The Achievement of the British Navy in the World-War

by John Leyland

The situation in the North Sea is, therefore, of absorbing interest. It may be studied chiefly from the two points of view of the strategy of the opposing fleets and the exercise of the blockade. There is a peculiarity in naval warfare, which is not found in warfare upon land, that a belligerent can withdraw his naval forces entirely from the theatre of war by retaining them, as with a threat, or in a position of weakness, behind the guns of his shore defences. Nothing of the kind is possible with land armies. A general can always find his enemy, and attack or invest him, and, if successful, drive him back, or cause him to surrender, and occupy the territory he has held. The Germans have chosen the reticent strategy of the sea. They have never come out to make a fight to a finish, to put the matter to the touch, “to gain or lose it all.” The animus pugnandi is wanting to their fleet. It was necessary that they should do something. They could not lie for ever stagnant at Kiel and Wilhelmshaven. They could keep their officers and men in training by making brief cruises in and outside the Bight of Heligoland. They might, with luck, meet some portion of the Grand Fleet detached and at a disadvantage.

In any case, they were bold enough to take their chance on occasions, always with their fortified ports and mined waters and their submarines under their lee. They might succeed in reducing British superiority by the “attrition” of some encounters. Such was the genesis of the Dogger Bank battle of January 24th, 1915, when that gallant officer Sir David Beatty inflicted a severe defeat upon Admiral Hipper, and drove him back in flight, with the loss of the Blücher and much other injury. The same causes brought the German High Sea Fleet, under Admiral Scheer, into the great conflict, first with Sir David Beatty, and then with the main force of the Grand Fleet, under command of Sir John Jellicoe, on May 31st, 1916. The events of the great engagement of the Jutland Bank will not be related here. All that it is necessary to note is that the Germans had so chosen their time that they were able to avoid decisive battle with Sir John Jellicoe’s fleet by retreating in the failing light of the day, and that their adventure availed them nothing to break the blockade or otherwise to modify the impotent position in which they are placed at sea. That action operated to the disadvantage of England and her Allies in no degree whatever. The superiority of the British Fleet as a fighting engine had been placed beyond dispute.

The mine and the submarine have put an end to the system of naval blockade as practised by St. Vincent and Cornwallis. No fleet can now lie off, or within striking range of, an enemy’s port. Battleships cannot be risked against submarines, acting either as torpedo craft or mine-layers, nor against swift destroyers at night. That is the explanation of the situation which has arisen in the North Sea. The blockade is necessarily of a distant kind. There are no places on the British coasts where the Grand Fleet could be located, except those in which it lies and from which it issues to sweep the North Sea periodically. The first essential is to control the enemy’s communications, which is done effectively at the North Passage—between the Orkneys and Shetlands, and the Norwegian coast—and at the Straits of Dover. If the enemy desired a final struggle for supremacy at sea, with all its tremendous consequences, he could have it. But he can be attacked only when he is accessible. “There shall be neither sickness nor death which shall make us yield until this service be ended,” wrote Howard in 1588. That is the spirit of the British Navy to-day. But, then, the Spanish Armada was at sea. It was not hiding behind its shore defences. Be it noted that the Germans, thus hiding themselves, enjoy a certain opportunity of undertaking raiding operations in the North Sea. It is not a difficult thing to rush a force of destroyers on a dark night against some point in an extended line of patrols and effect a little damage somewhere. What advantage the Germans hope to gain by such proceedings is difficult to discover.

The magnificence of the work of the British patrol flotillas and the auxiliary patrols must be recognised. In the North Sea these are subsidiary services of the Grand Fleet. Day and night, in every weather—in summer heats and winter blasts and blizzards, when icy seas wash the boats from stem to stern and the cold penetrates to the bone—these patrols are at work. The records of heroism at sea in these services have never been surpassed, and England owes a very great deal to the men who came to her service. The mercantile marine has given its vessels to the State, from the luxurious liner to the fishing trawler, and officers and men have come in who have rendered priceless services. The trawlers have carried on their perilous work of bringing up the strange harvest of horned mines by the score. The patrol boats have examined suspicious vessels, controlled sea traffic, and watched the sea passages. The destroyer flotillas have been constantly at work and ready at any time to bring raiding enemy forces to action. The Royal Naval Air Service has never relaxed its activity and has engaged in countless combats.

It has sometimes been wondered why the Grand Fleet did not take some aggressive action: Why did it not attack the North German sea coast, or rout out the pestilent hornets’ nest of Zeebrugge, which the enemy, by internal communications impregnable to sea-power, had provided with the most powerful guns, besides defending it by great mine-fields? This matter requires to be examined. Naval history abounds with evidence that to attack coast defences is not the proper or even the permissible work of warships. It is the business of military forces, though naval forces may often assist, and even give the means of victory. Moreover, what was once possible is not possible now. Would Nelson have attacked the French Fleet at the Nile if it had lain under the powerful guns of these days, and behind mine-fields, through the secret passages of which submarines could have issued to destroy him? It would be absurd to compare Nelson’s attack upon a line of block-ships and rafts at Copenhagen, covered by a few forts armed with old smoothbores, to an attack upon coast positions defended by modern guns.

When old Sir Charles Napier was in the Baltic in 1854 he was denounced at home because he did not destroy Kronstadt or Helsingfors. He rightly refused to play his enemy’s game by endangering his ships. Captain (afterwards Admiral Sir) B. J. Sulivan, who was with the fleet, put the situation quite clearly in a letter written at the time. A military operation was really required then, as it would be now, to accomplish such a task.

We know that two guns have beaten off two large ships with great loss. Had Nelson been here with thirty English ships he would have blockaded the gulf for years, without thinking of attacking such fortresses to get at ships inside. Brest, Toulon, and Cadiz were probably much weaker than these places.... I suppose there will be an outcry at home about doing nothing here, but we might as well try to reach the moon.

But the Navy has never left the Belgian coast secure from attack. It has never lost its aggressive spirit. It has attacked from the ship and the air. The seaplanes of the Royal Naval Air Service spotted for the guns when the monitors were bombarding. Bombs have repeatedly been dropped on Ostend, Zeebrugge, and the places in the rear. When the guns were silent there were reasons for it. A conjoint naval and military expedition was required. The enemy began to feel his hold on the coast precarious. Continued operations by sea and land might compel him to relax his grasp. Ships may not attack places defended by big guns, mine-fields, and submarines and destroyers issuing from secret passages through them, but it is certain the British naval offensive will never be paralysed.

Such is the magnificent work of the British Navy in blockading the German Fleet, molesting the enemy’s coast positions, and controlling his communications with the oceans.

The commercial blockade, by which the enemy’s supplies and commodities are cut off and his exports paralysed, is too large a subject to be dealt with here. The object is to bring the full measure of sea-power to bear in crushing the national life of the enemy. It is vital but “silent” work of the Navy, and does not lend itself to discussion or description. Questions of contraband and the right and method of search, which arise from the blockade, caused discussions with the United States before the States came into the war. The only object of the British Navy and the Foreign Office was to put an end to the transit of the enemy’s commodities, and to do so with the utmost consideration for the interests of neutrals, and complete protection for the lives of the officers and crews in their ships and in the examining ships. For these reasons neutral vessels were taken into port for examination, safe from the attentions of the enemy’s submarines. One great hope of the Germans was that the neutrals would become more and more exasperated with England. They remembered that the war of 1812 arose from this very cause. But they were completely disappointed in all such hopes, and they themselves, by interfering with the free navigation of other countries, brought the United States into the war against them.