The other school went for a short cut to naval triumph. If only they could get a fleet of ships so big, so fabulously armed, so numerous as to make it seem to the enemy that his fleet was too feeble to attack, why then battle would be made altogether superfluous, and no further worry over so unlikely a contingency was necessary. They did not, therefore, trouble to inquire either into the processes needed for bringing battle about, or into what was necessary for success when battle came. They passed on to the contemplation of what can only be the fruit of victory—as if victory were not a condition precedent!
It was, unfortunately, this group, hypnotized by a theory it did not understand, which controlled naval policy in Great Britain for the ten years preceding the war, and for the first three and a half years of it. Their error lay, of course, in supposing that a fleet, so materially strong and numerous that its defeat was unimaginable because no attack on it could be conceived, must—so long as any serious lowering of its force by attrition was avoided—be the military equivalent to one which had already defeated the enemy; that “invincible” and “victorious” were, in short, interchangeable terms. So masterful was this obsession that their apologists—shutting their eyes to the obvious and appalling consequences of this creed in action—two years after the event, still regarded the only encounter between the main fleets in this war as a great victory, because the larger, by avoiding the risk of close contact with the lesser, came out of the conflict with forces as substantially superior to the enemy’s as they were before the opportunity of a decisive battle had been offered.
The group in question had, indeed, become possessed of one truth. It was simply that preponderant force is a vital element. But by holding it to the exclusion of all other truths they were blinded not only to the crucial business of studying the intellectual and technical essentials to fighting, but even to the orthodox meaning of the communication theory of sea war, on which they had so eagerly, but ignorantly, seized. For the true doctrine is, as we have already seen, just this, that when an enemy refuses battle, the stronger navy’s sole remaining offensive is to cut him off from communication with the sea. It must do this, as we have seen, to restrict his supplies, to weaken his armed forces, to strike at his prosperity and the comfort of his civil population, and thus obtain that partial paralysis of his national life, the completion of which can only be got by a victory that disarms him. And these things, which are the results of blockade, are also the intended results. But they are not intended for their own sake only, nor, primarily, to make the enemy surrender to avoid them. They are inflicted to force the enemy to the battle which he has refused, because it is only by battle that he can relieve himself from them. A stringent blockade, then, is the primary means of inducing a fleet action, and hence we see that siege, while truly the only alternative to battle, is something much more.
Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that, viewed in its right relation to the true theory of war—a state of things in which a conflict of wills between nations is settled by a conflict of their armed forces—it is almost the primary object of siege to bring this conflict about and so to hasten the issue. From the definition the aim of war is the enemy’s defeat and not merely his surrender. And battle is necessary to defeat.
The failure to realize this elementary truth was the cause of much more than an omission to fathom the technique of fighting, the fruits of which we shall find, when we come to the consideration of the naval actions of the last three years and note the curious result of the Jutland deployment and the inconclusive character of so many of the artillery encounters which have occurred, and the extraordinary prolongation of those which were not inconclusive. It brought about what is, at first sight, something even more astonishing, viz., an actual indisposition by those in control of the British Navy, to adopt, when the enemy refused battle, the only course that could compel him to it, though it was actually the first article of their creed to gain the power to do this very thing.
Great Britain went to war at midnight August 4, 1914. The Grand Fleet went to its war stations. The High Seas Fleet withdrew to the security of the Kiel Canal. Within a day no enemy trading ships dared put to sea. Within a week, transports were carrying a British army to France. Our merchantmen continued their sea trading almost as if nothing had happened. But, though the German flag vanished from the seas, neutral vessels were free to use the German ports until the following March, and for another six months the enemy was free to import, in almost any quantities that he liked, certain forms of food, cotton, fats, and many of the ores and chemicals which were the indispensable raw material of the propellants and explosives vitally necessary to him in a prolonged war.
By permitting this, we showed that our policy, in other words, was not to attack but to wait attack, and then not to do anything to compel the enemy to attack. Our sea statesmen had not indoctrinated the civil government with a clearly defined policy that it was prepared to enforce at the opening of hostilities. Yet in a matter of this kind it was exactly at the opening of hostilities that a stringent blockade, accompanied by a generous rationing of sea supplies to the neutrals bordering on Germany, could have been proclaimed and enforced with the least friction. For, in the first place, Germany’s declaration of war was so entirely unprovoked and sudden, and her first measure of war, the invasion of Belgium—when her soldiery became at once outrageous—combined the world over to create a neutral opinion strongly in favour of the Allies. Next, the fact that Great Britain’s participation in the war was both professedly and actually in loyalty to the identical obligation to Belgium which Germany had violated, predisposed America, for the first time since the colonies proclaimed their independence, to an active sympathy with the British ideal, perhaps because for the first time that ideal appeared to them to be one that was purely chivalrous. It was then everything that the psychological moment should have been seized. Nor could it have been difficult to see that, if the opportunity was allowed to slip by, the mere fact that a half measure—to wit, the suspense of German shipping—had been enforced, must lead to a new condition, namely, a hugely magnified trade through the neutral ports. This trade, it is true, was nominally confined to goods that were not contraband of war. But contraband is an elastic term, and, to make things worse, the British Government proclaimed its intention—so little had war-trained thought prepared its policy—of accepting the provisions of the unexecuted Declaration of London as defining what contraband was to be. This gave the enemy the liberty to import materials indispensable to his manufacture of munitions and of armament, was one of which full advantage was taken. It was bad enough that cotton, indispensable ores, the raw materials of glycerine as well as the finished product, were poured into the laboratories, the factories, and the arsenals of Germany without stint or limit. It was, if possible, worse that this traffic created gigantic exporting interests in America which, once vested, made the restriction of them wear the appearance of an intolerable hardship when, many months too late, more stringent measures were taken. So powerful indeed had these interests become, that the real and rigid blockade which, under the doctrines of the “continuous voyage” and the “ultimate destination” would from the first have been fully consonant with international law, was actually never attempted at all until the United States themselves became belligerents.
For fourteen months, then, we witnessed a state of things so paradoxical as to be without parallel in history. It was our professed creed that the fleet existed to seize and control sea communications. The enemy conceded us this control and, so far from using it to straiten him so relentlessly that he would have no choice but to fight for relief from it, we actually permitted him to draw, through sources absolutely under our control, for essentials in the form of overseas supplies that he needed in a war which all the world realized must now be a prolonged one. The traditional naval policy of the country was thus not reflected in the action of the country’s government, because that policy had no representation in the Navy’s counsels. There is, perhaps, no single heresy for which so high and disastrous a price has been paid.
It would appear, then, that our pre-war naval policy did not contemplate that immediate and stringent sea pressure that would compel the enemy to action, nor yet the closest and most vigilant kind of watch that would have brought him to action in the promptest and most fatal manner when circumstances compelled him to come out. Nor is it difficult to see why this was so. To profess the communication theory of sea war without realizing that the control of communications is the result of victory, that is, setting up a consequence as an aim while ignoring its cause, inevitably led to the inverted error, an unwillingness so to employ the control of communications, when the enemy ceded them without victory, as to force the enemy into battle as the only hope of escaping an intolerable condition. Not having contemplated and prepared for battle as the first aim of naval policy, they left an instinctive disinclination to force on an affair which they suddenly realized would be as critical as it was certainly unanticipated. It is this which explains possibly the greatest paradox in history, viz., that Germany proclaimed a strict blockade of Great Britain before Great Britain proclaimed such a blockade of Germany.