I append a couple of extracts from Memoranda made by me in 1902, when I was Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet.
“Here we see 5,000 of these offensive floating mines laid down off Port Arthur, covering a wider space than the English Channel, and we, so far, have none, nor any vessel yet fitted! What a scandal! For a purpose unnecessary to be detailed here, it is absolutely obligatory for us to have these mines instantly for war against Germany. They are an imperative strategic necessity, and must be got at once.”
Automatic Dropping Mines for Ocean Use.
“The question of the use of these mines as an adjunct to a Battle Fleet in a Fleet action has not been put forward so strongly as desirable as compared with their use for preventing ingress or egress to a port. They can be used with facility in the open sea in depths up to 150 fathoms. There is no question that they could be employed with immense effect to protect the rear of a retreating Fleet. This type of mine is quite different to the blockade mine. They are offensive mines. Is it wise, indeed is it prudent not to acquaint ourselves, by exhaustive trials, what the possibility of such a weapon may be, and how it may be counteracted?”
CHAPTER XVI
THE NAVY IN THE WAR
Scapa Flow.
Ages before the War, but after I became First Sea Lord on Trafalgar Day, 1904, I was sitting locked up in a secluded room that I had mis-appropriated at the Admiralty, looking at a chart of the North Sea, and playing with a pair of compasses, when these thoughts came into my mind! “Those d—d Germans, if dear old Tirpitz is only far-seeing enough, will multiply means of ‘dishing’ a blockade by making the life of surface ships near the coast line a burden to them by submarines and destroyers. (At this time the Germans had only one submarine, and she a failure!) Also, as their radius of action grows through the marvellous oil engine, and ‘internal combustion’ changes the face of sea war, we must have our British Fleet so placed at such a distance from hostile attack that our Force off the Enemy’s Coast will cut off his marauders at daylight in the morning on their marauding return.” I put that safe distance for the British Fleet on my compasses and swept a circle, and behold it came to a large inland land-locked sheet of water, but there was no name to it on the chart and no soundings in it put on the chart. I sent for the Hydrographer, and pointing to the spot, I said: “Bring me the large scale chart. What’s its name?” He didn’t know. He would find out.
He was a d—d long time away, and I rang the bell twice and sent him word each time that I was getting angry!
When he turned up, he said it hadn’t been properly surveyed, and he believed it was called Scapa Flow! So up went a surveying ship about an hour afterwards, and discovered, though the current raged through the Pentland Firth at sometimes 14 knots, yet inside this huge secluded basin it was comparatively a stagnant pool! Wasn’t that another proof that we are the ten lost tribes of Israel? And the Fleet went there forty-eight hours before the War, and a German in the German Fleet wrote to his father to say how it had been intended to torpedo the British Fleet, but it had left unexpectedly sooner for this Northern “Unknown!” Also, he said in his letter that Jellicoe’s appointment as Admiralissimo was very painful to them as they knew of his extreme skill in the British Naval Manœuvres of 1913. Also, thirdly, he added to his Papa that it was a d—d nuisance we had bagged the two Turkish Dreadnoughts in the Tyne the very day they were ready to start, as they belonged to Germany!
The mention of Jellicoe reminds me of Yamamoto saying to me that, just before their War with Russia, he had superseded a splendid Admiral loved by his Fleet, because Togo was “just a little better!!!”