The British Navy in Battle

by Arthur Joseph Hungerford Pollen

(b) Weapons delivering a more devastating blow, that can reach to longer ranges, and can be employed with higher rapidity.

(c) Methods of employing both the ships and the weapons that will assure to them the utmost scope of efficiency so as to strike at the enemy—if possible—before the enemy can strike, and will keep them in use when conditions of movement, light, and weather have become too difficult for the enemy to overcome.

(d) A personnel of higher moral, better discipline, and greater skill.

(e) A staff of officers to train and command this personnel, adept in all the craft of fighting, instinct with the loftiest patriotism, and masters of the art of leadership.

(f) A supreme command, not only equally conversant both with the doctrine that can be gathered from a study of the past and with the resources that modern scientific and industrial development place at the disposal of the fighting men, but consciously cultivating what may be called a prophetic imagination, by which alone future developments can be anticipated, and guided throughout, and always, by regard to the public interest only.

The factors that enter are first, material; secondly, men; and, thirdly, the intellectual, spiritual, and moral activities necessary for shaping and turning the first two to their purpose.

Looked at largely, the elements have been enumerated above in the inverse order of their importance. For, clearly, the qualities of the ship are much less important than the qualities of the weapons that she carries. A slow, unarmoured battleship, carrying accurate, quick-firing, long-range guns, is a better fleet unit than a fast, perfectly protected ship with weapons unlikely to hit, because ill-made, poorly mounted, or badly ammunitioned. And the power and range of the weapons are less important than the science and methods with which they are employed. An old 12-inch gun that can be used with constant effect at 12,000 yards when the change of range is high, the target often obscured by smoke, and the firing ship constantly under helm, is an infinitely more effective weapon than a new 15-inch that, in spite of a legend range of 20,000 yards, cannot be made to hit in action conditions. And it is from right method that are derived right tactics by which, in turn, the decisive massing of ships in action is obtained. Again, the best of ships’ weapons and methods must be absolutely useless unless the discipline, moral, and skill of those who use them are equal to the strain of fighting. Again, it is highly improbable that you will have good discipline and skill unless you have good leaders, for the excellent reason that it is the officers who make the men; certainly, if they exist in spite of there not being good leaders, weak or heartless leadership can throw them altogether away. The Revolution robbed the French Navy of nearly all its trained officers—and, though possessed of better ships and courageous crews, that navy never fought with real effect in the Great War of from 1792 to 1815. Again, however excellent your ships, weapons, and methods, your moral and your courage, unskilful command at sea and ignorance of the true principles of tactics may rob you of victory. And, lastly, unless those who are responsible for the creation of the material and the training of human force, and for the chief command and general strategy before and during war, are equal to their task unless they keep in close and real touch with the active service, not only is it almost impossible that a force of very high efficiency can exist, but quite impossible that a right direction can be given to it in war.

The reader will very likely detect in the foregoing category of precedence a trite maxim of Napoleon’s elaborated into a series of sonorous, if illustrative, commonplaces. But this is a matter in which, even at the cost of being hackneyed, it is absolutely necessary that certain points should be clearly established. First, looking at the whole subject of sea force as a problem in dynamics, it should be constantly before our eyes that a navy is so highly complex an affair that it can only act rightly when all the elements of which it is composed are employed in accord with the principles peculiar to each, and are combined so that each takes its due place in relation to the rest. It is, for example, quite conceivable that you might have a fleet or a flotilla equipped with the best material, its personnel instructed and expert in the best methods, commanded in detail and directed by the chief command according to the soundest principles of tactics and strategy, and yet that such a unit might fail in winning its legitimate purpose, simply because of some failure to base its operations on correct data. The omission to provide all the means for obtaining intelligence that science and experience suggest, or, having employed them and got the raw material, an inability to interpret and transmit it rightly and promptly to the officer in command, might send a fleet upon its mission either to the wrong place or at the wrong time, or with the wrong dispositions. In considering naval science, then, it is, so to speak, axiomatic to recognize that, as its extent and variety are almost infinite, the task of elucidating and teaching its principles and their application, so that every person making up the organism which is to set the science into action shall act in the light of true doctrine, requires an intellectual effort of incalculable magnitude, just because the dynamic laws governing each element are extraordinarily obscure, and because the number of elements is so extraordinarily great. To be part perfect, then, may vitiate the whole effort.

But if a whole science must be explored and its principles universally inculcated, it would seem as if a wholly untenable ideal was being put forward. But there is no escape from this ideal. For the laws of science are ruthless. Just as “the wages of sin is death,” so is failure the fruit of false doctrine. And the cruelty of the things lies in this, that what seems an almost infinitesimal infidelity may bring a large and noble effort, greatly conceived and gallantly executed, to disaster.

The scale of the task prescribes the scale of the instruments for its discharge. It was clearly beyond the scope of a single individual as chief professional adviser to the Admiralty, I will not say to solve, but even to keep account of, all the intricate problems which require investigation. Indeed, for many years before the war it was fully realized that only a properly organized war staff could even make a beginning from which a right understanding of naval war in modern conditions could derive. The necessity for this had constantly been urged upon successive governments. The matter came to a head when, in 1909, the Cabinet appointed a committee from its own members to consider Lord Charles Beresford’s very grave statements as to the condition of the Navy. This committee never published the evidence by which Lord Charles and his associates tried to establish their case. But in the course of a brief report which was published they said that they had been impressed “with the difference of opinion amongst officers of high rank and professional attainments regarding important principles of naval strategy and tactics, and they look forward with much confidence to the further development of a naval war staff, from which naval members of the Board and flag officers and their staffs at sea may be expected to derive common benefit.” Observe, that the most experienced officers of the day differed with regard to important principles of tactics! The technical officers of the navy knew that this absence of doctrine “among officers of high rank and professional attainments” arose very largely out of a total want of exact data as to the precise effect our weapons could be expected to have upon the enemy, and the effect the enemy’s weapons could be expected to have upon us. If there was no agreement as to how to use weapons there could be no agreement as to their value and, without such agreement, any common doctrine of tactics must be impossible. And with tactics in the melting-pot, strategy must be pure guesswork.