The British Navy in Battle

by Arthur Joseph Hungerford Pollen

It is a little difficult to say exactly what the British plan was, if by plan we mean a definite understanding existing between the Higher Command in London and the Commander-in-Chief at sea. For as to this no information whatever has been given to the public and we can only arrive at its tenor by the fact that the Admiralty after the event expressed itself completely satisfied with the Commander-in-Chief’s conduct after the fight—a matter to be gone into in greater detail later. For the moment the only indication we have of the general policy which has inspired Whitehall, is that given by Mr. Churchill in an article contributed to a popular magazine a few months after the action was fought. In this he laid down the following as the sea doctrine that should guide our naval conduct:

From the first day of the war, he said, the British Navy had exercised the full and unquestioned command of the sea. So long as it really remained unchallenged and unbeaten the superior fleet ruled all the open waters of the world. From the beginning it had enjoyed all the fruits of a complete victory. Had Germany never built a Dreadnought, or if all the German Dreadnoughts had been sunk, the control and authority of the British Navy could not have been more effective. There had been no Trafalgar, but the full consequences of a Trafalgar had been continuously operative. There was no reason why this condition of affairs should not continue indefinitely. Without a battle we had all that the most victorious of battles could give us. This was the true starting point of any reflections on the war by sea. We were content! As for Jutland, there was no need for the British to seek that battle at all. There was no strategic cause or compulsion operating to draw our battle fleet into Danish waters. If we chose to go there it was because of zeal and strength. A keen desire to engage the enemy impelled, and a cool calculation of ample margins of superiority justified, a movement not necessarily required by any practical need. The battle must, therefore, be regarded as an audacious attempt to bring the enemy to action, arising out of consciousness of overwhelming superiority!

A little consideration will, I think, convince us that Mr. Churchill was altogether wrong in supposing that a decisive action was not highly important to us at this time. For obviously the German Fleet came out to do something, and if my suggestion is right—that its mission was to raise German moral—we had first the obvious duty of preventing the German Fleet doing anything it wished to do, and next an insistent duty to depress German moral, at least as much as Admiral Scheer wished to raise it. Apart from any material or directly military results, a second Trafalgar, had it really broken the hearts of German civilians, might have been an element decisive of the power of the German people to endure the privations that the prolongation of war inflicts upon them. It might finally have broken down the whole structure of lying bluff that the Emperor’s government has maintained. This would have been a military object of the first value and importance. If the war is to end by the collapse, not of the German Army but of the German people, the value of such a victory and such a result can be measured by the number of days of war that it would have saved at a cost in men and treasure that it is hard to calculate.

But apart altogether from this, there were other considerations, some economic and some military, so immensely serious, as would certainly have justified Sir David Beatty in risking, not three, but all his battle-cruisers, if by so doing he could have insured the entire destruction of the German Fleet by Sir John Jellicoe’s forces. To realize this point we must carry our consideration of the naval strategy of the two sides in this war a little further. We have seen that our method of disposing of our forces in the North Sea gave the German Fleet a certain limited freedom of manœuvre in the irregular quadrilateral formed by Peterhead, the Skagerack, Heligoland, and Lowestoft. Outside of this area there was not, after December 8, 1914, a single German warship afloat that was not a fugitive or in hiding, nor has any surface ship ventured outside this area since. When the careers of Karlsruhe and Emden terminated, the period of systematic capture of our trading ships closed also. But Von Tirpitz was very far from being satisfied with the situation so created.

The Grand Admiral was wildly wrong in the kind of navy that he built for Germany, and hopelessly at sea in his forecast of the action England would take in the kind of war that Germany intended to provoke. But when the events of the first few months showed that the war would be a long one, it is not certain that he was not the first European in authority to realize to the full the rôle sea-power would play. In a long war, the merchant shipping of the world—and it was immaterial whether it was belligerent or neutral—would obviously be the one thing by which the Allies, by importations of raw material, and the manufactures of America, the British colonies, and Japan, could counterbalance the vastly superior organization of the Central Powers for working their industries and factories. Shipping was at once the source of supply of the whole Alliance and the military communications of the most formidable of them. The German submarines had had a small initial success against British warships. It was disappointing from the point of view of the attrition that Germany had hoped for. But it opened Von Tirpitz’s eyes to the immense possibilities of a submarine attack on trading ships. He saw, then, both the necessity of cutting the Allies off from the sea, and the means of cutting them off. The plan was an outrageous one from the point of view of morals. But Von Tirpitz’s conception of the importance of sea supplies to the Allies was perfectly correct, and in organizing an attack upon it he was striking straight at the heart of our power of carrying on the war.

This campaign had a very direct bearing upon our North Sea strategy, for at the date at which the Battle of Jutland was fought, about two and a half million tons of British, Allied, and neutral shipping had been sunk by submarine and mine. Had the war imposed no other attacks upon merchant shipping, the percentage lost would not have been very formidable. In the eighteen months that had elapsed since the first organized submarine attack on trade, it represented a rate of sinking of less than a million and three-quarter tons a year, a loss which the Allies and neutrals could easily have counteracted by more energetic building. But more than half of Great Britain’s ocean-going shipping had been commandeered for various war purposes and already in 1916 it had become obvious that the remaining stock of ships could not seriously be diminished without grave embarrassment, either to civil supply, to our financial position, to our military power abroad, or to all three. What was much more serious was this: It was a well-known fact that immediately after the German Government decided to blockade by submarine, a very large building programme was put in hand. The programme, as we have seen, had begun to materialize at the beginning of 1916, and it was Germany’s resources in new ships that was Tirpitz’s justification for risking a quarrel with America, so certain did the ruin of England seem, were ruthlessness of method combined with the employment of larger and larger numbers. The Higher Naval Command, then, in this country were fully aware of the extreme importance of being able to deal drastically with this menace, should it once more arise to threaten our sea communications. They also knew that it was certain to arise. And, again, they knew that the under-water threat could only be completely met by an under-water antidote. In the nature of things, as we have seen, there could be no complete reply to the submarine except by mines laid in continuous barrage outside the German harbours, and this in turn was a thing that could not be done unless the German Fleet were destroyed. Whatever reason there may have been in 1914 and 1915 for holding the Churchill doctrine that a victory was unnecessary, the brief submarine campaign of 1916 must have undeceived the blindest. For this campaign had not only shown that ruthlessness could double the rate of sinking, it had also shown that our stock counter-measures were ineffective to thwart it. It was, then, a matter of the very highest military importance to the cause of the Alliance that the German Fleet should be disposed of, so that the renewal of the German submarine campaign should be virtually impossible.

Had this indeed been the result, it is difficult to calculate the profound influence it must have had upon the course of the war, for within a year of the Battle of Jutland over five and a half million tons of shipping were destroyed and throughout that year a very high percentage of British shipbuilding capacity had necessarily to be devoted to purely military purposes.

The continued existence of the German Fleet made it impossible to curtail, made it indeed obligatory to increase and accelerate, the building of war ships of all sizes. The effect of this on the capacity to build merchant ships was felt immediately. In pre-war days the shipyards of Great Britain had turned out over a million and a quarter tons of merchant shipping and a quarter of a million tons of naval shipping. The same yards, had their industry been organized as a national activity, could under the pressure of war undoubtedly have produced two and a half million tons a year. The complete destruction of the German Fleet at Jutland, then, would have made the difference of nearly eight million tons of shipping before another year was out. What would this have meant in the saving of treasure, in man-power, in every other form of military strength to the Allies? But apart from these, there were further military objects of a very striking kind that might well have been within reach.

We have just seen, in discussing the North Sea strategy, that the kind of blockade we have maintained over the Germans was a long-range sort, leaving the German fleets an area of, say, 60,000 square miles in which to manœuvre. If there had been no fleet of German battleships something very like the old close blockade could have been maintained. It is well known that it is not mines and submarines that close the Channel and the Sound to the German and British fleets. It is the fact that the operation of clearing these things away must expose the force doing it to battleship action. The converse also holds true. If there were no German battleships the operation of confining the German cruisers, destroyers, as well as the German submarines, within waters of comparatively narrow limits, by mines, nets, &c., might not have been impossible. Certainly the opening of the battle would have been comparatively simple. There are many kinds of operations in which it would be folly to risk a battle-fleet so long as the enemy’s battle-fleet was in being. But with no hostile enemy fleet in existence a whole vista of new possibilities is opened up to naval and amphibious force. It is unnecessary to enumerate them.

We may take it, then, as axiomatic that, if any chance of bringing the German Fleet to action was offered, it was the first business of the British Navy, and on purely military grounds, no less than those of economic and moral advantage, to force it to decisive action, and that very heavy losses indeed would be justified by complete success.