But the Royal Navy which is always at work upon the open seas can never have at any one moment its whole force available for battle. The squadrons composing the Fleets were, however, exceedingly powerful, far more than sufficient for the complete destruction of the Germans had they dared to fight out the action. As the battle was fought the main burden fell upon thirteen only of our ships—Beatty’s four Cat battle cruisers assisted by the New Zealand and Indefatigable, Hood’s three battle cruisers of the Invincible class, and Evan-Thomas’s four Queen Elizabeth battleships. Jellicoe’s available main Fleet of twenty-five battleships, including two Royal Sovereigns with 15-inch guns, the Canada with 14-inch guns, and twelve Orions, K.G. Fives and Iron Dukes with 13.5-inch guns, which was robbed of its fought-out battle by the enemy’s skilful withdrawal, was almost sufficient by itself to have eaten up the German High Seas Fleet.
During the battle we lost the Queen Mary with 13.5-inch guns, and the Invincible and Indefatigable with 12-inch guns, all of which were battle cruisers. So that after the action our total battle cruiser strength had declined from ten to seven, while our battleship strength was unimpaired.
It is not easy to be quite sure of what the Germans had managed to do during those twenty-two months of war. I have given them credit for completing every ship which it was possible for them to complete. They were too fully occupied with building submarines to attack our merchant ships, too fully occupied with guns and shells for land fighting, and too much hampered in regard to many essential materials by our blockade, to be able to effect more than the best possible. Rumour from time to time credited them with the construction of “surprise” ships carrying 17-inch guns, but nothing unexpected was revealed when the clash of Fleets came on May 31st, 1916. Huge new battleships and huge new guns take us at the very least fifteen months to complete at full war pressure—most of them nearer two years—and the German rate of construction, even when unhampered by a blockade and the calling to the army of all available men, has always been much slower than ours. The British Admiralty does not work in the dark and doubtless knew fully what the Germans were doing.
If we credit the Germans with their best possible they might have added, by May, 1916, four battleships and two battle cruisers to their High Seas Fleet as it existed early in 1915. One of the battleships was the Salamis, which was building at Stettin for Greece when the war broke out. She was designed for speed of twenty-three knots, and to carry ten 14-inch guns. The other three battleships were copies of our Queen Elizabeths, though slower by about four knots. They were to have been equipped with eight 15-inch guns, though Germany had not before the war managed to make any naval guns larger than 12-inch. The battle cruisers (Hindenburg and Lützow) were vessels of twenty-seven knots with eight 12-inch guns, not to be compared with our Cats and no better than our comparatively old class of Invincibles.
The story of the Salamis and its 14-inch guns forms a very precious piece of war history. The guns for this Greek battleship had been ordered in America, a country which has specialised in guns of that calibre. But when Germany took over the ship the guns had not been delivered at Stettin, and never were delivered. They had quite another destination and employment. Our Admiralty interposed, in its grimly humorous way, bought the guns in America, brought them over to this country, and used the weapons intended for the Salamis to bombard the Germans at Zeebrugge and the Turks in Gallipoli. One may speculate as to which potentate was the more irritated by this piece of poetic justice—the Kaiser in Berlin or his brother-in-law “Tino” in Athens.
At their utmost, therefore, the Germans could not have added more than five vessels to their first line (they had lost one battle cruiser), thus raising it at the utmost to twenty-five battleships and cruisers, as compared with our maximum of forty-two much more powerful and faster ships. Four of their battleships were the obsolete Nassaus with twelve 11-inch guns and two of their battle cruisers (Moltke and Seydlitz) were also armed with 11-inch guns. If a successful fight with our Grand Fleet was hopeless in August, 1914, it was still more hopeless in May, 1916. We had not doubled our lead in actual numbers but had much more than doubled it in speed and power of the vessels available for a battle in the North Sea. In gun power we had nearly twice Germany’s strength at the beginning; we had not far from three times her effective strength by the end of May of 1916. It is indeed probable that Germany was not so strong in big ships and guns as I have here reckoned. She did not produce so many in the Jutland Battle. I can account for five battle cruisers and sixteen battleships (excluding pre-Dreadnoughts) making twenty-one in all. I have allowed her, however, the best possible, but long before the year 1916 it must have been brought bitterly home to the German Sea Command that by no device of labour, thought, and machinery could they produce great ships to range in battle with ours. We had progressed from strength to strength at so dazzling a speed that we could not possibly be overtaken. Had not the hare gone to sleep, the tortoise could never have come up with it—and the British hare had no intention of sleeping to oblige the German tortoise. There is every indication that Germany soon gave up the contest in battleships and put her faith in super-submarines, and in Zeppelins, the one to scout and raid, and the other to sink merchant vessels and so between them either to starve or terrify England into seeking an end of the war.
CHAPTER XI
THE CRUISE OF THE “GLASGOW”