It will be seen how completely during the war the Royal Navy had “gone nap” on the ever faster ship and the ever bigger gun. Calculations might be partially upset by weather and visibility—as they were in the Jutland Battle—but even under the worst conditions speed and gun power came triumphantly by their own. Our fast and powerful battle cruisers, and our four fast and more powerful Queen Elizabeths—the name ship was not present—could not on that day of low visibility choose their most effective ranges, but the speed and power of the battle cruisers enabled them to outflank the enemy while the speed and hitting power of the Barham, Valiant, Warspite and Malaya held up the whole of the German High Seas Fleet until Jellicoe with his overwhelming squadrons could come to their support. Even under the worst conditions of light, speed and gun power had fully justified themselves.
Let us for a moment consider what are the advantages and disadvantages of the bigger and bigger gun; the advantages of speed will be obvious to all. To take first the disadvantages. Big guns mean weight, and weight is inconsistent with speed. The bigger the gun, the heavier it is, the heavier its mountings, its turrets, and its ammunition. Therefore in order that weight may be kept down and high speed attained, the ships which carry big guns must carry fewer guns than those which are more lightly armed. The Orions, K.G. Fives, and Iron Dukes each bear ten 13.5-inch guns within their turrets, but the battle cruisers of which the Lion is the flagship, built for speed, can carry no more than eight. The Queen Elizabeth battleships, designed to carry 15-inch guns and to have a speed of twenty-five knots, mount eight guns only against the ten of the earlier and more lightly armed super-Dreadnoughts. Speed and weight being inconsistent, increase in speed and increase in size of guns can only be reconciled by reducing the number of guns carried. The fewer the guns carried, the fewer the salvos that can be fired at an enemy during a fixed time even if the rate of fire of the big guns can be kept so high as that of the smaller ones. When opposing ships are moving fast upon divergent courses, ranges are continually varying and the difficulty of making effective hits is very great indeed. The elaboration of checks and controls, which are among the most cherished of naval gunnery secrets, are designed to increase the proportion of hits to misses which must always be small even when the light is most favourable. If the heavy gun were no more accurate than the light one, then the small number of guns carried and the reduced number of salvos, would probably annul the benefit derived from the greater smashing power of the heavier shell when it did hit an enemy. The ever-expanding gun has, therefore, disadvantages, notable disadvantages, but as we shall see they are far more than outweighed by its great and conspicuous merits.
The first overwhelming advantage of the big gun is the gain in accuracy. It is far more accurate than the lighter one. As the fighting range increases so does the elevation of a gun, needed to reach an object within the visible limits of the horizon, sensibly increase. But the bigger the gun and the heavier its shell, the flatter becomes its trajectory. And a flat trajectory—low elevation—means not only more accurate shooting, but a larger danger zone for an enemy ship. At 24,000 yards (twelve sea miles) a 12-inch shell is falling very steeply and can rarely be pumped upon an enemy’s deck, but a 15-inch shell is still travelling upon a fairly flat path which makes it effective against the sides and upper works of a ship as well as against its deck. The 15-inch shell thus has the bigger mark. It also suffers less from deflection and, what is more important, maintains its speed for a much longer time than a lighter shell. Increased weight means increased momentum. When the 15-inch shell gets home upon its bigger mark at a long range it has still speed and weight (momentum) with which to penetrate protective armour. When it does hit and penetrate there is no comparison in destructiveness between the effect of a 15-inch shell and one of twelve inches. The larger shell is nearly two and a half times as heavy as the smaller one (1,960 lbs. against 850), and the power of the bursting charge of the big shell is more than six times that of the smaller one. Far-distant ships, big ships, can be destroyed by 15-inch shells when, even if occasionally hit by one of twelve inches, they would be little more than peppered. The big gun therefore gives to our Navy a larger mark, greater accuracy arising from the lower trajectory, and far greater destructive hitting power in comparison with the lighter guns carried by most of the German battleships.
But the advantages of the big gun do not end here. Gunnery, in spite of all its elaboration of checks and controls, is largely a matter of trial and error. All that the checks and controls are designed to do is to reduce the proportion of errors; they cannot by themselves ensure accurate shooting. Accuracy is obtained through correcting the errors by actual observation of the results of shots. This is called “spotting.” When shells are seen to fall too short, or too far, or too much to one side or the other, the error in direction or elevation is at once corrected. But everything depends upon exact meticulous spotting, an almost incredibly difficult matter at the long ranges of modern sea fighting. Imagine oneself looking for the splash of a shell, bursting on contact with the sea ten or more miles away, and estimating just how far that splash is short or over or to one side of the object aimed at. It will be obvious to anyone that the position of a big splash can be gauged more surely than that of a small one, and that the huge splash of the big shell, which sends up a column of water hundreds of feet high, can be seen and placed by spotting officers who would be quite baffled if they were observing shots from 12-inch weapons. In this respect also, that of spotting results, the big gun with its big shell, greatly assists the elimination of inevitable errors and increases the proportion of effective hits to misses. If then we get from bigger guns a higher proportion of hits, and a much greater effectiveness from those hits, then the bigger gun has paid a handsome dividend on its cost and has more than compensated us for the reduction in its numbers. Where the useful limit will be reached one cannot say, nothing but experience in war can decide, but the visible horizon being limited to about fifteen sea miles, there must come a stage in gun expansion when increase in size, accuracy, and destructiveness will cease to compensate for smallness of numbers. And the limit will be more quickly reached when during an action the light does not allow the big gun to use its accuracy at longer ranges to the fullest advantage.
Although one’s attention is apt to be absorbed by the great ships of the first battle line, the ultimate Fount of naval Power, a Navy which built only vast battleships and cruisers would be quite unable to control the seas. A navy’s daily work does not consist of battles. For the main purposes of watching the seas, hunting submarines, blockading an enemy, and guarding the communications of ourselves and our Allies, and also for protecting our big ships against submarines and other mosquito attacks, we needed vast numbers of light cruisers, patrol boats, destroyers, armed merchant cruisers, steam drifters and so on, and these had to be built or adapted with as great an energy as that devoted to turning out the monsters of the first battle line. The construction of light cruisers and destroyers—the cavalry of the seas—kept pace during 1915 and 1916 with that of the big fighting ships, while the turning out of the light fast craft essential for hunting down enemy submarines, far surpassed in speed and other building operations. At the beginning of the war we had 270 light mosquito vessels; at the end of 1917 we had 3,500!
Nothing like the tremendous activity in warship building during 1915 has ever been seen in our country. Mercantile building was to a large extent suspended, labour was both scarce and dear, builders could not complete commercial contracts at the prices named in them, the great yards became “controlled establishments” with priority claims both for labour and material. Consequently every yard which could add to the Navy’s strength, whether in super-battleships or cruisers, destroyers or in the humble mine sweeper, were put on to war work. The Clyde, typical of the shipbuilding rivers, was a forest of scaffolding poles from Fairfield to Greenock within which huge rusty hulls—to the unaccustomed eye very unlike new vessels—grew from day to day in the open almost with the speed of mushrooms. A trip down the teeming river became one of the sights of the city on the Clyde and, though precautions were taken to exclude aliens, the Germans must have known with some approach to accuracy the numbers and nature of the craft which were under construction. What was going on in the Clyde during that year of supreme activity, when naval brains were unhampered by Parliament or the Treasury, was also going on in the Tyne, at Barrow and Birkenhead, in the Royal Dockyards—everywhere day and night the Navy was growing at a speed fully three times as great as in any year in our history.
Twenty-two months after war broke out, in May of 1916, Jellicoe’s battle line had been strengthened during the previous twelve months by the addition of no less than seven great vessels. Three more Queen Elizabeths were finished and so were three Royal Sovereigns, and in addition a fine battleship, which had been building in England for Brazil, was taken over and completed. She was named the Canada, had twenty-three knots of speed, and was designed to carry ten 14-inch guns. There were thus available in the North Sea, allowing for occasional absences, from thirty-eight to forty-two great ships of the battle line, of which no fewer than eight carried 15-inch guns of the very latest design. This huge piling up of strength was essential not only to provide against possible losses but to ensure that, in spite of all accidents, an immense preponderance of naval power would always be available should Germany venture to put her fortunes to the hazard of battle. And accidents did occur. The coast lights had all been extinguished and ships at sea cruising at night were almost buried in darkness. As time went on it became more and more certain that a Battle of the Giants could have but one result.
I have now carried the story of naval expansion down to the time of the Jutland Battle—May 31st, 1916—and will show by how much our paper strength had increased between August 4th, 1914, and that date, and how much of that strength was available when the call for battle rang out. It happened that none of our battle cruisers was away upon overseas enterprises, so that we were in good circumstances to meet the call. There had been added to the Fleets one battle cruiser, the Tiger, with 13.5-inch guns, five Queen Elizabeth battleships with 15-inch guns, three Royal Sovereign battleships with 15-inch guns (Royal Sovereign, Royal Oak and Revenge), the Erin battleship with 13.5-inch guns, the Canada battleship with 14-inch guns, and the Agincourt battleship with fourteen 12-inch guns. At the beginning of the war our total strength in battleships and battle cruisers of the Dreadnought and later more powerful types was thirty-one, so that on May 31st we had in and near the North Sea a full paper total of forty-two ships of the battle line.