We should have expected it to safeguard the incoming of the supplies without which neither the people nor their industries could exist—to be the panoply of all trade and interests afloat, whether in the nature of imports or exports. We should have expected it to deny all external activity to the enemy at sea—we might not have anticipated the advent of the submarine as a pirate commerce-destroyer—to shut off his sea-borne supplies, and to exert that noiseless pressure on the vitals of the adversary of which Admiral Mahan speaks—“that compulsion, whose silence, when once noted, becomes to the observer the most striking and awful mark of the working of sea-power.” We should have expected the Navy to become the support, in thrust and holding, of the armies in the field—the shaft to their spearhead; their flank and rearguard also. Inasmuch as the war is world-wide, and we have powerful Allies, we should have expected naval influence and pressure to be manifested in the oceans, in the Mediterranean, and, indeed, wherever the enemy is and the seas are. Finally, we should have expected the Navy to be to the British Empire what it has always been to the Empire’s heart—its safeguard from injury and disruption, and the bond that holds it together.
Each one of these functions has been executed by in Navy with triumphant success in the war, and history would show that it is executing them now as the Sea Service has accomplished them in all the wars of the past.
CHAPTER II
The Centre of Sea-Power[A]
Of speedy victory let no man doubt,
Our worst work’s past, now we have found them out.
Behold, their navy does at anchor lie,
And they are ours, for now they cannot fly.
Andrew Marvel, 1653.
Of all the theatres of the war, on sea or land, the North Sea is the most important. It is vital to all the operations of the Allies. Command of its waters and its outlets is the thing that matters most. In that sea is the centre of naval influence. It is the key of all the hostilities. From either side of it the great protagonists in the struggle look at one another. There the great constriction of the blockade is exerted upon Germany. It is the mare clausum against which she protests. Geography is there in the scales against her. She rebels against British sea supremacy. The “freedom of the seas” is, therefore, her claim—though she is endeavouring to qualify to be the tyrant of them. Her only outlook towards the outer seas is from the Bight of Heligoland and the fringe of coast behind the East Frisian Islands, or from the Baltic, if her ships pass the Sound or the Belt, issuing into the North Sea through the Skager-Rak. But they cannot reach the ocean, except through the North Passage, where the Grand Fleet holds the guard. Only isolated raiders, bent upon predatory enterprise, have stealthily gone that way after nightfall. At the southern gate of the North Sea, through the Straits of Dover and in the Channel, the way is barred. The guns of Dover, the Dover Patrol, and certain other deterrents forbid the enemy to adventure in that direction.
[A] See [Map I.], at end of book.
The new engines of naval warfare—the mine, submarine, airship, and aeroplane—found their first and greatest use in the North Sea; and only by employing craft which hide beneath the water, and, on rare occasion, by destroyers which seek the cover of darkness for local forays, have the Germans been able to exert their efforts in any waters outside the North Sea. At the beginning of the war they had raiding cruisers in the Pacific and Atlantic, and a detached squadron in the Far East; but the British Fleet reached out to those regions, and, aided by the warships of Japan and France, it drove every vestige of German naval power from the oceans.
In the North Sea, therefore, sea-power has exerted its greatest, most vital, and most far-reaching effect. There the Germans, if they had possessed the power, could have struck a blow which, if successful for them, would have proved a mortal stroke at the British Empire and would have rendered useless all the efforts of the Allies. Millions of men, incalculable volumes of guns, munitions, and stores of every imaginable kind for the use of the greatest armies ever set in the field, have entered the French ports solely because the Grand Fleet holds the guard in the North Sea. The whole face of the world would have been changed by German naval victory. England would have been subjected by invasion and famine. If the heart of the Empire had been struck, what would have been the future of its members? If sea communication with the Allies had been cut, what would have been their fate at the hands of the victors? The attacks of sallying cruisers and destroyers upon the coast towns of England, the “tip and run” raids, as they have been called, and the visits of bomb-dropping airships and aeroplanes are the signs of the naval impotence of Germany.