In its inmost heart, and especially in the heart of the higher command, the Royal Navy knew that German designers of big ships were but pale copyists of their own, and that the shipyards of Danzig and Stettin and Hamburg could not compete in speed or in quantity with its own yards and those of its contractors in England and Scotland. And yet knowing these things, there was an undercurrent of anxiety ever present both in the Navy and in those circles within its sphere of influence. It seemed to some anxious minds—especially of civilian naval students—that what was known could not be the whole truth, and that the Germans—belief in whose ingenuity and resources had become an obsession with many people—must have some wonderful unknown ships and still more wonderful guns hidden in the deep recesses behind the Frisian sandbanks. In those days, a year or two before August 1914, men who ought to have known better would talk gravely of secret shipyards where stupendous vessels were under construction, and of secret gunshops where the superhuman Krupps were at work upon designs which would change the destinies of nations. Anyone who has ever seen a battleship upon a building slip, and knows how few are the slips which can accommodate them and how few are the builders competent to make them, and how few can build the great guns and gun mountings, will smile at the idea of secret yards and secret construction. Details may be kept secret, as with the first Dreadnought and with many of our super-battleships, but the main dimensions and purpose of a design are glaringly conspicuous to the eyes of the Royal Navy’s Intelligence Service. One might as well try to hide a Zeppelin as a battleship.
As with ships so with guns. I will deal in another chapter with the Navy’s belief, fully justified in action, in the bigger gun—the straight shooting, hard hitting naval gun of ever-expanding calibre—and in the higher speed of ships which enables the bigger gun to be used at its most effective range. There was nothing new in this belief; it was the ripe fruit of all naval experience. Speed without hitting power is of little use in the battle line; hitting power without speed gives to an enemy the advantage of manœuvre and of escape; but speed and hitting power, both greater than those of an enemy, spell certain annihilation for him. He can neither fight nor run away. Given sufficient light and sea room for a fight to the finish, he must be destroyed. The North Sea deadlock is due to lack of room.
Our guns developed in size and in power as rapidly as did our great ships in the capacity to carry and use them. Krupps have a very famous name, made famous beyond their merits by the extravagant adulation which for years past has been poured upon them in our own country by our own people. The Germans are a race of egotists, but they have never exalted themselves, and everything that is German, to the utterly absurd heights to which many fearful Englishmen have exalted them in England. Krupps have been bowed down to and almost worshipped as the Gods of Terror. Their supreme capacity for inventing and constructing the best possible guns has been taken as proved beyond the need of demonstration. But Krupps were not and are not supermen; they have had to learn their trade like more humble folk, and naval gun-making is not a trade which can be taken up one day and made perfect on the next. Krupps are good gun-makers, but our own naval gunshops have for years outclassed them at every point—in design, in size, in power, in quality, and in speed of production. The long wire-wound naval gun, a miracle of patient workmanship, is British not German. While Krupps were labouring to make 11-inch guns which would shoot straight and not “droop” at the muzzle, our Navy was designing and making 12-inch and 13.5-inch weapons of far greater power and accuracy; when Krupps had at last achieved good 12-inch guns, we were turning out rapidly 15-inch weapons of equal precision and far greater power. In naval guns Krupps lag far behind us. And even in land guns—well, the huge siege howitzers which battered Liège and Namur into powder, came not from Essen but from the Austrian Skoda Works at Pilsen! And among field guns, the best of the best by universal acclaim is the French Soixante Quinze, in design and workmanship entirely the product of French artistic skill. War is a sad leveller, and it has not been very kind to Krupps.
Collectively, the Navy is a fount of serene knowledge and wisdom, and has been fully conscious of its superiority in men, in ships, and in guns, but individual naval officers afloat or ashore are not always either learned or wise. Foolish things were thought and said in 1913 and in 1914, which one can now recall with a smile and charitably endeavour to forget.
The Royal Navy was, and is, as superior to that of Germany in officers and men as in ships and in guns. Indeed the one is the direct and inevitable consequence of the other. Ships and guns are not imposed upon the Navy by some outside intelligence; they are secretions from the brains and experience and traditions of the Service itself; they are the expressions in machinery of its Soul. One always comes back to this fundamental fact when making any comparison of relative values in men or in machines. It was the Navy’s Soul which conceived and made ready the ships and the guns. The officers and men are the temporary embodiment of that immortal Soul; it is preserved and developed in them, and through them is passed on to succeeding generations in the Service.
Though the German Navy had not had time or opportunity to evolve within itself that dominant moral force which I have called a naval Soul, it contained both officers and men of notable fighting quality and efficiency. The Royal Navy no more under-rated the personality of its German opponents than it under-rated their ships and their guns. We English, though in foreign eyes we may appear to be self-satisfied, even bumptious, are at heart rather diffident. No nation on earth publicly depreciates itself as we do; no nation is so willing to proclaim its own weaknesses and follies and crimes. Much of this self-depreciation is mere humbug, little more sincere than our confession on Sunday that we are “miserable sinners,” but much of it is the result of our native diffidence. No Scotsman was ever mistrustful of himself or of his race, but very many Englishmen quite genuinely are. And the Navy being, as it always has been, English of the English, tends to be modest, even diffident. It is always learning, always testing itself, always seeking after improvement; it realises out of the fullness of its experience how much still remains to be learned, and becomes inevitably diffident of its very great knowledge and skill. No man is so modest as the genuine unchallengeable expert.
If one cannot improvise ships and guns of the highest quality by an exercise of the Imperial will, still less can one improvise the officers and men who have to man and use them. But Germany tried to do both. The German Navy could not secrete its ships and guns, for there was no considerable German navy a score of years ago; the machines were designed and provided for it by Vulcan and Schichau and Krupps, and the personnel to fight them had to be collected and trained from out of the best available material. The officers were largely drawn from Prussian families which for generations had served in the Army, and had in their blood that sense of discipline and warlike fervour which are invaluable in the leaders of any fighting force. But they had in them also the ruthless temper of the German Army, which we have seen revealed in its frightful worst in Belgium, Serbia and Poland; they knew nothing of that kindly chivalrous spirit which is born out of the wide salt womb of the Sea Mother. Many of these officers, though lacking in the Sea Spirit, were highly competent at their work. Von Spee’s Pacific Squadron, which beat Craddock off Coronel and was a little later annihilated by Sturdee off the Falkland Islands, was, officer for officer and man for man, almost as good as our best. The German Pacific Squadron was nearer the realisation of the naval Soul than was any other part of the German Navy. Admiral von Spee was a gallant and chivalrous gentleman, and the captain of the Emden, ingenious, gay, humorous, unspoiled in success and undaunted in defeat, was as English in spirit as he was unlike most of his compatriots in sentiment. The Navy and the public at home were right when they acclaimed von Spee and von Müller as seamen worthy to rank with their own Service.
The German Pacific Squadron, being on foreign service, had not only picked officers of outstanding merit, but also long-service crews of unpressed men. It was, therefore, in organisation and personnel much more akin to our Navy than was the High Seas Fleet at home in which the men were for the most part conscripts on short service (three years) from the Baltic, Elbe and inland provinces. In our Service the sailors and marines join for twenty-one years, and in actual practice frequently serve very much longer. They begin as children in training-ships and in the schools attached to Marine barracks, and often continue in middle life as grave men in the petty and warrant officer ranks. The Naval Service is the work of their lives just as it is with the commissioned officers. But in the German High Seas Fleet, with its three years of forced service, a man was no sooner half-trained than his time was up and he gladly made way for a raw recruit. The German crews were not of the Sea nor of the Service. During the war, no doubt, they became better trained. The experienced seamen were not discharged and the general level of skill arose; the best were passed into the submarines which alone of the Fleet were continuously at work on the sea. In our own Navy, in consequence of the very great increase in the number of ships, both large and small, the professional sailors had to be diluted by the calling up of Naval Reservists, and by the expansion of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. But unlike Germany we had, fortunately for ourselves, an almost limitless maritime population from which to draw the new naval elements. Fishermen at the call of their country flocked into the perilous service of mine sweeping and patrolling, young men from the seaports readily joined the Volunteer detachments in training for the great ships, dilution was carried on deftly and with so clear a judgment that the general level of efficiency all round was almost completely maintained. That this was possible is not so remarkable as it sounds. The Royal Navy of the fighting ships, even after the war expansion, remained a very small select service of carefully chosen men. Half of its personnel was professional and perfectly trained, the second and new half was so mingled and stirred up with the first that the professional leaven permeated the whole mass. The Army which desired millions had to take what it could get; but the Navy, which counts its men in tens of thousands only, could pick and choose of the best. In the Army the old Regulars were either killed or swamped under the flood of new entrants; in the Navy the professionals remained always predominant. It was very characteristic of the proud exclusiveness of our Royal Navy, very characteristic of its haughty Soul, that the temporary officers were allotted rank marks which distinguished them at a glance, even of civilian eyes, from the regular Service.
Though, as events proved, the Royal Navy need have felt little anxiety about the result of a fair trial of strength with its German opponents, there was one ever-present justification for that deeper apprehension with which the Navy in peace regarded an outbreak of war. It really was feared lest our Government should leave to the Germans the moment for beginning hostilities. It was feared lest while politicians were waiting and seeing the Germans would strike suddenly at their “selected moment,” and by a well-planned torpedo and submarine attack in time of supposed peace, would put themselves in a position of substantial advantage. There was undoubted ground for this fear. The German Government has not, and never has had, any scruples; it has no moral standards; if before a declaration of war it could have struck hard and successfully at our Fleets it would have seized the opportunity without hesitation. And realising this with the clarity of vision which distinguishes the Sea Service, the Navy feared lest its freedom of action should be fatally restricted at the very moment when its hands needed to be most free.
A distinguished naval captain—now an admiral—once put the matter before me plainly from the naval point of view: