The British Navy in Battle

by Arthur Joseph Hungerford Pollen

He would know generally, of course, that such things as cruisers, destroyers, and submarines not only existed, but were indeed necessary. He would know vaguely that cruisers were useful for cruising, and destroyers for their eponymous duties—though he would have been sorely puzzled if he had been asked to say exactly what the cruising was for, or what the destroyers were intended to destroy. He would have heard of the mystic properties of torpedoes, and of mines, and of certain weird possibilities that lay before the combination of the torpedo with the submarine. Similarly, if one challenged him, he would admit, of course, that guns could only be formidable if they hit, and that fleets could only succeed in battle if their officers and crews were properly trained and skilfully led. But these were things that could not be tabulated or scheduled. They did not figure in Naval Annuals, nor in Admiralty statements. They were stumbling blocks to the layman’s desire to be satisfied—and he took it for granted that they were all right, and was content to measure naval strength by the number of the biggest ships, and so rate the navies of the world by what they possessed in these colossal units only. Thus, he would always put Great Britain first, and recently Germany second, with the United States, Japan, and France taking the third place in succession, as their annual programmes of construction were announced. And just as he thought of navies in terms of battleships, so he thought of naval war in terms of great sea battles. A reaction was inevitable.

Four years have now passed since Germany struck her felon blow at the Christian tradition the nations have been struggling to maintain—and so far there has been no Trafalgar. The German Fleet, hidden behind its defences, is still integral and afloat, and though the British Fleet has again and again come out, its battleships have got into action but once, and then for a few minutes only. For four years, therefore, the two greatest battle fleets in the world seem to have been doing nothing; and to be doing nothing now! And so, if you ask the average layman for a broad opinion on sea-power to-day, he will tell you that battle fleets are useless. For a year or more he has heard little of any work at sea except of the work of the submarine. To him, therefore, it seemed manifest that the torpedo has superseded the gun and the submarine the battleship. His opinions, in other words, have swung full cycle. Was he right before and is he wrong now, or was his first view an error and has he at last, under the stern teachings of war, attained the truth?

He was wrong then and he is wrong now. It was an error to think of sea-power only in terms of battleships. It is a still greater error to suppose that sea-power can exist in any useful form unless based on battleships in overwhelming strength. It is true that the German submarines did for a period so threaten the world’s shipping as to make it possible that the overwhelming military resources of the Allies might never be brought to bear against the full strength of the German line in France. It is also true that they have added years to the duration of the war, millions and millions to its cost, and have brought us to straits that are hard to bear. They were truly Germany’s most powerful defence, the only useful form of sea force for her. But it is, nevertheless, quite impossible that the submarine can give to Germany any of the direct advantages which the command of the sea confers.

These simple truths will come home convincingly to us if we suppose for a minute that, at the only encounter in which the battle fleets met, it had been the German Fleet that was victorious. Had Scheer and Von Hipper met Beatty and Jellicoe in a fair, well-fought-out action, and sunk or captured the greater part of the British Fleet so that but a crippled remnant could struggle back to harbour—as little left of the mighty British armada as survived of Villeneuve’s and Gravina’s forces after Trafalgar—would it ever have been necessary for Germany to have challenged the forbearance of the world by reckless and piratical attacks on peaceful shipping? Quite obviously not. For with her battle-cruisers patrolling unchallenged in the Channel, the North Sea, and the Atlantic, with all her destroyers and light cruisers working under their protection, no British merchantman could have cleared or entered any British port, no neutral could have passed the blockading lines. British submarines might, indeed, have held up German shipping—but we should have lost the use of merchant shipping ourselves. Our armies would have been cut off from their overseas base, our fighting Allies would have been robbed of the food and material now reaching them from North and South America and the British Dominions, and the civil population of England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, would have been threatened by immediate invasion or by not very far distant famine. And this is so because command of the sea is conditioned by a superior battleship strength, and can only be exercised by surface craft which cannot be driven off the sea.

Let us look at this question again from another angle. It is probable that Germany possessed, during the summer of 1917, some two hundred submarines at least. She may have possessed more. These submarines were, for many months, sinking on an average of from twenty to twenty-four British ships a week, and perhaps rather more than half as many Allied and neutral ships as well. It was, of course, a very formidable loss. But of every seventeen ships that went into the danger zone, sixteen did actually escape. How many would have escaped if Germany could have maintained a fleet of fifty surface ships—light cruisers, armed merchantmen, swift destroyers—in these waters? Supposing trade ships were to put to sea and try to get past such a cordon just as they risk passing the submarines, how many could possibly escape? What would be the toll each surface ship would take—one a fortnight? One a week? One a day?

These are all ridiculous questions, because, could such a cordon be maintained, no ship bound for Great Britain would put to sea at all. It would not be sixteen escaping to one captured; the whole seventeen would so certainly be doomed that they all would stay in port. So much the war has certainly taught us. When, on August 4, 1914, the British Government declared war on Germany, the sailing of every German ship the world over was then and there stopped. A hundred that were at sea could not be warned and were captured. Those that escaped capture made German or neutral ports. But the order not to sail did not wait upon results. The stoppage of the German merchant service was automatic and instantaneous. It would have been raving insanity to have risked encounter with a navy that held the surface command.

Three months later the situation was locally reversed in South American waters. Von Spee, with two very powerful armoured cruisers and three light fast vessels, encountered a very inferior British force under Admiral Cradock off Coronel, and defeated it decisively. Von Spee’s victory meant that in the Southern Atlantic there was no force capable of opposing him. Instantly every South American port was closed. No one knew where Von Spee might turn up next. Not a captain dared clear for England. Even in South Africa General Botha’s hands were tied. A section of the Transvaal and Orange Colony Dutch had risen in rebellion, and had made common cause with the Germans in South West Africa. With Von Spee at large there was no saying what help he would bring to the enemy, and the risk that communications with the mother country might be cut, was a real one. For four weeks the South African Government was paralyzed.

Then followed the most brilliant piece of sea strategy in the war. Two battle-cruisers were sent secretly and at top speed to the Falkland Islands. They reached Port Stanley on December 7, and on the next morning at eight o’clock, Von Spee, in obedience to some inexplicable instinct, brought the whole of his forces to attack the islands. It was the most extraordinary coincidence in the history of war. It was as if a man had been told that a sixty-pound salmon had been seen in a certain river, had thrown a fly at random, and had got a bite and landed him with his first cast. The verdict of Coronel was reversed. Four out of five German ships were sunk. The Dresden escaped, but only to hide herself in the fjords of Patagonia. Germany’s brief spell of sea command in the South Atlantic had ended as dramatically as it began. And within twenty-four hours the laden ships of Chile and the Argentine had put to sea, the underwriters had dropped their premiums to the pre-war rate, and the arrangements for the invasion of South West Africa had begun.

Once more it had been proved that the course of sea traffic is governed by sea command, and sea command means the general power to use the ocean for what it truly is, the highway that connects all the ports of the world together. To use, that is to say, exclusively; to limit its use to the power possessing that command, and to those other powers that might be friendly to them, or to neutrals unconcerned with the war altogether. Never in history has this command been complete. From Trafalgar to 1815, the British, if ever, commanded the sea adversely against their enemies. But they lost anything from six hundred to one thousand ships a year, and it was never possible to stop the whole of the enemy’s trade. Before submarines were ever heard of, then, command could not be made absolute. Strangely enough, steam changed all this. To-day the surface command against surface force is virtually absolute. In August, 1914, Germany had in all a dozen armed vessels on the high seas prepared to attack British shipping. They took and destroyed fifty-six vessels only. All but three were destroyed or driven to intern in very few months. Save for a raider or two—exceptions that prove the rule—no surface attack has been made on the Allies’ ocean trade since then. And there has been no ocean trade in German bottoms at all. In a sense, then, the submarine has only restored to the weaker belligerent a part—and only a small part—of the powers he possessed in the days of sailing fleets. It gives him a limited power of attack on his enemy’s supply. But, two cruises of the Deutschland notwithstanding, it has returned him none of his old trading power. And, as the course of the submarine war has shown, so long as he limits the attack on trade to proportions which the neutral world can put up with, the power of attack is so restricted as to be without military value. The attempt, then, to get a kind of command of the sea by submarine alone could only be made at the cost of turning the whole neutral world into an enemy world. And from the German point of view, the tragedy of the thing is this. The attempt was made, the whole world has become hostile, and the thing has failed.

In these two popular fallacies—the pre-war error that battleships were everything, and the present error that they are absolutely useless, and that it is the submarine that reigns at sea—we see, as it appears to me, convincing proofs that an exposition of the A B C of sea fighting would not be a work of supererogation. I have spoken of these fallacies as popular fallacies, but they are not limited to the unlettered, nor are they foreign to men of affairs. They have, on the contrary, flourished most in ministries, and been strongly held by those whose business it should have been not only to follow or express, but to mould, public opinion. A British statesman, afterwards Prime Minister, said once in Parliament: “I believe that since the Declaration of Paris, the fleet, valuable as it is for preventing an invasion of these shores, is almost valueless for any other purpose.” Most strange of all, the strongest exponents of these heresies have been certain naval officers themselves. It would be interesting to essay to account for this, as it seems to me the strangest curiosity of our times. Let it suffice for the moment to state that what up to a year ago was a dominating faith, is recognized universally to-day as a devastating tissue of errors.