Although the Germans, by adopting a waiting policy, prevented the Royal Navy from fulfilling its first duty—the seeking out and destruction of an enemy’s fighting fleets—their inaction emphasised the completeness of the Victory of Brains and Soul which the Navy had won during those few days before the outbreak of war. It was because our mobilisation had been so prompt and complete, it was because the disposition of our fleets had been so perfectly conceived, that the Germans dared not risk a battle with us in the open and were unable to send out their cruisers to cut off our trading ships and to break our communications with France. Although the enemy’s fleets had not been destroyed, they had been rendered very largely impotent. We held, more completely than we did even after the crowning mercy of Trafalgar, the command of the seas of the world. The first great battle was bloodless but complete, it had won for us and for the civilised world a very great victory, and the Royal Navy had never in its long history more fully realised and revealed its tremendous unconquerable Soul.
It may be of some little interest, now that the veil of secrecy can be partly raised, to describe the opposing battle fleets upon which rested the decision of victory or defeat. Before the war it had become the habit of many critics, both naval and civilian, to exalt the striking power of the torpedo craft—both destroyers and submarines—and to talk of the great battleship as an obsolete monster, as some vast Mammoth at the mercy of a wasp with a poison sting. But the war has shown that the Navy was right to hold to the deep beliefs, the outcome of all past experience, that supremacy in the battle line means supremacy in Sea Control. The smaller vessels, cruisers, and mosquito craft, are vitally necessary for their several rôles,—without them the great ships cannot carry out a commercial blockade, cannot protect trade or transports, cannot conduct those hundreds of operations both of offence and defence which fall within the duties of a complete Navy. But the ultimate decision rests with the Battle Fleets. They are the Fount of Power. While they are supreme, the seas are free to the smaller active vessels; without such supremacy, the seas are closed to all craft, except to submarines and, as events have proved, to a large extent even to those under-water wasps.
In August, 1914, our Battle Fleets available for the North Sea—and at the moment of supreme test no vessels, however powerful, which were not on the spot were of any account at all—were not at their full strength. The battleships were all at home—the ten Dreadnoughts, each with ten 12-inch guns, the four Orions, the four K.G.V.s and the four Iron Dukes, each with their ten 13.5-inch guns far more powerful than the earlier Dreadnoughts,—and were all fully mobilised by August 3rd. But of our nine fast and invaluable battle cruisers as many as four were far away. The Australia was at the other side of the globe, and three others had a short time before been despatched to the Mediterranean. Beatty had the Lion, Queen Mary, and Princess Royal, each with eight 13.5-inch guns and twenty-nine knots of speed, in addition to the New Zealand, and Invincible each with eight 12-inch guns. The First Lord of the Admiralty announced quite correctly that we had mobilised thirty-one ships of the battle line, but actually in the North Sea at their war stations upon that fateful evening of August 4th—which now seems so long ago—Jellicoe and Beatty had twenty-seven only of first line ships. They were enough as it proved, but one rather grudged at that time, those three in the Mediterranean and the Australia at the Antipodes. Had there been a battle of the Giants we should have needed them all, for only numbers can annihilate. Jellicoe had, in addition to those which I have reckoned, the Lord Nelson and Agamemnon—pre-Dreadnoughts, each with four 12-inch guns and ten 9.2-inch guns—useful ships but not of the first battle line.
Opposed to our twenty-seven available monsters the Germans had under their hands eighteen completed vessels of their first line. I do not count in this select company the armoured cruiser Blücher, with her twelve 8-inch guns, which was sunk later on in the Dogger Bank action by the 13.5-inch weapons of Beatty’s great cruisers. Neither do I count the fine cruiser Goeben, a fast vessel with ten 11-inch guns which, like our three absent battle cruisers, was in the Mediterranean. The Goeben escaped later to the Dardanelles and ceased to be on the North Sea roll of the German High Seas Fleet.
Germany had, then, eighteen battleships and battle cruisers, and had it been known to the public that our apparent superiority in available numbers was only 50 per cent. in the North Sea, many good people might have trembled for the safety of their homes and for the honour of their wives and daughters. But luckily they did not know, for they could with difficulty have been brought to understand that naval superiority rests more in speed and in quality and in striking power than in the mere numbers of ships. When I have said that numbers only can annihilate, I mean, of course, numbers of equal or superior ships. In quality of ships and especially of men, in speed and in striking power, our twenty-seven ships had fully double the strength of the eighteen Germans who might have been opposed to them in battle. None of our vessels carried anything smaller—for battle—than 12-inch guns, and fifteen of them bore within their turrets the new 13.5-inch guns of which the weight of shell and destructive power were more than 50 per cent. greater than that of the earlier 12-inch weapons. On the other hand, four of the German battleships (the Nassau class) carried 11-inch guns and were fully two knots slower in speed than any of the British first line. Three of their battle cruisers also had 11-inch guns. While therefore we had guns of 12 and 13.5 inches the Germans had nothing more powerful to oppose to us than guns of 11 and 12 inches. Ship for ship the Germans were about two knots slower than ourselves, so that we always had the advantage of manœuvre, the choosing of the most effective range, and the power of preventing by our higher speed the escape of a defeated foe. Had the Germans come north into the open sea, we could have chosen absolutely, by virtue of our greater speed, gun power and numbers, the conditions under which an action should have been fought and how it should have been brought to a finish.
An inch or two in the bore of a naval gun, a few feet more or less of length, may not seem much to some of my readers. But they should remember that the weight of a shell, and the weight of its explosive charge, vary as the cube of its diameter. A 12-inch shell is a third heavier than one of 11 inches, while a 13.5-inch shell is more than one-half heavier than a 12-inch and twice as heavy as one of 11 inches only. The power of the bursting charge varies not as the weight, but as the square of the weight of a shell. The Germans were very slow to learn the naval lesson of the superiority of the bigger gun and the heavier shell. It was not until after the Dogger Bank action when Beatty’s monstrous 13.5-inch shells broke in a terrible storm upon their lighter-armed battle cruisers that the truth fully came home to them. Had Jellicoe and Beatty fought the German Fleet in the wide spaces of the upper North Sea in August, 1914, we should have opposed a fighting efficiency in power and weight of guns of more than two to one. Rarely have the precious qualities of insight and foresight been more strikingly shown forth than in the superiority in ships, in guns, and in men that the Royal Navy was able to range against their German antagonists in those early days of August, when the fortunes of the Empire would have turned upon the chances of a naval battle. In the long contest waged between 1900 and 1914, in the bloodless war of peace, the spiritual force of the Navy had gained the victory; the enemy had been beaten, and knew it, and thenceforward for many months, until the spring of 1916, he abode in his tents. Whenever he did venture forth it was not to give battle but to kill some women, some babes, and then to scuttle home to proclaim the dazzling triumph which “Gott” had granted to his arms.
It may seem to many a fact most extraordinary that in August, 1914, not one of our great ships of the first class—the so-called “super-Dreadnoughts”—upon which we depended for the domination of the seas and the security of the Empire, not one was more than three years old. The four Orions—Orion, Conqueror, Thunderer and Monarch—were completed in 1911 and 1912. The four K.G. Fives—King George V, Centurion, Ajax, and Audacious in 1912 and 1913; and the four Iron Dukes—Iron Duke, Marlborough, Emperor of India and Benbow—in 1914. All these new battleships carried ten 13.5-inch guns and had an effective speed of nearly 23 knots. The super-battle cruisers—Lion, Queen Mary and Princess Royal—were completed in 1912, carried eight 13.5-inch guns, and had a speed of over 29 knots. Upon these fifteen ships, not one of which was more than three years old, depended British Sea Power. The Germans had nothing, when the war broke out, which was comparable with these fifteen splendid monsters. Their first line battleships and battle cruisers completed in the corresponding years, from 1911 to 1914—their “opposite numbers” as the Navy calls them—were not superior in speed, design and power of guns to our Dreadnought battleships and battle cruisers, which had already passed into the second class, and which, long before the war ended, had sunk to the third class. But the newness and overwhelming superiority of our true first line do not surprise those who realise that these fifteen great ships were the fine flower of our naval brains and soul. The new Navy of the three years immediately preceding the war was simply the old Navy writ large. As the need had arisen, so had the Navy expanded to meet it. The designs for these fifteen ships did not fall down from Heaven; they were worked out in naval brains years before they found their material expression in steel. The vast ships issued forth upon the seas, crushingly superior to anything which our enemy could put into commission against us, because our naval brains were superior to his and our naval Soul was to his as a white glowing flame to a tallow candle. In a sentence, while Germany was laboriously copying our Dreadnoughts we had cast their designs aside, and were producing at a speed, with which he could not compete, Orions, K.G. Fives, Iron Dukes and Lions.