Why were not these problems, each and all of them, thoroughly investigated and their solutions discovered before war began?
Mr. Churchill supplies us with the answer. He closes his article in the London Magazine of September, 1916, with a protest against naval operations being more critically and even captiously judged than military operations. They are so judged, he tells us, because of the apparent simplicity of a naval battle, and the obvious character of any disaster that happens to any unit of a fleet. Regiments may be thrown away upon land and no one be any the wiser, but to lose a ship is an event about which there can be no dispute. It is regarded as a disaster, and at once somebody, it is assumed, must be to blame. This is hard measure on the seaman. Surely, an admiral, he tells us, has a greater claim upon the generosity of his countrymen than a general. “His warfare is almost entirely novel. Scarcely one had ever had any experience of sea fighting. All had to learn the strange new, unmeasured, and, in times of peace, largely immeasurable conditions.”
Now this is really a very striking admission. Whence arose this theory that naval warfare consisted of unfathomable mysteries? Perhaps the explanation is as follows: Popular interest in the navy was first thoroughly aroused by Mr. Stead’s Pall Mall articles in the middle eighties. It is from the controversies that he aroused that Brassey’s and the other annual naval publications emerged. For twenty years newspaper interest in shipbuilding programmes, design, and so forth, advanced in a crescendo of intensity. The many and startling departures in naval policy that characterized Lord Fisher’s tenure of the first professional place on the Board of Admiralty, brought this interest to a climax. There was a controversial demand for more costly programmes involving political and journalistic opposition, which in turn provoked greater vigour in those that advocated them. Thus the whole of naval policy had to be commended to popular—and civilian—judgment. And it followed that the advocates of expansion had to employ arguments that civilians could understand. They very soon perceived that success lay along the line of sensationalism. Larger and faster ships, heavier and longer range guns carrying bigger and more devastating shells, faster and more terrifying torpedoes, those new craft of weird mystery, the submarines—all these things in turn and for considerable periods were urged upon the public and the statesmen in terms of awe and wonder. But the Augurs, instead of winking behind the veil, came finally to be hypnotized by their own wonder talk. Who cannot remember that ever-recurring phrase, “the untold possibilities” of the new engines of war? They got to be so convinced on this subject that they made no effort to find out precisely what the possibilities were, and Mr. Churchill’s phrase that I have just quoted, “the strange new, unmeasured, and largely immeasurable conditions,” exactly summed up the frame of mind of those who were responsible for naval policy up to and including Mr. Churchill’s time. If all these problems were insoluble, if the conditions were immeasurable, if the possibilities of new weapons were really untold and untellable, what was the use of worrying about experiment and knowledge, judgment and expertize? It was this frame of mind that led a humorist to suggest that the materialists ought really to be called the spiritualists.
It was all very unfortunate, because any rightly organized system of inquiry, investigation, and experiment, would have dissipated this atmosphere of mystery once and for all. When new inventions are made that affect the processes of industry, it is not the men who go about talking of their “untold possibilities,” their “incalculable” effects, and their “immeasurable” results, that get the commercial advantage of their development. It is those who take immediate steps to investigate the limits of their action and the precise scope of their operations who turn new discoveries to account. To talk as if the performance of guns, torpedoes, submarines, and aircraft were beyond human calculation, was really a confession of incompetence. The application to these things of the principles of inquiry universally employed in other fields was always perfectly simple, and had it been employed we should not have begun the war with wondering what we could do, but knowing precisely what we ought to do. It was want of preparation in these matters that was undoubtedly one of the deciding factors in tying us down both to defensive strategy and to defensive tactics.
Once grasp what are the possibilities open to the enemy’s armed forces; once realize the scope the mine and torpedo possess; once analyze their influence both on strategy and on tactics, with the new problems that they create both for cruising force and for naval artillery in action, and it becomes exceedingly clear what it is that your own fleet must be prepared to do. Had these things been realized at any time between 1911 and 1914, should we have had our own naval bases unprotected against submarine attack? Should we have been without any organization for using mines offensively against the enemy? Still more, should we have been practically without any means whatever of preventing the enemy using mines against us? We should have had a fleet composed of different units, organized, trained, and equipped in a very different way.
CHAPTER VI
The Actions
The naval operations suggested and described in the following chapters are the surprise attack that Germany did not deliver, the destruction of Koenigsberg, the capture of Emden, Cradock’s heroic self-sacrifice off Coronel, the destruction of Von Spee’s squadron off the Falkland Islands, the affair of the Heligoland Bight, the pursuit of Von Hipper across the Dogger Bank, the battle of Jutland, and finally, the operations carried out against Zeebrügge and Ostend in the fourth year of the war. I have not in these chapters followed strict chronological order, but have arranged them so as to present the problems of sea fighting as they arise in a crescendo of interest and complexity.
Modern war is fought in conditions to which history offers no parallel. Both the British and German Governments have maintained the strictest reserve in regard to every operation. When one reads the despatches it is quite obvious to the least instructed student of war, that their publication has been guided by the consciousness that within two or three days of issue the text would be in the enemy’s hands. Every atom of information, then, that could be of the slightest value to the Germans has been ruthlessly excised, with results to a great extent ruinous to lay comprehension of the events described. This being so, I wish it clearly to be understood that every opinion or judgment expressed in these chapters must obviously be subject to modification and revision when further information becomes available. Generally speaking, too, the plans I have included with the text have no pretence whatever to be authentic, but are presented simply as diagrammatic ways of making the text intelligible. No more can be claimed for them than that they should not be inconsistent with the information officially given. The plans of the Falkland Islands engagements are the only exceptions. These I believe to be substantially correct.