Battleships of increasing power, cruisers of many classes, destroyers, submarines, and auxiliaries were built. Lord Fisher came to the Admiralty as First Sea Lord in 1904, and during the subsequent six years an enormous work was carried on. The battleships culminated in the Dreadnoughts—that class of ships with a main armament of all big guns—the cruisers in the battle-cruisers, destroyers grew more numerous and of much greater power, submarines were developed in range and sea-keeping qualities. None of these types have stood still. The Dreadnought developed into the Super-Dreadnought, and the latter has developed into the ships of powers before undreamed of, which no one has yet described. The submarine has been changed out of recognition, and no one suspects what these British vessels can and will do when “The Day” really comes.
All these mechanical developments of the Fleet, which are so essential at the present time, grew out of the impetus given in and after the year 1904. But that was not the only thing which placed the country in such a position of advantage at the beginning of the war. The battle-fleet and cruiser squadrons had been reorganised to coincide with the needs of the Empire, owing to the shifting of the stress of naval power from the Atlantic and the Channel to the North Sea. Some squadrons in distant waters were reduced in strength to correspond with the requirements, and non-fighting ships—vessels too weak to fight and too slow to run away—were brought home from distant seas, and their officers and men were made available for modern ships. A system of nucleus crews was adopted for the reserve ships to facilitate mobilisation and to make sure that the ships would be really fit for sea. Before that time the whole Fleet had been pivoted on the Mediterranean, and a British warship was rarely seen in the North Sea. By progressive steps the naval front was changed from the South to the East. On the east coast of the United Kingdom destroyer and submarine flotillas were based on ports prepared for them. A great dockyard was erected at Rosyth, and all along the coast naval bases were developed, and every preparation was made for the possibility of war. These were developments of great significance, and the immense and growing strength of the British Fleet justified the French in concentrating their battle squadrons in the Mediterranean, and leaving at Brest and in the Channel only a division of cruisers, supported by flotillas.
Fleets of warships are meant to fight when the need for fighting comes; but there was no affront to Germany, no cause for resentment or agitation, in the concentration of the main strength of the British Fleet in such places, and with such bases, that they could carry their power into the North Sea. Force attracts force in strategy as in physics, and the growth of the German High Sea Fleet at Wilhelmshaven, with the great sea canal thence to Kiel on the Baltic, inevitably brought about the British concentration. How magnificently advantageous was the position secured has already been shown. In an earlier chapter it has also been explained that by the strategic position occupied by the Grand Fleet, and the grip held on the entrance to the Channel at Dover, the North Sea became strategically a closed sea—a mare clausum.
This fact, which is a fact of geography as well as of strategic concentration, has made the enemy restive and resentful. We are described as the “tyrants of the seas,” and the “freedom of the seas” became a catchword of the Germans. Every ruler who has felt the hard pressure of British sea-power, whether his name was Louis, or Napoleon, or Wilhelm, has, perhaps inevitably, taken this line in denouncing us to neutrals and endeavouring to array neutrals against us. In an earlier stage of the present war this was the consistent plea of German statesmen. But when they instructed their sea officers to sink the Lusitania and many other ships, and when they threatened with disaster neutral ships which approached the British Isles, they became themselves the tyrants of the sea in a very real sense, and they thus arrayed the United States and other States against themselves, and brought a new Armada to strengthen the already superior British Fleet.
The war is a fight for freedom. The British Navy is fighting, and glad to have the Allied navies fighting in co-ordination with it, for the liberation of oppressed nations and countries from military domination. Command of the sea implies no restriction of navigation. It exists only in war time. In time of peace the British Navy guaranteed the freedom of the seas, and will guarantee it again when the war is at an end. We cannot do better than quote on this question what that distinguished American writer Admiral Mahan said:—
Why do English innate political conceptions of popular representative Government, of the balance of law and liberty, prevail in North America from the Arctic Circle to the Gulf of Mexico, from the Atlantic to the Pacific? Because the command of the sea at the decisive era belonged to Great Britain. In India and Egypt administrative efficiency has taken the place of a welter of tyranny, feudal struggle, and bloodshed, achieving thereby the comparative welfare of the once harried populations. What underlies this administrative efficiency? The British Navy, assuring in the first place British control and thereafter communication with the home country, whence comes the local power without which administration everywhere is futile. What, at the moment when the Monroe doctrine was proclaimed, insured beyond peradventure the immunity from foreign oppression of the Spanish-American colonies in their struggle for independence? The command of the sea by Great Britain, backed by the feeble Navy but imposing strategic position of the United States, with her swarm of potential commerce-destroyers, which, a decade before, had harassed the trade even of the Mistress of the Seas.
In concluding, therefore, we see how the British Navy, having served Great Britain and the British Empire so efficiently and so well in every interest and possession, fighting constantly against every stealthy device of the enemy, has served the Allies not less well and worthily. And we discover, too, that the Navy is ever friendly to neutral Powers, and that the command of the sea which it exercises in the war is the panoply of freedom and liberty throughout the world.
I. THE CENTRE OF SEA POWER: THE NORTH SEA