I refer to my resignation on the aircraft question with some fear and trembling of denials; however, I have a copy of my letter, so it’s all right. I withdrew my resignation at the request of Authority, because Authority said that the War Office and not the Admiralty were responsible and would be held responsible. The aircraft belonged to the War Office; why on earth couldn’t I mind my own business? I didn’t want the Admiralty building and our wireless on the roof of it to be bombed; so it was my business (the War Office was as safe as a church, the Germans would never bomb that establishment!).
Recently I fortuned to meet Mr. Holt Thomas, and he brought to my recollection what was quite a famous meeting at the Admiralty. Soon after I became First Sea Lord on October 31st, 1914, I had called together at the Admiralty a Great Company of all interested in the air; for at that moment I had fully satisfied myself that small airships with a speed of fifty miles an hour would be of inestimable value against submarines and also for scouting purposes near the coast. So they proved.
Mr. Holt Thomas was a valued witness before the Royal Commission on Oil and Oil Engines, of which I was Chairman (a sad business for me financially—I only possessed a few hundred pounds and I put it into Oil—I had to sell them out, of course, on becoming Chairman of the Oil Commission, and what I put those few hundreds into caused a disappearance of most of those hundreds, and when I emerged from the Royal Commission the oil shares had more than quintupled in value and gone up to twenty times what they were when I first put in).
Through Mr. Holt Thomas we obtained the very important evidence of the French inventor of the Gnome engine—that wonderful engine that really made aeroplanes what they now are. His evidence was of peculiar value; and so also was that of Mr. Holt Thomas’s experience; and the result of the Admiralty meeting on aircraft was that we obtained from Mr. Holt Thomas an airship in a few weeks, when the experience hitherto had been that it took years; and a great number of this type of aircraft were used with immense advantage in the war. I remember so well that the very least time that could be promised with every effort and unstinted money, was three months (but Mr. Holt Thomas gave a shorter time). In three weeks an airship was flying over the Admiralty at 50 miles an hour (“there’s nothing you can’t have if you want it enough”), and now we’ve reached the Epoch—prodigious in its advent—when positively the Air commands and dominates both Land and Sea; and we shall witness quite shortly a combination in one Structure of the Aeroplane, the Airship, the parachute, the common balloon, and an Aerial Torpedo, which will both astound people by its simplicity and by its extraordinary possibilities, both in War and Commerce (the torpedo will become cargo in Commerce). The aeroplane has now to keep moving to live—but why should it? The aerial gyroscopic locomotive torpedo suspended by a parachute has a tremendous significance.
And let no one think like the ostrich that burying one’s head in the sand will make Invention desist. At the first Hague Peace Conference in 1899, when I was one of the British Delegates, huge nonsense was talked about the amenities of war. War has no amenities, although Mr. Norman Angell attacked me in print for saying so. It’s like two Innocents playing singlestick; they agree, when they begin, not to hit hard, but it don’t last long! Like fighting using only one fist against the other man with two; the other fist damn soon comes out! The Ancient who formulated that “All’s fair in love and war” enunciated a great natural principle
“War is the essence of violence.”
“Moderation in War is imbecility.”
“HIT FIRST. HIT HARD. KEEP ON HITTING.”
The following Reports and letter will illustrate this history of my efforts in this direction:—
Lord Fisher returned to the Admiralty on October 30th, 1914.