Early in 1915, six months after the outbreak of War, our shipyards and gun shops had turned out an extraordinary quantity of finished work. There had been some loss in skilled labour through voluntary enlistment in the Army, but the men that were left worked day and night shifts in the most enthusiastic and uncomplaining spirit. The war was still new and the greatness of the Empire’s emergency had thrilled all hearts. Some coolness came later, as was inevitable—poor human nature has its cold fits as well as its hot ones—and there was even some successful intriguing by enemy agents in the North, but the great mass of British workmen remained sound at heart. The work went on, more slowly, a little less enthusiastically, but it went on.
During the first six months we completed the great battle cruiser Tiger, a sister of the Lion with her eight 13.5-inch guns, and the sisters fought together with those others of their class—the Queen Mary and Princess Royal—in the Dogger Bank action in January, 1915. We took over and completed two battleships which were building for Turkey and under their new names of Erin and Agincourt they joined Jellicoe in the north. The second of these great vessels—ravished from the enemy—had fourteen 12-inch guns (set in seven turrets) and the other ten 13.5-inch. We completed two vast super-ships, the Queen Elizabeth and another like to her, both with a speed of twenty-five knots and eight 15-inch guns apiece. The battle cruisers, Indomitable and Indefatigable, speeding home from the Mediterranean, had raised the Battle Cruiser strength in the North Sea to seven fine vessels of which four carried 13.5-inch guns and the three others 12-inch weapons. Even though the Inflexible and Invincible were still away—they were not yet back from fighting that perfect little action in which the German Pacific Squadron had been destroyed—we had a battle cruiser force against which the rival German vessels could not fight and hope to remain afloat.
After six months, therefore, Jellicoe had received four new battleships—two of them by far the most powerful at that time afloat—and Beatty had been joined by three battle cruisers, one of them quite new. The Grand Fleet was the stronger for six months of work by seven ships.
As compared with our increased strength of seven ships (five quite new), Germany had managed to muster no more than three. She completed two battleships of a speed of twenty and a half knots, each carrying ten 12-inch guns. Neither of these vessels were more powerful than our original Dreadnought class and they were not to be compared with our King George V’s, Orions or Iron Dukes and still less with our Queen Elizabeths. That Germany should, six months after the war began, be completing battleships of a class which with us had been far surpassed fully four years earlier is the best possible illustration of her poverty in naval brains and foresight. Germany had also completed one battle cruiser, the Derfflinger, of twenty-seven knots speed and with eight 12-inch guns, which in her turn was not more powerful than our Invincibles of five years earlier date. The Derfflinger could no more have stood up to our new Tiger than the two battleships just completed by our enemies could have fought for half an hour with our two new Queen Elizabeths. So great indeed had our superiority become as early in the war as the beginning of 1915 that we could without serious risk afford to release two or three battle cruisers for the Mediterranean and to escort the Canadian and Australian contingents across the seas, and to send to the Mediterranean the mighty Queen Elizabeth to flesh her maiden guns upon the Turkish defences of the Dardanelles. Ship guns are not designed to fight with land forts, and though the Queen Elizabeth’s 15-inch shells, weighing over 1,900 lbs. apiece, may not have achieved very much against the defences of the Narrows, their smashing power and wonderful accuracy of control were fully demonstrated.
Inconclusive though it was in actual results, the Dogger Bank action of January, 1915, proved to be most instructive. It showed clearly three things: first, that no decisive action could be fought by the big ships in the southern portion of the North Sea—there was not sufficient room to complete the destruction of the enemy. Secondly, it demonstrated the overwhelming power of the larger gun and the heavier shell. Thanks to the skill of the Navy’s engineering staffs it was also found that the actual speed of our battle cruisers was quite a knot faster than their designed speed, and since no similar advance in speed was noticeable in the case of the fleeing German cruisers it could be concluded that the training of our engineers was fully as superior to theirs as was unquestionably the training of our long-service seamen and gunners superior to that of their short-service crews. As the fleets grew larger our superiority in personnel tended to become more marked. We had an almost unlimited maritime population upon which to draw for the few thousands whom we needed—before the war the professional Navy was almost wholly recruited from the seaboards of the South of England—we had still as our reserves the east and west coasts of England and Scotland. But Germany, even before the war, could not man her fleets from her scanty resources of men from her seaboards, and more and more had to depend upon partially trained landsmen. If one adds to this initial disadvantage in the quality of the German sea recruits, that other disadvantage of the cooping up of her fleets—sea training can only be acquired fully upon the open seas—while ours were continually at work, patrolling, cruising, practising gunnery, and so on, it will be seen that on the one side the personal efficiency of officers and men, upon which the value of machines wholly depends, tended continually to advance, while upon the German side it tended as continually to recede. It was the old story. Nelson’s sea-worn fleet, though actually smaller in numbers and weaker in guns than those of the French and Spaniards at Trafalgar, was so infinitely superior to its opponents in trained officers and men that the result of the battle was never for a moment in doubt.
At the time of the Dogger Bank action, which confirmed our Navy in its growing conviction that Speed and Power of guns were of supreme importance, the Germans had no guns afloat larger in calibre than 12-inch and seven of the ships in their first line were armed with weapons of 11 inches. They then mustered in all twenty big ships which they could place in the battle line against our available thirty-two, and of their twenty not more than thirteen were of a class comparable even with our older Dreadnoughts. They had nothing to touch our twelve Orions, King Georges, Iron Dukes, all with 13.5-inch guns, and upon a supreme eminence by themselves stood the two new Queen Elizabeths which, if need be, could have disposed of any half-dozen of the weaker German battleships. In the Jutland Battle four Queen Elizabeths—Barham, Warspite, Valiant and Malaya—fought for an hour and more the whole High Seas Fleet. It is no wonder, then, that the Germans did not come out far enough for Jellicoe to get at them. And yet there were silly people ashore who still prattled about the inactivity of the Royal Navy and asked one another “what it was doing.”
There is a good story told of the scorn of the professional seamen afloat for the querulous civilians ashore. When the Lion was summoned to lead the battle cruisers in the Dogger Bank action she was lying in the Forth undergoing some slight repairs. As she got up steam a gang of dockyard mateys, at work upon her, pleaded anxiously to be put ashore. They had no stomach for a battle. But there was no time to worry about their feelings; they were carried into action with the ship, and when the shots began to fly they were contemptuously assured by the grizzled old sea dogs, that they were in for the time of their lives. “You wanted to know,” said they, “what the b——y Navy’s doing and now you’re going to see.”
While the power of the Grand Fleet dominated the war at sea, some thirty supply ships and transports safely crossed the English Channel every day, and troops poured into Britain and France from every part of our wide-flung Empire. But for that silent, brooding, ever-expanding Grand Fleet, watching over the world’s seas from its eyries on the Scottish coast, not a man or a gun or a pound of stores could have been sent to France, not a man could have been moved from India or Australia, Canada or New Zealand. But for that “idle” Grand Fleet the war would have been over and Germany victorious before the summer and autumn of 1914 had passed into winter. During the war sea power, as always in naval history, has depended absolutely upon the power in men, in ships, and in guns of the first battle line.
At the beginning of 1915, in addition to the completed ships which I have already mentioned, Great Britain had under construction three additional Queen Elizabeths—Malaya, Barham, and Valiant—all of twenty-five knot speed and carrying eight 15-inch guns apiece. She had also on the stocks in various stages of growth five Royal Sovereign Battleships designed for very heavy armour, with a speed of from twenty-one to twenty-two knots, and to be equipped with eight 15-inch guns each.