CHAPTER IX
THE DOVER PATROL
The kings and the presidents go their ways,
Their armies march behind them,
But where would they be,
Said the man from the sea,
Without us Jacks to mind them?
It is seldom possible, during the course of a war, to appraise the ultimate value of any single action; and it was only by slow degrees, as we have suggested, that the results of Jutland were to become visible. Not until the very end was it fully to appear that the enemy's capital surface ships had been so hammered and cowed as to have freed the seas of them with a finality equalled by no other naval fight in history. Presently, as we shall show, that proved to be the case; and, from now onward, he relied upon his submarines—it was early in 1917 that these reached their high-water mark of mercantile destruction—and occasional tip-and-run raids on the part of his destroyers based upon Zeebrugge and Ostend.
With regard to the submarine campaign, this was the most serious menace the Admiralty had been required to face; and it was to take charge of the grave situation, created by its initial success, that Sir John Jellicoe, to the sorrow of the Fleet and with much personal regret, was called to the Admiralty as First Sea Lord in succession to Sir Henry Jackson.
This able officer had succeeded Lord Fisher on the latter's resignation in May, 1915—when the Gallipoli campaign had seemed to him finally to have made an end of his alternative policy—Mr. Balfour having become First Lord in the Coalition Government formed at the same time. In Admiral Beatty, however, both the navy and the nation felt that the Grand Fleet would be in capable hands—the changes taking place after friendly discussion between the officers concerned, in the Iron Duke—and Sir John Jellicoe returned to Whitehall to deal with as perilous a crisis as had ever faced the empire.
What had in fact happened was that, under the stimulus of war, both scientific research and achievement had advanced, as regarded the submarine, with unprecedented strides. From a range of scores to a range of hundreds and even thousands of miles, they had become effective. They had begun to attain a speed that put them on superior terms to the vast bulk of mercantile steamers; and they already carried guns that, before the war, it would have been thought impossible to mount, and that were in fact heavier than those carried by the earlier German destroyers. Nor had the measures of defence as yet overtaken those of destruction in the race for stability. The methods that, to a great extent, had been successful in dealing with the smaller submarines had become obsolete; and the devising of others, their practical application, and the safeguarding, in the meantime, of our mercantile marine—more than half a million tons of mercantile shipping were, at this time, being sunk every month—were problems upon whose solution depended not only the victory of the Allied cause, but the actual physical existence of the people upon these islands.
Of the means ultimately adopted, of which it may at once be said that none was in itself a complete solution, it would be impossible, in the present volume, to give more than the briefest details. The plotting out of minefields for which 100,000 mines, of an improved type, were ordered by Admiral Jellicoe, and of which the most extensive was designed to stretch from the north of Scotland to the waters of Norway; the construction and employment on a vast scale of speedy patrol vessels of all descriptions; the regular use of aircraft, both for observation and the dropping of depth-charges; and the development of the convoy system with destroyer escorts, as the increase in the production of the latter justified this—it was rather to a combination of all these methods, and the skill and adaptability of the men employing them, that the ascendency over this new weapon was slowly regained. Of one particular means, however, namely the employment of lure ships—armed vessels, variously disguised—no record of our naval activities from the personal standpoint could omit some account; and of the amazing courage and ingenuity with which the Q ships, as they were called, were handled, let the following couple of examples, chosen at random, sufficiently indicate.