The Submarine Mine
As quite a young Lieutenant, with extraordinary impudence I told the then First Sea Lord of the Admiralty that the Hertz German Submarine Mine, which I had seen a few days before in Kiel Harbour, would so far revolutionise sea warfare as possibly to prevent one fleet pursuing another, by the Fleet that was flying dropping submarine mines in its wake; and certainly that sudden sea operations of the old Nelsonic type would seriously be interfered with. He very good humouredly sent me away as a young desperado, as he remembered that I had been a lunatic in prophesying the doom of masts and sails, which were still then magnificently supreme, and the despised engineer yet hiding his diminished head had to keep the smell of oily oakum away from the noses of the Lords of the ship.
That same Hertz mine in all its essentials remains still “The King of Mines,” and if only in those years immediately preceding the war we had manufactured none else, instead of trying to improve on it, we should have bagged no end of big game. But as it was, our mines were squibs; the enemy’s ship always steamed away and got into harbour, while ours always went down plump.
The Policy of the Submarine Mine favoured us, but our authorities couldn’t see it. I printed in three kinds of type:
(1) Huge capitals; (2) Italics; (3) big Roman block letters the following words, submitted to the authorities very early in the war—
“Sow the North Sea with Mines on such a huge scale that Naval Operations in it become utterly impossible.”
So you nip into the Baltic with the British Fleet.
That British Mining Policy blocked the North Sea entrance to the Kiel Canal—that British Mining Policy dished the neutrals. When the neutrals got blown up you swore it was a German mine—it was the Germans who began laying mines; and a mine, when it blows you up, don’t hand you a ticket like a passport, saying what nationality it is. In fact, our mines were so damned bad they couldn’t help believing it was a German mine. But I might add I think they would have sunk any Merchant ship, squibs though they were; and I may add in a parenthesis this British policy of submarine mines for the North Sea would have played hell with the German submarines, not so much blowing them up but entangling their screws.
Well, at the last—longo intervallo—towards the close of the war, being the fifteenth “Too Late” of Mr. Lloyd George’s ever memorable and absolutely true speech, the British Foreign Office did allow this policy, and the United States sent over mines in thousands upon thousands, and we’re still trying to pick ’em up, in such vast numbers were they laid down!
We really are a very peculiar people.
Lions led by Asses!