(5) No spot of German Territory in the wide world to be permitted! It would infallibly be a Submarine Base.
Yours,
(Signed) Fisher,
October 21st, 1918.
(Trafalgar Day).
Why we were not as relentless in carrying out our Peace requirements at Sea as on Land is positively incomprehensible.
The German Fleet was not turned over and was afterwards sunk at pleasure by the German crews. I don’t feel at all sure that every German submarine, complete and incomplete, was handed over. Every oil engine ought to have been cleared out of Germany. Through some extraordinary chain of reasoning, absolutely incomprehensible, the three Islands of Heligoland, Sylt and Borkum were not claimed and occupied. In view of the prodigious development of Aircraft it was imperative that these Islands should be in the possession of England.
All this to me is absolutely astounding. The British Fleet won the War, and the British Fleet didn’t get a single thing it ought to have, excepting the everlasting stigma amongst our Allies, of being fools, in allowing the German Fleet to be sunk under our noses, because we mistook the Germans for gentlemen.
The Miracle of the Peace
(that took place at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th Month!) only equalled by the Destruction of Sennacherib’s Army, on the night described in the 25th verse of the 19th chapter of Second Book of Kings! The heading of the chapter is “An Angel slayeth the Assyrians.”
“That night the Angel of the Lord went forth ... in the morning behold they were all dead corpses!”
A Cabinet Minister, in an article (after the Armistice) in a newspaper, stated that the Allies were at their last gasp when the Armistice occurred as it did as a Miracle! for Marshal Foch had been foiled on the strategic flank by the inability of the American Army to advance and the unavoidable consequences of want of experience in a new Army (immense but inexperienced—they were slaughtered in hecatombs and died like flies!) and so the American advance on the Verdun flank was held up, and Haig therefore had to batter away instead (and well he did it!). And though the British Army entered Mons, yet the German Army was efficient, was undemoralised, and had immense lines of resistance in its rear before reaching the Rhine! There was no Waterloo, no Sedan, no Trafalgar (though there could have been one on October 21st, 1918, for the German Naval Mutiny was known! Sir E. Geddes said so in a Mansion House Speech on November 9th, 1918). There was no Napoleon—no Nelson! but “The Angel of the Lord went forth....”