Records, by Admiral of the Fleet, Lord Fisher

by Baron John Arbuthnot Fisher Fisher

The superseded man was his own protégé, and Togo wasn’t. No wonder these Japanese fight!

Prince Fushishima, the Mikado’s brother, told me of 4,000 of a special company of the bluest blood in Japan, of whom all except four were killed in action or died of wounds—only nine were invalided for sickness. However, I remarked to him we were braver than those 4,000 Japanese, because their religion is they go to Heaven if they die for their country, and we are not so sure! He agreed with me, and gave me a lovely present.

A Pre-War Prophecy.

On December the 3rd, 1908, when I was First Sea Lord of the Admiralty, I hazarded a prophecy (but, of course, I was only doing the obvious!) that should we be led by our anti-Democratic tendencies in High Places, and by Secret Treaties and by Compromising Attendances of Great Military Officers at the French Manœuvres at Nancy, into a sort of tacit pledge to France to land a British Army in France in a war against Germany, then would come the biggest blow to England she would ever have experienced—not a defeat, because we never succumb—but a deadly blow to our economic resources and by the relegation of the British Navy into a “Subsidiary Service.” I said in 1908 (and told King Edward so) that the German Emperor would, in such a case, order his generals “to fight neither with small nor great,” but only with the English and wipe them out! So has it come to pass, as regards the Emperor giving these orders and his having this desire!

The original English Expeditionary Force was but a drop in the Ocean as compared with the German and French millions of soldiers, and the value, though not the gallantry of its exploits, has been greatly over-rated. It was a very long time indeed before the British Army held any considerable portion of the fighting line in France, and instead of being on the seashore, in touch with the British Fleet and with easy access to England, the British Expeditionary Force was by French directions and because of French susceptibilities, stationed far away from the sea, and sandwiched between French troops. We have always been giving in to the susceptibilities of others and having none of our own! The whole war illustrates this statement. The Naval situation in the Mediterranean perhaps exemplifies this more than any other instance!

Had the French maintained the defensive in 1915, it is unquestionable that it would have been the Germans and not the French who would have suffered the bloody losses in the regions of Artois and the Champagne.

We built up a great Army, but we wrecked our shipbuilding. We ought to have equipped Russia before we equipped our own Armies, for, had we done so, the Russians would never have sustained the appalling losses they did in pitting pikes against rifles and machine-guns. This was the real reason of the Russian Catastrophe—the appalling casualties and the inability of the old régime to supply armaments on the modern scale. Had another policy been pursued and the British Fleet, with its enormous supremacy, cleared the Baltic of the German Navy and landed a Russian Army on the Pomeranian Coast, then the War would have been won in 1915! Also, as I pointed out in November, 1914, to Lord Kitchener, we ought to have given Bulgaria all she asked of us. When later we offered her these same terms she refused us with derisive laughter!

There was no difficulty in all this, but we were pusillanimous and we procrastinated.

We did not equip Russia! WE DID NOT SOW THE NORTH SEA WITH THOUSANDS UPON THOUSANDS OF MINES, as I advocated in the Autumn of 1914, and I bought eight of the fastest ships in the world to lay them down! This sowing of the North Sea with a multitude of mines would automatically have established a Complete Blockade! Again, we did not foster Agriculture, and we almost ceased building Merchant Ships, and robbed our building yards and machine shops of the most skilled artisans and mechanics in the world to become “cannon fodder”! But a wave of unthinking Militarism swept over the country and submerged the Government, and we were in May, 1918, hard put to it to bring the American Army across the Atlantic as we were so short of shipping.

It needs not a Soldier to realise that had the British Expeditionary Force of 160,000 men been landed at Antwerp by the British Fleet in August, 1914 (instead of its occupying a small sector in the midst of the French Army in France), that the War would certainly have ended in 1915. This, in conjunction with the seizure of the Baltic by the British Fleet and the landing of a Russian Army on the Pomeranian Coast would have smashed the Germans. All this was foreshadowed in 1908, and the German Emperor kindly gave me the credit as the Instigator of the Idea so deadly to Germany.