The 1909 committee had hoped that an extended war staff would bring order out of chaos. But by 1911 there had still been nothing done to realize its pious aspirations. When Mr. Churchill took office, then, in the autumn of that year, he had the conclusions of the Beresford Committee to guide him as to the state of strategy and tactics and a state of things in the matter of guns, torpedoes, and mines, no less than the manifest trend of active naval thought, to show where the beginnings of reform must be made.
Mr. Churchill became First Lord in circumstances which were very unexpected, and his first public announcement raised hope to the highest point. For, over the date of New Year’s Day, 1912, there was published by the First Lord a Memorandum which contained a passage on which every optimist fastened. This document defined the root need of naval force with masterly precision. Coming so soon, expressed with such clarity and conviction, it seemed to be not so much a collection of eloquent and thoughtful sentences logically compacted, but a profession of intentions that must definitely turn the current of naval life into the only channel that could assure right progress. Mr. Churchill, in short, had quite evidently grasped the fundamental truth that the whole structure of naval war was based upon the mastery of weapons and, as evidently, intended the pursuit of this mastery to be the watchword of his administration. His actual words were as follows:
“Unit efficiency—that is to say, the individual fighting power of each vessel—is in the sea service for considerable periods entirely independent of all external arrangements and unit efficiency at sea, far more so than on land, is the prime and final factor without which the combinations of strategy and tactics are only the preliminaries of defeat, but with which even faulty dispositions can be swiftly and decisively retrieved.”
At last, then, the man and the moment had come together. To the new First Lord had been given the vision that the moment called for. At last, the consistent, concerted, co-ordinated effort would be made which, proceeding by investigation, analysis, reason, and experiment, would lead us to the root truths of one weapon after another. When the conditions of action were analyzed and the problems they propounded isolated, a measure of our capacity to deal with them would be afforded, and not only would the points of our incapacity be made clear, but the reasons for that incapacity and the character of the measures needed for the remedy would be automatically shown by the analysis. For the first condition for solving any problem is its accurate, scientific, and exhaustive statement. And, if the statement is sufficiently full, it almost carries the solution with it. Let the problems of the gun, torpedo, mine, and submarine once be set out in full, and the principles on which we should proceed to get the utmost out of them in attack, and the utmost against similar efforts by the enemy in defence, would become very clear indeed. In short, when all available knowledge was put before those capable of appreciating it, weighing it, and drawing from it right deductions, progress in a right direction would be assured because, for the first time, it would be established on a scientific foundation.
Nor, indeed, was this all. For no such inquisition could be made in fundamentals without the work being reflected in every other department of naval activity. In place of uninstructed conjecture, we should have, as a basis of naval thought and plan, the reasoned conclusions of expert knowledge.
There was the more reason for this optimistic view because Mr. Churchill’s Memorandum went on to indicate the machinery by which alone right methods can invariably, because together impartially and impersonally, be discovered. For the particular occasion of the Memorandum was the establishment of a new and extended war staff for which, since 1904, we had all been waiting. This, the First Lord explained, must have four carefully differentiated but very important tasks.
It was first, the Memorandum said, “to be the means of preparing and training officers for dealing with the extended problems that await them in stations of high responsibility.” Its second function was to sift, develop, and apply the results of history and experience, and to preserve them “as a general stock of reasoned opinion available as an aid and as a guide for all who are called upon to determine in peace or war the naval policy of the country.” Its third function was the exhibition of the vast superiority which a well-selected committee of experts possesses over even the most brilliant expert working by himself. The Staff was to be a “brain far more comprehensive than of any single man, however gifted, and tireless and unceasing in its action, applied continuously to the scientific study of naval strategy and preparation.” Finally, this Staff, carefully selected from the most promising officers, whose work would train them for the highest command, making all history and experience the province from which to draw the raw material of its doctrines, engaged tirelessly and unceasingly in applying this doctrine to the guidance of the civilian authorities by defining the requirements of our war preparation and war strategy, was also to be the executive department through which the higher command would issue its authoritative orders. “It is to be an instrument capable of formulating any decision which has been taken, or may be taken, by the executive, in terms of precise and exhaustive detail.”
To those hopefully disposed this departure, then, seemed beyond words momentous. For thirty years, whatever disagreement there may have been in the navy, there was absolute unanimity as to the need of a staff for the study of war and the formulation of campaign plans. So long as weapons in use could be mastered by the personnel of the ships without dependence on methods of fire control and so forth extraneously supplied, this was indeed the navy’s chief and overmastering need. Had such a staff existed even sixteen years ago, it is quite inconceivable that we could imperceptibly have drifted into dependence on extraneous methods for the right use of weapons, without the staff responsible for preparation for war, bringing the fact of this dependence to the notice of its chief. And, the principle once recognized that staff organization is the only road to infallibility, the institution of an additional staff for the study of so vital a matter must inevitably have followed. The existence of one competent, impartial, and impersonal expert body would automatically have resulted in the creation of another.
But actually when this new staff was so resoundingly established at the beginning of 1912, some amongst the optimists began to wonder whether there might not be a fly in the ointment of their content. It was pointed out that to create a staff for dealing “with the combinations of strategy and tactics” before any machinery existed for elucidating the essentials of “unit efficiency” did most certainly have the air of putting the cart before the horse. But to doubt that this machinery would follow seemed too absurd in face of the tremendous emphasis that Mr. Churchill had laid upon its necessity. If, without unit efficiency, “the combinations of strategy and tactics were only the preliminaries of defeat,” whereas if it existed a position in which tactics had failed, “could be retrieved with swiftness and decision,” it was manifestly unthinkable that such efficiency could be left to chance, or assumed to exist on the ipse dixit of any official. Obviously the First Lord, having put his hand to the minor and secondary matter, would not delay action at least as drastic in the major primary.
The institution of the War Staff, then, was watched with sympathetic interest in the full expectation, not only that it must lead to great results, but that it must be followed—as, of course, it should have been preceded—by one for fathoming all the potentialities of the means employed in the attack and defence of fleets.