CHAPTER X
FROM STRENGTH TO STRENGTH
Since I have not been so foolish as to set myself the task of writing a history of the Naval War, I am not hampered by any trammels of chronological sequence. It is my purpose to select those events which will best illustrate the workings of the British Naval Soul, and to present them in such a manner and in such an order as will make for the greatest simplicity and force. Naval warfare, viewed in the scattered detail of operations taking place all over the world, is a mightily confusing study; but, if it be analysed and set forth in its essential features, the resultant picture has the clarity and atmosphere of the broad sea horizon itself. There is nothing in naval warfare, as waged by the Royal Navy, of that frightful confusion and grime and clotted horror which has become inseparable from the operations of huge land forces. Sailors live clean lives—except when the poor fellows are coaling ship!—and die clean deaths. They have the inestimable privilege of freedom both in the conception of their plans and in their execution. The broad distinction between land and sea service was put clearly to me once by a Marine officer who had known both. “At sea,” he observed, “one at least lives like a gentleman until one is dead.” It must be very difficult to live or to feel like a gentleman when one is smothered in the mud of Flanders’ trenches and has not had a bath for a month.
Although, as I have shown, the Grand Fleet at the outbreak of war was, in effective battle power, of twice the strength of its German opponents, no time was lost in adding largely to that margin of strength. Mines, with which Germany recklessly sowed the seas whenever she could evade the watchful eyes of our cruisers and destroyers, and the elusive and destructively armed submarine, were perils not lightly to be regarded by our great ships. We took the measure of both these dangers in due course, but in the early months of war they caused a vast amount of apprehension. In addition, therefore, to dealing directly with these perils the whole power of our shipyards, gun shops, and armour-rolling mills was turned to the task of increasing the available margin of battle strength so as to anticipate the possibility of serious losses.
And here we had great advantages over Germany. We not only had a far longer and far greater experience, both in designing and constructing ships and guns, but we had a larger number of yards and shops where battleships and battle cruisers could be completed and equipped. Throughout the fourteen years of the peace contest Germany had always been far behind us in design, in speed of construction, and in the volume of output. We built the first Dreadnought in little more than fifteen months—by preparing all the material in advance and taking a good deal from other ships—but our average time of completing the later models was rather more than two years apiece. The exalted super-battleships occupied about two years and three months before they were in commission. Germany—which so many fearful folk seriously look upon as superhuman in efficiency—never built an ordinary Dreadnought in peace time in less than two years and ten months, and always waited for the chance of copying our designs before she laid one down. It is reasonable to suppose that in the early days of war the German yards and gun shops worked much more rapidly than during the peace competition, but as our own quicker rate of construction was also enormously accelerated it is in the highest degree unlikely that our speed of war output was ever approached by our opponents. We had at the beginning far more skilled labour and, what is more important, far more available skilled labour. Since it was only by slow degrees that we enlisted a vast army for Continental service while Germany had to mobilise the whole of hers at the beginning of hostilities and to call upon the millions of untrained men, the drain upon our manhood was for a long time far less than the drain upon hers. As time went on labour became scarce with us, even for naval work, but it could never have been so scarce as with the Germans when after their immense losses they were driven to employ every possible trained and untrained man with the colours.
We had yet another advantage. In August, 1914, as the result of the far-seeing demands of the British Admiralty we had twice as many great ships under construction in this country as Germany had in the whole of her North Sea and Baltic yards. This initial advantage was an enormous one, since it meant that for eighteen months Germany could make no effective efforts to catch up with us, and that at the end of that period we should inevitably have in commission an increase in battle strength more than twice as great as hers. The completed new lead thus secured early in 1916, added to the lead obtained before the outbreak of war, then made our position almost impregnable. We were thus free to concentrate much of our attention upon those smaller vessels—the destroyers, patrol boats, steam drifters, fast submarine catchers and motor boats—which were urgently needed to cope with Germany’s attacks upon the world’s merchant ships.
Early in 1915, six months after the outbreak of War, our shipyards and gun shops had turned out an extraordinary quantity of finished work. There had been some loss in skilled labour through voluntary enlistment in the Army, but the men that were left worked day and night shifts in the most enthusiastic and uncomplaining spirit. The war was still new and the greatness of the Empire’s emergency had thrilled all hearts. Some coolness came later, as was inevitable—poor human nature has its cold fits as well as its hot ones—and there was even some successful intriguing by enemy agents in the North, but the great mass of British workmen remained sound at heart. The work went on, more slowly, a little less enthusiastically, but it went on.
During the first six months we completed the great battle cruiser Tiger, a sister of the Lion with her eight 13.5-inch guns, and the sisters fought together with those others of their class—the Queen Mary and Princess Royal—in the Dogger Bank action in January, 1915. We took over and completed two battleships which were building for Turkey and under their new names of Erin and Agincourt they joined Jellicoe in the north. The second of these great vessels—ravished from the enemy—had fourteen 12-inch guns (set in seven turrets) and the other ten 13.5-inch. We completed two vast super-ships, the Queen Elizabeth and another like to her, both with a speed of twenty-five knots and eight 15-inch guns apiece. The battle cruisers, Indomitable and Indefatigable, speeding home from the Mediterranean, had raised the Battle Cruiser strength in the North Sea to seven fine vessels of which four carried 13.5-inch guns and the three others 12-inch weapons. Even though the Inflexible and Invincible were still away—they were not yet back from fighting that perfect little action in which the German Pacific Squadron had been destroyed—we had a battle cruiser force against which the rival German vessels could not fight and hope to remain afloat.
After six months, therefore, Jellicoe had received four new battleships—two of them by far the most powerful at that time afloat—and Beatty had been joined by three battle cruisers, one of them quite new. The Grand Fleet was the stronger for six months of work by seven ships.
As compared with our increased strength of seven ships (five quite new), Germany had managed to muster no more than three. She completed two battleships of a speed of twenty and a half knots, each carrying ten 12-inch guns. Neither of these vessels were more powerful than our original Dreadnought class and they were not to be compared with our King George V’s, Orions or Iron Dukes and still less with our Queen Elizabeths. That Germany should, six months after the war began, be completing battleships of a class which with us had been far surpassed fully four years earlier is the best possible illustration of her poverty in naval brains and foresight. Germany had also completed one battle cruiser, the Derfflinger, of twenty-seven knots speed and with eight 12-inch guns, which in her turn was not more powerful than our Invincibles of five years earlier date. The Derfflinger could no more have stood up to our new Tiger than the two battleships just completed by our enemies could have fought for half an hour with our two new Queen Elizabeths. So great indeed had our superiority become as early in the war as the beginning of 1915 that we could without serious risk afford to release two or three battle cruisers for the Mediterranean and to escort the Canadian and Australian contingents across the seas, and to send to the Mediterranean the mighty Queen Elizabeth to flesh her maiden guns upon the Turkish defences of the Dardanelles. Ship guns are not designed to fight with land forts, and though the Queen Elizabeth’s 15-inch shells, weighing over 1,900 lbs. apiece, may not have achieved very much against the defences of the Narrows, their smashing power and wonderful accuracy of control were fully demonstrated.
Inconclusive though it was in actual results, the Dogger Bank action of January, 1915, proved to be most instructive. It showed clearly three things: first, that no decisive action could be fought by the big ships in the southern portion of the North Sea—there was not sufficient room to complete the destruction of the enemy. Secondly, it demonstrated the overwhelming power of the larger gun and the heavier shell. Thanks to the skill of the Navy’s engineering staffs it was also found that the actual speed of our battle cruisers was quite a knot faster than their designed speed, and since no similar advance in speed was noticeable in the case of the fleeing German cruisers it could be concluded that the training of our engineers was fully as superior to theirs as was unquestionably the training of our long-service seamen and gunners superior to that of their short-service crews. As the fleets grew larger our superiority in personnel tended to become more marked. We had an almost unlimited maritime population upon which to draw for the few thousands whom we needed—before the war the professional Navy was almost wholly recruited from the seaboards of the South of England—we had still as our reserves the east and west coasts of England and Scotland. But Germany, even before the war, could not man her fleets from her scanty resources of men from her seaboards, and more and more had to depend upon partially trained landsmen. If one adds to this initial disadvantage in the quality of the German sea recruits, that other disadvantage of the cooping up of her fleets—sea training can only be acquired fully upon the open seas—while ours were continually at work, patrolling, cruising, practising gunnery, and so on, it will be seen that on the one side the personal efficiency of officers and men, upon which the value of machines wholly depends, tended continually to advance, while upon the German side it tended as continually to recede. It was the old story. Nelson’s sea-worn fleet, though actually smaller in numbers and weaker in guns than those of the French and Spaniards at Trafalgar, was so infinitely superior to its opponents in trained officers and men that the result of the battle was never for a moment in doubt.
At the time of the Dogger Bank action, which confirmed our Navy in its growing conviction that Speed and Power of guns were of supreme importance, the Germans had no guns afloat larger in calibre than 12-inch and seven of the ships in their first line were armed with weapons of 11 inches. They then mustered in all twenty big ships which they could place in the battle line against our available thirty-two, and of their twenty not more than thirteen were of a class comparable even with our older Dreadnoughts. They had nothing to touch our twelve Orions, King Georges, Iron Dukes, all with 13.5-inch guns, and upon a supreme eminence by themselves stood the two new Queen Elizabeths which, if need be, could have disposed of any half-dozen of the weaker German battleships. In the Jutland Battle four Queen Elizabeths—Barham, Warspite, Valiant and Malaya—fought for an hour and more the whole High Seas Fleet. It is no wonder, then, that the Germans did not come out far enough for Jellicoe to get at them. And yet there were silly people ashore who still prattled about the inactivity of the Royal Navy and asked one another “what it was doing.”
There is a good story told of the scorn of the professional seamen afloat for the querulous civilians ashore. When the Lion was summoned to lead the battle cruisers in the Dogger Bank action she was lying in the Forth undergoing some slight repairs. As she got up steam a gang of dockyard mateys, at work upon her, pleaded anxiously to be put ashore. They had no stomach for a battle. But there was no time to worry about their feelings; they were carried into action with the ship, and when the shots began to fly they were contemptuously assured by the grizzled old sea dogs, that they were in for the time of their lives. “You wanted to know,” said they, “what the b——y Navy’s doing and now you’re going to see.”
While the power of the Grand Fleet dominated the war at sea, some thirty supply ships and transports safely crossed the English Channel every day, and troops poured into Britain and France from every part of our wide-flung Empire. But for that silent, brooding, ever-expanding Grand Fleet, watching over the world’s seas from its eyries on the Scottish coast, not a man or a gun or a pound of stores could have been sent to France, not a man could have been moved from India or Australia, Canada or New Zealand. But for that “idle” Grand Fleet the war would have been over and Germany victorious before the summer and autumn of 1914 had passed into winter. During the war sea power, as always in naval history, has depended absolutely upon the power in men, in ships, and in guns of the first battle line.
At the beginning of 1915, in addition to the completed ships which I have already mentioned, Great Britain had under construction three additional Queen Elizabeths—Malaya, Barham, and Valiant—all of twenty-five knot speed and carrying eight 15-inch guns apiece. She had also on the stocks in various stages of growth five Royal Sovereign Battleships designed for very heavy armour, with a speed of from twenty-one to twenty-two knots, and to be equipped with eight 15-inch guns each.
It will be seen how completely during the war the Royal Navy had “gone nap” on the ever faster ship and the ever bigger gun. Calculations might be partially upset by weather and visibility—as they were in the Jutland Battle—but even under the worst conditions speed and gun power came triumphantly by their own. Our fast and powerful battle cruisers, and our four fast and more powerful Queen Elizabeths—the name ship was not present—could not on that day of low visibility choose their most effective ranges, but the speed and power of the battle cruisers enabled them to outflank the enemy while the speed and hitting power of the Barham, Valiant, Warspite and Malaya held up the whole of the German High Seas Fleet until Jellicoe with his overwhelming squadrons could come to their support. Even under the worst conditions of light, speed and gun power had fully justified themselves.
Let us for a moment consider what are the advantages and disadvantages of the bigger and bigger gun; the advantages of speed will be obvious to all. To take first the disadvantages. Big guns mean weight, and weight is inconsistent with speed. The bigger the gun, the heavier it is, the heavier its mountings, its turrets, and its ammunition. Therefore in order that weight may be kept down and high speed attained, the ships which carry big guns must carry fewer guns than those which are more lightly armed. The Orions, K.G. Fives, and Iron Dukes each bear ten 13.5-inch guns within their turrets, but the battle cruisers of which the Lion is the flagship, built for speed, can carry no more than eight. The Queen Elizabeth battleships, designed to carry 15-inch guns and to have a speed of twenty-five knots, mount eight guns only against the ten of the earlier and more lightly armed super-Dreadnoughts. Speed and weight being inconsistent, increase in speed and increase in size of guns can only be reconciled by reducing the number of guns carried. The fewer the guns carried, the fewer the salvos that can be fired at an enemy during a fixed time even if the rate of fire of the big guns can be kept so high as that of the smaller ones. When opposing ships are moving fast upon divergent courses, ranges are continually varying and the difficulty of making effective hits is very great indeed. The elaboration of checks and controls, which are among the most cherished of naval gunnery secrets, are designed to increase the proportion of hits to misses which must always be small even when the light is most favourable. If the heavy gun were no more accurate than the light one, then the small number of guns carried and the reduced number of salvos, would probably annul the benefit derived from the greater smashing power of the heavier shell when it did hit an enemy. The ever-expanding gun has, therefore, disadvantages, notable disadvantages, but as we shall see they are far more than outweighed by its great and conspicuous merits.
The first overwhelming advantage of the big gun is the gain in accuracy. It is far more accurate than the lighter one. As the fighting range increases so does the elevation of a gun, needed to reach an object within the visible limits of the horizon, sensibly increase. But the bigger the gun and the heavier its shell, the flatter becomes its trajectory. And a flat trajectory—low elevation—means not only more accurate shooting, but a larger danger zone for an enemy ship. At 24,000 yards (twelve sea miles) a 12-inch shell is falling very steeply and can rarely be pumped upon an enemy’s deck, but a 15-inch shell is still travelling upon a fairly flat path which makes it effective against the sides and upper works of a ship as well as against its deck. The 15-inch shell thus has the bigger mark. It also suffers less from deflection and, what is more important, maintains its speed for a much longer time than a lighter shell. Increased weight means increased momentum. When the 15-inch shell gets home upon its bigger mark at a long range it has still speed and weight (momentum) with which to penetrate protective armour. When it does hit and penetrate there is no comparison in destructiveness between the effect of a 15-inch shell and one of twelve inches. The larger shell is nearly two and a half times as heavy as the smaller one (1,960 lbs. against 850), and the power of the bursting charge of the big shell is more than six times that of the smaller one. Far-distant ships, big ships, can be destroyed by 15-inch shells when, even if occasionally hit by one of twelve inches, they would be little more than peppered. The big gun therefore gives to our Navy a larger mark, greater accuracy arising from the lower trajectory, and far greater destructive hitting power in comparison with the lighter guns carried by most of the German battleships.
But the advantages of the big gun do not end here. Gunnery, in spite of all its elaboration of checks and controls, is largely a matter of trial and error. All that the checks and controls are designed to do is to reduce the proportion of errors; they cannot by themselves ensure accurate shooting. Accuracy is obtained through correcting the errors by actual observation of the results of shots. This is called “spotting.” When shells are seen to fall too short, or too far, or too much to one side or the other, the error in direction or elevation is at once corrected. But everything depends upon exact meticulous spotting, an almost incredibly difficult matter at the long ranges of modern sea fighting. Imagine oneself looking for the splash of a shell, bursting on contact with the sea ten or more miles away, and estimating just how far that splash is short or over or to one side of the object aimed at. It will be obvious to anyone that the position of a big splash can be gauged more surely than that of a small one, and that the huge splash of the big shell, which sends up a column of water hundreds of feet high, can be seen and placed by spotting officers who would be quite baffled if they were observing shots from 12-inch weapons. In this respect also, that of spotting results, the big gun with its big shell, greatly assists the elimination of inevitable errors and increases the proportion of effective hits to misses. If then we get from bigger guns a higher proportion of hits, and a much greater effectiveness from those hits, then the bigger gun has paid a handsome dividend on its cost and has more than compensated us for the reduction in its numbers. Where the useful limit will be reached one cannot say, nothing but experience in war can decide, but the visible horizon being limited to about fifteen sea miles, there must come a stage in gun expansion when increase in size, accuracy, and destructiveness will cease to compensate for smallness of numbers. And the limit will be more quickly reached when during an action the light does not allow the big gun to use its accuracy at longer ranges to the fullest advantage.
Although one’s attention is apt to be absorbed by the great ships of the first battle line, the ultimate Fount of naval Power, a Navy which built only vast battleships and cruisers would be quite unable to control the seas. A navy’s daily work does not consist of battles. For the main purposes of watching the seas, hunting submarines, blockading an enemy, and guarding the communications of ourselves and our Allies, and also for protecting our big ships against submarines and other mosquito attacks, we needed vast numbers of light cruisers, patrol boats, destroyers, armed merchant cruisers, steam drifters and so on, and these had to be built or adapted with as great an energy as that devoted to turning out the monsters of the first battle line. The construction of light cruisers and destroyers—the cavalry of the seas—kept pace during 1915 and 1916 with that of the big fighting ships, while the turning out of the light fast craft essential for hunting down enemy submarines, far surpassed in speed and other building operations. At the beginning of the war we had 270 light mosquito vessels; at the end of 1917 we had 3,500!
Nothing like the tremendous activity in warship building during 1915 has ever been seen in our country. Mercantile building was to a large extent suspended, labour was both scarce and dear, builders could not complete commercial contracts at the prices named in them, the great yards became “controlled establishments” with priority claims both for labour and material. Consequently every yard which could add to the Navy’s strength, whether in super-battleships or cruisers, destroyers or in the humble mine sweeper, were put on to war work. The Clyde, typical of the shipbuilding rivers, was a forest of scaffolding poles from Fairfield to Greenock within which huge rusty hulls—to the unaccustomed eye very unlike new vessels—grew from day to day in the open almost with the speed of mushrooms. A trip down the teeming river became one of the sights of the city on the Clyde and, though precautions were taken to exclude aliens, the Germans must have known with some approach to accuracy the numbers and nature of the craft which were under construction. What was going on in the Clyde during that year of supreme activity, when naval brains were unhampered by Parliament or the Treasury, was also going on in the Tyne, at Barrow and Birkenhead, in the Royal Dockyards—everywhere day and night the Navy was growing at a speed fully three times as great as in any year in our history.
Twenty-two months after war broke out, in May of 1916, Jellicoe’s battle line had been strengthened during the previous twelve months by the addition of no less than seven great vessels. Three more Queen Elizabeths were finished and so were three Royal Sovereigns, and in addition a fine battleship, which had been building in England for Brazil, was taken over and completed. She was named the Canada, had twenty-three knots of speed, and was designed to carry ten 14-inch guns. There were thus available in the North Sea, allowing for occasional absences, from thirty-eight to forty-two great ships of the battle line, of which no fewer than eight carried 15-inch guns of the very latest design. This huge piling up of strength was essential not only to provide against possible losses but to ensure that, in spite of all accidents, an immense preponderance of naval power would always be available should Germany venture to put her fortunes to the hazard of battle. And accidents did occur. The coast lights had all been extinguished and ships at sea cruising at night were almost buried in darkness. As time went on it became more and more certain that a Battle of the Giants could have but one result.
I have now carried the story of naval expansion down to the time of the Jutland Battle—May 31st, 1916—and will show by how much our paper strength had increased between August 4th, 1914, and that date, and how much of that strength was available when the call for battle rang out. It happened that none of our battle cruisers was away upon overseas enterprises, so that we were in good circumstances to meet the call. There had been added to the Fleets one battle cruiser, the Tiger, with 13.5-inch guns, five Queen Elizabeth battleships with 15-inch guns, three Royal Sovereign battleships with 15-inch guns (Royal Sovereign, Royal Oak and Revenge), the Erin battleship with 13.5-inch guns, the Canada battleship with 14-inch guns, and the Agincourt battleship with fourteen 12-inch guns. At the beginning of the war our total strength in battleships and battle cruisers of the Dreadnought and later more powerful types was thirty-one, so that on May 31st we had in and near the North Sea a full paper total of forty-two ships of the battle line.
But the Royal Navy which is always at work upon the open seas can never have at any one moment its whole force available for battle. The squadrons composing the Fleets were, however, exceedingly powerful, far more than sufficient for the complete destruction of the Germans had they dared to fight out the action. As the battle was fought the main burden fell upon thirteen only of our ships—Beatty’s four Cat battle cruisers assisted by the New Zealand and Indefatigable, Hood’s three battle cruisers of the Invincible class, and Evan-Thomas’s four Queen Elizabeth battleships. Jellicoe’s available main Fleet of twenty-five battleships, including two Royal Sovereigns with 15-inch guns, the Canada with 14-inch guns, and twelve Orions, K.G. Fives and Iron Dukes with 13.5-inch guns, which was robbed of its fought-out battle by the enemy’s skilful withdrawal, was almost sufficient by itself to have eaten up the German High Seas Fleet.
During the battle we lost the Queen Mary with 13.5-inch guns, and the Invincible and Indefatigable with 12-inch guns, all of which were battle cruisers. So that after the action our total battle cruiser strength had declined from ten to seven, while our battleship strength was unimpaired.
It is not easy to be quite sure of what the Germans had managed to do during those twenty-two months of war. I have given them credit for completing every ship which it was possible for them to complete. They were too fully occupied with building submarines to attack our merchant ships, too fully occupied with guns and shells for land fighting, and too much hampered in regard to many essential materials by our blockade, to be able to effect more than the best possible. Rumour from time to time credited them with the construction of “surprise” ships carrying 17-inch guns, but nothing unexpected was revealed when the clash of Fleets came on May 31st, 1916. Huge new battleships and huge new guns take us at the very least fifteen months to complete at full war pressure—most of them nearer two years—and the German rate of construction, even when unhampered by a blockade and the calling to the army of all available men, has always been much slower than ours. The British Admiralty does not work in the dark and doubtless knew fully what the Germans were doing.
If we credit the Germans with their best possible they might have added, by May, 1916, four battleships and two battle cruisers to their High Seas Fleet as it existed early in 1915. One of the battleships was the Salamis, which was building at Stettin for Greece when the war broke out. She was designed for speed of twenty-three knots, and to carry ten 14-inch guns. The other three battleships were copies of our Queen Elizabeths, though slower by about four knots. They were to have been equipped with eight 15-inch guns, though Germany had not before the war managed to make any naval guns larger than 12-inch. The battle cruisers (Hindenburg and Lützow) were vessels of twenty-seven knots with eight 12-inch guns, not to be compared with our Cats and no better than our comparatively old class of Invincibles.
The story of the Salamis and its 14-inch guns forms a very precious piece of war history. The guns for this Greek battleship had been ordered in America, a country which has specialised in guns of that calibre. But when Germany took over the ship the guns had not been delivered at Stettin, and never were delivered. They had quite another destination and employment. Our Admiralty interposed, in its grimly humorous way, bought the guns in America, brought them over to this country, and used the weapons intended for the Salamis to bombard the Germans at Zeebrugge and the Turks in Gallipoli. One may speculate as to which potentate was the more irritated by this piece of poetic justice—the Kaiser in Berlin or his brother-in-law “Tino” in Athens.
At their utmost, therefore, the Germans could not have added more than five vessels to their first line (they had lost one battle cruiser), thus raising it at the utmost to twenty-five battleships and cruisers, as compared with our maximum of forty-two much more powerful and faster ships. Four of their battleships were the obsolete Nassaus with twelve 11-inch guns and two of their battle cruisers (Moltke and Seydlitz) were also armed with 11-inch guns. If a successful fight with our Grand Fleet was hopeless in August, 1914, it was still more hopeless in May, 1916. We had not doubled our lead in actual numbers but had much more than doubled it in speed and power of the vessels available for a battle in the North Sea. In gun power we had nearly twice Germany’s strength at the beginning; we had not far from three times her effective strength by the end of May of 1916. It is indeed probable that Germany was not so strong in big ships and guns as I have here reckoned. She did not produce so many in the Jutland Battle. I can account for five battle cruisers and sixteen battleships (excluding pre-Dreadnoughts) making twenty-one in all. I have allowed her, however, the best possible, but long before the year 1916 it must have been brought bitterly home to the German Sea Command that by no device of labour, thought, and machinery could they produce great ships to range in battle with ours. We had progressed from strength to strength at so dazzling a speed that we could not possibly be overtaken. Had not the hare gone to sleep, the tortoise could never have come up with it—and the British hare had no intention of sleeping to oblige the German tortoise. There is every indication that Germany soon gave up the contest in battleships and put her faith in super-submarines, and in Zeppelins, the one to scout and raid, and the other to sink merchant vessels and so between them either to starve or terrify England into seeking an end of the war.