Such was the high standard set at the outset by the Dover Patrol; and, under Vice-Admiral Sir Reginald H. Bacon, who succeeded Rear-Admiral Hood in the following April, it was not only worthily sustained, but finally established beyond challenge—the development of Dunkirk as an additional offensive base, being one of the great achievements of the war. Thus, in spite of its ever more arduous and multitudinous duties—and it is interesting to remember that this was the command in which Nelson was the least successful and most ill at ease—it had been engaged, by the end of 1915, in no less than fourteen concerted actions. Knocke, Heyst, Zeebrugge, Ostend, Middlekerke, and Westende had been severally attacked; three military factories, two ammunition depots, storehouses, and signalling stations had been destroyed; considerable damage had been done to the wharves and the famous Mole at Zeebrugge; thirteen large guns had been put out of action; and a dredger, a torpedo-boat, and two submarines sunk.
During this time the only British losses were three vessels sunk; and their very names indicate the extent and variety of the marine resources that were to prove our salvation. The armed yacht Sanda, the pleasure steamer Brighton Queen, once so often thronged with cross-channel trippers, and the drifter Great Heart—these were the first casualties of the Dover Patrol. That they were so few was due in large measure to the vigilance and seamanship of three men, of Commodore C. D. Johnston in command of the Dover destroyers; of Captain P. G. Bird in charge of the drifters; and of Commander W. Rigg, who was chiefly responsible for the early organization of the mine-sweepers; while to Wing-Commander Longmore of the Dunkirk aerodrome must be assigned much of the credit for checking the enemy's aircraft. Had they not been supported, however, by the cheerful fidelity and amazing competence of their subordinates, they could have achieved but little as was generously recognized by Vice-Admiral Bacon in his first official despatch.
"Their Lordships will appreciate," he wrote, "the difficulties attendant on the cruising in company by day and night under war conditions of a fleet of eighty vessels comprising several widely different classes, manned partly by trained naval ratings, but more largely by officers of the naval reserve, whose fleet training has necessarily been scant, and by men whose work in life has hitherto been that of deep sea fishermen. The protection of such a moving fleet by the destroyers in waters which are the natural home of the enemy's submarines, has been admirable, and justifies the training and organization of the personnel of the flotilla. But more remarkable still, in my opinion, is the aptitude shown by the officers and crews of the drifters and trawlers, which, in difficult waters, under conditions totally strange to them, have maintained their allotted stations without a single accident. Moreover, these men under fire have exhibited a coolness well worthy of the personnel of a service inured by discipline. The results show how deeply sea adaptability is ingrained in the seafaring race of these islands."
Those are words that, if they were true of the first sea-recruits of 1914, are equally, and, in some respects, more astonishingly applicable to the thousands that subsequently joined them from all ranks. Of these earlier candidates for sea service, none was more typical than Lieutenant-Commander H. T. Gartside Tipping, the oldest naval officer then afloat and one of the first to perish in the Narrow Seas. Having retired from the navy, with the rank of lieutenant, thirty-five years before the outbreak of war, Lieutenant-Commander Tipping had inherited a small estate, including a yacht, in the Isle of Wight. Here he had lived a quiet country life, ardently devoted to yacht racing; had kept himself alert and physically fit; and, at the age of sixty-six, having rejoined his old service and been given the rank of lieutenant-commander, had gladly and efficiently served under officers who might almost have been his grandsons.
To such a man as Lieutenant-Commander Tipping, however, the call of the sea may quite understandably have been imperative. Far less foretellable, and only to be explained, surely, by the racial instinct referred to by Admiral Bacon, was the later phenomenon of expert sailors quartering the seas in fast patrol-boats, who, but a year or two before, had been farmers or commercial travellers, or clerks behind counters in London shops. Christened in naval fashion by their professional brothers with various opprobious nicknames, these were in reality but the affectionate symbols of the older navy's pride in its temporary junior partners; and the best measure of their work—necessarily undramatic, as all preventive work must largely be—is a survey of what the enemy was unable to accomplish in any representative period of the war. Let us take, for example, the six months before the Battle of Jutland, in its middle period. In that half year, through the Dover Patrol alone, there passed 21,000 merchant ships, and of these only 21 were lost or seriously damaged as the result of enemy action—little less than one in every thousand, entrusted to the case of this particular command. More remarkable still, perhaps, since these were inevitably, of course, the enemy's constant and most tempting target, not a single transport or one soldier's life was lost at sea during the same time.
Such had been the record, then, of the Dover Patrol up to the events described in the last chapter—events that, as we have shown, drove Germany's naval activity, for its main efforts, under the water, and confined it afloat to those tip-and-run raids of which that of the following February may be taken as typical. It was on Sunday night, February 25th, soon after eleven o'clock, that a number of star-shells suddenly broke in the sky over the Isle of Thanet, illuminating the coast for a long distance and bringing many of its inhabitants to their windows. Almost simultaneously a brisk bombardment revealed the presence of a flotilla of German destroyers—Margate, Broadstairs, and a little hamlet between them, being subjected to the enemy's fire. Fortunately the casualties were few, and there was no military damage—none of the places attacked being fortified towns—but a woman and a child were killed and two children seriously wounded, and a dozen houses wrecked or injured. A single British destroyer pluckily engaged the enemy, who was soon lost to sight in the darkness, neither the British vessel nor any of the raiders suffering, as far as was known, any serious hurt.
For this enemy success, if such it can be called, and for one or two previous ones of a like nature, there was considerable criticism of the Dover Patrol, chiefly of an ignorant and hasty character. With the Germans at Zeebrugge and Ostend, and in favourable conditions of weather and darkness, it was obviously out of the question to give immutable guarantees against occasional excursions such as these; and that these brief and lawless bombardments reflected no lack of spirit on the part of the Patrol, the Dover destroyers Swift and Broke were soon triumphantly to demonstrate.
This was in the small hours of the dark morning of April 21, 1917, some of the German destroyers having crept into the Straits and shelled both Dover and Calais. In the case of the former town there were no casualties, but over a hundred shells were thrown into Calais, several people being killed, others injured, and a good many houses being destroyed. Out on patrol and near mid-channel steaming westward, were the Swift and Broke, the Swift leading under Commander Ambrose Peck, and the Broke in charge of Commander E. R. Evans. Of the two vessels, soon to become immortal, the Swift was seven years the older, having been launched at Birkenhead in 1907 from the yards of Messrs. Cammel Laird. She had a displacement of 1,800 tons and carried four 4-inch guns. The Broke, on the other hand, had only just been completed before the outbreak of war, and, although approximately of the same dimensions, carried six 4-inch guns and three torpedo-tubes. By a remarkable coincidence, in view of what was to come, she bore the name of that Sir Philip Broke who commanded the Shannon during her historic duel in the spring of 1813, with the Chesapeake, when the latter was captured, after a most heroic resistance, during a hand-to-hand struggle on her deck. Commander Evans was, of course, the famous Polar explorer, who had been second-in-command to the ill-fated Captain Scott.
The sea was quite calm, but, in the black night, it was impossible to see more than half a mile ahead; and the enemy vessels were but six hundred yards distant when they were spotted by the destroyers' lookouts. Six in number, and including amongst them some of the fastest destroyers in the world, they were then on the port bow and travelling at high speed in an opposite direction to that of the Swift and Broke; and, almost simultaneously, they became aware of the presence of the two Britishers. Instantly they sounded their fire-gongs, and, six to two, opened rapid fire. A minute before and the Swift and Broke had been respectable members of a gallant flotilla. Ten minutes later—such is the luck of the sea—and they had written their names forever in British naval history.
Wheeling round almost at right angles to her previous course, and in the face of the point-blank fire and dazzling flashes of the enemy's guns; with a target before her little more than 300 feet long and racing through the darkness at nearly thirty miles an hour; with the practical certainty, if she missed this, of being herself rammed by the next in the line; regardless of the odds, the Swift hurled herself at the first visible German destroyer. So instant had been the decision of the Swift's commander, that it might almost have been called automatic—the natural response not only of a lifetime's schooling, but of all the centuries behind this of British admiralty. Hit or miss, it was a sporting chance, the chance of a lifetime, and he took it. Alas, it was a miss, but such a narrow one that he himself cut through without disaster, swung round to port, torpedoed another of the six, and then picked up and chased a third.