spee at the Falkland Islands.
But the sine qua non in these great Ships must ever be that they carry the Biggest Possible Gun. It was for this reason that the 18-in. gun was introduced in the Autumn of 1914[15] and put on board the new Battle Cruiser “Furious”; and indeed all was completely arranged for 20-in. guns being placed in the succeeding proposed Battle Cruisers of immense speed and very light draft of water and possessing the special merit of exceeding rapid construction.
Alas! those in authority went back on it! It was precisely the same argument that made these same retrograde Lot’s wives go back from oil to coal. Coal, they said, was good enough and was so safe! Lot’s wife thought of her toasted muffins. Notice now especially that if a man is five per cent. before his time he may possibly be accounted a Genius! but if this same poor devil goes ten per cent. better, then he’s voted a Crank. Above that percentage, he is stark staring Mad.
(N.B.—I have gone through all these percentages!)
The Way to Victory.
Lord Fisher to the Prime Minister.
House of Lords,
June 12th, 1917.
My Dear Prime Minister,
In November, 1914, Sir John French came specially from France to attend the War Council to consider a proposal put forward by the Admiralty that the British Army should advance along the sea shore flanked by the British Fleet. Had this proposal been given effect to, the German Submarine Menace would have been deprived of much of its strength, and many Enemy Air Raids on our coast would have been far more difficult. The considerations which made me urge this proposal at that time have continuously grown stronger, and to-day I feel it my duty to press upon you the vital necessity of a joint Naval and Military operation of this kind. I do not feel justified in arguing the Military advantages which are, however, so obvious as to be patent to the whole world, nor the political advantage of getting in touch with Holland along the Scheldt, but solely from a Naval point of view the enterprise is one that ought to be undertaken with all our powers without further delay. The present occasion is peculiarly favourable, as we can call upon the support of the whole American Fleet.
Yours truly,
(Signed) Fisher.
* * * * *
36, Berkeley Square,
London,
July 11th, 1917.
My Dear Prime Minister,
In putting before your urgent notice the following two propositions, I have consulted no one, and seen no experts. It is the emanation of my own brain.
Owing to two years of departmental apathy and inconceivable strategical as well as tactical blunders, we are wrongly raided in the air, and being ruined under water.
I remember a very famous speech of yours where you pointed out that we had been fourteen times “Too Late!”
This letter is to persuade you against two more “Too lates”:
(1) The Air:
You want two ideas carried out:
(a) A multitude of bombing aircraft made like Ford cars (so therefore very expeditiously obtained thereby).
(b) The other type of aircraft constantly improving to get better fighting qualities.
The Air is going to win the War owing to the sad and grievous other neglects.
(2) The Water:
Here we have a very simple proposition. Now that America has joined us, we have a simply overwhelming sea preponderance!
Are you not going to do anything with this?
Make the German Fleet fight, and you win the war!
How can you make the German Fleet fight? By undertaking on a huge scale, with an immense Armada of special rapidly-built craft, an operation that threatens the German Fleet’s existence!
That operation, on the basis in my mind, is one absolutely sure of success, because the force employed is so gigantic as to be negligible of fools.
If you sweep away the German Fleet, you sweep away all else and end the War, as then you have the Baltic clear and a straight run of some 90 miles only from the Pomeranian Coast to Berlin, and it is the Russian Army we want to enter Berlin, not the English or French.
Yours truly,
(Signed) Fisher.
Lord Fisher to a Friend.
February 28th, 1918.
My Dear Friend, ...
Quite recently we lost a golden opportunity of wrecking the residue of the German Fleet and wrecking the Kiel Canal, when the main German Fleet went to Riga with the German army embarked in a huge fleet of transports and so requiring all the Destroyers and Submarines of Germany to protect it.
Well, in reply to your question, this is what I would do now:
I would carry out the policy enunciated in the Print on the Baltic Project which was submitted early in the war[16] and again reverted to in my letter to the Prime Minister, dated June 2nd, 1916. Sow the North Sea with mines as thick as the leaves in Vallombrosa! That blocks effectually the Kiel Canal, if continued laying of these mines is always perpetually going on with damnable pertinacity! Then I guarantee to force a passage into the Baltic in combination with a great Military co-operation, but that co-operation must not be the co-operation of the Walcheren Expedition!
“Lord Chatham with his sword drawn
Was waiting for Sir Richard Strachan,
Sir Richard, longing to be at ’em!
Was waiting for the Earl of Chatham!”
It has got to be chiefly a Naval Job! And the Army will be landed by the Navy! The Navy will guarantee landing the Army on the Coast of Pomerania and elsewhere. Three feints, any of which can be turned into a Reality.
Further in detail I won’t go, but I can guarantee success.
Have I ever failed yet? It’s an egotistical question, but I never have!
What a d—d fool I should be to brag now if I wasn’t certain!
Yours, etc.,
(Signed) Fisher.
P.S.—I have heard some Idiots say that the Baltic Sea is now impregnable because of German mines in it. No earthly System of mines can possibly avoid being destroyed. We can get into the Baltic whenever we like to do so. I guarantee it.
“Sow the North Sea with Mines.”
(Written in November, 1914).
The German policy of laying mines has resulted in denying our access to their harbours; has hampered our Submarines in their attempts to penetrate into German waters; and we have lost the latest type of “Dreadnought” (“Audacious”) and many other war vessels and over 70 merchant vessels of various sizes.
As we have only laid a patch of mines off Ostend (whose position we have notified), the Germans have free access to our coasts to lay fresh mines and to carry out raids and bombardments.
We have had, to our own immense disadvantage in holding up our coastwise traffic, to extinguish the navigation lights on our East Coast, so as to impede German ships laying mines. At times we have had completely to stop our traffic on the East Coast because of German mines; and the risk is so great that freights in some cases have advanced 75 per cent.—quite apart from shortness of tonnage.
The Germans have laid mines off the North of Ireland, and may further hamper movements of shipping in the Atlantic.
The German mine-laying policy has so hindered the movements of the British Fleet, by necessitating wide detours, that to deal with a raid such as the recent Hartlepool affair involves enormous risks, while at the same time the German Fleet can navigate to our coast with the utmost speed and the utmost confidence. They know that we have laid no mines, and the position, of course, of their own mines is accurately charted by them—indeed we know this as a fact. Our Fleet, on the contrary, has to confine its movements to deep water, or slowly to grope its way behind mine-sweeping vessels.
There is no option but to adopt an offensive mine-laying policy.
It is unfortunate, however, that we have only 4,900 mines at present available. On February 1st (together with 1,000 mines from Russia) we shall have 9,110, and on March 1st we shall have 11,100 mines. This number, however, is quite inadequate, but every effort is being made to get more. Also FAST Mine-Layers are being procured, as the present ones are very slow and their coal supply very small. So at present we can only go very slow in mine-laying; but carefully selected positions can be proceeded with.
We must certainly look forward to a big extension of German mine-laying in the Bristol Channel and English Channel and elsewhere, in view of Admiral Tirpitz’s recent statements in regard to attacking our commerce.
Neutral vessels now pick up Pilots at the German island of Sylt, and take goods unimpeded to German ports—ostensibly carrying cotton, but more probably copper, etc., and thus circumventing our economic pressure.[17]
This would be at once stopped effectually by a mine-laying policy.
Nor could any German vessels get out to sea at speed as at present; they would have to go slow, preceded by mine-sweeping vessels, and so would be exposed to attack by our Submarines.
The Submarine Monitor M 1,
which lately returned from a successful cruise in the Mediterranean. She is designed to fight above or below water. She carries a 12-inch gun firing an 850-lb. shell, which can be discharged when only the muzzle of the gun is above water.
A Birthday Letter. Lord Fisher to a Friend.
January 25th, 1918.
My Dear Friend,
A letter to-day on my birthday from an eminent Engineer, cheers me up by saying that never has France been so vigorously governed as she is now by her present Prime Minister, Clemenceau, and that he is my age, 77.
The Conduct of the War, both by Sea and Land, has been perilously effete and wanting in Imagination and Audacity since May, 1915.
I know these words of mine give you the stomachache, but so did Jeremiah the Jews when he kept on telling them in his chapter v., verse 31:
“The prophets prophesy falsely,
And the priests [the unfit] bear rule by their means,
And my people love to have it so,
And what will ye do in the end thereof?”
(Why! Send for Jephthah!)
“And Jephthah said unto the elders of Gilead”
(who came supplicating, asking him to come back as their captain)
“Did ye not hate me and expel me?
And why are ye come unto me now when ye are in distress?”
And the elders of Gilead said unto Jephthah:
“We turn again to thee now, that thou mayest go with us and fight!”
By Sea, when the German Fleet took the German Army to Riga, we had a wonderful sure certainty of destroying the German Fleet and the Kiel Canal, but we let it slip because there were risks. (As if war could be conducted without risks!) Considered Rashness in war is Prudence, and Prudence in war is usually a synonym for imbecility!
Observe the Mediterranean! The whole Sea Power of France and Italy is collected in the Mediterranean to fight the puny Austrian Fleet, but they haven’t fought it. Not only that, but hundreds of vessels of the English Navy are perforce out in the Mediterranean to aid them; and yet the German ships, “Goeben” and “Breslau,” known to be fast, powerful and efficient, emerge from the Dardanelles with impunity and massacre two of our Monitors—never meant to be out there and totally unfitted for such service—and two obsolete British Destroyers have to put up a fight! But God intervened and sent the “Goeben” and “Breslau” on top of mines. It was thus the act of God and not the act of our Sea Fools that kept these two powerful German ships from going to the coast of Syria, where they would have played Hell with Allenby and our Palestine Army.
We have pandered to our Allies from the very beginning of the War, and yet practically we find most of the money and have found four million soldiers, and a thousand millions sterling lent to Russia have been lent in vain.
You know as well as I do that our Expeditionary Force should have been sent in August, 1914, to Antwerp and not to France; we should then have held the Belgian Coast and the Scheldt, but this was too tame—we were all singing:
“Malbrook s’en va-t’en guerre!”
The Baltic Project was scoffed at, though it had the impregnable sanction of Frederick the Great, and the project was turned down in November, 1914; and now the Germans, because of their possession of the Baltic as a German lake, are going to annex all the Islands they want that command Russia and Sweden, and the Russian Fleet, with its splendid “Dreadnoughts” and Destroyers disappear and eight British Submarines have been sunk. Ichabod!
Yours truly,
Fisher.
The German Submarine Menace. Lord Fisher to a Friend.
March 2nd, 1918.
My Dear “Mr. Faithful,”
You write anxious to have some connected statement in regard to the whole history of the German Submarine Menace.
Now, the first observation thereon is the oft-repeated indisputable statement that no private person whatever can hope to fight successfully any Public Department. So even if you had the most conclusive evidence of effete apathy such as at first characterised the dealing with this German Submarine Menace, yet you would to the World at large be completely refuted by a rejoinder in Parliament of departmental facts. Nevertheless here is a bit of Naval History.
In December, 1915, the Prime Minister (Mr. Asquith) unexpectedly came up to me in the Lobby of the House of Commons, and said he was anxious to consult me about Naval affairs, and he would take an early opportunity of seeing me! However, he must have been put off this for I never saw him. A month afterwards I pressed him in writing to see Sir John Jellicoe in regard to the paucity both of suitable apparatus and of suitable measures to cope with the German Submarine Menace; after much opposition the Prime Minister himself sent for Sir John Jellicoe and he appeared before the War Council. This is my Memorandum at that time, dated February 7th, 1916: