CHAPTER IX
Officers and Men of the Navy
Sailor, what of the debt we owe you?
Day or night is the peril more?
Who so dull that he fails to know you,
Sleepless guard of our island shore?
Safe the corn to the farmyard taken;
Grain ships safe upon all the seas;
Homes in peace and a faith unshaken—
Sailor, what do we owe for these?
The late Viscount Stuart.
No picture of the war work of the British Navy could be complete without some account of its officers and men. From what has already been said, the nature of the qualities demanded of them will have been realised. In the general direction of the Navy by the Admiralty there have been required calm reflection, profound insight, strategic imagination, sound and swift judgment as to the full use and the yet ill-understood limitations of sea-power, an abundant spring of action, and the unflinching resolution to give effect to the utmost to the striking and controlling force of the naval arm. In the Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Fleet there was needed the high ability to administer and exercise the command, to inspire officers and men of every rank and rating in the Fleet with zeal, efficiency, and devotion, as well as sleepless vigilance in the long waiting for the enemy, and instant readiness for action at all times. The Commander-in-Chief does not work alone. He has a staff who collaborate in these duties and give effect to his plans; and admirals secondary in command, who have no light task in directing the work and operations of the larger elements of the Fleet. Sir John Jellicoe, who was appointed to the Grand Fleet at the beginning of the war, was a master of the high attainments required for his office, and it was he who created the base of his operations, organised all the agencies of his command, and exercised that command with consummate ability. The instrument he had shaped and handled so capably fell to the charge of Sir David Beatty, a most gallant officer, eminently fitted to use it, whose temperament is the very spirit of action, and yet who forms his plans in the mould of cool reflection. Happily for the British Navy, the fire of action is mingled in its officers with the ice of thought. They know when to strike, and when they strike they strike hard.
Great responsibilities have rested on the captains of His Majesty’s ships. They showed in the Jutland battle, in which they were tried by the searching test of decisive action, that they possessed the ability to inspire and discipline their men, and to put forth the maximum of the fighting power of the ships. Officers in detached command away from the Fleet have rendered very great services. The junior officers are beyond praise. By universal testimony, their devotion, courage, and ever-ready professional skill, in every test of emergency and endurance, have never been excelled. The officers of the destroyers are men above price. The commanders of submarines, who have even carried their enterprise into the Baltic, and risked the perils of mine and gun in the narrow waters of the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus, are officers who have won new laurels for the Fleet.
The men of the lower deck, wherever they serve, give daily proof of the bravery, hardihood, cheerfulness, and long endurance which have always been the qualities of British seamen. Let Sir John Jellicoe speak of them as he knew them:—
Nothing can ever have been finer than the coolness and courage shown in every case where ships have been sunk by mines or torpedoes; discipline has been perfect, and men have gone to their deaths not only most gallantly, but most unselfishly. One heard on all sides of numerous instances of men giving up on these occasions the plank which had supported them to some more feeble comrade, and I feel prouder every day that passes that I command such men. During the period of waiting and watching they are cheerful and contented, in spite of the grey dullness of their lives.
It would not be difficult to single out instances from the records of the war of constructive power in thought, and sound and swift judgment in action, as well as of splendid courage, enterprise, dash, and resolution—call it what you will—in the crisis of battle and in moments of stress, exhibited in a manner rarely exampled in naval warfare. The British Fleet has been rich in the mental endowments of its officers, showing them to possess grasp and insight, and moral force, to dominate hesitation and sustain action in the tremendous emergencies of battle and when confronted with the most formidable responsibilities. Excitement has never carried them away. Judgment has worked through all their endeavours as, in the long watches and waiting, it has sustained them.
Eulogy is not required. Nothing that has been said exceeds the merits of officers and men. It is right that these things should be understood. The man is more than the machine, and the finest fleet and most compete material equipment are dead and inert without the living power of the officers who command, and the men who man the ships and vessels of every class. It is they who have done and are doing the work of the Navy in the war. They, and not their ships, have given security to the British Isles, have kept the seas and oceans open for the Allies, have safeguarded every interest afloat, and have worked and are working, day and night, to defeat the purposes of the enemy.
We now turn to a consideration which is of paramount importance for a right understanding of the Navy’s work in the war. England is the support of all her Continental Allies. If she should suffer or lose her power of supplying them with armies and arms, or should weaken in her offensive, the Allies would collapse. This is a fact of primary importance. The Germans realise it fully. They hesitate at nothing in their efforts to strike at England. They publicly declared that they would reduce her by famine. They struck at her mercantile marine, not merely at ships which were armed and engaged in the naval service in such large numbers, but at the ordinary cargo vessels, including neutral vessels carrying British supplies, and at fishermen pursuing their regular avocations, who, under The Hague Conventions, were, with their boats, tackle, rigging, gear, and cargoes, to be exempt from capture, and still more from destruction. Of the officers and men of these services we must speak also. It became necessary, in the conditions which had arisen, to bring the whole mercantile marine under naval direction and orders, and practically it is embodied with the Navy, and provided for the most part with armaments for defence, and closely in touch with a great protective organisation.
When Mr. Balfour was First Lord of the Admiralty, speaking in the House of Commons on March 7th, 1916, he directed special attention to this aspect of naval work, not merely to the service of ships flying the White Ensign, but to that of transports and of merchant and cargo vessels, and their officers and men, conveying imports and exports, and the supplies required by the Allied armies. “On them,” he said, “we depend, not less than on our armed forces, for maintaining the necessary economic basis upon which all war must ultimately be waged.” There were, as he said, thousands of officers and men whose ships had been sunk under them by mine and submarine, and yet who had cheerfully signed on again, and were not to be driven from their ancient heritage of the sea. England depends upon her mercantile marine for her national existence. To a great extent, her food and raw materials are in its charge; and it also brings without ceasing hundreds of thousands of tons of munitions of many kinds required by the Allies. When, therefore, we estimate the work of the Navy in the war, we must give to the merchant branch of the Sea Service the position it deserves, as an absolute and primary necessity to England and her Allies.
The nobility of the work carried on by the officers and men of the merchant service and the fishermen, whether in armed ships, mine-trawlers, or cargo vessels, is a dominant note of the war. Their heroism has been conspicuous, and, as was stated by Admiral Sir Henry Jackson, when he was First Sea Lord of the Admiralty, the facility with which they learned to carry out their duties as part of a trained fighting force was extraordinary. “The Allied nations,” he said, “owe them a deep debt of gratitude for their response, as well as for their indomitable pluck and endurance.” “There is no room in the Navy for anything but the most sincere admiration and respect for the officers and men of the mercantile marine,” said Sir John Jellicoe. They had practically become a part of the fighting force, sharing in the work of the Navy in the war, and their courageous conduct and unflinching devotion to duty have gained the testimony of naval officers everywhere, not only in the British service, but in the Allied navies which have come into contact with them. Of the magnificent service of the mine-trawlers we have spoken in a previous chapter.
Let this chapter conclude with an appeal to England and her Allies to remember the great and enduring services of British seamen. They do not often speak of one another. Sometimes, as by a flash, as when Sir John Jellicoe wrote of his men, the truth is revealed. It was that taciturn old officer, Sir John Jervis, who said of Troubridge that he had “honour and courage as bright as his sword.” The torch is handed on from one officer to another. There are many qualities among them. The fire of Drake meets the resolute gravity of Blake; the long reflection of Kempenfelt is the foil to the fierce glow of Nelson. The tradition is continuous. Sir John Jellicoe could find no words to do justice to his officers and men in the day and night actions of the Jutland Battle. The glorious traditions of the past were worthily upheld. Sir David Beatty showed his fine qualities of gallant leadership, high determination, and correct strategic insight. Great qualities were manifested by every rank and rating. Down in the engine-rooms, seeing nothing of the battle, men were working like Titans, and some ships reached speeds which they had never before attained. This was great service for England and her Allies.
There is sometimes a tendency to forget—to lose proportion, also—in censuring seamen for not doing what the power of the sea alone can never achieve. Howe was burned in effigy in London almost at the very time when he was fighting his glorious battle of Quiberon Bay, braving the perils of rocks which were charted and known, and not, be it noted, of submarines and mines which are invisible and unknown. As the sarcastic songster wrote at the time:
When Hawke did bang
Monsieur Conflans,
You sent us beef and beer;
Now Monsieur’s beat,
We’ve naught to eat,
Since you have naught to fear.
And so Nelson spoke. “I will only apply,” he said, “some very old lines wrote at the end of some former war:
“Our God and sailor we adore
In times of danger—not before!
The danger past, both are alike requited:
God is forgotten, and the sailor slighted!”
Now, the object of this book is to show what are the services of the British Navy to England and to the Allies. Its influence has been visible throughout the world, working everywhere with unexampled success. It operates solely because of the qualities and sacrifices of its officers and men. To them a high tribute must be paid.
CHAPTER X
What the British Navy Is and What It Fights For
Where shall the watchful sun,
England, my England,
Match the master-work you’ve done,
England, my own?
When shall he rejoice agen
Such a breed of mighty men
As come forward, one to ten,
To the song on your bugles blown,
England—
Down the years on your bugles blown?
W. E. Henley.
Antagonism between England and Germany became the central fact in the international situation many years before the war. There seemed to be a fundamental antithesis between the ideals of the two peoples. The freedom of the Englishman, guaranteed to him by sea-power, appeared effeminate and undisciplined weakness to the German; the freedom of the German, guaranteed to him only by the military strength of his autocratic State, was regarded as feudal dependence by the Englishman. Not to bring about a conflict, but to avert one—or, if the worst came to the worst, to engage in one with success—was the motive of British policy. There was no visible ground for German aggression, but deep-seated antagonism was the element of danger which successive Premiers and Foreign Ministers had had to take account of in appraising their country’s future, and, with the guidance of their colleague at the Admiralty, who based his judgment on that of his naval advisers, they had obtained the means to build up the Fleet, which was to be the country’s and Empire’s defence.
A BRITISH SUBMARINE
JOURNALISTS ON BOARD A MONITOR
Armageddon was foreseen, though there was hope against hope that, in the great crisis, the dire struggle might be averted. It was known that Belgium and France would have need of England if the dogs of war were let slip. Many soldiers and writers had pointed out that Belgium would become the inevitable pathway of aggression. German writers had declared it an injury that the Congress of Vienna had not established Germany on the North Sea, and Arndt had expressed the ardent desire of the German heart to reconquer the great western rivers, implying the domination of the seas. There were dangers in these lesser countries. They were full of possibilities. Qui trop embrasse mal étreint. Belgium would cry aloud for English help. As to Italy, it was difficult to believe that she could hold to her compact with the Central Powers. Russia, it was known, would be against them. Thus in all her naval efforts, long before the war, England, while guarding her own interests, was working and building up her naval strength, in conscious knowledge of the duty she might one day have to her friends who have now become her Allies. This is a very important point, and it leads to a brief survey of great sacrifices and unstinted efforts which Englishmen have made in the past.
The Fleet that went into the war was the most powerful, best organised, and best equipped in every essential particular in the world. Yet, for a very long anterior period, Englishmen had remained unconscious of what they owed to the Fleet. They had fought brilliant campaigns in China, Afghanistan, India, Burma, the Crimea, Abyssinia, and elsewhere, in which the Navy was a most essential factor, though it had scarcely appeared in the public eye. It was therefore from a low ebb that the British Navy rose to the high-water mark of the war. It was not until about the year 1882 that the tide began to turn, driven forward by the lively breeze of a very useful agitation, in which the late Mr. W. T. Stead took a prominent part, and which is believed to have been inspired by the present Lord Fisher and the late Mr. Arnold Forster. A great shipbuilding scheme was put in hand in 1889. Ever since that time, under far-seeing First Lords and First Sea Lords of the Admiralty, the task of asserting British naval supremacy has gone forward. Expenditure on the Navy mounted from £31,000,000 in 1901 to £51,500,000 in 1914, which latter was thought a monstrous figure; but it was not a penny too much for the great interests which had to be safeguarded.
Battleships of increasing power, cruisers of many classes, destroyers, submarines, and auxiliaries were built. Lord Fisher came to the Admiralty as First Sea Lord in 1904, and during the subsequent six years an enormous work was carried on. The battleships culminated in the Dreadnoughts—that class of ships with a main armament of all big guns—the cruisers in the battle-cruisers, destroyers grew more numerous and of much greater power, submarines were developed in range and sea-keeping qualities. None of these types have stood still. The Dreadnought developed into the Super-Dreadnought, and the latter has developed into the ships of powers before undreamed of, which no one has yet described. The submarine has been changed out of recognition, and no one suspects what these British vessels can and will do when “The Day” really comes.
All these mechanical developments of the Fleet, which are so essential at the present time, grew out of the impetus given in and after the year 1904. But that was not the only thing which placed the country in such a position of advantage at the beginning of the war. The battle-fleet and cruiser squadrons had been reorganised to coincide with the needs of the Empire, owing to the shifting of the stress of naval power from the Atlantic and the Channel to the North Sea. Some squadrons in distant waters were reduced in strength to correspond with the requirements, and non-fighting ships—vessels too weak to fight and too slow to run away—were brought home from distant seas, and their officers and men were made available for modern ships. A system of nucleus crews was adopted for the reserve ships to facilitate mobilisation and to make sure that the ships would be really fit for sea. Before that time the whole Fleet had been pivoted on the Mediterranean, and a British warship was rarely seen in the North Sea. By progressive steps the naval front was changed from the South to the East. On the east coast of the United Kingdom destroyer and submarine flotillas were based on ports prepared for them. A great dockyard was erected at Rosyth, and all along the coast naval bases were developed, and every preparation was made for the possibility of war. These were developments of great significance, and the immense and growing strength of the British Fleet justified the French in concentrating their battle squadrons in the Mediterranean, and leaving at Brest and in the Channel only a division of cruisers, supported by flotillas.
Fleets of warships are meant to fight when the need for fighting comes; but there was no affront to Germany, no cause for resentment or agitation, in the concentration of the main strength of the British Fleet in such places, and with such bases, that they could carry their power into the North Sea. Force attracts force in strategy as in physics, and the growth of the German High Sea Fleet at Wilhelmshaven, with the great sea canal thence to Kiel on the Baltic, inevitably brought about the British concentration. How magnificently advantageous was the position secured has already been shown. In an earlier chapter it has also been explained that by the strategic position occupied by the Grand Fleet, and the grip held on the entrance to the Channel at Dover, the North Sea became strategically a closed sea—a mare clausum.
This fact, which is a fact of geography as well as of strategic concentration, has made the enemy restive and resentful. We are described as the “tyrants of the seas,” and the “freedom of the seas” became a catchword of the Germans. Every ruler who has felt the hard pressure of British sea-power, whether his name was Louis, or Napoleon, or Wilhelm, has, perhaps inevitably, taken this line in denouncing us to neutrals and endeavouring to array neutrals against us. In an earlier stage of the present war this was the consistent plea of German statesmen. But when they instructed their sea officers to sink the Lusitania and many other ships, and when they threatened with disaster neutral ships which approached the British Isles, they became themselves the tyrants of the sea in a very real sense, and they thus arrayed the United States and other States against themselves, and brought a new Armada to strengthen the already superior British Fleet.
The war is a fight for freedom. The British Navy is fighting, and glad to have the Allied navies fighting in co-ordination with it, for the liberation of oppressed nations and countries from military domination. Command of the sea implies no restriction of navigation. It exists only in war time. In time of peace the British Navy guaranteed the freedom of the seas, and will guarantee it again when the war is at an end. We cannot do better than quote on this question what that distinguished American writer Admiral Mahan said:—
Why do English innate political conceptions of popular representative Government, of the balance of law and liberty, prevail in North America from the Arctic Circle to the Gulf of Mexico, from the Atlantic to the Pacific? Because the command of the sea at the decisive era belonged to Great Britain. In India and Egypt administrative efficiency has taken the place of a welter of tyranny, feudal struggle, and bloodshed, achieving thereby the comparative welfare of the once harried populations. What underlies this administrative efficiency? The British Navy, assuring in the first place British control and thereafter communication with the home country, whence comes the local power without which administration everywhere is futile. What, at the moment when the Monroe doctrine was proclaimed, insured beyond peradventure the immunity from foreign oppression of the Spanish-American colonies in their struggle for independence? The command of the sea by Great Britain, backed by the feeble Navy but imposing strategic position of the United States, with her swarm of potential commerce-destroyers, which, a decade before, had harassed the trade even of the Mistress of the Seas.
In concluding, therefore, we see how the British Navy, having served Great Britain and the British Empire so efficiently and so well in every interest and possession, fighting constantly against every stealthy device of the enemy, has served the Allies not less well and worthily. And we discover, too, that the Navy is ever friendly to neutral Powers, and that the command of the sea which it exercises in the war is the panoply of freedom and liberty throughout the world.
I. THE CENTRE OF SEA POWER: THE NORTH SEA
II. THE GRASP OF THE MEDITERRANEAN—LAND AND SEA POWER
(II left)
(II right)